Fukushima! (PRESQU’ILE RECORDS PSQ004-2) is a compilation themed on the Japanese nuclear disaster of 2011, caused by an earthquake and leading to multiple reactor meltdowns. Otomo Yoshihide went on a lecture tour to raise awareness, and his appearance at the University of Tokyo in April 2011 was the direct inspiration for this two-disc set. I would imagine that Otomo gave a very direct, honest and impassioned account of the situation, if his music is anything to go by. He doesn’t appear on the compilation, but there is much modern avant performed music to savour. Disc two is dominated by star players from the Berlin reduced improv sphere, notably Burkhard Beins, Annette Krebs and Ingar Zach, plus similar minimalists Mark Wastell, Greg Kelley and Michael Pisaro. Their accumulated tracks put the listener in a suitably sober mood, and are politically contextualised by Krebs’ field recordings of a Berlin street demonstration. The main event is on disc one, a 34-minute John Tilbury piano solo from a composition by Dave Smith. It’s like listening to a very coherent argument made by an intelligent and assured wise man, which is exactly what it is. There’s also some alarming tones from Magda Mayas and a superbly baffling performance from Joe Foster of English with the Korean players Jin Sangtae, Hong Chulki and Choi Joonyong. Overlong, uneven, but this fund-raising comp is in a good cause. (19/07/2012)

Psykisk Tortur are the Norwegian combo, currently down to a duo of founder member Nicolaysen and Ronny Waernes, missing original member Tore Nilsen. When these maniacs began their unholy career in 1984 they became notorious for physically dangerous performances involving industrial machinery and metal percussion, thus aligning themselves with the early Faust, Hanatarash, and Einstürzende Neubaten – and although I’m not sure if the Norwegians ever succeeded in destroying any venue in which they played, they were certainly in receipt of numerous banning orders and they never ate lunch in Bodø again. On Nightrider (GO TO GATE RECORDS GO TO CD 022), their intense noise has mutated into a grotesque form of heavy metal rock, where mad electronic gibberish takes the place of squealing guitar solos, and the drumming is every bit as intense as a thousand Slayer tribute bands. It’s especially memorable when a “song” is attempted, as on ‘Stille Er Morgen’, where the monotonous chant is solemnly intoned against an insane cataclysm of heavily-distorted amplified wildness and remorseless drumbeats. Those who crave more outright “experimental” noise are advised to spin ‘Lettmetall’ to experience the more free-form tendencies of this powerful team, while rest of album is sufficient to satisfy any crazed Napalm Death fans. Very percussive and metallic throughout; the album virtually builds an iron suit around your whole body while you wait. As Robert Pepper astutely noted, “Psykisk Tortur rules!” (06/07/2012)

Matt Earle is an Australian musician and label owner, who has improvised with Guthrie and Guerra in his home country and recorded electronic music as part of Stasis Duo. Muura is his solo outlet, and the object simply titled Tape (ORGANIZED MUSIC FROM THESSALONIKI T19) is a cassette of process drone music that crawls from the speakers like over-baked ectoplasm escaping a desert climate. It’s built up from layered recordings of by-products of the electric guitar, including amplifier hum, feedback, and other “mistakes” generally considered undesirable by normal men. From this swamp of friable material, Muura impressively manages to build a hefty brick wall – a compelling experience of solid, throbbing abstract sound. The B side may have employed the same processes, but is somehow hollowed out and subtracted to create an extremely bleak and negative effect. Ultra-drone. (19/07/2012)

We last noted the Irish noise duo Safe in late 2010 with their Bare Life release. Now here’s their fifth item Crop (DOTDOTDOT MUSIC DOTDOTDOTCD010), where Hegarty and O’Shaugnessy supplement the group with four collaborators who add guitars, synth and toy instruments to the melee on this live recording. And it’s a continuous 40-minute assault, so civilians should approach this toxic area with caution. What may appear at first to be an indistinguishable howl of unpleasant frequencies slugging it out inside a tight arena of hate will reveal itself to be much more complex, and as deep as an aquarium filled with unusual marine life. The usual relentless Merzbow-chug power blast which Safe favour has been slightly subdued to act as a rhythmical backdrop to the instrumental lines of Langan, Condon, O’Brien and Lynch, guitar and synth eruptions which mew most plaintively. When you get this many noiseicians gathered together in a live situation, it can sometimes be a guarantee of unlistenable, sloppy chaos. But the musicians here reverse that trend, cohering strongly and sustaining interest unflaggingly for all 40 minutes. (24/07/2012)

