Nowadays, with music genres continually splintering into a thousand and one pieces, it was a full-on dead cert that mentions of “post everything” world eventually surface in those accompanying crib sheets. The trio, who’ll subsequently be called O.D.E.H., are a good a choice as any to be the hood ornament for this particularly spacious vehicle. After a handful of European and middle-eastern concerts performed as a duo, electric oudist Dargent and guitarist/vocalist Oberland later joined up with bassist Tony Elieh (also of Karkhana) and Polyphemè’s Wassim Halal (on darbuka and percussive ‘others’). Their first recordings were hatched at the Downton Studios in 2002; a three-day brainstorming session where this plunge into cross-fertilization, now finely tuned, became the more manageable “Sihr”.

We’re in safe hands here b.t.w., as Oberland’s ten years as Oiseaux-Tempête’s majordomo means that there’s an experienced ear hovering over this and indeed other projects inc. Foudre! And L.R.D.T. But, as anyone who is aware of sixties U.S. combos Kaleidoscope and The Devil’s Anvil (not forgetting * The Saqqara Dogs with Factrix’s Bond Bergland), when it comes to east meets west alliances, there really isn’t anything new under the sun. However, O.D.E.H. acquit themselves famously. “Oui-Ja’aa” matches an insistent marching beat with a hyper-tense swarm of keyboard activity. The sombre/lyrical tones of “YouGotALight” are dominated by Frédéric’s breathy alto sax while slithering into view “Babel Cedex” would be perfect for a Marrakech-based T.V. Thriller where intrigue and the fine art of double-crossing is second nature.

Now well into its middle-age, Sub Rosa remains in the forefront of labels where consistently challenging and adventurous releases come with the regularity of a stuck disc. “Sihr” is a welcome addition to that ever-teetering pile.

* ‎One-time ‘Melody Maker’ scribe Paul Oldfield made their “Thirst” (on Pathfinder Records/U.S.), one of his top five albums for 1988. How soon we forget.

Hail the Traveler (PUBLIC EYESORE PE158) has been released on Bryan Day’s label, and as you ought to know he’s no stranger to embracing “invented instruments”, a term which can probably include almost any household object or re-wired electrical device, running all the way up to hand-carved beauties and junkyard salvages to make the eyes of Harry Partch water in appreciation. This particular album also connects to the butoh dance work of Christina Braun, we’re told that all the tunes are “museum commissions” (did the California Academy of Sciences phone them up one day?), and that the music “explores the mythology of death”. Boy, there sure is a lot of that going around lately, what with Kim Myhr and Kitchen Orchestra playing Hereafter and Sonologyst with his Ancient Death Cults and Beliefs album.

Well, there’s also “intoning voices” on today’s record, moments of which do indeed evoke Delusion of the Fury, and we also glimpse into an alternative universe where Partch got elected US President on tracks like ‘Garden of the Gods’. I like the overall “art music” vibe of Hail the Traveler which (in my mind) is something I could very easily align with Art Bears, Lars Pedersen (When), C.W. Vrtacek and other 1980s gemuloids, but I also keep wishing they’d go further down the pathways marked “unexplored monsters live here”; for all the promise of their invented instruments, the record still sounds rather flat, and Pet The Tiger aren’t really seizing the moment to get truly adventurous. We last heard them in 2020 on Gaze Emanations; Jennifer praised the detail of the imaginary worlds they created. For more of Tom Nunn, see Music For Hard Times (e.g. the jolly City of Cardboard item). (15/07/2024)

The impressive vocal skills of this American singer-composer-performance artist are dazzling for sure, but she’s reined herself in a bit since the excesses of her 2018 “robot dog” piece, which stood on the cusp of saying something useful about modern technology. Here the plan is to provide a guide to modern living, an instruction manual of sorts; she regards the modern world as “chaotic”, not without good cause, and her spoken-sung imprecations here might be read as a form of survivalist literature, as we attempt to “navigate choice”. Stephanie Pan achieves this by alternating between memorable and portable didactic phrases, such as “question your motivations….weigh all options”, and sharp imagist poetry, for instance as on ‘I Am A Lizard’. As to the latter motif, for sure she’s not attempting to follow the lineage of Jim Morrison; his masculinist lizard-king thing was assertive phallocentrism at its early 1970s peak, while the lizard of Stephanie Pan is an agile, quick-thinking reptile darting freely between the interstices that might seek to confine it.

