“I want to send you some more new records”, so said an email I recently received from Miguel A. García. He’s making so many lately that he’s afraid of sending out duplicates. I asked him to send me pictures rather than titles – it’s easier for me to identify them that way. In the meantime I need to take up the slack and look at this bundle-maroo which he sent on 22 November 2013, which is chock-full of grim noises. One of them, Asto Ilunno, was already sent to us by Nick Hoffman and was reviewed here.
Sohorna (OBS RD#1) is a split with Oier Iruretagoiena and is #1 in a series called Radical Demos, subtitled “places, objects, electronics”. Yes, field recordings, electronic music, miked-up objects, the mixing desk…these are the commonplace tools of your young sound artists these days. García uses them like pickaxes and delves deep into the coal mine of ultra-processed sound…coming up with four stern lumps of pitch-black seething and grumbling. You’ll be lost in the abstraction of it all within moments. Iruretagoiena has just one cut, the 26-minute title track, and it’s one of those horrifying onslaughts that jangles the nerve-endings and induces unbearable tension and fear in the listener, with no remorse. Thank your lucky stars only 100 copies of this exist. Score so far: 5 points for the steady droning sound, 50 points for the cruelty.
On icgs el (NADAcdr nada 14), García changes identity and slips on his xedh guise (I assume it involves wearing a wrestling mask, much like El Santo or Mil Mascaras) to join forces with his old sparring warrior buddy noish (Oscar Martin) and the fab Lali Barrière. Lali must one of the few women experimenters who is not only well respected in the areas of improv and computer music in Spain, but can also square up to these two macho bastards in the arena, probably matching them drink for drink in the cantina. Close-miked objects, hacked software, feedback and “raw electronics” are the basic components of these two 20-minute slow-motion punchfests. By and large, a less “grim” experience for your ears than Sohorna above, but that’s a relative term. I like the fact that every moment of the aural canvas is filled with activity of some sort – fizzing, burbling and writhing about like a rag-tag assembly of bizarre wildlife cavorting about in an unknown landscape. On the first track, that is; the second piece has more in the way of minimalist tones and desiccated longeurs inserted into the continuum, at which point the music loses some of its momentum for me. Score: 10 points for the “witches brew” impressions this conveys, plus 5 additional points for the ego-less collaborative dimension.
Hiztun! (ATTENUATION CIRCUIT ACM 1008) is quite a grabber…from the start, we know we’re back on more cerebral hard-core experimentation turf as it’s published by our conceptual German friends Attenuation Circuit, and as such comes packaged in one of those sandwich cartons which you could also use for storing half a piece of Ryvita. This one is an all-radiophonic piece, created using radios, and intended for broadcast on the online experimental radio station, Hots!. García does it brilliantly, bringing a portable radio set for use as a receiver / FM tuner but also as an additional sound-source in his murmuring electric broth, and a third time when he plays back voice tapes through the speaker (and re-records them, I might add). The spirit of the work is “hacking” into radio technology, a strategy which I think we can all approve of as that was the basis for much 20th-century experimentation and discovery in sound – just ask Theremin, Stockhausen, Keith Rowe or Hugh Davies. Hiztun! is an exciting and dynamic listen with its remarkable textures and contrasts, alien voices drifting in from the ether with their foreign-language barks, stray music phrases likewise wandering in, and moments of high tension when you can hear the creator flicking his switches live on air. Dramatic! Score for this gem: 80 points for innovative manipulation of the crackling ether, 20 bonus points for its raw-edged exposure of the processes involved, plus an additional “silver antenna” award for radical reinvention in radiophonic art.
Lastly we have the untitled split tape (ABOS4-137) on A Beard Of Snails Records. The first side is Star Turbine, a duo whose name are new to me, but this Danish-Norwegian pair of improvisers are certainly stirring a fine pot of beans with these live recordings from London, Reading, and parts of mainland Europe. Poulsen and Bjerga have only been working as a team since about 2011-12, but have already made about six full-length albums of their own and have a couple of European tours etched in their passports. Unlike your average Joe Drone types, they have a unique approach to manipulating their broken electronics and cracked objects which produces compelling sensations; the music creates the hoped-for mesmerising experience, without having to resort to oversimplified methods like one-note drones. Plus they even seem to have a sense of humour, if I’m reading these interspersed electric doodles correctly. Hope to hear more from these two astral travellers in due course.
The flip shows our man García noising it up with Swiss creator Valentina Vuksic on Live At Radio Ruido, NYC. What we got here is three extracts from a lengthier performance recorded in a radio studio. Oddly enough I was expecting their side to be a brutal blast of heaviness that would beat Star Turbine into a cream puff, but in fact the Gar-Sic team are just edged out from the top spot due to a deficiency of engagement and innovation. There’s something slightly tentative about the duo’s work here, as though they’re padding around each other like two mismatched ocelots, and I appreciate that neither of them may have felt completely at home on the New York turf. Even so they belch out plenty of feedback, stuttering, hissing and buzzing noise combined in tasty textural layers, enough to satisfy the hungry anteater who’s in search of more tasty noise-ants which he can scoop up with his sticky tongue. Score for this tape: 100 points for latterday cosmic explorer vibes, but this is mostly due to Star Turbine’s input. Regrettably, García loses 10 credibility points for treading water on his side. The label gets a “best in show” ribbon for its preposterous name and for publishing this tape in a garish pink shell. Now that’s class!