The Sound Projector

This pile of putrid vomit and vile spew arrived mid-December from Vomir, the French Harsh Noise Wall King, in a large envelope which I can’t help but think of as a Barf Bag. ‘Finally a pack full of the latest releases,’ he writes in the enclosed letter, anticipating my joyous reception of this jiffy-bag full of filth. ‘Of course everything is almost sold out…BUT most of it are split releases so you can discover new HNW names and labels.’ Practically everything you see in picture above (taken under yesterday afternoon’s gloomy lighting conditions) is also a very limited release, barely existing on tiny labels most of which are quite new to me. If you want to know what any of them sound like, just imagine being fed feet-first into a meat grinder. Not pleasant. Vomir’s brutalising no-prisoners approach to making noise refuses the niceties of anything remotely artistic or aesthetically pleasing, and is so primitive it makes Merzbow and Incapacitants look like world-class symphony composers. If his work can be said to be ‘about’ anything, it might be about the utter negation of self, as embodied in his current motto ‘ERODE SECLUDE YOUR SELF’ which is accompanied by an image of the artist with his head inside a black bag. It’s nice to know, I suppose, that he has found a few like-minded souls in the international CDR network who are able to support him and indeed find a niche audience for his very special blanked-out strain of oppressive and nihilistic din of death. Faint hearts forbidden!

• Hommage au duc de Reschwig – 25 copies only on Monolithische Aktion (mn005).
• Vomir / Ptomain – split CDR in a large cover with a poster insert and a health warning. 37 copies only on Hellville Records (HVR019). Mail to hellville@freenet.de.
• Vomir / Flesh Coffin – split CDR in large cover with a sticker (and a barcode, surprisingly). 50 copies only on Twilight Luggage (TLCD06).
• Vomir – thing in brown cover with dead bodies on cover. Edition of 77 copies from ROKOT (RKT-06).
• Vomir – Indecente. In a rather naughty cover featuring photographs of a Japanese doll. 30 copies issued as ZUKOVINA 0054 in Sarajevo.
• Vomir – untitled C77 cassette in a thick padded vinyl box, issued as SATANSDIN SD08. 23 copies, of which mine is #1. Already sold out.
• Vomir / Concrete Threat – split C40 cassette. 100 copies in all-black packaging from At War With With False Noise (ATWAR045).
• Vomir – Subsequent Wall. A cassette issued by the tiny American label Central Dynamo Room in 2008, limited edition. Notable because it lasts only one minute per side.
• Various – Noise Propaganda Volume 2. A compilation from Corrosive Art Records (CA-18) for which Vomir contributes a two-minute untitled track. Also on the comp are such repellent projects as Mania, Morbid Behaviour, Mixturizer, Liver Mortis, Chav Stabber and – my personal favourite – The Vomit Arsonist. The other contributors have names which are too inflammatory to repeat here.
• Lastly there is something about the size of a slim DVD case sealed in a black plastic bag, which I haven’t yet unsealed…
• …and a VOMIR patch (’for your old denim jacket…!!’).

Further information from Discogs.

Among all the prevailing efforts to reissue just about anything that moved from the international post-punk home-made cassette and DIY era, it’s a pleasure to find this astonishing curio from Mika Taanila who, in 1980-1981, did his bit for the Finnish underground, recording cassettes under the guise of Musiikkivyöry (literally, ‘music avalanche’). A disaffected and introverted young man, Mika was just 15 when he recorded these raw and primitive pieces of electronic concrete negativity, working alone in his bedroom and turning his back on his parents and the confirmation-school camp where he was born. He issued the results in tiny quantities on the label Valtavat Ihmesilmälasit Records, an enterprise co-managed by the very notable Anton Nikkilä, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that like many others in the Finnish scene, he drew inspiration from such bands as This Heat, Cabaret Voltaire and The Normal. Compiled here with all tape hiss intact, and a full-colour insert with detailed photographs of the original tapes, Tilemm Sokeiksi (EKTRO RECORDS EKTRO-059) is a great package which also exists as a newly-minted limited edition cassette, and is testament to Jussi Lehtisalo’s attention to detail in such matters. Mika’s music was of course featured on the excellent compilation Pilottilasit, which I also recommend. Another piece in the huge jigsaw of this hitherto-neglected area of music, this record is full of sinister pulsing, unpleasant growling, vari-speeded voices, relentless tape loops, scrapey metallic bursts, and all the unhealthy obsessiveness we should expect from an intelligent, alienated adolescent genius. (Mika Taanila has since gone on to become an international film-maker of some note.) Great release, highly recommended in every possible way.