From the Belgian duo NDE we have Kampfbereit (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR146CD), their second release which in typography and cover art at least is “disguised” as a Black Metal album, but turns out to be a wild experiment in suffocating, extreme noise – situated in the “Death Industrial” sub-sub-genre, as the press notes would have it. As they hurl around their buckets of distortion, hammering percussion, and excessively filtered screaming vocals, NDE also prove they can do dynamic changes pretty well, and the album is designed almost purely as an extreme listening experience, where we are given few clues or map points and the listener’s imagination must work hard to process the scrambled information. A few quieter tracks paint “bleak and empty” vistas of desolate misery, but most of the content is simply intolerably repellent and over-layered loud noise. A painful and torturous journey to the depths of a Pandemonium-styled Hades. (28/07/2012)

Is it too early to say Northern Spy Records are taking up the slack from ESP-Disk? The latter label used to make a point in the 1960s of signing up eccentric performers from rock’s margins, some of them recruited direct from the street, and gradually made history thereby (even if they sold few records at the time). I’m getting a similar vibe from Diamond Terrifier, although my impression is based largely on the photo inside the gatefold of Kill The Self That Wants To Kill Your Self (NORTHERN SPY RECORDS NSCD026), and I may be misreading it completely. This odd record is a one-man show by Sam Hillmer, who exhibits untrammelled raw passion when playing his saxophone, recorded in strange ways and at strange times, with minimal (or zero) accompaniment. That woodwind instrument has rarely sounded so other-worldly. It’s not just microphone placement, either; Hillmer is reaching down into a very deep personal place to extract these hollow bellows and loosing them into the ether like mind-drenching fog clouds. Diamond Terrifier, who cutely expresses his name as <>T, is a truly original primitive. This is his debut record; will the world allow a second release? P.S. – the fauvist version of the American flag on back cover is a nice touch, clues us in to the “alternative” universe of Mr. Hillmer. (19/07/2012)

Blindshore is James Adkisson, a Texas guitarist who used to play in Seven Percent Solution. Hollow (SELF-RELEASED) is a solo album on which he plays everything, and freely owns up to his influences – some of them rather conventional, such as Adrian Belew or Brian May, along with his first loves Fripp and Sonic Youth. The results are agreeable and competent modern rock music, but given his proclivities for progressive rock and melody (no bad things, I hasten to add), Blindshore is unlikely to be mistaken for a carbon-copy of solemn post-rockers such as Isis or Red Sparowes. Adkisson’s vocals are a tad thin, but he uses the singing voice as another instrument in his very thickened mixes, where no space is left unfilled and there is barely space for the listener to move. (18/07/2012)

Attacca are an improvising trio based in Berlin active since 2010, who declare O’ The Emotions! (SCHRAUM 15). Two German players, the trombonist Mattias Müller and the bassist Axel Haller, are joined by Canadian Dave Bennett, a refugee electro-acoustic student who has made his home in Europe’s financial capital and contributes guitar to the trio’s sound. Attacca seem to be all about the very rich sound they make together, rather than owing much of a debt to jazz or even improvised music, and don’t wish to draw attention to their respective techniques. Instead, we hear a compelling and integrated combination of tones and textures, with repetitions and patterns arrived at by very natural means. The ebbs and flows of this watery gelatin suck us in like so much quicksand. The “emotions” of the title are thus very hard to name or identify, and clearly they can only be processed by the players through their exploratory work. (12/07/2012)

More splendidly sickened and corrupted computer noise from dsic, the New Zealand expat who lives in Bristol and whose LF Records netlabel rarely disappoints. Public Benefits, Private Vices (LF020) is one of his more aggressive concoctions, seething with hateful noise for most of its duration, and feeling entitled to pummel the listener’s head with cruel buffets. When this punch-up with a street drunk subsides, we are left with curious passages of disaffected half-noise, which pulsate and sizzle like an angry insect poised to strike again. The only variations to the above scheme are found with the final track, a soothing potion of pure tones deployed in random fashion; and the curious voice loops which last for 36 seconds on track two. Whole album could erupt into violence at any moment, creating a tense and invigorating spin. When I grow tired of “polite” and well-manicured laptop music, I always turn to dsic, a man who’s never afraid to show his Samsung just who wears the pants in his house! (24/07/2012)

