Swedish electronicist Joachim Nordwall has penetrated zones of deep gloom and anxiety with his grimoire-styled work as one half of the noisy Skull Defekts, but his cassette Ignition (ASH INTERNATIONAL ASH 8.9) contains five rather subdued drone-pieces made from analogue synthesizers, fed through effects and computer processing, and most of them purr along quietly in the layered idiom with tinges of the sinister curling around at their edges. Assembled over four years and in several different international locations, the actual musical content of Ignition may not be large, but your listening pleasure is delivered by the subtle changes in timbre and texture that are gradually enacted. Largely a slow-moving album, although there are passages where sequencer rhythms and patterns are overlaid together to create vaguely hypnotic op-art effects. Using the cassette format appears to have enabled Nordwall to really stretch out into infinite lengths in ways which are not possible on the CD, even. The mysterious track titles, almost like chapters from an existentialist horror story, do not exactly inspire good cheer.

Just mentioned English noisester Hate-Male the other day, and I forgot we had this odd tape from him also. Reversible Tape #1 (EAR EAR RECORDS EER006) is a powerful electro-acoustic experiment built out of voice tapes, guitars and laptop processing, but it’s the voices – echoed, overlaid, multiplied – which form the core of the work, and three friends add their voices to Lawrence Conquest’s to supplement the eerie vox humana wall. In the context of Hate-Male’s other brutal releases, this tape is quite subtle and approachable, and might be a good starting point if you’re tempted to investigate this creator’s world of surreal insanity and sonic violence. The keynote of Reversible Tape #1 is sheer gaping horror rather than violence, and the unsettling Otto Dix cover painting which reminds us all of the fleeting joys of youth and our own approaching mortality, is just the beginning. A truly grisly ghost-train ride in both aural and psychological terms, and the light at the end of the tunnel is a long way away. The tape purports to play the same content both sides; the B side may run backwards, but I can’t verify that.

No less unsettling are the Streams Of Unconscious (NO LABEL) tapes sent to us by the American writer and performance artist Bryan Lewis Saunders. Three volumes I know of so far; the first is Replicate, a collaboration with Hopi Torvald, and Kommissar Hjuler and his wife with Red Bugs. Saunders has been documenting his sleep-talking and dream states for many years, even recording his own sleep-talking on tape. For this series of projects, he sends out the tapes to musicians and sound-artists to refashion them as they will. Torvald creates a suitably ambiguous tapestry of nightmarish ambient music, whose very disjunctiveness does its level best to follow the twists of Saunders’ mind. For this side of the tape, Saunders’ continual mumbling becomes one more element in the mix, and the overall effect will gradually unhinge your mind. Full transcriptions of the sleep-raps are included inside little printed booklets with the releases. The Kommissar Hjuler side is quite different, looping and repeating a single short phrase of the sleep-talking as the basis for an invented song, a dark nursery-rhyme plucked from the deepest recesses of the brain. The endless repetition of ‘objects…supernatural’ will probably send you to the bughouse in short order, but since Hjuler is a Dadaist nutcase of the first water anyway (and I sincerely mean that as a compliment) he is a perfect candidate for a marginal aural experiment of this nature. Also pictured, not yet heard: Volume 2 with Razen and Classwar Karaoke Friends, and Volume 3 with Evil Moisture and Wehwalt. If you’re a fan of the record Dion McGregor Dreams Again, prepare for something so powerfully odd that McGregor will soon seem positively quaint and charming in comparison.

More Richard Rupenus product arrived in September and November, cassette reissues of existing works, both in limited editions of 200 copies. Mixed Band Philanthropist‘s The Impossible Humane (HYPNAGOGIA PN01), mostly recorded 1984-1984 and now remastered by Paul Coates; and Simphonie In A Major (HYPNAGOGIA PN03) by The New Blockaders, a 1989 recording originally issued on vinyl in 1991, now here with new sleeve art. These items have already been covered in previous issues of the magazine, and this is just to let you know the tape versions exist.

The Chica-X (HEWHOCORRUPTSINC) tape is an oddity we’ve had in the box for some time now sent to us by André Foisy of Locrian. The story behind it is explained on the enclosed letter written on a bright pink index card, which I have photographed. Chica-X, just ten years old at time of recording although she’s been doing it since age seven, sings her take on modern electropop and raps her little heart out; the way she intones “To the library…and step on it!” is sheer brilliance. I thought this release might be somewhere in the area of The Shaggs (untutored / naïve expressions of pop music) but of course it isn’t; Chica-X is clearly as well-informed and sophisticated as you’d expect from a 21st-century urban American youngster and probably has more street smarts than the average X-Factor wannabee from Solihull. The main listening interest here derives from her distinctly odd and highly-enthused way of burbling out the words in her thin but feisty voice. If anything, the musical backdrops supplied by her Dad are the boring bits; he may play in an experimental band, but here he’s transformed himself into a cheap karaoke machine. Not sure about availability of this tape, but these five tracks are available as a digital download; and there are YouTube videos of Chica-X too.