Three of France’s finest contemporary improvising players slug it out in assorted jazz festival arenas on Dos D’Ânes (RONDA RND12), a curious title referring to the remarkable load-bearing qualities of the humble donkey who often performs well in the improv circuit, carrying amplifiers and instruments. Jérôme Noetinger, eRikm and Michel Doneda produce many pleasing examples of improvised sax music rubbing up against live electronics and CD-skipping work in a highly salty manner. To my mind, eRikm hasn’t made a single sub-standard record in recent years and his many team-ups are reaping dividends, lug-pleasure wise. Noetinger (label boss of Metamkine) is likewise steaming like an industrial street sweeper with his ‘dispositif electroacoustique’ work, parping out illogical swawks like some exotic jungle parrot. Meanwhile Doneda’s sax is sweetening up the mix in ways we haven’t heard since the glory days of Lol Coxhill. Three long and tangly pieces of chattering, serpentine noise recorded in 2007, with the great Jean-Marc Foussat (among others) sitting behind the recording desk.

The Prisma Records label has been created to document music performed at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Norway and showcases Norwegian sound-artists and musicians on its two new releases. On Music For Tinguely (PRISMA 706), Ingar Zach plays unobtrusive percussive effects alongside a motorised drone, and Andreas Meland uses his computer to reprocess environmental sounds recorded at a Jean Tinguely exhibition. On Nova (PRISMA 705), we have a short 25-minute 1972 piece of electronic composition from the contemporary composer Kåre Kolberg, originally used as part of a multi-media piece in collaboration with visual artist Anders Kjaer. Archival photos from this event adorn the sleeve. A nice brace of examples of art-gallery music, with cover designs by Lasse Marhaug.

Dmytro Federenko from the Ukraine kindly sent us a copy of Sturqen’s Piranha (KIVITNU 8), a sterling example of avant-techno blackitude rendered with evil pulsing beats and sullen, surly bassundo throbs. An elaborate die-cut card sleeve unfolds to provide many jagged edges, which could be the teeth of those piranha fish all set to tear our soft, supple flesh to ribbons. The label is home to other examples of underground Ukraine electronica, including the very good Kotra, some of whose stark and challenging releases have arrived here in past times.

From Swansea, a quite nice pastoral record which combines the electronic ambient drone music of Ian Holloway with the countryside field recordings of Banks Bailey. Holloway (who has done film soundtracks) began A Brief Sojourn (QUIET WORLD 12) working with his own field recordings, but decided that those of Bailey were far superior; the results take us on a continuous journey across land, water and air and produce many pleasing effects along the way. Cover images of a feather and dragonfly wings suggest the fragile and delicate themes these creators are attempting to evoke.

From Paris, we received a CD from the French combo P.H.O.B.O.S. who make a decent attempt at realising a studio record that is intended to appeal to an audience of frowning grim-faced listeners besotted with noise, black metal, industrial and doom. The resultant Anœdipal (MEGATON MASS PRODUCTS PIKADON001CD) is not too bad, belting us sideways with six lengthy tracks of guitar-based excess and misery that usually start out atmospheric and foggy before erupting into full-blown creaking hate and venom-spitting racket delivered at a sluggish pace. What with the generous welter of layers on offer (voices, guitars, drumming, noise effects), it just feels like they’ve over-egged the pudding, and half the force of their brutal anguished thrusting is lost in amongst the need to create dynamic studio ranges. No denying the energy they’ve expended onto the tape, but the music feels rootless and meandery, and the record is ultimately a flat and monotonous listen, thrashing about as it attempts to lift itself out from its narrow sound-world. The full-colour booklet will also impress you with its surfaces; the artworks by Stefan Thanneur are astonishing mixtures of found graphics, photo source material, and wild colour effects, saying everything possible about the mutilation of the human body and the overthrow of Christianity by powerful forces, but (like the CD) doing it all in a rather oblique and intellectual way.

Three Austrian musicians make some quite nice melodic droning minimal music as Dirac on their Emphasis (SPEKK KK021) CD. Four days of recording in a basement have been edited down to just four tracks, working under snowy conditions which may have helped shape the essential stillness of these Eno-influenced ambientwerks. Much to their credit, it seems they tend to put everything down in one take and without overdubs, adhering to the principle they call ‘direct recording’.

An excellent document of Japanese minimal improvisation is Semi-Impressionism (SPEKK KK020) by two greats in this area, Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakamura. Akiyama is the very versatile guitarist who is constantly rising to eclipse many other pretenders who pick up the six-string, but who cannot match him for sheer understated concentrated power. Three tracks recorded in Sweden and Austria, each beautiful episode largely a showcase for Akiyama’s delicate playing which is about as obtrusive as a snowflake falling onto a bed of white feathers, sometimes punctuated by the textured white noise of Toshi’s mixing board. And isn’t the cover just beautiful? It took three people to design it, one to do the calligraphy, one for the drawings, and another to design the package. There’s an interesting anecdote behind the title which can be read in full here; as to that, I do have to give maximum credit to Toshi for expressing his exasperation at our careless use of the word ‘Zen’, but doing it in such a restrained and polite manner.