More to the point, Pan pushes her feminist agenda to the forefront, valuing skillsets such as intuition and emotions as the basis of the tools we must use to understand and shape our lives. In this framework, it’s even OK to be vulnerable and afraid; we can embrace the uncertainty and feel equipped to go forward, even when we don’t know what’s around the next corner. In this context, I suppose “Doing Nothing” doesn’t refer to a sense of despondency or apathy in the face of a futile struggle; it might have more to do with biding your time, not interfering, and simply waiting to see if something is going to become a problem before sticking your oar in. The photo of the stage version of this piece does in fact show two performers simply sitting on a leather couch, perhaps providing a visual counterpart to one of the object lessons.

Ensemble Klang play the musical backdrops composed by Pan, doing much to enhance the mood and meanings with their synths, saxes, percussion, guitars and trombone, underscoring the texts in a sympathetic manner. But it’s 100% her own personal vision, and she not only plays synth and drum machine on the set, she also co-produced and mixed the record. With some of these vocal gymnastics, one’s tempted to liken her to a futuristic Yma Sumac, but she’s closer to being a refitted version of Laurie Anderson, and every bit as incisive. Very original and useful work. From 10th June 2024.

The players are Marina Cyrino, Tony Elieh, JD Zazie, and Matthias Francisco Koole, operating in Berlin since 2020, where this live concert was recorded in 2022. Strong gender balance, and a rare mix of nationalities in this group – Cyrino is Brazilian, Koole is Belgian, and I think Elieh comes from Beirut originally, where he was at the forefront of post-rock music in the group Scrambled Eggs. Already Hic Up have evolved a very democratic way of playing, and no single instrument ever dominates or overpowers the others. Yet I myself keep wishing for a bit more energy and stronger dynamic in the playing; too much of a boneless soup, not enough roughage. The sounds they make are very good though, and I understand it’s intended to be impressionistic and “gestural” music. (10/06/2024)

In his work, Bjørgeengen explores the potential to transform audio signals into video signals. On A Thought For Two (TRUE BLANKING 003), we’re hearing a concert recorded 5th December 2010 in New York City, where he’s doing it with Keith Rowe’s guitar and electronics in a situation which is evidently a subtle, but quite complex, interactive system of feedback and interplay. Bjørgeengen starts with his audio oscillators and supplies “video reference synch signals” which can transform that sound into video. He wants to stress this is not the same thing as an oscilloscope – an instrument that can present a graphic rendition of any voltage signal; Bjørgeengen’s work, although not visible on this release, is evidently a lot more subtle, and he claims to produce a “direct” correspondence between sound and image. At the 2010 concert, this video was replayed on an old cathode-ray monitor, at which point Keith Rowe starts to engage with it. The actual detail of this engagement is a bit hazy to me – indicated here by the phrase “picking up the debris of the magnetic field” – but it sounds like Rowe was able to participate in a very productive feedback loop of some sort, with both guitar and live electronics being brought into play. There’s also something called a “flood coil”, supplied by a third party Dave Jones, which likewise is able to receive and amplify this “magnetic field debris” in some way, intriguingly using a telephone receiver to do it.

While I was somewhat resistant to this release at first, on today’s spin I’m finding 41 mins just fly by. We’re now a million miles away from 1960s AMM, and it’s also quite some distance from Rowe’s solo records, or even his low-key long-form excursions and collaborations in the “EAI” field so generously documented on the Erstwhile Recordings label. It might not have anything much to do with playing the guitar or even with free improvisation, yet neither can it be dismissed as empty process art. I’ve no clear idea as yet what, if anything, makes this a compelling listen; it might have something to do with the intense concentration of the artists, as if making a detailed and patient exploration of some new and unknown form of life, studying it with powerful optical instruments. With Keith Rowe drawings on the cover suggesting waves of magnetic energy or the paths of electronic signals, we’re got a nicely integrated art statement. (15/05/24)

For Flicker, Scratch, and Ivory (TRUE BLANKING 002) we move ahead to 2018, a date which coincides with the release of the Sissel item – indeed the Cafe Oto event documented here was staged to promote that release. Rowe is now joined by John Tilbury on piano and Bjørgeengen is credited with video and electronics. Most of the press note for this one is taken up with Rowe’s fine art observations and insights, particularly on a specific painting by Nicolas Poussin from the 17th century, which he uses as the starting point for some profound and touching ruminations about death and friendship, and perhaps touching on something about the indifference of the universe; he contemplates “the muteness of trees” in this landscape painting, as if nature was watching our grief in silence.

