The main event is ‘Bamboo Stick Shop’ which weaves its ancient-seeming spell for some 18 minutes of trancey, open-ended material. Not just free improvisation, there are an uncountable quantity of influences, accents and generic experiments in play here, and the attentive listener can discover everything from minimal electronica to psychedelia, jazz, and fusion-y elements. Nicolas Laureau is a revelation to us; I see he used to play guitar and sitar in a French avant-rock group Prohibition in the 1990s, then later played with NLF3, a group which apparently exhibited a very European take on “math rock”. Never heard these bands, but they suggest high-energy and complexity, whereas if anything characterises Laureau’s playing on this Scaring Mice record, we’d have to clutch for keywords like “serene” and “disciplined”, as of a fellow not especially in a rush to reach the end of the road before his trousers catch fire. The entire record feels like I’m riding in a howdah on top of an elephant, swaying leisurely to and fro. It might be the title refers obliquely to this experience, if you believe the old myth about elephants being afraid of mice. Cover artworks by Yu Matsuoka, with friendly press note by Julien Becourt. (30/08/2022)

Always enjoyed the tape music of French genius Jérôme Noetinger, but it’s usually been heard in the context of small group improvisation, electro-acoustic duo team-ups, and such like. Very good to hear him with a solo release now, and a double album at that. Sur Quelques Mondes Étranges (GAGARIN RECORDS GR2042) should more than satisfy your urge to hear what this man can do with his trusty Revox tape recorder. Although when I say “urge”, with me it’s an obsessive compulsion.

It’s been made mostly with the Revox B77, but also electronics, radio sets, and prepared recordings, and was all performed live in the studio. There are no overdubs and everything was recorded using room mics, plus something called “tube broadcast monitors” were part of the audio chain…I’m assuming that’s a good thing, and there’s no doubt that the electrifying “live room sound” is what passes over to the listener on hearing this exciting double LP, the moment you click on the stylus. Vivid! Unstoppable! Convulsive! You bet! Anthony Pateras, the Australian composer and modern electronicist, has provided a press note and is unstinting in his praise of this great French player, noting his respect for “the acousmatic tradition” and reminding us that Noetinger has pretty much dedicated his life to his music, working with the Revox machines for over 35 years now in production of live electro-acoustic music. Pateras speaks warmly of “tireless timbral research” and the “detailed and rich vocabulary”, sentiments we can only endorse. It’s also worth dwelling on the “aurally strange” dimension which Pateras highlights – true to its title this record does offer glimpses and views of Quelques Mondes Étranges, where almost no sound is familiar, and some of them are shockingly odd and troubling. Ideas unspool at a quicksilver pace, often three or more events unfolding in real time before us inside this galactic zoo, this fifth-dimensional aquarium.

Can’t stress enough the tiny miracle of hearing these profound transformations, these radical shifts, happening live in the studio, where jolts and currents dance about in uninhibited fashion…which shows something about the achievement of this French maverick oxide-wrangler who has deliberately avoided the laptop route, where sounds pass before us after their 200th trip through the digital reprocessing factory using ho-hum software that knocks all the corners off, and they arrive listless and apathetic, denuded of all life. Not so with Noetinger, whose music lives and breathes fire, flowing with the blood and juices of creation. Strap into the chair now to hear nine explosive short episodes – with surreal titles like ‘White Horse against UFOs’ and ‘Le Bouffon Moderne’, and even a French translation of Sun Ra’s Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy – then settle into Side C for a fizzy distorted interrupto-drone that lasts for 18 minutes and is guaranteed to dispel headaches, rheumatism, and other winter ailments. The lock-grooves on side D don’t work exactly as planned on my promo CD, but they should send your mind (what’s left of it) into a state of bedlam quite soon. A true modern triumph of analogue electronic music and imaginative ideas, presented on Felix Kubin’s label (and who better, himself being a champion of old-school methods and equipment for as long as I can recall). Tale a big bite out of the strange…recommended!! (15/08/2022).

