An Ambient Squashy Quagmire
Original position in magazine: pages 30-33
Contents: James Plotkin, Flux, James Plotkin and Mick Harris, Tactile, Solarus, Narcosis Dark Ambient compilation, Driftworks box set, Thomas Köner
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Mosta these CDs have all been grouped together in the following notes, as to begin with I couldn’t tell them apart. Centreless, shapeless, abstract drones. This Ambient music is all melding into one at the moment…try me again later and see how I feel. Electronica these days is just too easy for the performers; not to say the machines do everything now, but they seem to do an awful lot of it. You just get so sick of all these ‘textures’ - textures are for interior designers, listening to music shouldn’t be like flipping through a book of fabric samples. A clutch of CDs like this is to me like a Siamese twin on a grand scale - say about thirty-six individual human beings, all fusing into one grotesque monstrous body. I don’t know if this is a process taking place in the womb or on the operating table. If the former, perhaps humans are now becoming like amoebas and splitting cells to form weird new genes, thus the warping of flesh into something resembling a Chapmanworld sculpture. If the latter, no less hideous, but a Victorian sewing-together of body parts like Frankenstein’s monster; but the work was farmed out to a team of urchins labouring in a grim factory with soot-caked walls.
Musician James Plotkin has infiltrated this Crackling Ether batch in a big way. He is an avant-garde guitar manipulator with his star in the ascendant if you believe all the press cuttings, who churns out his effects-heavy drones very often resembling some latterday Robert Fripp. He’s been associated with John Zorn, Japanese arch-fiend KK Null, Michael Gira, Justin Broadrick (of Techno Animal); and frequently with Mick Harris who used to be the drummer in Napalm Death but later became one half of Scorn. Plotkin requires an arsenal of effects before he can even get of bed in the morning; the Korg A2 multi-effector, the DeltaLab 8-second delay and the EMG loaded Steinberger are all humming merrily away before his breakfast toast is done, and he spreads his marmalade with a E-bow. Naturally, the actual sound of the guitar is completely transformed and rendered unrecognisable by the time it reaches us poor souls, like perhaps the dying light from a super-nova hundreds of thousands of years ago. Not that this is a bad thing at all, even if the rise of the Midi-unit has spread a certain saminess through the recorded music landscape of the 1990s. When I was 17 the height of wild and crazy guitar outrage to me was Jimmy Page’s electronic experiments documented in the film The Song Remains the Same. Whatever device he used it’s doubtless regarded as primitive and ’steam-driven’ these days, yet it transformed side two of that ghastly soundtrack album (’Dazed and Confused’) into a virtual avant-garde guitar noise that Keith Rowe wouldn’t have been ashamed of!
James Plotkin
The Joy of Disease
JAPAN AVANT AVAN 028 CD (1996)
Pretty damn excellent…Plotkin demonstrates to the satisfaction of all parties that he is the supreme master of his effects and studio, and turns in track after track of very convincing and entertaining ditties, showcasing his guitar noise. Razor sharp production values you’d somehow associate with a product of this quality, a bright and shiny surface (as opposed to the ambient murkiness of other CDs that we must wade through below). Everything is bolstered up with drum machine and drum loops and that big guitar sound is opened up wide, like a Montana skyline. One thing that helps is his very attractive melodies, quite simple guitar solos that actually never stray outside of a very limited modal range; they’re given added authority by the effects. But I’m sure you’d rather listen to this than say, some fusion showoff cramming a billion notes inside an impossibly clever chord sequence. It can’t really be claimed that any of these tunes really develop very much, but at least they never outstay their welcome for the minutes that they inhabit this earth. Some of ‘em, like ‘Euphoria Passing’, are actually almost evocative in a clinical kinda way. Plotkin is aided here by Franz Treichler’s ‘ominous guitar loop’, Ruth Collins who did some annoying breathy vocalising and pretty pictures, and old buddy Mick Harris who also co-produced.
ED PINSENT
Flux
Protoplasmic
USA RELEASE RECORDS RR 6958-2 CD (1997)
This is El Plotkino again, credited with ‘music, instrumentation and voice’ while Ruth Collins adds yet more of her lyrical contributions. Musically this is only about as good as a B-side to The Joy of Disease, nowhere near as satisfying; layered guitars actually sounding like guitars, very poppy drum beats and danceable time signatures. In a way he’s trying to create some kind of heavy progressive pop record, picking up the torch from the first LP by M (you remember, ‘New York London Paris Munich, everybody talking ’bout…Pop Music!’). One track even features a voice vocoder, use of which in this context verges on Buggles territory for me. Heaven knows I’d be diverted enough if something as well-crafted as this actually appeared on Top of the Pops instead of some teenaged ninnies bopping about to their mechanical sequencer, but that’s probably not going to happen. Collins, speak-singing her ill-fitting vocal interpolations, reminds me of Danielle Dax’s ‘Hamsprachtmusik’ on the first League of Gentlemen LP from 1981 (yet another Robert Fripp connection, amazingly), although Collins sounds annoyingly prim and pleased with her absurdist observations, which are in fact simply pretentious guff. Mick Harris co-produced, again in the lavish splendour of his Birmingham-based ‘Black Box’ house of tricks.