Another fine package of grumbly electronic mayhem on CDRs from the lf records label in Bristol, owned and operated by Greg Godwin who also records as dsic, one of my favourite discoveries from last year. dsic’s twig (lf010) is packed with a rich variety of angry barks, shrill grinding tones, low-bass throbs and crazy mixtures of samples with uncontrolled electronic noise explosions, all of them very suggestive of a deeply unhinged and unhappy frame of mind. One of my hobbyhorses is how, whenever affairs are going very badly, the government and big corporations put up optimistic posters reassuring us that everything is actually going very well. One example which I personally find intensely irritating is the current Lloyds Bank campaign, whose images of smugly contented investors, customers and bank staff (all rendered as dozy-looking plastic puppets) serve merely to conceal and disguise the current financial disarray in which we find ourselves. Anyhow, if you want to discover the unpleasant truth about modern urban Britain, you could do worse than start with dsic’s front-line reports. dsic has also released P45 (lf009) which is wrapped in a doctored Inland Revenue form, and compiles ten tracks of morbid electric insanity from 2007-2008 in an edition limited to just 20 copies.

On same label, a highly intriguing release by Joinedbywire, a trio from Bath who have been playing some form of guitar-drum instrumental music for seven years. Black Axis 1-4 (lf008) was recorded during an unhappy time after their guitarist Sara had suddenly died, and somehow her presence lingers on a record that is effectively a compelling and abrasive collection of process-music making great and imaginative use of echo and delay effects. The 17-minute final track is particularly layered and confusing, packed with ugly incident; the intended effect on the listener seems decidedly hostile, something to do with ‘aural decimation’, an attempt to abrade your very body out of existence by means of the sonic hatchet and several sheets of sandpaper. Sara (RIP) contributes a posthumous vocal section to the second track, and she sounds positively resigned to the grim fate of the world with her sullen and clipped tones. Another fine record whose strung-out bitterness is very much in keeping with this label’s aesthetic.

Christian Zanési is a young French composer who had his life turned around in the 1970s when his music tutor played him a record by Parmegiani, resulting in an epiphany that caused his devotion to electro-acoustic composition. On Soixante Dix-Huit Tours (DOUBLE ENTENDRE DE2/002), we have two 15-minute suites; ‘Sémaphores’ is a pleasant piece of zippy minimalism which is something to do with reprocessing electronic signals in a highly intellectual construct. ‘Tours et détours en 78 tours’ is potentially more interesting; he derived it from a rare find, a 78 rpm record created by the great Pierre Schaeffer and pressed in 1949. It was just a set of loops of musical instrument samples which Schaeffer used as the source for one of his tape compositions. Here, Zanési works with small fragments extracted from the record, combining them with more modern electronic sounds, and making all sorts of oblique comments on what he regards as the essential qualities of this very unique form of composition, which now seems to be regarded as an important part of French heritage. A delicate and spindly record, but worth giving it close attention with both ears wide open.

All the above arrived in the mangled mitts of The Sound Projector during late November 2009.

The Russian Waystyx label has sent another four releases all graced with their stand-out packaging, which takes hand-made CD wallets to a level of quality and imagination which few have surpassed. RLW has put out Herzbluntanteil I.K.K. IV (WAYSTYX 47), which is another instalment in his ongoing project to remix and reshape a popular German Christmas song as rendered by his daughter. We noted IKK – Purpur in this series when it was released by SIRR in 2006. I find to my chagrin I have missed the two intervening releases, but this one (released in November 2009) gives us contributions from Brume, Formanex, Anla Courtis, Dustbreeders, Intertronik, Howard Stelzer, and other prominent international tape’n'noise merchants, all engaged with the process of revisiting the innocence of a child’s view of Christmas and extracting from this source much alien darkness and nightmarishly unnatural sounds. A chillingly beautiful collection which boasts RLW’s usual strict quality control; not an ounce of fat on this Christmas goose. The Christmas-card wallet unfolds to reveal typesetting in the outline of an angel, and a window-grid containing all the notes in the form of cut-up slices of card. ‘Don’t wish me a merry Christmas,’ snarls the misanthropic Howard Stelzer in his sleeve note, ‘I won’t have one’.