Today’s item seems to be one step beyond all that. It’s very hard to tell, but I think Cloud Holding was done by processing of live music. He’s doing it with other musicians and singers, such as the flautist Ka Baird, trombonist Michael Wrasman Hurder, and vocalist Alice Cohen. The press note by Nina Bower Crooke invites us to hear Hackford’s work as “little sculptures of sound”. Hackford was playing live music too, including an old Wurlitzer organ and something called the “Nobara”, a species of electronic koto with a lot of built-in preset sounds. Matter of fact that koto appears on several tracks. There’s a good deal more to the project than an electronicist simply sampling live improvisation, though; even the basic recording of the six players was unusual, as none of them could hear what the others were doing, and this injected the degree of synchronicity that our man is looking for. I guess Hackford’s digital processing, and mixing, is a large part of the work, but the performances still underpin everything.

The end results are quite unlike 99% of improvised music, and at first spin I found it was almost possible to mistake Cloud Holding for a very modern form of minimal electro-pop, an extreme remix project where even the backing vocalists have been transformed into unexpected shapes. At the same time, the music is quite rootless, almost nebulous in the way it refuses to coalesce into solid shapes. This can pass on an impression of dreamy insouciance, but Hackford’s intention is far from the swaddling clouts of any average ambient producer, and he doesn’t shy away from jarring, uncomfortable sounds when the occasion requires it. I was wrong to mistake this as a “sampling” record on first listen, as it’s evidently been assembled and created with a good deal of care and sympathy. From the same Belgian label that brought us the unusual Fernand Schirren LP in 2021. This, from 21st February 2022.

Newcomer Nocturnal Hiss has made Degrader (ACRS 1016), described aptly as a mash-up between Techno and Noise…he also likes violence and video games, with track titles that reflect adolescent interest in science fiction and alien death rays, plus he did the cover art which looks like a cut-up drawing of a skull. So far I’d be happy to file this alongside CDR (Hikaru Tsunematsu), a like-minded lover of fast-moving noise spliced with chiptune, or perhaps Venta Protesix (without the pornography), but Nocturnal Hiss doesn’t quite have the staying power to deliver something truly obnoxious. His beats supply a modicum of energy, but underneath all the fizz and distortion they’re very ordinary rhythms, often running on auto-pilot. More successful when he moves away from the alien disco grid and just plays around with formless noise bursts and wayward explosions, thus edging closer to the desired chaotic states.

Turkish electronicist Melih Sarigöl heard by us in 2020 on his Birkac Parsek record made as one half of FezayaFirar. He’s now gone solo under the name f:rar to bring us his Magara (ACU 1030) album. He currently lives in Berlin and used the 2020 lockdown period as an opportunity to create a “virtual tour” of the city, capturing field recordings and then patiently remixing the sources in his lair, adding improvised passages on his modular synth. Not especially novel technique there, but Magara manages to convey a nice degree of paranoia and claustrophobia in its semi-chaotic grooves and tones, in places suggesting an environment that is out of control and somewhat threatening. The Turkish word magara translates as “cave”, and he adheres to this metaphor by suggesting that us urban dwelling types are all living in caves, nursing an ancient primordial fear of what lies outside. The cover drawing also conveys this, suggesting a pedestrian emerging from an underground walkway to encounter an unfriendly concrete facade. A slight improvement on the rather pedestrian FezayaFirar record.

WaSm is a duo of two Dutch experimenters of long standing, Frans de Waard and Jos Smolders, old friends for the last thirty years and both making considerable impact in the culture. Twee (= Number Two) (ACU 1030) is their follow-up release to Een (= Number One) which came out on Silken Tofu in 2016. Seven quite lengthy tracks recorded in a studio in 2019, which in duration, detail and construction make the above two releases seem a little sketchy, energetic though they may be. We’re given some hints as to the methods they used to make Twee, but as usual I lack the technological brain cells to apprehend the full meaning of their activity. I think it’s to do with treated recordings (of objects, of musical instruments, of environments), but the keywords I’m reading are terms associated with making fine art sculptures – “casting”, “chiseled”, “spatialisation”, “shapes”, “tactile”, “rough and smooth”. All these descriptive texts are highly fitting for the well-crafted and carefully-arranged sounds we hear, which do indeed succeed in creating the sense of a space around us, a virtual art gallery filled with fascinating shapes, some of them so well-rendered as to be almost tangible. Given Smolders’ background in studying architecture, this spatial dimension has a certain extra poignancy in the work. A fine set from two accomplished masters of sound manipulation.

