Tagged: ambient

December 7, 2013

Rotten Developments

This should be the last of the bundle received from Richard Kamerman’s Copy For Your Records label in August 2012. Developer’s self-titled (CFYRT04) is a cassette most likely made by Matthew Reis of Ohio, whose email address for his Factotum Tapes label is supplied in the inner of this short, small-run tape. Despite indications of brevity, Developer manages to compress a good deal of overpowering factory-noise and metallic shriek into a tiny frame, creating a rather haunting sensation of alienation and futility with his echoing klang. Oddly enough, I like it less when the episode collapses into more conventional harsh noise, but even so there is plenty of evidence of skill and subtlety in the way Developer handles his very abstract, abrasive material – especially in the editing. Reis is one of these impossibly prolific creators who not only has numerous releases under this name, but has also operated under numerous aliases, including Antennaeboy, Black Almas, Disasternaut, Heart Of The Whore, Wasteland Jazz Ensemble, and Yes, Collapse. (09/08/2012)

Another noisy cassette is the one from Darren Wyngarde aka Filthy Turd, who also sent a package in August. For this C20 release, “The Filthy One” extends his filth into the packaging itself, which arrives with a little packet of dirt in a plastic bag, marked with the legend “This mud protects against Radiant Cracks” – presumably just one of many spells and charms lifted from his warlock’s cabinet of magic philtres. This even made me slightly reluctant to open the thing at all, which is another index of this uniquely English noise-maker’s success; he radiates powerful waves of unapproachability. Two titles are printed on the skuzzy photocopy insert – ‘A Rotting Throb’ and ‘Rancid and Trmblin’, and it’s released on Urine Soaked Rag as #23 in that catalogue. When you succeed in spinning the tape itself, you’ll know that the world has finally come to an end amid a cacophony of distorted screaming, sirens, extended explosions of devastating destruction of earth-shaking building collapse proportions. With this release, Filthy Turd manages to pollute at least three of our five senses, and right now he’s probably working on methods to assault our noses and taste buds too. Another triumph for this remorseless, absurdist fun-loving magickal-prankster. 30 copies only. (06/08/2012)

UN NU is the team of Pascal Battus and Benjamin Duboc, and their Recoupements (EH?63) was recorded in 2010 at a performance space in Albi in the middle of the Pyrenees. Battus has wowed listeners before with his radical “rotating surfaces” method by which he produces slow and grindy sound-art, and his 2010 Ichnites (a collab with Christine Sehnaoui Abdelnour) was a “classic” of that genre. No surprise to learn Battus has been seen grinding his axe with that other primo scrapey fellow, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, for a goodly number of years. For Recoupements, he’s working only with guitar pickups, probably using them as a low-grade electronic instrument to generate the intensely irritating background squeal that permeates most of the length of this 52-minute endurance test; when he’s given the chance to “take a solo”, you won’t believe the obnoxious results nor the shrill, inhuman nastiness that Battus is capable of. Duboc meanwhile veers between attempting to play some simple tunes on his bass – free-form bowing to create simple two-note patterns, as if expecting Cecil Taylor to arrive and rescue the session – and making boxed-in clattering noises that are slightly more suited to the austere sound-art nature of the gig. As an album this has some great moments, but I sense the duo keep running out of steam every ten minutes, and the pauses in between ideas are a little bit awkward. But I’m a sucker for minimal improv when the noises produced are as deliciously abrasive, introverted and unfriendly as this. (08/08/2013).

Highly unusual item credited to HÁK-DAH is in fact the team of Hákarl (i.e. Kevin Nickells) and Daniel Alexander Hignell, and their Bambi (LF RECORDS LF025) includes a small insert which indicates, by means of a Venn diagram, what their musical contributions are where they overlap. Based on the scant 32 minutes of mist-drenched gumbo they provide here, I’d tend to characterise this music as a form of sinister ambient crawl, an assertion I make when faced by the nebulous clouds puffed out by Hignell’s fog-pumping electronic machines, and the experience is made ten times more creepy by the insistent violin work of Nickells. He himself calls it a “screaming violin”, and with good cause. One has rarely felt so terrorised by the sound of the instrument, which in his hands becomes a very persistent ghost stalking us along the deserted shore with all the tenacity of an M.R. James spectre. The agonised faces reproduced on the cover of this item are but a small indicator of the mental anguish that you, as the listener, will endure upon purchase and playback of this excellent item. Both players are based in Brighton, and on the strength of this they must have spent many hours wandering by the sea during off-season, when skies are grey and a mysterious offshore mist swirls around the feet of the unwary traveller. The record becomes even more of a weirdie around its mid-point, as voice elements and drum beats are added; one would hesitate to say it mutates into a “song”, but I’m lost for words to best describe the unsettling dirge that emerges from my tremulous speakers – the rhythms are askew, the pace lumbers like a crippled sea-monster, and Daniel’s vocals are just plain harrowing. HÁK-DAH would be lost with their echo chamber device, but they put it to very good use. This record may not be especially enjoyable listening, but it is quite unique and delivered with as much conviction as the two pallid ghoul-like creators can manage, as they brush the dirt of the grave from their faded black funeral outfits. (30/05/2012)