Well, this is part of the creative approach of these players in this project; Kjell Bjørgeengen suggested this painting as “a possible focal point” for the 2018 Stavanger performance, indicating that their work on stage is assisted by having a shared image, or idea, in mind. What interests me here is how receptive Keith Rowe is to suggestions like this, a near-intangible notion which would probably mean nothing to a lot of musicians. It’s also encouraging how his perception of visual art, and its value, is not restricted, but rather enriched by situating it in a wider culture, the written criticisms of other art experts, and allowing it to resonate with a deeper understanding of experience and life. Flicker, Scratch, and Ivory has the added dimension of Tilbury’s sympathetic piano notes joining the very abstracted, attenuated electronic graininess, and while I enjoy the intent concentration of A Thought For Two and the way it explores a single pathway right through to the end, this 2018 performance takes off in several different dimensions and discovers new haunts and obscure corners in the wraith-like zone it inhabits. I can’t account for it; fragile, mysterious, beauty, steeped in loneliness and sorrow. (15/05/24)

Evidently there’s a strong connection to Sheffield, the home of this label and its owner Martin Archer; Somerset refers obliquely to “Steel City rehearsals” in his account of his musical and creative history, and members of important Sheffield bands Adi Newton (Clock DVA) and Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire) also appear, a fact which you’d think would have been emblazoned on a hype sticker. Newton’s recit on ‘Future Cartography’ is a kind of sub-Burroughs rant, an unstoppable flow of obscure images where it’s not clear if he’s reflecting on his own rich past or foreseeing a bleak dystopia, with phrases such as “the political economy of noise” uttered implacably in a grating tone against a jazz-inflected Techno stew. Mallinder’s vision on ‘Doomerati’ is expressed through the prism of an echo chamber to lend extra weight to the apocalyptic gloom. Somerset has also played with Orchestra of the Upper Atmosphere on this label, and appeared on the Julie Tippetts / Martin Archer Illusion record from 2022, itself an equally overpowering blend of jazz and Techno.

Today’s record might be a follow up to Kiedy Wilki Zawyja? from 2021, which for some reason I perceived as an electropop extravagance intended to showcase the singing talents of Sylwia Anna Drwal; today’s item is no less histrionic, and there are songs but more instrumentals too, and one senses that now Somerset is pulling things in his own chosen direction. The overall mood is dour, but also pugnacious, as Somerset and his allies rail against the forces of darkness. (18/04/2024)

Since 2002, they’ve been compiling and releasing a series of records under the rubric Expériences De Vol (experiences of flight), which I’ve managed to miss for the most part, but now here comes the excellent three-disc set Expériences De Vol #15#16#17 (IN-POSSIBLE RECORDS EXP23/13). Unlike the earlier releases in the series which were effectively collaborative affairs between Art Zoyd and Musiques Nouvelles Ensemble, today’s release is a showcase for 16 talented European composers, largely in the electro-acoustic area, some names even familiar to this listener.

They did well to lead off the set with Christian Zanési – a veteran of the INA GRM studio (albeit a late straggler), his Stop! L’Horizon is a personal favourite and has been on my find-a-physical-copy list for many years. His ‘Before the Blast’ here is an understated exercise in tape composition, yet it’s compelling – you can’t turn away from its mesmerising hum for a second. Annabelle Playe is one we’ve heard on a record by Franck Vigroux many years ago – known for her voice experiments – and she’s had at least two releases on his label also. Her ‘Arca’ isn’t as abrasive as Vigroux often was, but I enjoy the brooding darkness it suggests with its broken and craggy forms.

Dror Feiler (Israeli ex-pat living in Stockholm) panders to my love of near-chaotic rubble with his excellent blast ‘The Archipelago of Noise Islands’. With booklet liner notes written in French, I don’t fully grasp the method by which he arrived at this delicious slice of multi-layered polyphony, but it verges on being overwhelming – all the moving parts rotating in complex planes. Parisian Nadia Ratsimandresy comes to us from a conservatoire background and has also composed for theatre and dance, but she’s by no means a sedate salon player as her ‘Pinte de Cafe’ will testify. It seems from her notes that the piece is about an energy so wild and strange that it cannot even say its own name. She also states for the record that she “detests” coffee and will never drink it again, a risky statement to make in any given Parisian brasserie, but she carries on unafraid with these sullen, humming, lower-register tones, any moment of which could wither a young pretender who’s aiming for success on the Mego label.