French electro-acoustic rebel genius Lieutenant Caramel informs us rather gloomily that Street Noise Penetrates My House (WAYSTYX 46), on a fine collection of tape-debris mumbling and rattling excess which arrives packaged in the form of a lace-up shoe, complete with a shoelace and a suede finish. I’m going to send this to my bootmaker in St James’s so he can unlace it properly, since doing so is the only way I’ll be able to access the intriguing sleeve notes and psychedelic black-and-white pattern inside. The music, which includes ‘Variation on a Lost Horizon’ and ‘Dialogo Con Luigi Russolo’, is quite some way from resembling street noise; it’s full of queasy and unsettling sounds, strange voices, and non-musical twists, all painstakingly assembled and clashed in exciting ways, creating that miasma of unreal and disorienting experience which Lieutenant Caramel has made all his own. This guy was a revelation to me when I heard that double-CD compilation on Monochrome Vision, so it’s a delight to find more of his excellent work.

Slightly easier to open is the fine double-disc compilation The Wheel (WAYSTYX 39) by Maeror Tri, which gives us a generous sampling of this project’s electronic and semi-industrial music from 1988 to 1996. Many of these twenty tracks originally appeared on cassettes and CD compilations, now mostly out of print; there’s also some unreleased material here. This German trio apparently used only electric guitars (with plenty of effects) to create these droney ambientscapes, although voice work does surface from time to time in these murked-out mixes. Their penchant for Teutonic gloom may make for oppressive listening at times, but at their best it’s clear that Maeror Tri crafted their work with patience and skill, and achieved many distinctive sounds of their own. The package for this one comprises two pieces of very sturdy thick card die-cut into wheel shapes, one of them embossed with the band’s famous tri-partite ‘glyph’. The set is bound up by a strip of coloured paper held in place by a circular paperclip.

French emperor of fogged-in ambient electronics Brume has released Emergence (WAYSTYX 65), a set of two discs which the creator hopes you will play simultaneously to achieve more of the intended effect, including some ‘dephasings’. This is a reissue of a 1990 work originally put out on two cassettes by Old Europa Cafe. Not quite as sonically rich as other Brume releases which I have heard, Emergence comprises a series of abstracted watery bubbling noises overlapping in weird ways, filtered through light touches of post-processing and treatments. It may have existed as an installation piece, in which context it would probably make a bit more sense. A foldout pack with artworks printed in white on clear vinyl, where the discs are clearly marked ‘Source 1′ and ‘Source 2′ in a clever bilingual pun which might refer to pre-recorded source material, or to the French word for a spring. I see Brume has a entire slew of his earlier releases available in remastered form from Waystyx, so maybe it’s time to get busy with the PayPal button if you’re a fan who needs to scoop up these very limited editions.

Previous Waystyx bundle noted here

Remarkably loud and forceful minimalist electronic tones from Acre on his Isolationist (ISOUNDERSCORE [ISO_14]) CD. Aaron Davis from Portland regards this as his most ambitious work, produced after a few years spent issuing very limited releases for CDR and tape labels; indeed a couple of tracks here were issued last year by the label Students Of Decay. Work your ears beyond the initially foreboding countenance of this semi-blank release, and a rich world of microtones, shifting variances, rippling soundwaves and rotating blocks of analogue power will await you in these careful compositions. Brandon Nickell did the striking modernist orange artwork with its varnish overprinting of a geometric grid.

The very versatile bass player Joe Williamson sent us three CDRs representing many facets of his work on the Jedso Records label from an address in Sweden, though he has a German email address and the music was mostly recorded in London…turns out he’s Canadian born…of the three items of musical spinnage, I couldn’t make much headway with Everything Should Have Been Just Fine (JEDSO#1), a collection of 10 songs he made with The Inconvenience, a small troupe which includes Alex Ward on guitar and two drummers. However, The King Of Herrings (JEDSO#3) is much better to my mind, a set of raucous and free-storming improv recorded in London which shows Joe is capable of just the correct degree of impolite and atonal interaction with the guitar of David Stackenäs and the laptop of Phil Durrant. For listeners who just enjoy the sound of the standup bass, The Inhibitionist (JEDSO#2) offers you three tracks of Williamson doing it solo, scraping and rubbing his grunty strings to produce many a hog-like utterance from his stipple-backed instrument. The painter Ivan Seal provided cover art to these releases.

From Athens, we received a rather nifty cassette of lo-fi electronic process noise by Dead Gum. The C30 tape Fake World (PHASE! RECORDS PHR-70) contains eight tracks of experimental echo and grind, packed with relentless repetitions, whose underlying abrasive nastiness makes for a perfect alternative to applying an emery board to your brain. The creator (who may or may not be named Pangiotis Spoulos) is clearly influenced by the dark and doomy end of the futuristic industrial genre, but he has imagination and dynamics, and never lets his machines take control of the day’s events. The curious listener is advised to purchase copy and wait until Mr Spoulos opens his mouth to issue a grisly chant-song on ‘Body Come Down’. Your whole day will never be the same. 50 copies only.