All the above from 9th June 2021.

Camping in the Mojave Desert outside the ghost town of Ludlow on the historic Route 66 Highway and finding a tangle of old quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape stuck on a cactus would appear to be the oddest inspiration and source of material for your debut solo album. Not when you happen to be clarinettist / electronicist Sam Dunscombe who comes with an impressively eclectic history: among other things, performing with Berlin-based Harmonic Space Orchestra, working with James Rushford and Judith Hamann in the project Golden Fur, and being the official archivist for the estate of Romanian-French composer Horatiu Radulescu (1942 – 2008) whose works in spectral music Dunscombe is also committed to performing. Dunscombe uses a digitised version of the old tape, along with transcribing its material and adding to that material on Hammond organ, as one of the main parts of the track “Outside Ludlow” on this vinyl LP release from Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle Records.

As befits Ludlow’s current ghost town existence, “Outside Ludlow” is an eerie work of field recordings of desert silence, insect noise and sparse birdsong punctuated by passing traffic on Route 66, clusters of gold mine explosions and local marine corps activity (the other major part of the track) that slowly grows and envelops your head and consciousness. In this strangely bubbling environment, in which helicopter-like sounds pass by like ominous droning flotsam, shrill piercing shafts of radiant-white drone cut through the space between your ears and harsh scraping, grinding circular noise and Hammond organ sighing follow and fill up the sheared voids. Your mind will certainly feel strangely cleansed of whatever trifles blocked it up before!

“Desert Disco” is an electronic sonic exploration structured around a fragment of the tape found in the cactus: it’s a much more ghostly ambient work, expanding like pulsing waves from a central point and penetrating all the little nooks and niches you never knew your brain had – until now. At once delicate and fragile, yet well-defined in its rhythms and very focused, this track has a hypnotic, even magical quality.

From apparent trash, both physically and perhaps in concept – track title “Desert Disco” gives some indication of the, uh, past glories that reel-to-reel tape must have held and the glittering dance clubs where it was played before being ungraciously jettisoned and ending up spiked on the cactus not far from an equally abandoned town – Dunscombe has crafted two works of mesmeric and haunting ambient beauty that hearken back to their source and look forward to transformation and rebirth.

Quentin Rollet, who plays saxophone, synth and electronics on this record, was the co-founder of the Rectangle label (with Noël Akchoté) which put out a good deal of unusual records by Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith, Lol Coxhill and others in the 1990s and 2000s, though I must admit I’ve only heard him once before on the MOSQ record he made with erikm and Charlie O. Romain Perrot is of course a personal favourite in these pages, last heard on two great records of wild noise, one by Maginot and the other by Saboteur Saboteur. Perrot plays electronics, keyboards, and adds vocals for this record, once again bringing his primitive and intuitive style to this music.

While ‘Le Chant Du Bouvier’ has its fair share of grit and grime and noisy elements, floating its soothing saxophone blasts over fractured synth bursts, it’s the track ‘Sans Aveu’ that really gets my crystals glowing with excitement and more than justifies the price of entry to this coal mine. On it, Perrot emits non-verbal growls and dark murmurs dredged from some unearthly region of a man’s soul, while sullen electronic devices make distorto-interruptino statements of an unsettling nature. Into this twilight tunnel region, the bright sax of Rollet enters like a mosquito on golden wings, attempting to stay above the fierce pulsings and angry hammers pistoning up from below. There’s a real tension between the emotional content, the psychological makeup of these two men, one pessimistic and malevolent, the other nimble and pro-active, hoping to bring a little tranquillity to the empty lives of men who march the streets like medieval beggars. Eventually Perrot settles for allowing his keyboards to punch out a spastic non-syncopated techno rhythm while other devices hiss out poisonous vapour, and his growling intoning voice enters into some form of harmony with the trilling sax lines. Quelle contraste.