Always Prepared for Action

Few have worked as hard as German composer and musician Reinhold Friedl to re-energise and update 20th century avant-garde music, most notably with his exciting Zeitrkratzer ensemble pieces. Here he is doing it solo on Inside Piano (ZEITKRATZER RECORDINGS ZKR 0013), an abundant double-disc set of his own piano compositions using his own robust and lusty approach to the prepared piano, amply illustrated with mouth-watering colour images giving us plenty of close-ups of the action – springs, cymbals, screws, glass tumbler, stone and bells on full display in the exposed interior of his Steinway D-274. The long set includes his 40-minute piece ‘L’Horizon Des Ballons’ on disc one and a number of relatively shorter thrusts on the second disc, but there is enough complex musical information here to keep your academic brow furrowed for months and slake your thirst for dissonant timbres as surely as eight glasses of Rhenish wine spiked with certain juices by a cabal of Stockhausen, Boulez, and the janitor who worked in the Darmstadt building. “The piano is a strange hybrid of a percussion and string instrument”, Friedl begins in his accompanying essay, proceeding with an assured scholarly sweep of the klavier’s history that takes in Liszt, Chopin, Debussy, Hindemith, Rubenstein, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Mario Bertoncini, Franco Evangelisti, and Michael Konig – and that’s just on the first page! Musically, he explores a large range of cutting-edge practices and methodologies to bring forth plaintive singing voices from the wired frame, including the breathy caress of the e-bow, the sadistic scraping and scratching attack, the hideous wail of “noise piano” hammerings, wobbly objects laid on the strings, piping, vibrators…a very full panoply of possible effects are extracted, in what he calls “orchestral music out of the piano”. This also exists as a vinyl collection from Hrönir, a release which contains additional music not on the CD. Simultaneously mesmerising and nerve-jangling music, these electrifying compositions verge on the transgressive and commit amazing acts of sonic violence, yet do so very quietly and unexpectedly.

Obsessive Fins

For Fin De Siècle (KORM PLASTICS KP 3040), Daniel Burke (Illusion of Safety) and Kurt Griesch were invited to revisit their 1995 LP tour release of this name, which had originally been heavily edited for the vinyl format. Now here it is as a 66-minute disc, where the exact nature of their interventions and restorations remain rather unclear (“our straight lines eventually formed perfect circles” is all Kurt can tell us), but it ends with an Epilogue and begins with a Prologue, suggesting the creators have found a way to make their own music perform some sort of reversal of the laws of time. Burke has been known to immerse parts of his musical brain in the darker side of the aural whirlpools that separate a man from his spectral counterpart, but ‘Part One’ is a gentle mysterious drone that includes a little birdsong (or digital facsimile thereof) and is almost pastoral in its small-scaled, sweetly-tempered throbs pulsing in the ground like little seeds in springtime. ‘Part Three’ includes urban field recordings which mutate into a vaguely airless machine-like drone, much like riding an endless elevator to the highest floor of an impossibly high building, where all the other passengers in the car just stand and stare silently from under the brims of their hats. Enigmatic, minimal, compelling.

Torsten Klank

Fine set of guitar and percussion instrumental music from Rant, which is the team of drummer Merle Bennett and guitarist Torsten Papenheim. At first spin, some of the tracks on Land (SCHRAUM 13) create an impression that we’re in for a set of avant-rock lite-grunge and post-punk angularity, but in fact Rant display a fine precision and deliberation in their crisp work which is extremely engaging – stark shapes, minimalism, mystery, weight. The guitarist never leans on loud amplification, distortion or mindless riffing to fill three minutes of time; instead every note is considered and weighed in his mind before emerging with the clarity of Kenny Burrell’s Gibson as recorded by Rudy Van Gelder. The drummer may appear to be marking time occasionally, but I dig his imaginative approaches to beat-provision (one track uses an old-fashioned typewriter), and he knows exactly when to leave yawning gaps in the continuum for purposes of dynamism and tension. So what may have first appeared as a strain of rock music (as slow and stately as Earth, for example) clearly owes more to cool jazz of the 1950s and (in places) even a little bit of dub-influenced drumming. The only slight drawback is that this mannered approach can become slightly stilted, and you sometimes wish the duo would just pull off their socks and swing a little more. Even so, investigate these compacted miniatures and unpack their statements as best ye may. Recorded in Berlin by Dave Bennett.