Bonus Filthy Turd image shewing bag of dirt

November 28, 2013

O’Rourke (About)

Jim O’Rourke
Old News #8
EDITIONS MEGO OLD NEWS #8 2 x LP (2012)

Some of you may be more familiar with Jim O’Rourke’s work than I am. His name and his fingers – with which he proddeth many pies – have been quite ubiquitous since the early nineties. Discogs can attest to that, as can many a back issue of The Wire, or indeed this here publication what you hold in your screen, I should think. Be that as it may, this is the first Jim O’Rourke I’ve ever knowingly listened to. It might seem a funny place in some ways to start with, then, this double LP being one in a series of archive recordings, rarities, unreleased stuff and the like. However, this reissue is in the main part of one of the younger Mr O’Rourke’s first CD albums, Disengage, although presented simply and generically as number eight in this Mego-curated series (the packaging for which, it should be noted, is quite swell and surely formatted to look pleasant as a complete edition by its devious designers). So it seems this is pretty much starting at the beginning – which, it should be noted, can work sometimes, or so I have been led to believe.

We have, in our sumptuously packaged, graven grooves four pieces, one per side of sticky black vinyl. Three parts ‘Mere’ followed by a refreshing chaser of ‘Merely’.

Initial investigations seem to reveal a curious mix of steely alienation, lukewarm, beating ambience without being ambient. A sound touching on the cold drifts of a cloudbank of post-industrial fumes. Mercurial ebbs and shifts within a subliminal onward glide or inexorable undertow of momentum. An unheimlich phasing of indistinct scenes and moods, all witnessed at a remove, some coming nearer to impinging emotionally, some simply there and antiseptic, like a deserted hospital ward.

So, Mere – Smear, microscope slide, a glide between glass plates, afloat on sterile liquid, Vaseline laminations – Mir – Peace – a Space Station – artificial sustained atmosphere, microgravity, (Apollo) ambience – from peace to ill at ease – seasick – Meer – Das Meer – O’Rourke would of course go on in a couple of years to produce Faust’s ‘Comeback’ album Rien – La Mer, Foghorns – although no Debussy, for that we look to Philip Corner and his gamelan whilst twisting back round to Debussy’s orchestrations of Satie (more on which will be forthcoming, just watch this space) – More dreams of Exxon Valdez glinting on the surface of the oily grooves, Charles’ Ives alpenhorn echoing across an empty harbour or our wintry pond (see Ed’s review of PGA November 17th) visited again in tetherless phantasm, slipped away once again to affectless digital oscillation, lent a surface impurity through vinyl but still – disengaged. More? Four sides of it, but no Pink Floyd, only fluorescent pink ink on blue. Merely? Unprocessed, constituent elements more recognisable, roiling timps, oil drums and static rotation below the waterline.

Here the samples hang on a sagging washing line stretched between the academy (although having been in peril for so long it is perhaps in a new phase of respectability) and ambience, stained by the steam of cooling towers, an electronic interzone flotation tank. Instrumentalists are credited, the mycophilic Michael Prime contributes radio, for example, there is cello, trombone, voice (apparently four vocal performers, somewhere). For the most part these ingredients are carefully extracted in tiny slivers and processed into seamless loops in digital space, massed in fog patches of tone which swell, wheeze and collapse through a variety of moods, some mournful and lugubrious, one – the first section of Mere. Pt. 1 – almost glimpsing a universe next door of beatific ambient glow – thence to dissipate into inscrutable texture or uneasy quiescences of glassy DX synth drone. An exploration of abstract null-spaces and large colour-fields in various rainbow shades of greyscale. A stasis in a 3D hologram waterscape, rush into it and find it was all a mirage, though not exactly insubstantial.

