The Sound Projector

Unseen are the mysterious group of UK players who have made it a point to adopt as low a profile as possible, without going so far as to extinguish their own identities or their own music. Their sporadic releases have graduated from low-run CDRs to slightly higher-run CDs, of which 2012 (HANDMADE IN ENGLAND RECORDINGS CDHMIER13) is the latest example. Paul Harnden, Wesley Smith, Aiko Machida and others appear on this 27-track CD of mostly-acoustic improvised oddness, whose credits privilege the list of instruments played over the names of the performers. The lengthy, indiscernible and wispy ensemble pieces that gradually emerge are interspersed with short cassette-tape bursts of paranoia and madness from their resident conspiracy-theorist ranting man, who logs every alien-abduction story and tabloid-inspired episode of weirdness onto his wobbly handheld recorder with his distorted voice. The musical events created by these talented and unassuming players are at all times filled with the excitement and tentativeness of genuine discovery; unlike some established improvisers who seem to find their way into their comfort zones within a matter of minutes and then stay there, Unseen do everything they can to keep the musical moment continually balanced on a razor-edge of anticipation, tension and uncertainty. And they’re so English; their best music has all the peculiar charm of a gentle rain-sodden afternoon in the countryside, a quality completely lacking in the assertive pop-art brashness of American contemporaries like No-Neck Blues Band. The doubt-ridden and ambiguous atmospheres transferred through listening will not be to the taste of all save the most intrepid Sound Projector explorers. Recommended, although I remain continually puzzled by the sleeve art for this release, which is a slightly détourné Gilbert Shelton cartoon, whose wild-eyed zaniness and garish colours are at odds with the music I hear.

Any Where Out of the World (STRUCTURES SONORES NO 2) is a title which might be Unseen’s motto, although in fact it’s a CD by Auton, a trio of Danish players who perform an affecting brand of moody chamber jazz music not unlike a slowed-down version of The Mothers of Invention but with much more charm and highly appealing chord sequences played with piano, vibes, strings and horns. The digipack sleeve unfolds two wings to reveal assorted curious images of loneliness and isolation, but the music’s warmth suggests that the action of removing yourself from the confines of worldly oppression and enclosure can only lead to good things, such as spiritual awareness and a sense of centredness in your inner being.

US improviser’s Erik Friedlander’s CD Block Ice & Propane (SKIPSTONE RECORDS) is an account of road travels across the USA. It’s impressive how he manages to make his cello perform in ways highly appropriate to that country, making it sound like an Appalachian fiddle on one track and a steel-stringed guitar on the next, and all of these improvised pieces feel like they’re informed by American folk idioms. The booklet for this CD is packed with evocative old photographs and anecdotes that match track titles such as ‘Airstream Envy’ and ‘Valley of Fire’. If TV producers had any sense of adventure, this wistful music would be ideal the next time they send Stephen Fry off to America to make a documentary series.

Merzbow’s latest team-up is with Richard Pinhas, of all people. Pinhas is the astonishingly talented French pioneer whose Heldon records in the 1970s were a revelation to me the first time I heard his LP Stand By, and continue to inspire new listeners to this day; it’s no exaggeration to state he’s managed to cross the philosophies of J G Ballard and Jean Giraud with the guitar sound of Robert Fripp, and thereby arrived at a cosmos-shattering glimpse into the infinite. He’s still making great records today. If you ask me, it’s the French half of the act which dominates Keio Line (CUNEIFORM RECORDS RUNE 278-279), a double-CD set of gloriously excessive, long and neo-psychedelic studio workouts which cannot help but mesmerise you with their complex fractal-esque structures; Merzbow’s aggressive volume, and his impatient speeds, have been toned down, muted and slowed, and generally relegated to provide sumptuous throbbing backdrops to Pinhas’s delirious guitar work. This record also exists in vinyl form, a triple LP released by Dirter Promotions in the UK, although the sleeve art to the CD release is arguably more interesting in terms of its rich visual detail and celebrations of fictional animal life.

GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters, Survival Research Laboratories) started to issue his Zelphabet series around September this year – we received the first five in the series, representing the letters A to E. The idea is that three or four artistes will be allotted around 15-20 mins of space on these hour-long compilations, and Jupitter-Larsen gives ample demonstration that he must own an address book that reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary underground music and sound art – we’ve got numerous impressive names mostly drawn from the worlds of industrial noise and tapework, and some avant-garde performers and minimalists. You are guaranteed a baffling and unsettling hour of listening mayhem and compelling sounds, whichever disc you purchase. A M K are responsible for my favourite on A (which also includes Achim Wollschied, Arcane Device and Asmus Tietchens); the track ‘Flux Owls for Evermore’ is a delirious odyssey of malfunctioning lo-fi tape loops that could probably cause fires to break out in the neighbourhood if left on repeat play. B is a belter of noise and nightmares, what with the eerie meanderings of Bob Bellerue and his ‘Fridge Tower’, further twisted tape loop ugliness from blackhumour, brutal table noise from 16 Bitch Pile-Up and the wild microphone and tape malarkey of The Beast People. On C, we’ve got Chop Shop, Contagious Orgasm and C Spencer Yeh (with an excellent piece of bleeping, throbbing electronic work which he performed using three synths), but also amazingly a rare 1974 tape donated by Charlemagne Palestine extracted from a longer performance called ‘Oberlin College Spectral Continuum’. On the letter D, we have two fairly open-ended long-form droneworks from Damion Romero (who does it with urban field recordings) and Daniel Menche (who does it with abrasive electronic layers), while the absurdist Dave Phillips provides a confusing jumble of unidentifiable noises on his 20-minute ‘Recycling’. Elliot Sharp, Evil Moisture and Emil Beaulieu all appear on the letter E. Beaulieu’s hearty potage of organic and electronic compost is thick enough to get lost inside, but for me Ed Osborn narrowly scoops the prize with his ‘Outfield Derivation’, a subtle and bewildering tape-composition that is rich in baffling detail.

You’ll have noticed from the selection of names above that Jupitter-Larsen is applying a rather – erm – eccentric method to his reading of the alphabet, a lapse which troubles my archivist bones, but one which makes perfect aesthetic sense in this context. So long as he doesn’t apply for an indexing job at the Los Angeles Public Library we should be safe. The cover images in this uniformly-packaged series are stark monotone, and offer a kind of adult version of a Picture Alphabet (A is for Atom, B is for Bone), where the images are all mildly disturbing and may have been treated in Photoshop to add an additional pallid lustre. The back covers use bold and clear typography, often providing zero in the way of contextual detail other than name, title, and website address. With this series, I’m reminded of the Hollis Frampton film Zorns Lemma, which likewise used the progression of the alphabet (obsessively so, in his case) as the structure for its arrangement of disjunctive images. I think releasing a series of compilations like this is a master-stroke, as it will guarantee appeal for some rabid underground collectors who will have no choice but to buy the full set! What’s coming next? “Francisco Lopez, Elliott Sharp, Giancarlo Toniutti, Gregory Whitehead, KK Null, The Legendary Pink Dots, Nocturnal Emissions, Thomas Dimuzio, Zbigniew Karkowski, and Z’EV have all signed on!” we are told.

Plenty goodies arriving from the ESP-Disk’ label this season, the recent batches containing an unusual mixture of free jazz, be-bop jazz, reissues of weird stuff and new signings to the label…thus confirming the label’s reputation for fairly wild eclecticism. The Charlie Parker four-CD box set is quite fascinating, even to this listener who can’t decide if he really digs Bird or not. Bird In Time 1940-1947 (ESP 4050) is a compilation of radio performances, demos, sessions and otherwise lost music some of which never made it into a recording studio at the time, peppered throughout with interviews with Parker, Max Roach, Milt Jackson and other contemporaries. ESP originally whacked some of this material out as vinyl LPs, original issues of which are quite rare; I think one edition had a 35mm slide inserted (why, I don’t know!). While at first sight this comp may seem kinda esoteric and only of appeal to mouldy figs who own versions of every single Parker side ever recorded, actually it’s a very compelling listen – surprises at every turn, like tuning in to a radio show from the past, where the signal quality may not be great but there’s enough information getting through to keep your ear twitching. The muffled sound quality also does something to leaven the sometimes slightly aggressive tone (for me) of Bird’s alto.