O Supermum

Californian flautist Anne La Berge spent some time in Holland as a performer and improviser in the 1990s, until about 2000 she grew more interested in using electronics, computers and texts to realise her own compositions. Some of these recent text-based works are showcased on Speak (NEW WORLD RECORDS 80717-2), including my personal favourite the 25-minute ‘Drive’ which starts with the strange story of a woman in Alabama who invented the windscreen wiper (emerging in the form of an imaginary interview invented by La Berge) and ends with a medical lecture about the uterus, read out by two English voices and cut up by computer methods. Their voices, that is, not the uterus. In between, gorgeous tracts of flute playing, improvisation and unusual electronic music are laid out like road signs on this episodic, avant-garde electro-acoustic road trip. An eccentric and wonderful work, a bit like Laurie Anderson but with less information and not as confusing. There’s also ‘Brokenheart’ from 2007, where La Berge reads out a medical text with the mannered distance of all good conceptual performers, along with computer-controlled music interacting with the piano of Cor Fuhler and the percussion of Steve Heather. Gently and insistently, she persuades her computer systems to generate gentle and fascinating half-random triggered samples that keep your listening body as buoyant as a cork in the Pacific. ‘ur_DU’ combines some heavy-duty breathy flute playing which verges on the sound of gargling, with a lecture on uranium and radium. ‘Away’ is more of a systems-piece, written for Stephen Altoft and his 19-tone trumpet, and demonstrates the way La Berge’s computer patches approaches the familiar minimalist’s task of carving up microtonal scales in an ordered way. However, I get the impression this imaginative and passionate composer/player is not very much indebted to the New York school, with her drones as generous and inclusive as those of Pauline Oliveros and her humanistic approach to fracturing narratives to reveal deeper truths about mankind, rather than to set up alienating devices. You will warm to this record very quickly and soon yearn to hear more of her work.

Formic Acid

Forma (SPECTRUM SPOOLS SP 003) by Forma exists as a vinyl LP, the debut release by three electronicists from Brooklyn – Mark Dwinell, Sophie Lam and drumbox man George Bennett, all playing the finest equipment on offer from the synthesizing houses of Roland, Moog, Yamaha, Oberheim and Alessis. Delicious and highly melodic kosmische-influenced music where not a space is left unfilled with colourful sweeps, mechanical beats and processed sounds. This is the third release on Spectrum Spools, a label run by John Elliott and managed through the Editions Mego imprint. Elliott is a member of Emeralds, another American combo who have earned many namechecks and cross-references to German electronic music of the 1970s; Forma in particular are described here as part of the “NYC minimal synth scene”. An uplifting and entertaining record with its head in the clouds and its feet on the surface of the sun, it oozes warmth and untroubled good vibes.

Bracing field recordings from Mark Peter Wright on Inanimate Life (3LEAVES 3L004), taken from the North East Coast of England. His preoccupations include observing the wind and the weather, and these striking coastal winds (possessing many meterological characteristics he may deem peculiar to this part of the United Kingdom) react with very specific objects and features he finds in the landscape; these are “catalogued”, both verbally and aurally, as a gorse bush, a barbed wire fence, a flagpole, a hand rail and so forth. These interactions between wind, metal and plant life can produce fascinatingly alien non-musical clonks and clanks that, in their quiet and intimate way, are almost like “acoustic” industrial music. Six photographs of his documentations are included in the sleeve, and there is a mini-cd (pressed up in a strange credit-card format) that includes audio commentary by the artist. He presents the ten pieces without track numbers intentionally, in hopes that the listener will “construct their own listening map”. Received here 8th September 2010.

Super Axel Dörner (ABSINTH RECORDS 018) is a curious improvisational collaboration between Axel Dörner the Berlin-based trumpeter and Diego Chamy, who I suppose to be a unique form of performance artist; on his website he takes the stance that he’s not going to publish an instant CV of his life just to keep the media happy, thus turning himself into another artistic form of Cup-A-Soup: “If you want to know more about me, I kindly invite you to spend some time taking a look at the works that are published on this site.”. Bravo! I love him already. There he is on the cover of this item in fact, looking out at the viewer with a mixture of vulnerability, amazement, and mild scorn. On this record, he is reading out texts, sometimes playing a large orchestral bass drum, and mostly doing dance and body movements; the first piece took place in Axel’s house, but for the second excursion they did it in public at Electronic Church in Berlin. Dance and improv is a winning combination I think, but outside of Derek Bailey who did it with Min Tanaka, I can’t immediately think of that many examples of it. (Although Japanese electronicist Ikuro Takahashi sometimes did it too.) Chamy realises that “movements can’t be seen on a recording”, but believes that his movements “added a visual stratum to the repetitions that were already present in our music”. What’s even more intriguing is his use of non-movement, where he strikes poses like a living statue and holds them for a long time. Chamy is also acutely aware of the effects he’s having on the audience, and indeed on his worthy constituent Dörner here, and is constantly asking himself questions about whether or not he’s doing the right thing. The important part is he’s doing something, and not allowing himself to be paralysed by pointless analysis of his ideas. All of these Absinth Records I regard as strong artistic statements, even if I don’t always like the music on them; this release is no exception (and I should add that I also like it very much). Arrived 30 July 2010. Limited edition.