‘Sans Aveu’ is a personal benchmark for this listener, a centre-piece of the album, but others may enjoy ‘La Tradition Est Une Trahison’, which resembles the meeting of a romantic poet clad in flowing robes (Rollet) and a half-mad aircraft pilot (Perrot) who is buzzing madly around the aerodrome in a replica of Amelia Earhart’s plane. What I’m trying to convey here is the thickness of the music, the textures which envelop everything and give you little room to move around in. It’s a wonder the sax half of the act can find any space to play in, but he inserts himself like quicksilver darts in cracks in the concrete. Incidentally the title for this one reads to me like a Situationist slogan picked up from the streets in Paris in May 1968, and may perhaps be transposed as a scathing barb against the conventions of so-called “free” improvisation which have all but developed into a trap for any honest musician. On ‘Embrocation Siamoise’, there’s something else again – surprisingly sweet synth tones and melodies, perhaps too sweet to come from Romain’s keyboard array, causing a perplexing conflict in the musical continuum. This conflict continues as the piece moves suddenly into blockier, noisier, territory, creating grim and grey vistas in the mind and exhilarating us with sci-fi yarns and visions of utopian cities. This particular track seems bent on carrying on the tradition of another great French electronicist, i.e. Richard Pinhas of Heldon, only forsaking any pretence at prog-rock futuro-idealism and mixing in brutally simple one-finger riffs and obnoxious electric tones. Great!

As regular readers may know, this writer has a strong attachment to sax-electronic duo records in the free improv mode (I have a mental list starting with Braxton and Teitelbaum), but few of them are as unrefined and impolite as this one, freely belching out polluted smoke and unpolished nuggets of music like so much crude ore dug straight from the ground. As the artistes themselves have it, they’re aiming for a blend of Albert Ayler with “the cold industrial music of pioneers like Throbbing Gristle”. Jointly released by Reqords and Decimation Sociale; arrived 7th April 2020.

With major involvement in The Attack Sextet and Brute Force, it seems that if certain band names can signify intent, then this Scandinavian avant jazz supergroup certainly has previous form when it boils down to a gritty, take-no-prisoners attitude. A further box ticked appears when one discovers that Big Yes! member; Danish trombonist/electronicist Maria Bertel (also of Selvhenter), is well known for her ‘outside the ‘bone’ techniques, while blasting out brassy invective “in front of a stack of amps”. An evocative promo sheet quote indeed, with shades of Peter Zummo, J.A. Deane and Sarah Gail Brand placing her in pretty exclusive company.

The Big Yes’s debut waxing comprises of a solitary thirty minute outing entitled “Kalmar”. A name check referring to an historic alliance between Denmark, Sweden and Norway that took place during the middle ages which finds a modern day equivalent in this outfit’s line-up, where Ms. Bartel and Swedish tenor saxophonist Anna Högberg are joined by the Norwegian rhythm section of double bassist Christian Meaas Svendsen and sticksman Ole Mofjell (also of Nypan and COKKO…). Captured live at the Element Studios, in Gothenberg, Sweden. “Kalmar” was smorgasborded in between gigs during 2018. It’s a barnstorming onslaught that focuses on red-blooded Ayleresque spiritual/marching band thematics, forceful trombone support (w/ digital treatments) and gargantuan Han Bennink-like drum/percussion detonations. But at the seven minutes mark, I did wonder if that eyes-on-stalks intensity could be maintained without injury to band life and limb. Things do resolve themselves however, with a strange extended interlude of bowed bass harmonics, teased and coaxed from the very bowels of its bulky wooden frame. The high-end creaks and whispers seemingly more allied to Chris Watson’s nature-sourced tape explorations than anything found in the current jazz idiom. A full circle is eventually completed with a second offering to the insatiable god of ‘Fire Music’ that just might be perceived as a more intense listening experience than the quartet’s bruising and rambunctious entrance.

Stating the obvious here, but for once the c.d. does have the advantage over its shiny vinyl counterpart as it provides a completely unbroken performance just as nature intended.