Jim played his cards rather close to his chest at this point, I feel, presenting a music of negation – removing authorial touches, the young O’Rourke somewhere behind the whirring sound-carrier like a spectral Oz in hiding in a Turquoise City, obscuring gesture and individual distinction from the instrumental parts, glossing over overt suggestions of specific emotional responses; a music that paradoxically also negates empty space, that throbs with a steady subliminal momentum and always maintains fluid levels in the soundpool of disembodied sources. Despite this impulse for camouflage one gets the sense of an authorial personality behind things, an author who however is reticent about making definite statements and happier hiding behind pretexts of process, obscured as they themselves might well be. Perhaps this can be ascribed to the relative youth of the composer; a sly air of ‘well here it is, make of it what you will’, or ‘mere’ it is, merely, might also be discernable, equally so in its inclusion as another part of this uniformly glossed Old News series ¹.

As an exercise in deconstructing and arranging acoustic sounds in drones without any particularly overt programmatic schema revealed, and certainly in terms of when it was made it has an oblique interest. If certain palette choices and techniques have become more familiar over the intervening 22 – 23 years that shouldn’t necessarily detract from the music. To listen in historical context probably helps in that respect. It is drones, is more long form and more abstract while still being notably electronic than much electronic music of the time, but uses what could loosely deemed electro-acoustic means to achieve that electronic status whilst mostly refusing resolved melody or mood, setting it a little apart from much industrial soundscaping on the one hand and synthetic ambience on the other. Fans of The Hafler Trio, Illusion of Safety, Staalplaat, Korm Plastics etc. things of the era may want to investigate – which isn’t to say it’s only of historical interest. It may, or may not be, essential or fascinating or mind-blowing, or none of the above, or something else, but undoubtedly there’s a lot of content in there, however reticent, inscrutable or blurred at the edges, and there’s a hell of a lot more to unpack than many current drone or electronic releases I’ve listened to or reviewed. It’s also probably more ambitious – structurally it is still rather sui generis, whether you can pick them out individually or not all the time those contributions and sound sources from other instrumentalists and musicians contribute shades and dimensions, and whether he’s deigning to show his face or not, there’s a distinctive although maybe still nascent authorial voice lurking in amongst the ostensibly de-personalised tones. An early footnote in long career and something of a curiosity with added historical cache, then ².

I find some obscure significance (pun always intended) that a few years later O’Rourke released another self-deprecatingly titled record in Insignificance. ↩
But not ‘Merely’. And we like footnotes here, they appeal to the part of the music fan that shelters the spirit of the collector and the searcher-after of obscure cultural lore and artefact; the spirit that hopes for a revelation from the past that transforms the present, scrambles the possible timelines, that opens mental doors to new utopian listening vistas; and of course let’s not forget there’s the fact it’s part of a nifty looking series… Old News can still be good news. ↩

November 13, 2013

The Angelic Conversation

Time to get our fangs into some more cassette tapes. There are times of the day when only a small-run independent tape can satisfy a man’s urges. Can a man who doesn’t own a tape deck truly be called a man, I ask myself ¹. Ilya Belorukov is a Russian fellow who we spoke to for TSP issue #21, and he’s pretty much waging a one-man campaign for free music, extreme metal, drone and avant-garde jazz in Saint Petersburg, often doing so in the space of a single album. Actually it’s not really a one-man effort when he has friends like the members of Wozzeck behind him. Wozzeck appear on side one of this split tape (ALREADY DEAD TAPES AD057) which we got on 11 December 2012. In fact for ‘Puhdas Ruoka’ they teamed up with the Finnish duo Banana Pill and the four-man team made a lovely sound together in Helsinki in the spring of 2011. What may begin as abrasive texturised abstractery resolves itself into quite a heavenly and mystical episode. Angelic choirs, I would say, worthy of inclusion as soundtrack music for certain cinematic moments of Tarkovsky. Many dream of achieving this degree of perfect and translucent blending of their combined sound, where the individual contributions just melt into a cosmic share of ever-giving plenty, surrendering their identities willingly. Just 40 copies of this artefact confirm it as something of a hidden gem.