Jakob Riis is a Danish laptop player involved in many projects and band combos, including one intriguing named Riis And The Smooth Ones (presumably inspired by the LP by Art Ensemble of Chicago). On No Denmark (OLOF BRIGHT OBCD 31), we hear him in collaborative duets with four musicians – two improvising saxophonists, and two guitarists. One of these is the French-Lebanese player Christine Sehnaoui, whose austere work on the Ichnites CD we very much enjoyed last year. On her track ‘No Soil’, she seems to be building a mental labyrinth with her intricate puffs. There’s also the scratchy axe pickings of Anders Lindsjö on ‘No Sky’, and some gorgeous rock-inflected excess from Per Svennsson’s amplified guitar on ‘No Sun’, for which Riis is content simply to provide a throbbing, resonant bass drone as a backdrop. Riis tends to work overtime on these collaborations, providing all manner of dynamic events when interacting with his partners, yet for the title track where he plays a solo laptop turn, he becomes introverted and contemplative, his minimal white-noise digital washes resembling an ocean breeze. I will resist the temptation to refer to this release as Riis’s Pieces, but like my favourite sweetmeat it’s got a nice tender and sweet filling nonetheless.

A single 39-minute track of live performance music from Thomas Ankersmitt can be heard on Live In Utrecht (ASH INTERNATIONAL ASH 8.8), realised with the help of a computer, an alto saxophone and the Serge analogue modular synthesizer, that wheezing device which Pauline Oliveros made into a household word in America in the 1960s. Valerio Tricoli also contributed some saxophone and tape parts to this minimo-dynamic roarer, recorded in November 2007 at Rumor in Utrecht. Netherlandish musician Ankersmitt has performed in large venues where the intention is to disrupt your normal perception of the performance space, and as part of this goal he pours a tremendous amount of energy into his saxophone improvisations, allowing the sounds to cross-pollinate with the intense processing power of his computers. This is a devilish listen which may owe some small debt to the methods of the American minimalists, and it’s about one-third digital-acoustic churning, one third minimal blippings, and one third scrapey mesmeretic droning. I’ve had surgical operations that were less physically devastating than this…release is also noteworthy because it is, in a sense, his first solo CD.

Another release from Spruit, the Dutch electronicist who we last noted on this site in February 2010. He’s half-musician, half-surgeon, and on this release, half-entymologist too. Bits ‘n Blocks (SOUL SHINE THROUGH 04) is intended as “A digital ode to the humming buzz of insect in a hot summer field”; I can only say I hope never to encounter the species of insect that could be associated with this sort of relentless aural assault, for fear that I might be stung to death, nibbled into eighteen pieces and then swept away by its gigantic gossamer wings. Spruit takes the idea of austerity to the level of a monk living in a cell eating root vegetables, and his compressed digital telegrams leak out into the sound-field like angry attack dogs chained to leashes. Two short tracks (the set is just 16 minutes long) made with a mixing desk and electronic sources in Spring and Summer 2010.

Echohaus (DEKORDER 049) is a fascinating collaboration between Felix Kubin and the Ensemble Intégrales, of which the composer Burkhard Friedrich used to be a member and was involved with this unusual project too. It seems the musicians were deployed in separate rooms in the Westwerk building in Hamburg, given graphic scores, and pretty much told to get on with the job in hand while Kubin sat in a control room with his mixing desk, presiding over all like some avant-garde version of Phil Spector. Except that while Spector used to cackle with glee as he captured his elaborate pop arrangements on tape, somehow creating order from the chaos of 56 session musicians making a hideous racket in the performance studio, this album is far from gleeful and instead gives off a strange, distant vibe of alien coldness. It is filled with jarring dissonances and odd meandering passages, as though hearing Pierrot Lunaire and some nameless subdued work from Darmstadt replayed over a PA in a deserted football arena. So it’s not what I normally associate with Felix “Mr Fun Bags” Kubin, but there’s no denying the strength of the concept or the way that this strange music gradually creeps over you and inhabits your flesh, like a crawling Gila monster with its poisoned tongue.