Paul Bley Quintet’s Barrage (ESP 1008) was his 1964 debut recording for the label. This white piano player had enough smarts to pick Marshall Allen (one of the Arkestra’s principal men) for alto duties and the uncanny free drummer Milford Graves for the stick work, although Dewey Johnson’s fine trumpet work is also showcased. Six cuts of fabulously intellectual New York sixties jazz emerged, the faster numbers owing no small debt to Ornette’s late 1950s work, but ‘And Now The Queen’, a slower and more mysterious number, provides ample evidence of the complexities of this new emerging language. Note the classy Michael Snow artwork on the cover, using negative prints and even incorporating one of his own paintings.

Alan Sondheim is an American polymath who caused many a furrow to appear in my surprised forehead when I first spun The Songs, his ensemble’s debut for the Riverboat Records label reissued by Fire Museum some 2 years ago. Ritual-All-7-70 is from the same period (1967), and I’m delighted to finally get a chance to hear it (never seen an original vinyl except in the collections of hard-core ESP collector freaks). Where The Songs was a loud all-out session of untamed wildness in instrumentation and voice, this record is more about making interesting combinations of rather unusual instrumentation, and arriving at very pleasing sonic experiments. There is still the free-blowing inflected influence present in the work of the horn players, and the weird warblings of vocalist Ruth Ann Hutchinson, which is why this work has often been branded a classic of early free improvisation from a country which hasn’t always rushed to welcome the genre with open arms. Sondheim, the visionary leader from Providence in Rhode Island, plays stringed instruments, woodwinds, and percussion across these 13 tracks of sumptuous loopery. He’s still making records today of his unusual guitar work, and was interviewed in Bixobal magazine.

Levitts sit there photographed in a sunny park for the cover of their 1968 LP, We Are The Levitts (ESP 1095), looking for all the world like a slightly sinister version of The Brady Bunch. They play a mixture of ‘jazz, pop and bossa nova’ according to the cover sticker; it’s mostly a collection of inoffensive soul-lite songs, packed with upbeat lyrics about birds, children, sunshine, and candy, and backed by jazz-lite musical backdrops, except for cuts like ‘Fun City’ where the band are trying to ape the bubblegum sound of Kasenatz-Katz about two years too late to cash in on that bandwagon. A real charmer and an oddity from the catalogue which I never heard of before, but I would hesitate to characterise it as ‘New Weird America from 1968′ as the label apparently claims; not a whiff of anything remotely strange emerges from the minds and voices of the utterly wholesome Levitts. These reissue jobs by ESP are getting better all the time; all the artworks for this one, including a poster insert, present the original typography and layouts in almost unadulterated form.

From the contemporary wing of the ESP signing department, we have Barnacled, a large combo from Rhode Island who have recorded Charles (ESP 4049), an album of very quirky instrumental music; it sounds like the sort of circus-styled big band jazz that I thought had become passé by 1986, but the presence of muted live electronics makes it somewhat more palatable. Alec K. Redfearn, who made a record with his band The Eyesores, contributes his distinctive accordion playing. There’s a painting of a friendly goat on the front cover, while inside the band members all wear orange jumpsuits. Yximalloo’s Unpop (ESP 4047) similarly comes across as sadly a little dated, and is hard to sit through despite his strenuous efforts to inject maximum wackiness and eccentric vocal bleats into his all-electronic and clunky drumbox tapestries. Even the drawings by Jad Fair don’t sweeten the deal for me. 24 short tracks, including a cover of a Donovan song.

Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention:

1. ‘Plastic People’
2. ‘The Duke Of Prunes’
3. ‘Amnesia Vivace’
4. ‘The Duke Regains His Chops’
5. ‘Call Any Vegetable’
6. ‘Invocation And Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin’
7. ‘Soft-Sell Conclusion & Ending Of Side #1′
8. ‘Lumpy Gravy Part I’
9. ‘Sleeping In A Jar’
10. ‘Our Bizarre Relationship’
11. ‘The Uncle Meat Variations’
12. ‘Electric Aunt Jemima’
13. ‘Prelude To King Kong’
14. ‘God Bless America (Live at the Whisky A Go Go)’
15. ‘A Pound For A Brown On The Bus’
16. ‘Ian Underwood Whips It Out (Live on stage in Copenhagen)’
17. ‘Nasal Retentive Caliope’
18. ‘Let’s Make The Water Turn Black’
19. ‘The Idiot Bastard Son’
20. ‘Lonely Little Girl’
21. ‘Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance’
22. ‘What’s The Ugliest Part Of Your Body (Reprise)’
23. ‘Mother People’
24. ‘The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny’
25. ‘Pound for a Brown’