Unwritten Rules Of A Ceaseless Journey (CRÓNICA 148-2019) was commissioned by a dance troupe (Ballet Teatro) and intended to be used for their dance-drama Revoluções. The resultant dreary slab of electronics and field recordings was created by Haarvöl (the trio of Fernando José Pereira, Joao Faria and Rui Manuel Vieira) with Xoán-Xil López. Some thought has at least gone into the titles of these three 15-minute exercises in tedium, in which the “journey” is structured as a movement from “utopian” to “trauma”, and the music attempts to shift its gears accordingly in line with these titles. But it’s just empty laptop drone, its vacuity disguised by liberal use of reverb effect. From 15 April 2019.

Perplexing record called Undulate (SOFA SOFA572) by the Danish sound artist Niklas Adam. I was wrong-footed from the get-go by this oddity. One of the two long tracks contains the phrase “percussion solo”, and what with SOFA specialising in improvisation records half the time, I misled myself into thinking this was a very strange drum solo set. Instead, it’s apparently done by computer programming, with the aim of building self-generating music structures. There’s some printed text on the inside which doesn’t really explain anything, although it looks like computer code, and may explain something of how his routines are built. His printed phrase “the horror at the prospect of a number multiplied manyfold grinding at the door” is especially poignant, since my poor brain can’t get a purchase on these illogical, disconnected sounds, floating in a sea of white space with no apparent meaning. Niklas Adam’s aim is to set us free from the “traditional patterns…of rational thinking”; but he seems to do this by denying human thought altogether, and letting the remorseless logic of the machine take control. I don’t feel liberated at all. From 15 April 2019.

Last heard from Israeli electronicist Yair Etzony with his Deliverance album, which we found to be “bleak and evocative”, but lacking in energy and drive. Yair is here today as one half of Maps and Diagrams, with Tim Diagram, and their Azurescens (FALSE INDUSTRIES FISH01) is a collection of instrumental pieces released in a hand-made cover. It’s a tad more upbeat than Deliverance, but aimless; there seems to be no point to any of these meandery digital layer-fests, which lack musical development and simply wallow in meaningless textures and shapes. His solo record for same label, Ingress (FALSE INDUSTRIES 025), is much more depressing and dismal; it’s supposed to represent something of his own personal depressive state since moving to Berlin, becoming ill, and meeting new people in Helsinki. Even his production method has become more minimal, apparently. I prefer the coldness of Ingress to the false optimism of Azurescens, but even so it’s a largely undistinguished set of over-long droners, long on atmosphere but very short on ideas. Despite learning Yair’s moving back-story to Ingress, there is hardly any emotional truth to the music. From 15th April 2019.

We have enjoyed moments of previous Celer (Will Long) releases, but today I’m finding Xiexie (TWO ACORNS 2A15) an over-long chore. Two discs of endlessly looping slow ambient drone inspired, it seems, by his travels in China. It seems to have been raining perpetually during his sojourn, even one track title remarks on the rain, and that rain has seeped into every note on the album. It’s a perpetual loop of a scene from Blade Runner. The sleeve is covered with grey tourist photos of incredible banality, and his press release notes find deep personal significance in his every gesture, no matter how trivial. Even the music aggrandises this self-centred take on life, providing a quasi-heroic soundtrack for meandering around a foreign city. From 15th April 2019.

Well, Karkowski now appears to be gaining status as one of “the” modernist composers of Poland, at least if this release Encumbrance (BÔŁT RECORDS BR 1054 / TURNING SOUNDS 3TS) is anything to go by. Antoni Beksiak – who calls himself “Baskak” – has taken the composition ‘Encumbrance’, originally designed as electronic music, and rethought it for performance by his Gęba Vocal Ensemble. As choirmaster, he leads these seven singers through two distinct performances of the piece, both enhanced with electronic segments. This interest in “extended vocal techniques” appears to be quite a thing in Poland just now, and has been steadily growing since around 2006. Baskak speaks animatedly of “the rapid development of human beatboxing” which has been taking place in Poland at various festivals and gatherings. One of these, called the “Great Warsaw Battles”, sounds particularly steamy. While “beatboxing” is something one would tend to associate with dance music and DJ culture, what we’ve got here is pretty much a self-taught avant-garde choir, presenting the grim tones of Karkowski’s music as a long series of incessant wails and moans. The structure of the work showcases the vocal elements first, then gradually develops into episodic bursts of electronic white noise, more like the kind of aggressive and bad-tempered onslaught I normally associate with old Karkers. The record features the same piece performed twice over, with slightly different vocal ensemble members, and different electronicists credited for the electronic noise parts.