Very nice to see Up Here In The Clouds (EDITIONS MEGO 106), another Editions Mego release from cindytalk, the extreme ambient project of Gordon Sharp; we very much enjoyed the bleak austerity of last year’s release The Crackle Of My Soul and it’s good to get one’s aural snappers into another slice of his brand of fog, sold in cubic feet from the slopes of the mountainsides where it was recorded. These 2003-2010 recordings were apparently made in the Mid-Levels in Hong Kong and Roi Vert in Okamoto; I’d like to think that Sharp created them through a mystical-alchemical process akin to bottling air from the slopes, but I suppose these digital escapades are likely to have a more prosaic explanation behind them. No matter, because these intensive abstractions are remarkably evocative of the extremes of weather and geography in ways that many creators wish they could emulate; listen for long enough to these fine glitchy drone-mulched rondellos and you become snowblind, sunblind, and unable to discern the horizon from the clouds. Titles such as ‘Hollow Stare’, ‘The Eight Sea’ and ‘I Walk Until I Fall’ confirm the extremely imaginative approach to fictional-landscaping and psychogeographical peregrinations undertaken by cindytalk. Just about anyone and everyone who’s sat themselves behind a synth since 1980 has aspired to justify having the word “glacial” applied to their work, but cindytalk certainly scoops the coveted “Golden Iceberg” prize for 2010 with this release.

Real-time instrument playing mixes up with laptop manipulation and live electronics on Ice Cold Pop (EVEREST RECORDS ER_LP_036), realised by the duo of Klaus Janek and Simon Berz performing as Ige*Timer. Janek’s acoustic double bass is fed through one of Toshiba’s finest pieces of hardware, while the Berz half of the act turns on his “analogue sound generators” while wielding a pair of “electroacoustic drumsticks”. He also picks up pieces of junk on his travels (bracelets? railway ties?) to use as percussive objects in the act. This record documents them doing all the above in live situations on a recent tour of the United States. A bit of a meandery listen, but it’s good to hear some authentic performing skills underpinning the work, and some of their errant sonic combinations really catch fire. The title of the LP refers, I assume, to a particular American frozen sweet snack rather than to a genre of “glacial” pop music.

On Mirrors (PRESTO!? P!?015), we hear a meeting up of two percussionists, the veteran player Christian Wolfarth who brings with him a respectable CV of collaborations and group playing with some of the renowned names of improv from the 1980s; and Enrico Malatesta, a younger conservatoire graduate from Bruno Maderna who’s got his noggin fixated on all manifestations of contemporary music and free improvisation. Seven studio cuts display a variety of approaches to avant-percussion, including bowed metal, tuned drums and assorted arrhythmical patterings. The enthused label speak warmly of the musicians’ “focus” and “concentration” on this limited edition (300 copies) release.

Abortion Eve is an Australian outsider making “acousmatic tape music” in Melbourne, and his new tape Rae (MRS TAPES 001) was sent to us from Maastricht. On it, he recorded his one-track guitar into a dictaphone, along the way using certain methods (tape loops?) to generate mechanical repetitions of short phrases. The lo-fi sound quality and machine hum are part of the overall work, and this oddity has all the sort of obsessive, narrow and near-maddening characteristics that endear it to me instantly. Despite some occasional tracts of echo, it seems that no guitar FX are used; all the mayhem and chaos is semi-structured, created perhaps by clever overdubbing. A real hands-on methodology involving analogue equipment and exploiting the effects of machinery in one’s favour; a throwback to bedroom cassettes of the 1980s. Nary a laptop in earshot!

Skjølbrot appears to be patiently building up an interesting resource at his website, with photographs, texts and quotations that are filled with semi-poetic connections and philosophical observations about our environment. Very specific places and small events are given detailed concentration in these online ruminations, often informed by a strong sense of ecology and awareness of green issues. The release Maersk is an extension of this approach, layering together field recordings of Parisian streets, markets, corridors underneath a hospital, fridges in supermarkets, VHF radio sounds, and evidence of industrial deforestation in Chittagong. All these things are glued together by tracts of mysterious and murky dark ambient music, which sometimes add a layer of drama or narrative to the record. The creator is clearly widely travelled, and in some cases appears to us almost as a time-traveller, floating freely through space as he makes his poignant observations about the declining state of the globe. Opaque work which deserves closer listening; I think ‘Ballad of windfarming’ is one of the most affecting titles I’ve heard for a while.

Birds + Machines (1980-1989) (POGUS PRODUCTIONS 21055-2) is a compilation of pieces by the great Gen Ken Montgomery from the 1980s. He’s personally selected all the cuts, concentrating on anything that combined electronic sounds with field recordings and “noisy songs”. 70 minutes of delirious joy result, machines, voices, birdsong, electronic pulses…everything quite untidy and unkempt, evidence of Gen Ken’s Cage-like ability to find music taking place everywhere around him all the time (even when he’s taking a shower). I’m sure this is probably a lot easier in an energetic and hyper-eventful city like New York, but some of these pieces were captured in Berlin and put together at the studio of his long-standing friend Conrad Schnitzler. Layers of sonic detritus and wobbly cassette tapes only add to the fun. What a gorgeous cover too! Highly recommended release.