Just heard from Alfredo Costa Monteiro yesterday, and here he is again as part of an ad-hoc trio called 300 Basses, with Jonas Kocher and Luca Venitucci. Sei Ritornelli (POTLATCH P212) was recorded in late 2011 when the three of them were on a residency in Switzerland. Although I personally would welcome the formation of an orchestra of 300 musicians playing only the upright double bass (and hopefully doing so at the Hot Gates), the music of 300 Basses is in fact predicated on the accordion. Continuing to pursue his radical, deconstructionist approach to conventional instruments, Monteiro attempts to refashion the very workings of the accordion according to his own diabolical schemes, rethinking the respective purposes of the bellows, keys and buttons. If applied to to the fields of biology or zoology, I suspect his “what-if” approach would lead to his being banned under various international anti-vivisection agreements. The resultant horrors are laid bare on this extreme record, where to my ears the accordions simply seem to be begging for mercy under this cruel and unusual treatment. Still, that’s clearly the intention. Kocher used to make me a little impatient with his earlier slow-moving minimalist releases like Materials and Solo, but there’s a little more fire to be heard in this collaborative work. (09/07/2012)

Puzzling thing sent from Sparks, Nevada in the US, maybe from Isa Tanaka. The name of the act and CD are rendered in runes I cannot reproduce, and the tracks have odd names such as ‘Rakine Hugoniot Relations’, which perplex. The front cover states “Ambients”, but this may be misleading information. On the CD are the most enigmatic stretches of low-key white-noise hoover-drones I have heard for a while. Some are possibly environmental in origin (a clinical shopping centre mode), some have vaguely musical elements. May seem unappealing, but I enjoy its inscrutable continuousness. (24/07/2012)

UK composer Martin Ayres has produced his Harmogram Suite (BURNING SHED BSHED0111) as a 5:1 surround sound DVD and as a regular audio CD. Not one to stint on hard labour and meticulous assembly, his work contains 140 layers of overdubs, with all parts played by Ayres himself; he’s also paid close attention to recording methods, set-ups, and different playing techniques, the better to simulate the richness of a full orchestra on this one-man show. Languorous strings drone slowly, and the work is suffused with melancholy astringency. (03/08/2012)

Mika Vainio will be an electronic musician I personally associate with a time in the 1990s when electronica was punchy, abstract, and brutal. His FE304 – Magnetite (TOUCH TO:86) thankfully contains some trace elements of these desirable features. With six track titles that incorporate the word “magnet”, he may be trying to tell us something profound about the world, even more than these stark, ultra-dynamic throbbers of pulsant noise reveal on first spin. Angry firebursts, puzzling silences, eerie distilled silver tones, deathly precision. An air of stern grimness abounds for album’s length, which is fine, but Vainio also relaxes into pedestrian mechanical drone once too often for my liking. ‘Elvis’s TV Room’ is a great title though, and it’s a good piece of mausoleum music too. (19/07/2012)

An uncanny oddity of terrifying beauty is Polin (MATHKA NO NUMBER) by Ireneusz Socha. Produced just with sampler and electronics, plus the voice of Jaroslaw Lipszyc and the bayan of Jaroslaw Bester, it tells you more than you want to know about Polish and Jewish history, and does so in just 20 minutes. An intricate “hörspiel” miniature, it took Socha several years to complete, which is unsurprising as, at the core, it’s a detailed assemblage of samples borrowed from a sound archive. Religious and political themes underpin the work, blended with speech recordings and cabaret or klezmer music, but ultimately it’s a transcendent art statement that takes the listener on a profound and fascinating journey. Bolstered with a concise essay “An Uneasy Rest” written by the composer. Very recommended! (13/07/2012)

Fêlure (ORGANIZED MUSIC FROM THESSALONIKI T18) is an item from two maestros of the school of non-musical object-based minimalism, Pascal Battus and Alfredo Costa Monteiro. Battus has done great things with his strange droney sounds based on “rotating surfaces”, which I assume are decommissioned potter’s wheels and broken cake-stands. Monteiro has taken his reductionist philosophy one stage further by playing “amplified paper” on this album, an action which presumably involves rubbing or stroking the grain in interesting ways. Atmospheric creaks, haunting hoots and sibilant rumblings abound. (03/07/2012)