AMP2 (Advanced Music and Mixed Media Pool Palermo) are a flange of five Italian experimenters armed with laptops, electronic devices, percussion and guitar, performing somewhat like an economy-sized version of MIMEO. For the new release Hums (BOWINDO RECORDINGS BW13), they were rather amazingly joined by the great Tim Hodgkinson, guitarist, clarinetist and composer from art-rock avant band Henry Cow. According to those present at the sessions, they ‘felt like a group of scientists at a conference’. The published results of their deliberations are given titles such as ‘Intelligent Sofa’, ‘The fish and dagger’ and ‘Hoop scorn’, and are packed in an utterly indifferent abstract sleeve. This cauldron of atonal bubbling musical soup sounds pretty good, but the performances are lacking in tension; I don’t feel much risk-taking going on between the many talented participants, many of whom are content to lapse into mediocre digital droning and fizzing.

Ramleh are one of those important and productive English noise acts (active for only two years, 1982-1984) whose work has somehow managed to elude this innocent listener, so I have been grateful for the opportunity to bend an ear to Valediction (SLR004), the new release on Pete Johnstone’s Second Layer Records. Johnstone is something of a connoisseur of fine repellent noise of all stripe, be it satanic Black Metal, Japanese table noise or industrial grind, and his verdicts in this area are often trustworthy. A collaboration between main man Gary Mundy (electronics, guitar and vocal) and Anthony Di Franco (electronics, synth, bass and guitar), Valediction contains six tracks of astonishingly dense and layered mutant ugliness that’s almost overpowering. I can see it’ll take a few million listens to wear down the rough edges on this ultra-heavy monster, providing I can survive its crushing effects and make my way through these tangled, clotted vats of sound. The sleeve and booklet for this high-quality package are replete with images and text conveying grisly sensations of emptiness, destruction, decay and misery. In fine, a nihilist’s dream come true!

From Brooklyn in New York, we have a release made by PAS last year. Led by Robert Pepper, this is a quartet of experimenters making rather quirky and quite dark electronic music with heavily treated vocals set to clonking rhythms, resembling in places a rather more sinister version of The Residents. I think it’s fair to say The Lyre Speaketh (NO NUMBER) is an idiosyncratic record and will not be to the taste of all listeners, but PAS (whose name unpacks into a rather unpleasant sentence of visceral horror) do have some distinctive moments of bizarre invention leaking out from this sprawling mass of analogue electronics, exotic effects, and incomprehensible jazz-poetry recits. I think they work best when they manage to shroud themselves inside an introverted, voodoo-fog of their own making, not raising their heads once as they weave their eerie spells. Apparently they make videos too, which if seen in conjunction with the music might have serious consequences for the audience’s overall grip on reality.

I’ve got no end of Mort Aux Vaches releases in the box awaiting attention, but here’s one of the more recent items to have emerged from that famed European house of eye-catching packages in the service of very marginal experimental music. I think Wouter Van Veldhoven are a Dutch trio of gentle and puzzling players featuring Rutger Zuydervelt and may have connections to Machinefabriek and Soccer Committee, and they produce a sort of photocopy-degraded version of Brian Eno ambient records. This record contains three tracks of sad and lonely playing produced by means unknown but may involve an accordion at some stage; everything has been put through various filters and post-production to create a distressed and broken surface, until it’s like looking at the world through a rain-streaked cracked window made of brown glass. The CD is housed in three panels of stout blue card, and is embossed with letterpress text in blind, packed with a jumble of letters and numbers that is very hard to interpret.

Cremaster once again offer us the finest in Spanish minimal improvised noise, this time using feedback, pickups and something akin to a prepared guitar on Noranta Graus A L’Esquerra (MONOTYPE RECORDS mono 026). The duo of Ferran Fages and Alfredo Costa Monteiro have impressed us in the past with their all-acoustic records of rumbling and rattling made using creaky junk and broken instruments, and some of the same distinctive non-aesthetic applies here. One long musical escapade is divided into four digestible chunks of discombobulated wheezy moanage.

Painting Petals on Planet Ghost is the showcase project for Ramona Ponzini, the talented lady who manages My Cat Is An Alien in Italy. She’s joined by the Opalio brothers playing acoustic guitars and gentle percussive effects on Haru No Omoi (PSF RECORDS PSFD-190), while she sings Japanese poetry in a distant, breathy voice. A delicate, lyrical and very intimate release.

On Polaroid Piano (SOMEONE GOOD RECORDS RMSG007), Akira Kosemura plays the piano as though it’s something so fragile he’s afraid he may break it; a brittle, porcelain sound emerges from this album, full of tiny details and imbued with an aura of nostalgia and wistful longings. At times the sound is muffled to the extent that it is indeed like a Polaroid photo – smeared, unfocused, yet still with some imagistic content of value shining through. Muneki Takasaka (from Paniyolo) contributes guitar on some cuts, and Lawrence English (whom I think has some connections to the record label) adds field recordings to three tracks. Another sad and intimate record.