1-7 from Absolutely Free (1967), UK RYKODISC RCD 10502 CD (1995)
8 from Lumpy Gravy (1968), UK RYKODISC RCD 10504 CD (1995)
9-16 from Uncle Meat, USA BIZARRE / REPRISE 2024 2 x LP (1968)
17-24 from We’re Only in it for the Money (1968), UK RYKODISC RCD 10503 CD (1995)
25 from Money Demos bootleg, ZAPPERMAN RECORDS ZAP 014 CD (2002)

The Sound Projector radio show,
originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM

Nikos Veliotis is the Greek emperor of the restrained cello – he can fill churches and cathedrals with his gut-tuned langourous drones which are of the utmost severity yet still encapsulate a soothing balm in their stern notes. He’s just made a new record Vertical (LOW IMPEDANCE RECORDINGS LOZ-0013) in Athens with Anastasis Grivas, who does many mysterious things with a custom made guitar, and four extremely long examples of their melancholic, bleak droning hath been engraved hereon. Something nearly ‘metallic’ in feel exudes from the sound of track two, but after five minutes of listening you’ll admit that it is not metal of any known kind and must concede our two Greek philosophers may have discovered a new addition to the table of the elements.

Lovers of string ensemble music may enjoy Ring Of Fire (OTHER MINDS OM 1016-2), a compilation of performances by the Del Sol String Quartet. Subtitled Music of the Pacific Rim, it’s a showcase for 20th century compositions by composers from China, New Zealand, Korea, America and Australia. John Adams is the only name I recognise, so here is your chance to investigate the work of Kui Dong, Chinary Ung, Zhou Long and Peter Sculthorpe, among others. A generous full-colour booklet contains no end of explanatory notes and images.

It’s been a banner time for Häxan, the notorious 1922 witchcraft movie from Sweden that just won’t go away. It was released as a 2-DVD set last year, but before that it was continually being ‘rediscovered’ by cognoscenti of the underground set, partially due perhaps to the version with the William Burroughs narration. Mirror memorably did a live soundtrack of atmospherics for it in 2003 at the Kill Your Timid Notion festival. Now here be Bronnt Industries Kapital, with a 27-track soundtrack (STATIC CARAVAN VAN168) of creepy instrumentals and slightly demented music-box inspired pieces. Bronnt may or may not be one Guy Bartell, but his website keeps things deliberately rather obscure. From what I’ve skimmed so far of this disc, it’s refreshingly free from the clichés one might expect to accompany a witchcraft movie (for example, no back-pedaling into eerie wind effects or howling screeches), and in places even achieves a compelling and stately beauty. Limited pressing on this one. There’s an old engraving of a drowning witch, undergoing trial by ordeal, on the cover.

While we’re still on a fairly supernatural theme, you could dip one toe in the waters of Fantasma Parastasie (ALIEN8 RECORDINGS ALIENCD81), an instrumental extravaganza concocted by the team-up of Aidan Baker and Tim Hecker. The fine digipack cover unfolds to reveal another old engraving, this one depicting the arrival of two unwanted evil apparitions above a congregation of terrified and alarmed citizens. They’re seated in rows as though at church, but the somewhat suspect accoutrements among the furnishings (such as the enormous censers billowing evil smoke) make me wonder if this is actually some form of early Black Mass going horribly wrong. Baker (of Nadja fame) does his usual distorto-everything performance, but when it’s tempered with the crisp electronic work of fellow Canadian Tim Hecker it makes for a not unappealing combination of romantic, semi-melodic layered noise. The work is in six titled parts (including ‘Gallery of the invisible woman’), yet I have no idea why the CD is indexed in 66 continuous segments, some of them a mere 30 seconds in length.