Flip it over to hear the Coaxil side, which contains two pieces, ‘Gulf Of Izmir’ and ‘Mzee’ and represents quite a different burst of digital malarkey. It’s more in the zone of strident avant-garde Techno than dreamy droning. Synths and sequencers and rhythm boxes spit out slightly addled phrases and half-formed patterns, occasionally interrupted by the voice of a chanting female mystic issuing a terse and enigmatic sentence. The overall sound seems so stripped-down that I assumed it was the work of a single synthesist, and was a tad surprised to learn that Coaxil are a threesome of Russians who have been doing it in Saint Petersburg since about 2009, often joined by their singer and a fifth member who does live mixes of visual material for their multi-media shows. On a chilly Russian night at 2 AM, fortified by strong vodka and surrounded by enthused clubbers hopefully wearing fur coats, I expect the Coaxil experience is truly memorable – especially if amplified and accompanied by fast-moving visuals on a big screen. On this cassette tape though, it comes over a bit limp and constrained. The itchy restlessness of their scatter-shot music may appeal, but unlike the flip side of this split their pieces don’t feel “performed” enough for me, and I harbour some doubts as to how much the team are able to successfully control or direct their equipment in their favour.

Keeping things more or less Russian, I thought fit to delve into the box of goodments kindly sent to us in September 2012 by Ivan Afanasyev from Petrozavoosk. Very coincidentally of the six tapes herein (all released on his Full Of Nothing label), one of them is a self-titled cassette by Banana Pill (FULL OF NOTHING fon31). This gives one a chance to hear their solo turn, and the two Finns Dmitri Zherbin and Sasha Kretova spread themselves out quite luxuriantly with their guitar and violin-based performances, the rich and melodic drone-music much enhanced and deepened by use of synths and some studio processing, or simply using a smidgen of digital delay. Sasha and Dmitri may be a little slow to start (like a Tunturi on a cold morning), but when they uncoil at length into the correct musical niches, they tend to occupy the space like an incandescent python. A very sleepy python. The duo also exhibit their own brand of the whimsical eccentricity and cluttering sound that has come to characterise certain strands of music from Finland, often labelled by some as “Finnish Folk” for want of a better way to pigeonhole any music made with acoustic instruments. However, there’s little aggression or grit in their spacey-vibey trance music, and even the label notes tend to emphasise the calm, sweetness and peacefulness of Banana Pill. Nothing wrong with those sentiments, but when that Pill is wafered into the more punchy-noisenik tendencies of Wozzeck as above, a more complex dosage results.

This gag borrowed from Lawrence Burton. ↩

November 8, 2013

Music Has The Right To Vowels

EAU-DC
NR 2
GERMANY EMPIRIC RECORDS EMREC 3 (2013)

It begins as a series of warm, leisurely pulses that ripple across my living room, like Janek Schaefer’s respiratory system beamed live from ‘Basic Channel’ radio. It’s a bare beginning, but evolves by and by, softly excavated by sub-bass scrapes, then accommodating an array of devices cherry-picked from the modern electronic(a) lexicon and stripped to the skeleton. The sound is eclectic but implacable, as if dreamed, depersonalised and filtered through the same slurred, sun-bleached prism that renders the best available dub techno so hypnotising.

EAU-DC is Messrs Thorsten Polomski and Jens Fischer, the latter of whom may or may not trade under the guise of ‘DJ Fox’. Information on the pair is scarcer than this 200-copy record (large posters enclosed in the first 100). It is a streamlined sequel to the artists’ ‘sometimes hasty’ debut, and it displays an approach to track construction that is as laconic as their press: “just mixing up favoured elements, adding more restrained, but sometimes pretty hasty beats and analog sounding fx’s”. And though dropped twice in the same copy, here ‘haste’ is as conspicuous by its audible absence as is unnecessary explanation. Personal satisfaction is the artists’ evident motivating mandate, but with indulgence subordinate to intuition. The results should thus please anyone with an ear for ambiguous, understated atmospheres that don’t necessitate herbal accompaniment.

The seamlessly segued ‘SKLLRDE / PRNCS’ provides a lengthy lead-in, draping layer upon luscious layer of languorous cloud-tone over a ghostly heartbeat. An arrhythmic limp sets the tempo for ‘MCROMRKA’, the first track to make use of more than one vowel in the title. The resulting oxygen expulsion and subsequently dizzying head-rush might explain this ear-catching meter, which is, in due course, ameliorated by a vertiginous, undulating organ line. Side B ups the speed slightly: scattering suggestions of drum’n’bass and even dubstep here and there, though always in the sparest, most tasteful manner I hasten to add. Even the remote, pitch-shifted (but radiant) female vocals in the final track – ‘ESTUTHAT’ – look unlikely to divide listeners the way Burial’s ‘Untrue’ did, instead allowing the record to drift into its longed-for last slumber.

NR 2 is a solid listening experience in its entirety, offering your ears some of the best comfort that music money can by, short of Boards of Canada reissues perhaps. These 8 tracks amount to a hazy road journey that casually deconstructs any number of electronic sub-genres, and if you choose to ignore the label’s ‘33rpm’ notice, you can make a double album of it to no dilution of your enjoyment.