The duo of Andreas Trobollowitsch and Johannes Tröndle put their noggins together in the duo Nörz, and have come up with a rag-bag of rather disconnected electro-acoustic sounds on the oddly-named release (also known as) acker velvet (SCHRAUM 10). Tapes, guitars, cello, electronics, feedback and radio sounds are all thrown into a cardboard box which is gently rattled about, occasionally resulting in some interesting effects; the duo maintain a faceless anonymity throughout, as is also shown by the nondescript cover art.

Frank Rothkamm has devised another puzzling release of rather queasy and bewildering electronic music, and wrapped it up in a contextual conundrum. Previous releases have alluded to the history of electronic music in both the groves of academe and in the movie theatre (science-fiction soundtracks), but on Ghost of New York (FLUX RECORDS FLX11) the chosen theme is Spiritualism. The track titles refer to ectoplasm and levitation, and there’s an ingeniously concocted spirit photograph on the front cover with all the other artworks tinted in sepia tones to drag the unwary listener back into a semi-fictional past. The back cover view of the Empire State Building is especially striking, for some reason. As usual, Rothkamm offers a rather difficult listen, packed with unnatural electronic sounds and very little underlying structure in evidence, in spite of the very extreme dynamics of composition.

Contemporary American minimalist Cory Allen did the booklet design and played the music on Hearing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears (QUIET DESIGN RECORDS ALAS010), five tracks of electronic music which, with its organ sound and use of delay effects, may remind the listener of Terry Riley’s 1960s work (such as Persian Surgery Dervishes). However, Allen’s sound is much cleaner as befits the digital age, and his patterns of notes (much like the patterns of grey and ultramarine dots in the booklet) follow clever and intricate structures that will repay the careful ear.

Two releases of marginal but fascinating music from the micro-label Hymns. Barthel Gadau Kopp Röther Weibel is apparently a collaborative project between three separate entities, and Radio Student’s (HYMN 30) centrepiece is a puzzling 21-minute melange of varispeeded tapes, radio sounds, voices and shapeless gobbets of noise. This radio session was improvised in Slovenia in 2003, and while it has some nice happy accidents, it feels a bit insouciant and careless; one wonders about the degree of commitment among its participants (CFS, Dobra Minus and The Nautilus Deconstruction). Notorious (HYMN 29), by Chefkirk and Ironing, contains evidence of more craft and to my mind is largely more successful than the above. Roger H Smith and Andrew Chadwick use microtapes, sampler, record player and a mixing desk to mangle and manipulate sources with glee and abandon, allowing small droplets of recognisable elements to leak out from an overall sound field of hissy, broken noise.

Some samples from the above can heard on this podcast.

Floating Signal (TICONZERO TCZ012-1) sees the combined efforts of Simon Balestrazzi, Max Eastley, Alessandro Olla and Z’EV making much scrapey and exciting textural noise in various locations in Italy, including in the crypt of St Domenico Church in Cagliari. The two Italians are using laptops and amplified objects, while Eastley deploys his famous Arc (half-sculpture, half-instrument), Z’EV plays unamplified percussion and the guitarist Marco Cappelli plucks his strings on a coupla cuts. Its release coincided with an avant-garde music festival which took place in November in Cagliari, called Signal.

The Norwegian label Roggbif Records, run by Sten Ove Toft, used to deal in CDRs, but now he’s leapt forward into the world of proper CD pressings and printed covers with a couple of great new Utarm releases. The newie is Panic Chamber (ROGGBIF022), an astringent and terrifying blast of scary-atmosfearic Black Metal whose cover boasts alarming images of torture, snakes, and diabolic ritual, with plenty of screaming voices and agonised metallic guitar within. With titles like ‘Scratches in the coffin of human existence’, you’re guaranteed a bleak and painful listen with this grisloid abortion. Substitute of Dimention Hell (ROGGBIF023) is a reissue of this project’s CDR from 2006, described as ‘a desperate metal album’ and one which I recall fondly as an effectively harrowing portrait of existence in the Underworld. Buy both of these to give yourself a taste of eternal damnation!

Dialis are an Italian duo who play a kind of symphonic chamber-prog low-key jazz music on Precatio (NO NUMBER CD), sometimes adding vocals in the service of songs such as ‘A Fragile Rebirth’ and ‘A Sweet Eclipse’. These lyrical and poetical explorations all depict humans facing some sort of crisis and struggle in their lives, hopefully resolving their very personal dilemmas to some satisfaction. The release is bolstered with a booklet of monochrome photos showing details from churches, architecture and landscapes, presumably in and around their home of Montemiletto. Much effort and time has been poured into making this heartfelt release.