Wicked Witch is nothing to do with sorcery, but turns out to be an ambitious young Afro-American performer named Richard Simms from Washington DC. On Chaos: 1978-86 (EM1080CD), we hear a compilation of his singles and album tracks (and remixes of same) originally released on Infinity Records at a time when he thought perhaps he could offer some serious competition to Prince and Michael Jackson. But as soon as you cue up the first cut, any resemblance to the afore-named acts ends abruptly. I have never heard such dark and horrifying workouts committed in the name of funk music, but outside of Funkadelic and Parliament it’s not really my area of familiarity. Even so this hypnotic and evil work, full of layers, whispered voices and obsessive loops, is bound to appeal to fans of the electric Miles Davis, especially with its slightly threatening edge encoded in track titles like ‘X Rated’ and ‘Electric War’. From Japan’s EM Records, home to many a forgotten eccentric from musical history, this weirdie lacks the usual informative booklet of notes but is packed with plenty of intriguing photographs.

1. Matmos, ‘Last Delicious Cigarette’
   From The West, USA AUTOFACT FACT06CD (2008)
2. Hans Grüsel’s Kränkenkabinet, ‘Blue Door Openings’
   From Blaue Blooded Türen, USA RESIPISCENT RSPT027 CD (2008)
3. Zeitkratzer and Terre Thaemlitz, ‘Sloppy 42nds’
   From Electronics, GERMANY ZEITKRATZER RECORDS ZKR 0005 CD (2008)
4. Oldman, ‘Sunny Afternoon African Charge’
   From Two Heads Bis Bis, GREECE LOW IMPEDANCE RECORDINGS LOZ 014 CD (2008)
5. Human Greed, ‘In Absentia’
   From Black Hill: Midnight at the Blighted Star, UK LUMBERTON TRADING COMPANY LUMB011 CD (2008)
6. Skozey Fetisch, ‘Ergo a-Spin’
   From This, Then, USA RESIPISCENT RSPT024 CD (2008)
7. ./morFrom/., ‘Phil’s Kind of Dogs’
   From Around The Corner, SWITZERLAND 121234 RECORDS FBL-004 CD (208)
8. Arrington de Dionyso, ‘Pluto In Capricorn’
   From I See Beyond the Black Sun, USA K RECORDS KLP 200 CD (2008)
9. Deadwood, ‘Deteriorate’
   From Ramblack, UK COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR104CD CD (2008)
10. Absolute Value of Noise, ‘Street Signs’
    From Magnetic Focus, CANADA NO NUMBER CD (2008)
11. Geordie Haley, ‘Upsardropi’
    From Sculptures, CANADA GEO_HA 06 CD (2008)
12. Miguel A. García, ‘Eve’
    From armiarmak, RMO PRODUCTIONS RMOMAG CD (2008)

The Sound Projector radio show,
originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM

The combination of improvised sax with electronic music is usually a winning combination for me personally. If you’re of a like mind, you could purchase The Tail (WM RECORDINGS WM000088) and you can hear 14 tracks of Chris Parfitt and Geoff Reader doing it live in Stoke Newington. These UK players trade under the name of Noteherder and McCloud, and call themselves ’sonic investigators’ mainly as a form of private joke rather than as some sort of pretentious description of their artistic endeavours. Parfitt’s tootling is acceptable, but too ‘wordy’ for me. The electronic half of the act gets my vote; his subdued gurgles often add an air of anticipation, even if the pieces generally feel somewhat unfinished.

Further subdued electronic murmurings of a quite different hue on Armiarmak (RMO PRODUCTIONS RMOMAG), by the young Basque composer Miguel A. García. He produced it using nothing but a mixing desk and an oscillator for the most part, but whereas many dabblers using similar tools emerge with something clean, somnolent and insipid, García’s minimalist work has a gritty, vaguely ugly texture which appeals to me, along with its unblinkingly stern countenance throughout. To listen is like staring into the stony visage of your own executioner.

Deadwood is a Swedish artist immersed in the inky depths of his own emotional whirlpools, as evidenced on Ramblack (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR104CD), his new CD of “black ambient / death noise”. The thick layers of palpable atmosphere on this disc could be the result of many hours spent toiling in the studio, adding multiple layers of processed sewage. Wallowing in its own ’sickness and depravity’, Ramblack may not be quite as intensely negative as its creator hopes, but its sinister blankets of noise, smothering loops and hideous voice effects have a strangely beguiling effect, as if riveted by the eyes of a hypnotic wild beast. Artwork presses all the buttons you’d expect – satanic symbols, gothic typefaces and snowy desolate forests, all printed on jet black paper.