Worsel Strauss decided one day to surrender his will to the way of the machine, and produced the music on Unattention Economy (VICMOD RECORDS VMDL16) using self-generating electronic devices including a Buchla synth, along with a deliberate refusal on his part to interfere with the pure course of automatism. The liner notes robustly defend this approach, ruminating on the psychology of fear and ideas about loss of control. Lest we think the resultant album is a sprawling mess of doodling synth noise, in reality the process has been carefully refined through listening and editing. Strauss found that the set-ups were incredibly labour-intensive, and even more work was involved in finding strong moments of structured or partially-structured music buried among the hours of chaos he recorded. His strenuous efforts are reflected in the 12 shortish tracks we now hear, some of which are quite good. I’m all in favour of editing, but doesn’t that strategy somehow undermine his “loss of control” philosophy? (04/07/2012)

The other point of interest to us here is the credit roster: Alvin Curran, now widely known for his very extreme synth experiments and avant-garde compositions, did the arrangements for the album and contributed synth backdrops, and Steve Lacy (soprano sax) is one of the session players – along with two guitarists and a baritone sax player. While the results may not be the wild mix of MEV with free jazz this combination might promise, it is still an unusual-sounding record with some daring and startling dynamics in evidence on tracks such as ‘La Pecora Crede Di Essere Un Cavallo’, a stark and bony thing which is almost like a more approachable version of John Cale’s production for Nico. And ‘Il Serpente Innamorato’ is a dramatic tour de force, a slice of apocalyptic poetry-recit and crazy mutant cinematic music compacted into two and a half minutes of precision-tooled mayhem. Slices of sonic art like this ought to make Il Bestiario a must-have item for fans of art music, soundtrack LPs, chanteuse records, and the cinema of Jess Franco. Maybe it’s some kind of missing link between all of these strands of buried wayward European madness. The producer was Ezio Leoni, a titan of the Italian music industry who’s been involved in the production and arrangement of about two hundred records from the late 1950s onwards. This was released in June 2012, a limited pressing, and sorry to tell you it seems to be sold out already from the label, but surely must be available somewhere. Highly recommended.

In spite of its title, this is an album of fusion klezmer / jazz / punk metal and the odd eccentric vocal or two. We’re entertained by sprightly light-hearted runaway chase-caper music dominated by a shrill clarinet with smart crisp percussion and a surprisingly deep, lightly fuzzed bass with an occasional hard edge following in the woodwind instrument’s wake. There’ll be rock or metal rhythms (most notably in the third track “Danglers Song”) but the attitude is not very serious and I get the occasional impression that this Israeli quartet is paying affectionate homage in performing light-hearted send-ups of various past heroes and musical inspirations.

Some tracks stand out more than others: “Shmock on the Water” substitutes Middle Eastern folk melodies for the signature Deep Purple riff; “Danglers Song” pokes fun at rock star posturing; “Young Ones” features creative percussion rhythms; and meaty bass lines and hell-for-tefillin-leather / go-for-broke passages of screaming clarinet and thrashy rhythm abound in the guys’ cover of a John Zorn piece “Meholalot”. Altogether though this is an enjoyable and fun set of spirited music for those born to be wild … or mild.

Contact: Auris Media, Kruzenshtern i parohod

Kruzenshtern i Parohod, hidden album, Auris Media, CD aum031 (2011)

Apart from a couple of those suggestive little black silhouettes on the cover artwork – those little scissors with the droplets remind me of that time I saw Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” at the cinema and a fellow in the audience yelped in fright and ran for his life out into the streets during Charlotte Gainsbourg’s notorious scene with the clippers – I quite like this breezy fusion of klezmer, jazz and punk metal attitude. The musicians who include an accordionist waltz through Keystone Kops chase soundtrack music and (later in the album) sequences of somewhat darker and more ambivalent jazzy improv. Mood highs and lows are traversed at lightning-fast speed in the blink of an eye, often in the same track. Blastbeat drumming is sometimes present and band leader Igor Krutogolov even has a go at rumbly death metal vocals in one hard-edged musical passage.

If heard in one sitting, the music appears to narrate a story that starts quite brightly and innocently enough and then endures several obstacles and tests of character that culminate in a very emotionally intense and upsetting revelation, as though long-buried family secrets are flushed out of rotting closets into the open and everyone’s lives are turned upside-down. Marriages founded on lies, bad faith and the point of a shotgun are rent apart, people hurriedly get new passports and shoot out of town forever, children big and small alike discover parents they never knew they had and relatives spend the rest of their lives regretting the things they’ve said and done or the lost opportunities they had to pass up. All right, Krutogolov and his pals didn’t intend this album to be a musical soap opera but it just feels that way: some of their playing on the last track “Koshka” can be gut-wrenching in its intensity and the clarinet nearly breaks into pieces trying to reach the peaks of keening sorrow. Next thing we know, we’re suddenly back to gay light-heartedness. When all’s over and done with, my head feels as though as it’s been put through an ancient washing-machine wringer.