Brighton collective Hamilton Yarns sent us their new release Rising (HARK RECORDINGS HARK! 012) which arrived in a charming decorated envelope. This five-piece of gentle English absurdist boys and girls use their voices and retro Wurlitzer keyboards to give us a series of very gentle and twee songs and ditties. They strive to avoid any self-conscious mannerisms in their vocal work, retaining local English accents and personal inflections, so that to them singing is only one step away from talking, telling a story, or reciting a poem. Indeed it seems they formed the band simply from “a desire to tell tales”. Quite often they finish what they have to say in the space of a minute and a half, sometimes managing to insert avant-gardesque electronic doodles into these compressed, sketchy songs. Arrives in a faux-Magritte gouache painted cover with four ascending balloons and the hand of a wistful observer.

Roland P. Young enhances his woodwinds with much electronic and studio treatment, making great use of echoplex and digital delay to create some remarkable effects on Istet Serenade (EM RECORDS EM1087CD). The record reminds one of the 1970s experiments carried out with an echoplex by West Coast player Stan Getz, but Young is far bolder in his reach. These ‘Isophonic Comprovisations’, as much composed as they are improvised, are intended to straddle many musical genres and styles, including jazz, ambient, electronic and classical chamber music. There’s no denying the basic jazz inflection of Young’s confident and intricate phrasing, and though he may occasionally lean towards the saccharine in his melodies, the record has a brilliant glistening surface and is by no means an unpleasant listen. Curious listeners may wish to know that EM Records also put out Isophonic Boogie-Woogie by this man in 2006, but I think it’s sold out. A vinyl edition of this new one has been released however; note the Risa Young artwork printed in powerful red and black amoeba blob-shapes that comes across like a cosmic version of Scottie Wilson.

Torturing Nurse are a terrific underground harsh noise combo from Shanghai. Their music has become something of an obsession for this writer ever since Tamon Mayakita of IllFM played a track on Southwark Anthology of Noise last year, regaling us with a selection from the band’s now impossible-to-get Eerie CDR from 2007. Only active for a few years, these Chinese loons have already built up a formidable back catalogue of dangerous and destructive releases, with an impressive array of live shows and collaborations to boot. Broken (RNF-039) was sent to us by R.O.N.F. Records, a micro-label in Spain specialising in issuing small runs of intense noise infections, including our good friend Vomir from France, many of them decorated with sickening images of death, sex, and torture. This one is a live recording in two halves, about 40 minutes long, and only 50 copies exist; perhaps not an essential example of TN’s craft, but it does convey something of their head-on approach to tackling very extreme dynamics. They’re also represented on the four-CD survey of Chinese experimental music from Sub Rosa, noted here.

Very good to hear from Kacheltisch again who impressed us last year with their formless and brutish synth bursts on their first release on Betong Tonträger, packed in a corrugated card box with a small lead weight. Their new one, Kacheltisch & Niko Tzoukmanis – 30072009 (BETONG TONTRÄGER #005), is mounted on a ceramic tile. I was thinking of buying the entire edition of 70 copies, since my bathroom needs retiling, and wondered if I could somehow activate the music when I take my morning shower. This new release, on which the Frankfurt duo of Becker and Pawlicki team up with Niko T from Audision and Unitary, may not have the same primitive power which so troubled me during the months of 2009, but it does have the shapeless go-anywhere quality like a tram that’s become uncoupled and is being driven by a half-mad operator through the hapless city. I see from their website I’ve already missed at least two releases in this series, but those who don’t collect boxes and simply want to hear the music are invited to download all their work for free from various Mediafire links on their site.

For a more convincing foray into the territory of simplistic electronic music, we can heartily recommend Fred Bigot‘s work on Mono/Stereo (HOLY MOUNTAIN 83268 / TLÖN UQBAR TUQ1003). Proudly declaring himself as ‘Pan Sonic meets Rockabilly’, he actually manages to surpass the Finnish electronicists for sheer relentlessness as he pushes his sequencers uphill with numerous unvarying black pulses, and he drives himself with all the determination of a blinkered digital cart-horse. Rockabilly fans expecting twangy guitars and reverb might not want to rush out to buy a copy of this, but true devotees of that genre who own original copies of the entire Meteor label back catalogue will recognise that Fred Bigot is a true brother under the skin. He somehow manages to inflect every note he makes with the pure hamburger grease that we hear on the best examples of 1950s Rockabilly (one of the most genuinely “isolationist” genres ever to have existed on this planet), and by so doing places himself some distance from the clean lines and antisepctic approach of the contemporary German schools of minimal electronica. However, we should not overlook the pioneering work of Alan Vega and Martin Rev, both as Suicide and in their solo careers; if you want to hear a truly modern update on Rockabilly, Vega’s first 1980 solo LP is required listening.