ED PINSENT
James Plotkin and Mick Harris
Collapse
USA ASPHODEL 0963 CD (1996)
Compared with the above two, this one is a simpler proposition in that you don’t have to put up with any stupid lyrics, drum beats or pop tunes. Instead, your resistance is ground down by heavily abstra, identikit featureless Ambient drones. Created ‘through use of looped guitar, natural and unnatural sound, processing’ by these two wearisome guys who are starting to look very humourless to me. ‘Collision’, with its Cyberman voice effect, is one step away from being a Dr Who sound effects record. This CD exerts a certain presence now and again, but you have to be prepared to listen in toto for it to weave its cunning spell; given that these 5 tracks are all what used to be considered ‘LP-track’ length, I suggest you bring a packed lunch or you too will ‘Collapse’.
ED PINSENT
Tactile
Inscape
FRANCE SENTRAX SNTX 3003CD (1996)
Intellectually at least, Tactile join the dots between Lucifer, Pan and The Wind in the Willows (ie The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; yes, Syd Barrett also spotted it); they photograph pagan-looking reindeer horns on their sleeve; they thank ‘the goat-footed balloon man’, and they namecheck Coil whose members I believe have some passing interest in Satanism. Tactile are an ‘Unholy Three’ of performers, who want to frighten us with their sinister musical atmospheres, I suspect. ‘Panoleptic’ at least in name would aspire to cross the alarming sensations of a panic attack with a Grand Mal epileptic fit, but all this track delivers is a really limp choppy helicopter rhythm like some bloody Pink Floyd track played at 16 rpm. ‘Caged Light’ is all lowest note on the organ and sinister strange insects dashing from speaker to speaker. Play it loudish and you might frighten some ten year-olds at a Halloween party. Otherwise you can probably live without this all-process and few-ideas moshfest.
ED PINSENT
Tactile
Recurrence and Intervention
USA RAWKUS ENTERTAINMENT / SENTRAX RWK 1118 CD (1997)
Moderately more engaging than the above as this features a bunch of guest artists remixing Tactile’s raw materials. Some of them actually succeed far better in suggesting the worrisome atmospheres that Tactile are trying for, alluding in sound to Lucifer’s armies on the march in their campaign to overthrow man’s domain. This martial aspect is further suggested by the combative nature of the credits: Coil VS Tactile, Scorn VS Tactile, etc…each remixer is pitched into an antagonistic struggle with their mentors. Coil play the devil’s own hurdy-gurdy, while James Plotkin plucks the dark lord’s stolen celestial harp. Zoviet France hint at the cries of a choir of fallen angels, then unleash a division of demons in the shape of crawling black insects. Scorn find Satan playing a backwards church organ in the disco. Solaris and Eyeless in Gaza also add in boring drumbeats, to not much effect. Blood From The Soul close the record and manage to tease out some ’screams of the massed damned’ from the electronic cobwebs. I’m not an expert, but isn’t this ‘unsettling drones with magick effects’ the sort of thing that certain Current 93 and other United Dairies releases were aiming at in the 1980s? Again, play it loud for maximum effect…any effect.
ED PINSENT
Solarus
Empty Nature
USA RELEASE RECORDS RR 6965-2 CD (1997)
Solarus are breaking away from the gene pool with their drum machines and near-melodies to produce a species of moderne pop music for airbrushed-robots in a souped-up Metropolis landscape; the sort of nightmare Duran Duran were hinting at, in short. Sadly they already sound a bit dated with the rather obvious default Midi-sounds, and especially the cliched use of voice samples; these are supposed to inject narrative tension (references to working, sweating and dying) and lead the listener to hope for some sort of resolution in the plodding chord sequence, but nothing actually happens. Solarus is Kipp Johnson with help from Bill Yurkiewicz. The ubiquitous James Plotkin, who seems to be dogging my life so much, contributes guitar.
ED PINSENT
Various Artists
Narcosis: A Dark Ambient Compilation
NOVATEKK / CREDO NTD 90402-24 2 x CD (1997)
Give your brain the day off and just get lost inside this one for a while. You’ll be glad you did. This budget-ish Double CD costs less than the price of an ecstasy trip (I’d imagine) and delivers the same numbing results without after effects. No track description this time fact fans: it has not been possible after even three listens to really distinguish any one piece from the next; they’re all equally slow moving, weightless astronauts lost in space, mountains getting up to stretch themselves and settling down again, proceeding at the same rate as three day-old porridge being poured down the sink…and all equally pleasant in a way that one wonders exactly what constitutes ‘Dark’ Ambient? Well, there’s one piece here towards the end of Disc Two which cuts in a voice sample yawping out ‘God is Dead! Satan Lives!’, which is pretty fucking dark all right, and for a moment might return us to the Tactile threesome and their invidious devilry; but I can’t find much to the actual content of the music that either affirms or denies God, or Satan, one way or the other. Content-free, noncommittal; near-music for people who are fed up with trying to use their ears. This is as good a compilation as you could manage given the state of the world today; put together by Neil Gardner, it’s mainly harvested from previously released albums, but contains two unreleased tracks. I recognise none of the artistes, apart from Coil and Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, whose very good Children of Nature LP is a nice tasteful and atmospheric film soundtrack. If you remember me wittering on about the ‘virtual womb’ imagery all over Isolationism last ish, it’s revealing to gaze into the front cover of Narcosis photograph. A mouthful of nails? A beech nut?