Full marks for the brilliant idea to re-think Karkowski as vocal music, but Gęba haven’t taken it far enough in my view; there’s still a certain reticence in the performance, a degree of uncertainty, which may reflect their lack of conventional training, or that Antoni Beksiak’s vision is not quite ambitious enough. Or simply that Karkowski himself is not in the room to direct things. I’m not feeling the force of it, nor the shape and direction of the work; it’s as though nobody on stage quite knows where it’s going to end up, as they advance cautiously with baby-steps. When you think what Ligeti was able to do with mixed choirs in an avant-garde context, or Penderecki’s religious works for that matter, then this material – severely lacking in drama, invention, or development – doesn’t really measure up. In its favour, the group make a plausible effort at realising the task at hand, and the sound they make is quite unusual. From 2nd April 2019.

Gorgeous outsize card cover for the CD, printed with a silver overlay and showing their “emblem” under which they clearly intend to enslave the human race. The track titles inside, also embossed in silver type, are like tiny essays; they read like fragments from a lost book of the Bible, resplendent with foretellings of terrible events and doomy scenarios, couched in a rather vengeful language that makes us fear for our own safety in the new universe; the creators put these texts together by sampling and mixing literature and poetry from William Blake, Lord Byron, Rimbaud, and other writers (presumably from Eastern Europe). The music is well-produced experimental techno, leaning on the heavy side with its ponderous beats and single-minded repetitions, given that extra depresso-edge by the dismal melodies, some of which sound like the anthems of the Lizard People which we will all have to learn by heart when these simians get their way. When the music is not trumpeting a fanfare of triumph over us downtrodden ones, it hisses out a track like 03 – ‘Fighters of the Fight…’ (look up the full title elsewhere, if ye so wish) – which I enjoy for its creepster sensibilities, its darkening emotion, minimalism made even more minimal, much snake-like hissing and writhing of scaly bodies on the battlefield.

Both Federenko and Zavoloka always give me hope that avant-techno has much potential as an art form in its own right, and can be just as expressive as the lush progressive rock of my youth. They certainly have the technical prowess to make it happen, if anyone does; this record, like many of theirs, boasts an immaculate production and sharp digital surface where the “lines” are so hard-edged and clean they almost seem too good to be true, untouched by human hands. From 16th November 2018.

For the fifth cut on this album, it’s the turn of the French to show what they’re made of; Quentin Conrate, Matthieu Lebrun, Anne-Laure Pudbut and Frédéric Tentelier lash it out on over 35 mins of ‘Gezeugt’, recorded in Roubaix we know not when. Matter of fact the venue itself is shrouded in mystery, since it’s named ‘Le Non Lieu’ which we might say as ‘The Non-Place’ in English. I’d still feel safe in characterising the work of this foursome as EAI, given as how we’ve got alto sax, organ and percussion bobbing about in the sea of light-drone generated by electronics and electroacoustic devices. These French grinders certainly get in the zone and stay there with these tense, atmospheric scrapers; it’s a happy combination of understated tones and drones blending into a pleasing layered squidge, and the metallic elements are so palpable as to leave a film on the roof of your mouth. Whereas the Russian-Swiss federation deliver extremely bitty and broken music in your box of groceries, this ‘Gezeugt’ has a solidity and continuity that is very satisfying; they don’t vary what they’re doing too much, and thus sustain the membrane of this watery balloon which floats over the swampy surface. On the other hand, the changes they make may seem imperceptible, yet they are also profound and effective, moving the listener from one place to another by means of telekinesis. The “ambient” sound of the audience chatter adds a lot to the package too, unless that’s sourced from found tapes lurking in Anne-Laure’s box. These names are all new to me, but this is impressive work; to hear more of them, you may want to look to their assorted band projects, such as L’Ouvreuse, Kaulquappen, Wing in Ground Effect, and Polder. From 16 May 2018.