November 5, 2013

Body Horror: a brooding work of heavy industrial metal dub and ambient dronescapes

Iron Forest, Body Horror, Crucial Blast, CD 020 (2013)

Iron Forest is a fairly new experimental music project by US Midwest artist Brandon Elkins that combines heavy industrial metal rhythms and riffs with drone, dub, noise and doom elements. “Body Horror”, the project’s second album, is a lavish effort: eight tracks of layers of power electronics, digital noise, warped dub, crushing machine rhythms, sharply cut reverb and space atmosphere, and elements of black / death / doom metal. The plastic case is a large DVD-style container with several postcards of pictures of mutant body parts that have a strange if repulsive and disturbing beauty.

The recording revolves around themes of mutation, deformity and transhumanism. Track 1 is a gentle introduction of reverb and fuzz, very spacey with spurts of dub rhythm, and highly atmospheric. Subsequent tracks range from fierce and threatening dub guitar-noise splatter with washes of shrieking vocals to doomy dronescapes set against an ambience suggesting post-apocalyptic industrial wastelands of polluted ponds of water and winds sweeping up fine sand mixed with industrial chemical dust. Although the music can be highly robotic and its rhythms dominated by echoing machine sounds, I always have the impression that here is a world in which biology and technology have become completely fused and to treat the two separately is an antiquated notion. All machine noises seem to come from cyborg creatures with self-awareness and cunning natures.

For music that draws its inspiration from past industrial metal heavies like Godflesh and Scorn who also included very liberal doses of dub rhythms and sounds into their work, “Body Horror” is as much atmospheric and meditative as it is harsh and grinding robot doom machine music. The surprising thing is that the music is very accessible and much less menacing than its title and artwork suggest. (The album is also much shorter than I would have liked – at least an hour would have done for this style of heavy industrial dub.) There’s a lot of murk along with the knife-sharp skittery quicksilver rhythms, the crunchy bass riffs and machine-gun synth percussion beats but the music never sounds chaotic or overwhelming. Parts of the CD remind me more of Keith Fullerton Whitman’s old Hrvatski act with the flighty rapid-fire blastbeat electronic rhythms, though without the playful attitude.

This genre of music has a lot of potential to be a mighty monster and I feel with most recordings I have that the artists are scraping just a thin layer of it. “Body Horror” doesn’t advance the known parts of the territory much but as it is, it’s quite a good work: it has a distinctive airy atmosphere in most tracks and there is a psychedelic trance element as well. Each track has enough in it that could generate a family of long remixed tracks.

November 2, 2013

Travels in my Armchair

Ametsub
All Is Silence
JAPAN NOTHINGS66 N66CD003 (2012)

Ametsub is the Tokyo-based musician and producer, hailed in 2006 with the perfect debut album released by the respected Progressive Form label. All Is Silence is his third CD published by the Japanese Nothings66 label which is quite new on the scene, but which has already impressed the post-IDM crowd with its multifaceted Duskscape Not Seen compilation and further releases of Sketches For Albinos and Moshimoss fame. Throughout those five years, Ametsub achieved appearances on many prestigious festivals and performed with such great artists as Plaid, Fennesz, Alva Noto, Vladislav Delay etc. – his talent gained necessary experience and now is in full bloom, resulting in the exceptional work he did with All Is Silence. The combination of floating melodies and melancholic mood with spacious and aloof beats leaves us with the sense of a dreamy place, where everyone can find his hidden thoughts, and becomes clear and appealing. There is the sort of contemplation stimulated by sonic colours and atmospheres, situated by harmony and ending up with the nostalgic sadness. What really make it different from the other IDM sounding efforts is the peculiar use of field recordings, giving us the sense of travelling and never-stopping movement. The compositional techniques are also far from the standard and boring computer programming – the prepared piano and taped sounds arranged through the old fashioned recorder makes the listening experience kind of unique and unforgettable. If you like soundscape-oriented electronic music with some beats thrown in, you should check out this stuff before exploring the new Tympanik Audio releases schedule.