The duo of Jason Kahn and Richard Francis is showcased on MV-28, with four pieces of improvised wispy and coarse sound art produced in various locales in recent years, using computers, electronics, an analogue synth and percussion. This fits the picture I have in my head of Kahn’s current work, where he seems intent on exploring thin washes of sound until he sees holy visions at the other end of a yellow tunnel. Spartan droning Spaniard Francisco López is treated to a double CD set called untitled (2006-2007) (MV25), bringing you a total of 16 substantial compositions and a mixed collection of reworkings of soundfiles contributed by other prominent droners, reprocessed versions of music performances by jazz-improvisers, and field recordings from the Amazon. Everything is bleak, slow and emptied out, but as usual López achieves his own highly-distilled brand of minimal beauty. No less minimal is Les Mailles, (MV26) a single 39-minute piece by Tomas Phillips and Dean King, both currently living in the US. This is an extremely washed-out example of work where the composers become preoccupied with tiny events, exploring the ‘grain’ of digital sound in an intimate way, producing inhuman and challenging music which seems to be constructed from the insides of clouds.

Russian electronicist Nikita Golyshev spreads his analogue wings wide on Solaris (MV20), subtitled an ‘electronic suite in two parts’. A rising star of the Russian underground since 2003, Golyshev has made numerous private press releases spanning the genres of metallic noise, dark ambient and bleak drones, always allowing his machines to lead him where they will with their blind unthinking eyes. Solaris may not be directly connected to the Edward Artemyev music for the famous Tarkovsky science-fiction allegorical film, but it still induces a pleasant state of spacey weightlessness while listening. Lastly we have a devastating collection of rare tracks by Le Syndicat, a French art-brut project from the early 1980s who won their spurs as Industrialist visionaries with their ferociously urban performances of trashy noise, celebrating everything from broken TV sets, dismembered Walkmans, vile feedback, and radio static. Timespace Losses 1982-1987 (MV30) picks 16 choice cuts of their vicious, militaristic work previously released on (now rare) cassette tapes and compilations, many of the titles rubbing our noses in the stink and squalor of everyday life in a stark, cruel manner. Thanks once again to Dmitry for his unstinting supply of these distinctive releases of hidden gems.

Arrived from Moscow 17 November 2009.

Lene Grenager is a Norwegian composer with her very credible Affinis Suite (+3DB RECORDS 009), composed in recent years especially for the Affinis Ensemble, masters of a repertoire of Norwegian contemporary music. These twisted lines and curlicue exploits, heavy on the dynamics and tight scoring, may put one in mind of a certain period of Frank Zappa’s work, especially with their jazz-esque arrangements. Grenager allows other interpolations, though; one of the saxophonists comes close at times to delivering atonal free-noise solos in a semi-controlled way, and the prepared piano of John Helge Sætre (using sheets of paper to dampen the hammers) is also an eyebrow-raiser in this context. A most engaging package which functions on many levels of the modernist sweet trolley.

Sister Iodine are a French trio of ugly avant-noise punks active since the 1990s apparently, dealing out the cat-o-nine-tails in sound using an ungodly combination of guitars, drums and the Korg synth all played and smashed together in ways more akin to stage-managing a traffic accident on the Lille underpass than anything we normally associate with music performance. The album Flame Desastre (EDITIONS MEGO DeMEGO 009), which I currently hold in my asbestos gloves, was recorded last year and originally released on vinyl by Premier Sang, whose owners violated numerous health and safety regulations just to get this scorcher pressed into the grooves. With titles like ‘Terminal Pain’ and ‘You Burned’, this pummeling ape delivers multiple high-energy bursts of apocalyptic rock-inflected noise performed with insane, incredible dynamics. A must!

From Sweden, that burgeoning land of a particular bittersweet strain of melancholy sound-art which enriches my current gloomy state so effectively, I’ve a CD by Tsukimono who I think I first heard on the Gothenburg 08 compilation with the memorable ‘Moan Jar’. Heart Attack Money (KALLIGRAMMOFON #7), all the work of Johan Gustavsson who modestly credits himself with ‘assembling’ the music, is a beautiful set of introverted, lonely and sorrowful ambient music which grows increasingly abstract over course of the disc. Among the many effective moments is his imaginative and original setting of Billie Holiday’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’, which consists of replaying the original record through filters in the midst of a long stretch of immersive blue pools of weeping fluidity. With graphic design by Thomas Ekelund inside the moody booklet of evocative twilight photos, this is perfect fodder for the onset of the Scandinavian winter.