ED PINSENT
Nijiumu / Pauline Oliveros and Randy Raine-Reusch / Thomas Köner / Paul Schütze
Driftworks
UNITED KINGDOM BIG CAT RECORDS ABB1000 4 x CD (1997)
Compiled by Kevin Martin, this set might just tell you everything that’s good and bad about Ambient and experimental music today. Four premium-quality artists have been chosen for this millenium-dome styled issue, each demonstrating a different aspect of what it is possible to achieve musically with volume, intensity, slow-moving development, and the luxury of 70 minutes to do it in. Top of the range is Nijiumu, one of Keiji Haino’s quieter musical hats, and for sheer pathos this live recording worth your entry money by itself; to call this slice of sheer emotion tear-inducing is not enough. You will weep! No faulting the premium-quality work of Thomas Köner’s Nuuk, and Pauline Oliveros with Randy Raine-Reusch (In the Shadow of the Phoenix), all superb adepts at electronic manipulation. Paul Schütze’s Stateless is good too, although I still remain to be convinced by this Australian composer living in the UK - there are facile qualities which make it hard to trust. The music then, wins hands down over a deal of the other Ambient releases to have reached us, but there remain some niggling difficulties. The tacky sleeve art - or ‘image poetry’, as one Buggy G Riphead wishes it to be known - seems to have been sampled from an in-flight British Airways magazine; you’re almost being invited on a Led Zeppelin styled private jet, with air hostesses in skimpy uniforms simpering ‘I’m Electro…Fly Me!’ Secondly, the inevitable problem of choosing four artists who don’t really have a great deal to do with each other. It’s almost as though they’re being used to illustrate a point about modern electronic music, rather than being granted the space to speak for themselves. That point is underscored by Biba Kopf’s elaborate sleevenote, which articulates every thought you could have had yourself on the music (just sit back and let the experts take over). Weirdly, Isolationism (which Kevin Martin also compiled, with far more interpretative sleeve notes) didn’t have this stumbling block at all…perhaps having more artists helped increase the chaotic feel. But this isn’t really important. The reality of playing a 4-CD set is that you never listen to it in one sitting. Rather each audition digests one of the handy slices and for that time, you not only forget the other ‘Driftworkers’, you also forget about all the other trivial problems weighing down your shoulders. Verily, this is highly seductive virtual space surround- sound, as near an equivalent as you’ll get to that glorious death they give you in the dystopian SciFi movie Solyent Green - a slow-acting poison winds down your bodily system, while romantic music plays over heartbreaking Technicolour visions of the natural world we have completely despoiled.
ED PINSENT
Thomas Köner
Teimo / PermaFrost
GERMANY MILLE PLATEAUX MP CD 35
New depths (or heights) in electronic minimalism. Despite the fact there seems to be so little actually going on here, Köner’s music asserts an incredible presence. A disembodied series of monotones seep out of your speakers like poison gas…’moving further and further away from the original source of the recordings’, as the These catalogue puts it. After 15 minutes you feel like there’s a gigantic invisible monster in the room, rattling the windows and loose objects. The weight of his bulk presses on your chest until you can’t breathe. An army of Poltergeists. I would be glad to meet somebody who can treat this as background music, as I find it so compelling it simply paralyses me.
This mysterious sound is in fact originated from brushed gongs, amplified to a quite disproportionate level. A microscopic sound event becomes the raw material Köner will use and subject to his careful and extended treatments. Stockhausen experimented with pretty much the same technique for Mikrophonie I for tam-tam and six players, in 1964. Stockhausen insisted on tam-tam as the correct name for a gong, an instrument whose sound he associates with a lion’s roar because he has somehow conflated two Hollywood movie openings (J Arthur Rank’s gong and the MGM lion). One player vibrates the gong, the second moves a microphone in accordance with the score, while the third plays the potentiometer and filters. In a 1971 lecture Stockhausen said ‘I tell my own students, if you want to become famous just take a magnifying glass and put it to one of my scores, and what you see there, just multiply that for five years.’ Looks like Köner took that suggestion to heart…
Where Charles Hayward keeps returning to his ‘water’ theme, Köner’s lifelong interest is in the snow and ice. A few years ago there was that rumour that CDs sounded better at temperatures close to zero, and now look what happens - somebody has to put it into practice! He had one track on Isolationism. Teimo and PermaFrost were at one time available as separate CDs on the Dutch Barooni label in 1991 and 1993, and yet here they are now in one handy double-pack courtesy of Mille Plateaux, the label dedicated to bringing you Experimental Techno at any cost. Cheaper and more effective than buying a new fridge freezer. Isn’t the consumer age great?
ED PINSENT