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Eye Contact With The City
GERMANY GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 108 CD (2013)

Oh yes, the Gruenrekorder label turns 10 this year, and through this decade it gains the deserved reputation as one of the finest European labels dealing with field recordings and electronic music utilising field recordings. Operated by German sound-artists Lasse-Marc Riek and Roland Etzin, Gruenrekorder has released over 130 albums up to this moment, and most of them are highly interesting for all of you phonography lovers. All these releases are on digital format (CD, CDr or downloads), so you can expect outstanding recording quality with each new release, but also very special aesthetics of listening to the world surrounding us, and wonder how musical these ordinary sounds from everyday life can be. One of the most recent outings is the new album by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – sound artist, audiovisual media practitioner and researcher from India who currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Based on the field recordings made in Bangalore (the capital city of the Indian state of Karnataka), it became a sound/video installation-project involving the audio from old reel-to-reel tapes found at the city’s flea markets. What really differentiates this work from other published field recordings is the narrative quality of music, which flows continuously for about one hour, forming the massive soundwalk without any certain direction, guiding us only by some strange crash/squeak-like sounds and distorted voices. There’s also a bit of processing over there, but not in a soundscape manner, just to sustain certain sounds and create a sort of hypnotic alignment. If you have heard the Buildings New York album by Francisco López, you will feel some similarity in structure. At times the soundflow receives a very ambient-like sonority, ending again with strange Eastern harmonisation and a definitive musique concrete quality. So you see, the music here is something that’s always changing but with no overall progress, just like a state of mind. Interesting album, not to miss out if you like to travel in your armchair.

October 29, 2013

Chaos is Come Again

Contrastate
A Breeding Ground for Flies
UK DIRTER PROMOTIONS DPROMCD91 CD (2011)

Contrastate is back! The well known British band was hitting the ground since the late 80s with a row of essential albums released by Tesco Org. and their own Black Rose Recordings, delivering outstanding post-industrial music penetrated by the cold atmosphere of England and social depravity causing the deepest melancholy and disaster in minds. Their epic works like A Thousand Badgers In Labour and A Live Coal Under The Ashes were absolute masterpieces of doomed, grotesque and sinister electronic music which remain incomparable with anything else. After the fabulous Todesmelodie, released by the now-defunct Noise Museum label at the turn of the millennium, it was pretty quiet in the Contrastate corner, and only a few re-editions appeared over the next decade. Rumours said that they were disbanded, confirmed by a few solo albums by former Contrastate member Stephen Meixner who was still running Black Rose Recordings but moving in another musical direction, dealing more with installation/soundtrack works. For me, this new Contrastate album was a true surprise, an unexpected but (now I can say) long awaited comeback. And without the shadow of a doubt, the glorious one! A Breeding Ground For Flies was released in 2012 by the ever-evolving Dirter Promotions label delivering the best underground works of post-industrial music masters like Ramleh, Andrew Liles and Con Demek. It features all new material recorded with the full lineup of Grieve/Pomeroy/Meixner. But since a lot of time passed by, the Contrastate sound has changed. No more abandoned industrial area sounds, no gloomy songs accompanied by guitar, and no theatrical spoken word nightmares. Cold as steel, intrinsic and dehumanised, minimalist electronic sonorities raised from the frozen land of sorrow and chaos. Paralysed by fear, you will listen to this mechanized symphony and forget about your neighbourhood, personal disdain and everyday struggle. This is the sound of overall sickness, claustrophobia and hopelessness. Without relying much on scary noises, pounding rhythms and grave vocals, Contrastate build another kind of horror reality, creepy and dull, merciless and uncompromising. As I’ve said already, no comparisons are possible – you should just hear it with own ears and feel the difference. If you are a long-time follower just like me – you will not be disappointed. If you never heard about Contrastate, this is your chance! And of course I need to mention the great packaging design conceived and carefully realised by the label – the CD housed in a massive cardboard box with the booklet inside the oversized slipcase, with the great and deep coloured artwork all around. More than just “recommended”!

T.A.C.
Chaosphere
ITALY OLD EUROPA CAFE OECD 170 CD [2013]