Another piece in the jigsaw puzzle concerning Max Brand, one of Europe’s most overlooked innovators in 20th-century electronic music, whose work first came my way with an excellent double CD on the Rhiz label with tapes from his archive and remixes of same by contemporary Viennese electronicists. In quite another vein is Kabelbrand: Sounds from the Max Brand Synthesizer (MOOZAK MZK#002), which delivers amply on the promise of its title. What sounds! The veteran machine in question was built for him by Robert Moog, at a time before said Moog had started on his road to commercial success, and is described here as ‘a reconstructed and enhanced Trautonium’. Performed here by Clemens Hausch, Benedikt Guschlbauer, Gerald Krist and Ulrich Kühn are 12 pieces of their own devising which display to a high degree of prominence the uncontrolled and impolite grumbly analogue belches of this smoked-up, smouldering circuit-board dragon of the synth world. The collection is rounded out by two unreleased and remastered Max Brand recordings from 1970 and 1974, one of which – the 28-minute ‘Ilian 4′ – was composed very late in the composer’s life and was intended as a ballet piece. Apparently released without much hue and cry, this record is both historically important and a great collection of exciting music and sound, pretty much essential listening for any serious investigators of modernism.

Greek solo electronicist Anika arrives from Athens with an LP called A:05-07 (NO LABEL) which he released last year; it’s a decent collection of droney, menacing science-fiction music, quite heavy on the effects and the filters which often-times render every analogue note into gobbets of glistening glorp. As well as meandering in his Chrome-inspired keyboard mindscapes, he likes to deploy his editing tools in odd ways – cutting up and rearranging his own material, resulting sometimes in very clipped and abrupt endings for some pieces, while others exist as mere sketches or short fragments. Sometimes I wish certain tracks could be given more room, as they seem to fade out just at the moment when they’re getting interesting, but in principle I agree that the editing scissors can be a musician’s best friend, and I wish more artistes could emulate Anika’s discipline. The artworks, somewhat like the music, are packed with distorted and cut-up information, using collaged close-ups of photographs and texts to create alienating and futuristic effects.

Tenor sax with electronics in quite a different vein on Lausanne (FOR4EARS CD 2072), with these 2006 live recordings made in Switzerland by Urs Leimgruber and veteran analogue synth genius Thomas Lehn. While the CD begins in fairly tranquil mode, full of discreet hums and gentle lulling sax blurts, the duo grow gradually more agitated over time; the third track is nothing short of science-fiction plumbing, Leimgruber drastically mutating his own tubes in real time without any sort of electronic processing.

Freakish item of the week might be this new double-CD from Maher Shalal Hash Baz, the Japanese combo of high oddity. C’est La Dernière Chanson (K KLP210) resulted from a recording session in France put together by band leader Tori Kudo, where the band (aided by French local players) recorded over 200 new tunes in six days. 177 of them are now released for your delectation; there’s 99 of them on the first CD alone, and needless to say they are notable for their extreme brevity. They mostly seem to state a melody – or just a fragment of a melody – then stop dead, using brass instruments, guitars, percussion and bass, all rendered in a highly skeletal fashion, and played quite slowly with an endearing clunkiness. At times you may think you’re hearing your local school band rehearsing for a Burt Bacharach concert. Maher Shalal Hash Baz have, I think, tended to divide listeners with their previous releases, and I admit to having no firm grasp on their back catalogue; with this puzzling item, it’s clear that Kudo is keen to resist being pigeonholed, which is a good thing.

DAKU (OUTFALL CHANNEL SPILL #016) arrived from Dayton Ohio. It’s a collection of very extreme vocal recits from Bryan Lewis Saunders, with sonic accompaniment by Z’EV. Saunders recounts nightmarish tales of mental anguish and medical disasters, with titles like ‘The Absurdity of Pain’, some of them involving anal penetration and much personal bodily agony. Saunders’ work has been described as “visceral” and “confrontational”, and his very urgent near-hysterical voice on these pieces (he literally sounds like he is possessed by demons) will probably alarm most listeners, if not repel them entirely, while Z’EV’s eerie distorted electronic sounds also tend to induce paranoia, claustrophobia, and a general sense of unease. This document of extreme performance art comes packaged in a handsome silk-screened wallet.

Swedish creator Ronnie Sundin (see earlier post) is back with another music-and-book package. Seven Year Silence (FANG BOMB FB011) is a full-length CD of his own music, packed in a slim booklet of monochrome drawings printed in dazzling, sharp blacks. All the sonic material was assembled over a seven-year period and subsequently compressed into two aural wodges of hissing, slithering and clattering noise in Ronnie’s Malmö studio. These are two of the densest, most dynamic and near-impenetrable blasters I’ve yet heard to be issued in the name of electro-acoustic noise; they are packed with content and import, even if the meaning is hard to decipher; and an overall sense of doom, defeat and futility (which fits this label’s identity) is never very far away. Meanwhile the booklet is filled with fragmented images of skulls, pyramids and disjointed lettering rendered in Indian ink, sometimes obscured with heavy ink blots and grey ink-wash clouds. Great! A gorgeous release fit to accompany anxieties and emotions of the jet-black variety.