The music was recorded all in one day with vocal overdubs added later so it has a live though not very raw feel.

Contact: Auris Media, Kruzenshtern i Parohod

“Fistula” is a medical term describing a passage between two organs that normally aren’t connected and, while I think it’s one of those topics that inspire surgeons to tell each other war stories and jokes at post-conference cocktail parties, I can see the title is an apt metaphor for the music, a collaboration between noise / drone guitarist Sujo (Ryan Huber) and ambient soundscape designer Sun Hammer (Jay Bodley). Seven quite beautiful atmospheric tracks of shimmery guitar fuzz and buzz drone, digital noise, musique concrete, industrial, ambient and post-rock are featured here. The various genres weave from one to another to create a network of passageways that result in a complex and temperamental sound beast of many unpredictable moods.

All tracks can be heard as movements (heh-heh) of one over-arching work or separately. Though they all include noise and drone as essential elements and can be harsh and abrasive in tone and volume, several tracks (especially later ones) can be very serene and blissful. From track 5 “Hari” onwards, the music can be introverted and brooding with little attempt made to find a way of resolving the darkness and tension arising from deep within its wells.

The album might not be as long as I’d like – a few pieces here and there feel quite cramped for room and time and deserve to be more expansive and exploratory – but the tracks exert a strong pull on the consciousness and quickly mesmerises and initiates the listener into its self-contained universe of sculptured noise / drone and moody dark ambience. The album has quite a distinct character, being energetic and strongly hard-edged in style in its first half before the aggression gives way to quieter and more introspective mood music.

Contact: Sujo, Sun Hammer

Piloted in the main by Jason Mullinax, responsible for vocals, keyboards, programmed percussion, most guitars and electronics effects on “Stereo Space”, Pilesar is a band of shifting personnel who create alternative mainstream melodic pop electronica of a sort that brings out the Devo fan in people of a certain generation. The songs featured here are short sweet affairs ruminating on aspects of modern life, particularly its disappointments and how small it can make people feel.

Early highlights include the reggae-tinged “Everywhere is Beauty” and the slightly dark, angsty “Wifestink”, both of which contain some unexpected but very unassuming gems in their rhythms, manipulations and subtle effects that suggest slight anxiety. From then on, the music sweeps by rather too briskly as though Mullinax insists on packing as much complaint into the space of 54 minutes as possible. A brief pause with an admission of emotional vulnerability appears in “Pinky Swear” but the song still feels hurried along, and a connection between song and listener only goes so deep (which is not much at all).

The mid-album sag inevitably arrives with songs notable more for fussiness or having that quality of you the listener having been there and heard that so let’s move right along to the next track. After doing time out in filler wilderness the album perks up with the instrumental “Things Break” which has some interesting texture effects snuck into the background. Final track “Are We Happy Next?” restores some semblance of the bright eccentricity and whimsy encountered at the album’s beginning but with that familiar air of being older, wiser and more guarded about the ups and downs that life always throws at you.

The album will be sure to pick up fans among its target audience of 20 – 30 years of age: the kind of people who enter the world factory bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with heads filled with ambition and wanting to change everything for the better but who come out of the sausage-making machines with dimmed spirit and perhaps bitter about what they’ve been through, railing at life’s injustices and never really questioning why the mass assembly line had to be there in the first place. But the paths “Stereo Space” treads though have already been heavily travelled by other pop acts, many of whom have done a far better and deeper investigation of the territory of emotions, relationships and disappointments experienced along the way.

Contact: Pilesar

Forma is a trio (Mark Dwinell, Sophie Lam, George Bennett) who use analog instruments of 1960s – 1970s vintage to create short electronic song-like melody compositions in a live setting. All ten tracks that appear here were recorded and mixed live in studios in New York and Cleveland. While they are quite separate from one another in construction and definite breaks between can be heard, they are best heard as one continuous work, though perhaps not for reasons the trio would prefer.