D’Incise has I think played with Diatribes, the didactic improvising combo from Switzerland, but here he be with a solo effort Sécheresse Plantée en Plein Ciel (GRUENREKORDER Gr 071). This is an interesting approach to field recordings, which allows the possibility of radical cut-ups and electronic treatments, to create a disorienting sonic portrait of everyday life in the Czech Republic and Poland. The murmured banalities of humankind are given an extra thrilling and slightly dangerous edge by these digital interpolations.

Austrian label Sulatron-Records, operated by the genial Dave Schmidt, doesn’t really deal in experimental music as such but his nouveau-prog releases often find a sympathetic ear in these quarters. Uran’s self-titled CD (sulatron-records 0904) is an entertaining and slightly wackoid record of ‘electropunk spacerock instrumental’ music packed with nonsensical titles and cartoony images inside and outside the cover. Uran are from Gothenborg, but clearly do not operate in the same zones of introverted gloom-drone dark music such as we enjoy on the Fang Bomb label. Great rockist fun for prog and krautrock fans with plenty of analogue synth doodles to brighten your day.

From the Spanish label Audiolab-Arteleku we have Gezurrezko Joera (AUDIOLAB ERTZ 5), a great release of eccentric improvised minimal organ music played in the church of Altzate in Bera by the wonderful French performer, Jean-Luc Guionnet. We don’t hear enough from this talented fellow, whose Pentes CD for the label A Bruit Secret has long been a personal favourite. His approach to the organ is to treat it like a cross between a saxophone (his other instrument) and a mixing desk, using the stops and diapasons like filters and switches (which in one sense, they are). This single 43-minute performance takes a little while before it lifts off, but be assured it will reach stratospheric proportions in its quiet and unassuming way. The cover art (executed by Jean-Luc) is called ‘organ not organ’ and seems to find consonances between the church instrument and parts of the human anatomy. Recorded in 2008 as part of the ERTZ Other Music Festival, this one’s a certified beaut!

All above received in the Sound Projector Tongs 16-18 November 2009

The Sound Projector Radio Show 11th December 2009

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

With guest Harley Richardson

1. Ennio Morricone, ‘Studi Per un Finale (Secondo)’ [1969]
   From Happening: Acid Sides of the Maestro, ITALY EL RECORDS ACMEM58 CD (UNKNOWN)
2. ‘Spazio 1999′ [1976]
3. ‘Ninna Nanna Per Adulteri’ [1969]
   From Crime and Dissonance, USA IPECAC RECORDINGS IPC66 2 x CD (2005)
4. ‘Forza G’ (Psichedelico Jazzistico) [1971]
   Available on Psichedelico Jazzistico, UK EL ACMEM 35CD (2004)
5. ‘Suspense’ [1968]
   From Il Mercenario / Faccia a Faccia, ITALY VIVI MUSICA SOUNDTRACKS VCDS 7018 CD (1995)
6. ‘Dies Irae Psichedelico’ [1968]
   Available on Escalation, ITALY CAM CSE 053 CD (1992)
7. ‘Matto, Caldo, Soldi, Morto… Girotondo (Reprise)’ [1968]
   From Molto Mondo Morricone, GERMANY ROYAL EAR FORCE REF 08 CD (2003)
8. ‘Come un Madrigale’ [1972]
   Available on Quattro Mosche Di Velluto Grigio, ITALY DAGORED RED 139-1 LP (2001)
9. ‘Squilli Gioiosi’
   From La Fidanzata Del Bersagliere, ITALY COMETA EDIZIONI MUSICALI CMT 1004/12 LP (ND)
10. ‘Bad Orchestra’ [1968]
    From A Fistful of Sounds, UK BMG 74321 660402 2 X CD (1999)
11. Peter Tevis, ‘Pastures of Plenty’ [1962]
    Original issue RCA PM45-3115
12. Ennio Morricone, ‘I Figli Morti’ [1971]
    From Morricone Aromatico, UK SNAPPER MUSIC SMDCD510 2 X CD (2004)
13. ‘Quemada Secondo’ [1969]
    From Happening: Acid Sides of the Maestro, op cit.
14. ‘The Hellbenders’ [1967]
    Available on Spaghetti Westerns Volume Two, USA DRG RECORDS 32909 2 x CD (1995)
15. ‘Intermezzino Pop’ [1970]
    From Molto Mondo Morricone, op cit.
16. Rita Monico, ‘Thrilling’ [1965]
    Available on Canto Morricone Vol. 1 – The 60s, GERMANY BEAR FAMILY BCD 16244 AH CD (1998)
17. Ennio Morricone, ‘Barnaba’s Bamba’ [1965]
    From A Gun for Ringo / The Return of Ringo / Death Rides A Horse, UK SNAPPER MUSIC SMDCD510 CD (2004)
18. Lisa Gastoni, ‘Una Stanza Vuota’ [1966]
    Available on Canto Morricone Vol. 1 – The 60s, op cit.
19. Ennio Morricone, ‘Un Uomo Da Rispettare (Titoli)’ (excerpt) [1973]
    From Crime and Dissonance, op cit.
20. ‘Seguita’ [1971]
    From Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura, ITALY DAGORED RED 119-1 LP (2000)
21. ‘Passegiata Notturna (movie version)’ [1971]
    From Il Gatto a Nove Code, ITALY DAGORED RED 111-1 LP (2000)
22. ‘L’Attessa / The Wait’ [1965]
    From A Gun for Ringo / The Return of Ringo / Death Rides A Horse, op cit.
23. ‘Esplicitamente Sospeso’ [1973]
    Available on Il Serpente, ITALY GDM MUSIC CD CLUB 7072 CD (2009)
24. ‘Come Maddalena’ (excerpt) [1971]
    From More Mondo Morricone Revisited, GERMANY COLOSSEUM CST 34.8058 CD (1996)