Swiss sax maniac Antoine Chessex proposes an ‘Avalanche’ with his typical amplified-instrument drones, which has a nice surface sound but as usual this player doesn’t manage to advance the music to any new aesthetic conclusions. Barbara Dang is a new name to me, but has appeared with Peter Orins on a few Circum-Disc records; her ‘Hypostasis’ is very reminiscent of Elaine Radigue, a crystal-clear minimal tone produced by electronic means. Raphaël Ortis is a Swiss bassist and composer who may have showed up on one of the numerous collaborative group pieces from the label Insub.Rec. I do like his title ‘C’est Déjà Arrivera’, which is not only a mild linguistic riddle but also hints at an imminent end-of-life scenario of which we’ve already received some clues on previous tracks in the set. I’d have liked Ortis to exhibit just a shade more muscle in his time-stretched, digitally-delayed, long-form emanations; the piece just feels like an endless crawl over stony ground, to no apparent aim.

Gerard Lebik has been doing great things in Poland with the music festival he runs in Wroclaw, and has collaborated with many great international musicians – his piece has a lengthy title apparently rhapsodising the beauties of a sunset in an urban setting. Oddly enough this title does a better job of invoking this natural phenomenon than his rather muffled and unadventurous music, but at least it does contain an aura of quiet mystery. Young cellist Brice Catherine is another unknown name – their ‘Chili and Bonbon’ has a distressed (and distressing) aspect which is ennervating and provocative, but ultimately the chaotic surface simply reveals more chaos underneath. Even less prolific is Mirtru Escalona-Mijares, although they may have appeared on an earlier Belgian comp called Métamorphoses 2016; ‘La Sierpe Alada del Sueno’ is a heartfelt composition which refers directly to a humanitarian crisis in his home country of Venezuela. With voice and contra-bass contributions from Charlotte Testu, this is a poetic and moving work with a lot of emotional truth. It may start out subdued and cryptical, but it grows into something much larger and quite harrowing, avoiding many potential pitfalls which often ensnare those who attempt “relevancy” through political statements in art.

Lastly the very prolific Julien Ottavi, gifted in everything from free improvisation to extreme noise and modernist composition, offers us ‘Cremator Opera’. This is but one excerpt from a larger operatic piece of this name, which he’s made with noise-generators, synthetic voices, and artificial intelligence software. The latter element touches on a development which I know is controversial and highly-contested, but I suppose it’s at least interesting to see the technique being applied to digital composition. If anyone can tame AI, Ottavi is the one to do it. The 15:22 minutes of solemn music here are profoundly depressing and make a suitable ending for a compilation which, if read in a certain way, might refer to aspects of our contemporary life in a very pessimistic fashion. Very good. From 23 Feb 2024.

Coming in a very strong second in the Zeuhlist hierarchy (Art Zoyd claiming a bronze), Belgian chamber-prog veterans Univers Zero have come in from the cold after nine years of inactivity on the recording front (their previous release Phosphorescent Dreams being primarily a Japanese import from 2014). Their re-emergence finds the outfit with a somewhat reduced line-up when compared to past activities. In fact, it’s only UZ founder member, drummer/keyboardist Daniel Denis who plays on all of Lueur‘s eleven cuts; some surprisingly concise, with seven tracks coming under four minutes (prog Heresie!). As for the occasionals; Daniel’s son Nicolas can be found on bass/percussion and vocals while Kurt Budé (clarinets) and Nicolas Dechêne (guitars) complete the picture.

I’ll admit the mothballing of the bygone/exotic instrumentation (almost a UZ trademark) is still sorely missed. But, shorn of the balofons, spinets and bassoons, the intense, brooding atmospherics and crumbling cliff face tension still manages to threaten and insinuate at the most unexpected times. Even now still a little too real for certain monthly prog glossies I guess. Surely rubber stamping that claim for example is “Sfumato”. Split into two distinct and separate pieces, it opens with a distressed, wavering organ motif, followed by an insidious Wyatt-like nursery rhyme that’s then gatecrashed by a heavy martial passage, piano stabs and cymbal splash. Part two pushes the intensity levels considerably with some strident keyboard fanfares, matched with militaristic drum barrages that see Monsieur Denis clearly playing out of his skin. “Axe 117”, though, is probably the heaviest element on this particular periodic table – an insistent one-note emergency tannoy signal finds itself the backbone to full flow iron foundry ambience, that are mixed with faux choral synthetics that come with an ‘x’ rating.

There’s obviously something going on here with the light-related titles; first Phosphorescent Dreams and now Lueur, which translates from the French as ‘glimmer’. That really undersells the project (two years in preparation), as it’s glaringly obvious (sorry…) that UZ burn as brightly as they did during their time at say, Atem, or the ReR Megacorp.