The music is pleasant if not very remarkable: it has a hard sound and comes over as artificial in its expression of mood. Several tracks have a forced quality to them as if the musicians are trying to convince themselves of the instruments’ capability to capture mood and sustain and manipulate particular emotions or feelings like joy and optimism, so they have to exaggerate what capacity there is and prolong it. Over time a banal impression drifts over the recording. Even though some later tracks have a bit of spark in the background of the melodies, there loiters with me a feeling that something isn’t quite right. It’s as if I were to wake up one morning and walk around in the street, and feel that every person and dog I see and greet have in fact been replaced by their simulacra that, however much like the real things they resemble in appearance, word and deed, are much lesser and inferior beings. If I were deluded enough to decapitate them, I should find real blood and real brains but I would still “know” somehow that they are not real flesh-and-blood creatures and if I dug deep enough (yick!), I would discover their tiny nano-mechanical workings.

After listening to the album about three or four times, I find no particular track stands out, though the work improves about the seventh or eighth track. The recording is rather like an overly conscious re-invention of the post-Autobahn Kraftwerk wheel in a way that doesn’t illuminate what made Kraftwerk special for generations of musicians who came after them, including Forma themselves.

Contact: Forma

We’ve got a sleeve note written by Roberto Conlazo, one of the original “unholy three” who created the Reynols madness in the 1990s. Anla Courtis was another of that trio, and he’s involved in the story too. Conlazo used to run a music school in Buenos Aires, and Nelson Gastaldi showed up there one day, leaving after a brief exchange about keyboards. Later Gastaldi met both Conlazo and Courtis by chance, and after a long talk about shared musical interests they had no hesitation in claiming this man as one of Reynols’ spiritual ancestors. Later still, they managed to interview him and have the results published in San Francisco’s Bananafish magazine, once the printed haven for far-out musical oddities of all stripe. If you like reading far-flung tales about strange visions and the power of ritual, it is certainly worth seeking out a copy of this text. Luckily it’s available on the label website. It persuades me that Gastaldi can probably be aligned with the magical-realist tradition of South American writers, like Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

One of the nuggets to spill from his mouth indicated that Gastaldi had a horror of all that was mainstream and successful in art, particularly music festivals, art galleries, and media coverage. He tended to see the dominant culture as a trap, a factory which just created “more of the same” and “parasite music”. This may account for why his own music has been kept out of the public eye for so long; perhaps he was a deliberately self-exiled Outsider. Like Charles Ives who worked in insurance for most of his life and kept unpublished scores in his desk drawer, Gastaldi worked for an electric company in Buenos Aires for most of his life. Only since his death in 2009 is the information and the music beginning to emanate out into the sphere of attention. Would he be happy about this? I’m always struck by the reaction of Henry Darger, whose secret cache of writings and artworks was discovered in his flat towards the end of his life, a revelation he was powerless to prevent. His reaction on hearing the news was one of unmitigated horror; the worst had happened.

We’d probably want to move back one or two notches from that end of the purist Outsider Art scale when accounting for Gastaldi’s music. After all, Roberto Conzalo was invited to the composer’s house and was extremely pleased to witness the bare-bones setup used by the artist to realise his music. Very basic tape recorders, cheap keyboards, some actual acoustic instruments including violin and trumpet, and lots of toys and percussion devices. It doesn’t take an expert to realise that the genius of this strange music is all in the imaginative power of the creator in this case, the resourcefulness that could make art out of almost anything; I am reminded of Joseph Cornell and his well-ordered boxes of cuttings, objects and commonplace found items that were reorganised into three-dimensional statements of profound beauty. This is one reason I always get so bored and fed up with electroacoustic music made by prize-winning composers in Canada who have expensive studios, keyboards, filters, computers and lavish effects at their disposal, yet what ends up on the grooves of their releases is boring, lifeless, academic tripe, for all its rich surface.

My own predilections in this area lead me to favour work like Gastaldi’s, which vibrates and floats with its own understated raw, uncooked energy. The work has been digitally restored from the composer’s home tapes, which makes me wonder if the wobbly tremor effects are part of the intended work or part of the restoration process. Either way they work beautifully. Lastly we have the title which may or may not be referring to Siddhartha, the 1922 novel by Herman Hesse. I was advised to read this book when I was 16 but I found it dull and unengaging, and since then have always remained unpersuaded by tales of spiritual illumination and self-discovery. I’m more attracted to the second half of the title, El Poder De La Nada which translates as “The Power of Nothing”. While Gastaldi’s music here may have some trace elements which put one in mind of the swirling mandalas of Popol Vuh or Between, there is also a very eccentric trajectory that causes the music to meander as inexorably as a huge river, cutting its way through inhospitable turf. From February 2012 – sorry to have been so dilatory in noting this release, but I find it is still in print. Recommended.