Another band with a history, T.A.C. defines the epoch. From the early 80s, the ingenious Italian band (with Simon Balestrazzi as mastermind and many other luminaries involved) created many albums of a totally different nature, starting from the jazz/funk influenced self-titled debut in 1983, to the chamber rock music of Ouvrez Vos Auditifs Canaux (1985) and the prog elements of Il Teatro della Crudelta (1987), going further to industrial/ambient/goth obscurity in the classic A Circle Of Limbs (1992) and dark folk, neoclassic and experimental electronics hybrids in Hypnotischer Eden and Apotropaismo. After the T.A.C. trilogy for the Italian Smallvoices label released in 2002-04, there were years of total silence. Some T.A.C. classics were reissued recently, but this album is also not that brand new stuff you may suggest. Yes, it was released in 2013 but actually recorded in 1998. As the label says, the masters were lost and damaged, so the material needed to be restored. Well, now we can say – it was worthwhile to complete this job, because the music looks fresh and up to date, still retaining this “lost in time” attitude. Chaosphere is much influenced by our favorite Tarkovsky films, and you can hear some samples from the cult Solaris movie behind the clouds of analogue synths and sparse arrangements. Looks like Simon Balestrazzi recorded the music alone, so this is the exception in the row of multiple albums featuring many other musicians at their best, with many instruments and techniques presented. However, I can’t say that the music is minimalist or totally different from other T.A.C. works. It keeps the same spirit of adventurous experiment, and the sincere austerity you can feel from the start to the end. The vintage sound of the VCS3 synthesizer is the main driving force behind the tracks, but the clever use of samples makes the music more vivid and reflective. For me, this album also announces the powerful return for the one of the best Italian underground projects, so let’s look forward to see more new music coming out from Simon’s NeuroHabitat studio!

October 27, 2013

Drift Away

Marihiko Hara
Flora
DRONE SWEET DRONE RECORDS DSD011 CD / NIGHT CRUISING NCD-02_2013 CD (2013)

Marihiko Hara’s Flora is a collection of calming and ambient sounds that evoke images of his native Japan. Inspired by nature, this is music to relax to and be carried away by.

Far from being bold or provocative, Flora sits very much at the other end of the musical spectrum; providing a reflective and transporting experience that forces you to stop for a while and step away from the stresses and frustrations of everyday life.

Recorded in Kyoto and Takashima City, Hara’s elegant piano and electronic compositions are combined with field recordings to produce a seamless selection of tracks that aim to transport listeners through forests, lakes and oceans, and even all the way up to the moon.

More than anything else, Flora highlights Hara’s talents as a composer and musician; with tracks like ‘Camera’ and ‘Curtain’, in particular, demonstrating his abilities as a classical-style pianist. Occasional electronic touches add a bit of an edge, but the overall feeling remains that of serenity and placidity; like a rippling lake or gentle summer breeze.

The ambient sounds, including twittering birds and buzzing insects, simply provide a subtle background to the Kyoto-based artist’s compositions. In fact, the whole CD almost feels like a soundtrack to nature. Only on one track, ‘Ocean’, does the drone take over from the piano; providing a slight shift in mood and ambience.

On some level, Flora might have benefited from the inclusion of more ambient field recordings (especially on the water-themed tracks), but as Hara himself states, the sounds he has chosen are ones that are close to his heart; and this certainly comes across.

For sheer beauty, ‘Ocean’ and ‘Eclipse’ are probably the standout tracks, but there’s no weak link here, as they all glide effortlessly into one another; each distinct, but no one track overpowering or diminishing the next.

Overall, Flora is an unchallenging, gentle and tranquil experience that allows the listener the chance to experience nature, reinterpreted and enhanced. It is a piece of work very much rooted in Japanese culture and conjures up images of the country’s landscape away from the hustle and bustle of city life.

As such, the best way to appreciate Flora is to lie down, close your eyes and let yourself drift off into Marihiko Hara’s world. Once there, you might find you want to hang around for a while.

October 23, 2013

They Awoke to the Scent of Spring: repetitive nature-themed black metal with nothing to say

Lustre, They Awoke to the Scent of Spring, Italy, De Tenebrarum Principio, DTP023 CD (2012)

A nature-themed atmospheric black metal album of beings that hibernate for most of the year to enjoy a brief period of life during spring, “They Awoke to the Scent of Spring” is grim majestic epic work. The music is split into four parts of which only the first two feature lyrics. Lustre’s style encompasses two extremes, one based on raw black metal guitar and the other based on pure-toned synth and both carrying all the advantages and limitations of their respective ranges. Ultimately they suffer from a fairly limited vision on the Lustre musician Nachtzeit’s part.

Part 1 begins well with aggressive raw BM guitar noise that burns steadfastly for much of the track until a repetitive synthesiser melody loop takes over and dominates the rest of the piece. Repetition and monotony reign for what seems an excruciating eternity. Part 2 starts out well enough but like Part 1, it’s slow-paced and endlessly repetitive. The vocals are reverb-heavy slurry that slide over the tremolo guitars.

The later two parts are very different, essentially being atmospheric non-BM acoustically styled material but still as slow and minimalist as the previous tracks. The fourth part is a ghostly piece composed entirely of a looping field recording of falling water and a wistful circular synth motif.