This band were a four-piece of talented Belgian players who formed in Antwerp in 1992 and put out this first album in 1995, on the Jack & Johnny Recording label. They were classically trained musicians, these four: Buni Lenski (violin) and his brother Simon Lenski (cello) with Han Stubbe (clarinet) and Roel van Camp (accordion), but what they play is very far from classical music – it’s derived from Roma, klezmer, and east European folk music, mixed up with jazz-ish elements. At least, that’s what we hear on this record – extremely lively tunes as if we’d been invited to a wedding in Romania and we’re the only ones not wearing the acceptable traditional garb.

DAAU (as they abbreviated) have a firm grasp of dynamics and precision and perform this material with verve and elan, but also an odd sort of precision and intellectual coolness, that indicates they’re not necessarily out to earn eighteen badges of “authenticity” from the New York Klezmer Series. On the contrary, DAAU thought of themselves as punk rockers, or at any rate they wished to foster a rebellious spirit in their bones, and if there was any grain to be had in Antwerp, against it they would go. Interestingly, the accordion player indicates they also emulated sixties psychedelia, progressive rock and new wave genres with their all-acoustic set-up (not on this record, though), and they bore aloft their instruments with pride – thereby avoiding the trap of being “just another rock band” with electric guitars and drums. Apparently this move went down very well in the Antwerp of the 1990s, home to bands such as dEUS, Zita Swoon and Kiss My Jazz – none of whom were ever heard by us, but the name of that last one suggests there was a band who paraded a similarly irreverent attitude towards conventional jazz genres.

As mentioned, DAAU play flawlessly on this record, an index of their classical training – which for them seems to be something of a paradox. They wanted to protect their hard-earned skillsets and continue to hone their craft, but also yearned to do something distinctive with music and create something new of their own. It’s not just in the playing, but also in the compositions here; five of the six tracks follow a pre-arranged three-movement structure, reflected in the name ‘Drieslagstelesels’, almost like a mini-symphony format into which the irrepressible folk modes must be pushed. The mere fact that they pull any of this off is worthy of anyone’s admiration, even if the “punk” thing doesn’t seem as self-evident to me as perhaps it ought. I’d say that DAAU intellectualised their rebellion right from the start, but then I suppose the same could be said of many UK post-punk bands too, and if they didn’t contextualise everything then the writers of the NME certainly did so in 1980-1982.

Even their name is lifted from a literary source; it comes from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse and is supposed to convey something about the outsider mentality and the halls of Bedlam. Well, this music didn’t exactly make me lose my wits, but it’s unique and well-crafted. I see the band are still playing to this day, although there have been personnel changes since this debut, and it didn’t take long for them to be signed up by Sony Classical – a fate which, as yet, has not befallen Johnny Rotten, The Clash, or The Damned. Vinyl edition also exists, the first time on that medium for this music. (24/10/2023)

Down the wormhole it is then…Steven Ball first began to tweak the ears of the underground during post punk’s year one of 1978 as fifty per cent of the Storm Bugs alongside Philip Sanderson. Here was a duo who were immersed in the thriving “D.I.Y. / Cassette Culture” movement, their releases on their own ‘Snatch Tapes‘ imprint, being occasionally documented at the time within the back pages of Sounds and the N.M.E. A fully justified rediscovery of their back catalogue took place a decade or so later with retrospective releases coming from the houses of Fusetron, Harbinger and Klanggalerie. But it was around 2015 that Steven began to take a series of long excursions outside of the confines of his home/studio to extract the genus loci (spirit of place), from a large number of far flung U.K. co-ordinates. The intention: to create ‘field songs’ – improvised lyrics and melodies (backed up by sparse guitar lines), that act as a response to the surrounding landscape.

Excepting the self-explanatory and somewhat desolate “Wind, Mersea Island”; an Essex-based composition, the remaining tracks all have their origins in the Outer Hebrides. “Atlantic”, “A Picture Containing…” and “Ground Rule” for example, almost smack of traditional folk airs, but at other times, conjure up precious memories of Woo (Sunshine Series/Drag City Records), or the more reflective, sun-dappled moments of Martyn Bates’ Eyeless in Gaza.

Interestingly…”Ground…” is one in a tiny minority of Steven’s releases where the front cover art omits images of the areas under the microphone, (the back sleeve photo doesn’t help, being a strangely blurred and indistinct strip). I’d guess that the aim was to stretch the grey cells of the armchair traveller just a little. A less than passive experience perhaps – which is surely no bad thing.