The Ultramarine Records label used to be based in Brooklyn, now it’s in Italy, but its New York allegiances are still somewhat in evidence…pleased to receive four vinyl items which represents almost their entire output to date. Ninni Morgia Control Unit (UM005) is a double LP by this Brooklyn guitarist who teams up with veteran free honker Daniel Carter and drummer Jeff Arnal, to create four sides of not-unpleasant jazz-rock fusion music. Superficially, the sound of the album seems to be in thrall to the 1970s – Bitches Brew, Weather Report and late Soft Machine records are some obvious touchstones, but I’m hoping to find time to engage with Morgia’s soloing work (he also plays electric sitar, autoharp, keyboards and percussion) to discover something original he may have to offer us. Scott Colburn’s mastering gives the set added dynamic punch, and SpiralSmokey provided the dazzling cover art.

Chris Forsyth is the Brooklyn guitarist who can do no wrong for me. Here he is with Shawn Edward Hansen (from Phantom Limb and Bison) with Dirty Pool (UM002), a gorgeous LP of instrumental music blending Forsyth’s golden-sunshine notes with the balmy Farfisa organ work of Hansen on these 2005 recordings. The entire A side is devoted to ‘I First Saw You’, a totally gorgeous continuous improvisation played in a single key inhabiting some zone of paradise where the best of Popol Vuh meets up with languid psychedelic musings. Forsyth’s confident strokes and licks contain compressed moments of pure genius. The cover here is attempting to emulate the look of an old Folkways or Origin Jazz Library LP, both of which wraparound paper pastedowns on black textured sleeves.

Amolvacy is an ad-hoc trio comprising two New Yorkers, Dave Nuss (No-Neck Blues Band) and Sheila 16 (Laboratory Theatre Group), joining forces with English wackster Aaron Moore from Volcano The Bear. A La Lu La (UM003) situates itself quite some way from the lengthy explorations of No-Neck, offering rather short and condensed tunes where the two guys demonstrate instrumental prowess with percussion and acoustic instruments, throwing out stark and wayward notes with inspiration. Over the top of these faux-primitive rhythmic backdrops, Sheila 16 caterwauls her unintelligible free-form wailing in shrill tones. Homage to various hip underground records from the 1960s is implied in these musical statements, and the back cover is printed with lines of quasi-Beat Poetry. Pressed in clear vinyl and housed in a very unusual fold-out cover with flaps.

Temperatures are of course English, the London duo of Peter Blundell and James Dunn, for whose recorded output I have cultivated a very soft spot of earth in the garden of my mind. Eksra (UM004) shows them using bass, drums, and synth as though the instruments had only just been discovered out of an archaeological dig, and the players are two scientist-musicians speculating wildly as to the original purpose of these unknown artifacts. Most effective is when Blundell adds his hideous grunting vocalising to certain tracks, arriving more successfully to my mind at the sort of primordial semi-conscious holy utterances that Sheila 16 claims to be aiming at. Eksra is not as outright brutal as their early work, yet still delivers many crushing tromps and bludgeoning moments. I have no idea what the image on the front cover could be, but it feels decidedly sinister, like the printout from a ghastly machine that measures psychic disruptions in the atmosphere.

The podcasts for two November radio shows, Subdued Hymns and Jiffing Rots, are now available for listening. Sorry for the delay on this, but many thanks to the hard-working crew at Resonance for rescuing the shows from the digital archive.