That Nachtzeit wants to emphasise the circular narrative of nature and life, and implicitly suggest that humans are also part of this order and if they try to subvert it, they will come to ruin (because as we know, Nature always bats last); but beyond stating the obvious, he does very little else with the music. Imagine reading one of those experimental novels where the backgrounds and furnishings are described in exquisite detail and the characters’s clothes receive equal fastidious attention, but what they do, say and think is unknown, and you have some idea of how this album pans out. We are left with a very well-crafted work of ambient black metal that really has nothing to add to the genre overall.

October 14, 2013

Moon and a Mask

Stuart Chalmers is a fiendishly witty and capable mangler / masher of cassette tapes, blending his outputs from that aural activity with other sources (field recordings, radio signals, synths) to produce moments of delirious joy on Daydream Empire (LF RECORDS LF029). As with many geniuses in this genre his plan is to give the ear/brain a overload of information to process, spewing it out in slightly haphazard order to allow maximal surprise to the listener, while underpinning each composition with a steady flow of musical or verbal patterns. Each piece just floats like polystyrene on a lake. Chalmers is not in the game to shock or outrage; rather his balmy, hazy and opaque works spread a fine surreal gauze over the surface of the world, and everything appears slightly askew. The titles act as an index to his intentions: ‘Fall of Reality’, ‘Melting of time’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ are poignant and accurate descriptions of his process. Chalmers is associated with improvising collectives in Oxford and Cheltenham, and also records as tusK and skarabee. (27/12/2012)

A shortish 7-track sampler from the Slovakian LOM label arrived 19 December 2012, showcasing the sound art of MRKVA and BOLKA (respectively, Jonáš Gruska and Matúš Kobolka). The label proposes itself as a meeting point for the assistance and encouragement of experimental art of all stripe, including field recordings, music, literature, books, images and poetry, and they tend to favour all of these cultural jewels when expressed in digital or web-based formats. The sounds hereon are ingenious compacted statements using intense digital glitchoid effects in abundance, the results quite often folded into pleated shapes that resemble swarms of insects – a trope which clearly preoccupies both their brains, if the fractured press release speaks true. They would like to help us to “channel our inner insect”. While each short slab of whoopery bounces with teeming life and transports you bodily across a field of grass, none of the sounds ever distress you with unpleasant noise nor threaten you with despondent gloomy drone. A charming and understated piece of imaginative electronica.

Nad Spiro is Rosa Arruti. This Spanish creatrice works mostly with heavily processed electric guitars, and builds intricately detailed patterns and textures from tiny samples, occasionally adding distorted voices on her CD Atomic Spy (GEOMETRIK RECORDS gr gsg 01). In an extremely precise manner, she weaves psychologically unsettling dramas which execute themselves with the deathly accuracy of a 1940s suspense movie – indeed the high-contrast photography of a film noir would seem an apt keynote for this whole album, with its mysterious jet-black shadows. This particular mesmerising outing has a vaguely “urban” theme, all eight tracks linking to suggest the narrative of a journalist or private eye who is tormented by unknown terrors in the city, including ghostly voices emanating from the old-fashioned valve radio set. The nocturnal mood and story are enhanced by the very strong cover image, a photo-collage by the artist Josep Renau which resembles a Weegee news photograph going horribly wrong.

The Chasms Of My Heart (CRUCIAL BLAST RECORDS CBR98) by Theologian is a strong dose of pounding industrialism, an overpowering abundance of powerful drone characterised by smothering intensity and relentless drive. Theologian plans to pursue his seething emotions with the determination of a pile-driver, rather than the stealth of a nimble hunter, and he’ll keep on screaming and howling in anguish until the very chambers of his own heart are rubbed raw. His record cover (and many of his other releases too) betray an interest in the frail flesh of the human body, the assorted juxtapositions here implying some sort of painful surgery for the torso, or the use of x-rays to reveal the hidden movements of the inner man, as if any felt emotion were a form of cancer that we must purge ourselves of. Track titles likewise allude to themes of despair and bodily decay; in some ways you could read the album as a gloss on a Hamlet soliloquy. While I personally strive to eschew artistic works which appear to wallow in self-pity and sentimentality, I am drawn to the compelling sonic surface of this heavy album, which veers between suffocating ultra-drones and hideously overloaded noise; technically it’s an admirable achievement of overdubbing and layering. Theologian is Leech, who also calls himself Navicon Torture Technologies, or Theologian Prime, and this is his third album for the Crucial Blast label.