More electronic music of interest from Skozey Fetisch, released on the wild San Francisco label that more often specialises in extreme and twisted noise. This, Then (RESIPISCENT RECORDS RSPT024) may be all the work of Mark C. Jackman, starting with reel to reel tape recordings and experiments on an analogue synth, and reworking them in a very digital way. But a description of the working methods used are inadequate to understand the resultant eerie glorp that pours out of your speakers when this freekeroonie is spun. The sound of it seems to sit in some twilight zone between classic French electro-acoustic music from IRCAM, electronic music for the World’s Fair in 1968, and Tod Dockstader’s back catalogue rebuilt by aliens who don’t quite understand what they’re doing. All of the above and more is filtered through a nightmarish, crazy-house mentality, made all the scarier by the fact that the dreamer seems to be wide awake with both eyes open. A ghastly, lurid record of genius.

Same label has also sent us the new release by Hans Grüsel’s Kränkenkabinet, whose previous release for C.I.P. delighted us with its imaginative and deliberately ugly approach to noise-making. Since then, this German émigré (so we are informed) act has become something of a cause celebre at underground US noise festivals like No Fun. Blue Blooded Türen (RESIPISCENT RECORDS RSPT027) is no less extreme than the previous disc, and conveys the same delicious effect to your ears – every sound, every note, feels like it’s been dipped in boiling liquorice, hot tar and thick grease. Performed with the help of the great Liz Allbee and others, this is mostly a solo turn for Hans with his very impolite wild and yawping electronic set-up, whose unwieldy complexity can only be mastered by his gnarled hands. The cover artworks, still in thrall to the line drawings of Edward Gorey, exude mystery, decay and squalor in equal amounts.

1. May Blitz, ‘For Mad Men Only’
   From The 2nd of May, UK VERTIGO 6360 037 LP (1971)
2. Cressida, ‘Lisa’
   From Asylum, UK VERTIGO 6360 025 LP (1971)
3. Patto, ‘Give it All Away’
   From Hold Your Fire, UK VERTIGO 6360 032 LP (1971)
4. Clear Blue Sky, ‘My Heaven’
   From Clear Blue Sky, UK VERTIGO 6360 013 LP (1971)
5. Gracious!, ‘Introduction’
   From Gracious!, UK VERTIGO 6360 002 LP (1970)
6. Affinity, ‘Night Flight’
   From Affinity, UK VERTIGO 6360 004 LP (1970)
7. Gravy Train, ‘Enterprise’
   From Gravy Train, UK VERTIGO 6360 023 LP (1970)
8. Black Sabbath, ‘Electric Funeral’
   From Paranoid, UK VERTIGO 6360 011 LP (1970)
9. Catapilla, ‘It could only happen to me’
   From Changes, UK VERTIGO 6360 074 LP (1972)
10. Nucleus, ‘Earth Mother’
    From Elastic Rock, UK VERTIGO 6360 008 LP (1970)
11. Gentle Giant, ‘Isn’t it quiet and cold?’
    From Gentle Giant, UK VERTIGO 6360 020 LP (1970)
12. Fairfield Parlour, ‘In My Box’
    From From Home to Home, UK VERTIGO 6360 001 LP (1970)
13. Jade Warrior, ‘Windweaver’
    From Jade Warrior, UK VERTIGO 6360 033 LP (1971)
14. Dr Strangely Strange, ‘Mary Malone of Moscow’
    From Heavy Petting, UK VERTIGO 6360 009 LP (1970)
15. Thin Lizzy, ‘Angel from the Coast’
    From Jailbreak, UK VERTIGO ACBR 252 LP (1976)
16. Streetwalkers, ‘Crazy Charade’
    From Red Card, UK VERTIGO 9102 010 LP (1976)
17. Beggars Opera, ‘Passacaglia’
    From Act One, UK VERTIGO 6360 018 LP (1970)

May we recommend: The Vertigo Swirl site

The Sound Projector radio show,
originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM