Tagged: beats

May 5, 2013

Cloaks versus Grain: blank snapshot of future society in industrial techno dubstep album

Cloaks, Versus Grain, 3by3, 3by3002CD (2009)

It has a certain cache for one track “R.F.I.D.” which contains samples from a flick “Zeitgeist” which several people have recommended that I see but about which I have reservations that it is emotionally manipulative, simplistic and confrontational in its approach. Apart from that tidbit, this album by Cloaks is a punchy industrial techno affair sure to appeal to us tinfoil-hatted fashionistas. Plenty of futuristic cyberpunk sci-fi paranoid nightmares of all-seeing / never-sleeping panopticon cities stretching many a mile from one side of the country to the other may be imagined here. Cyber-insekt drones survey the population either singly or in swarms, quickly scanning the state of people’s minds, analysising the neurochemical states of individuals’ brains and diving down quickly to jab in injection of tranquilising serotonin into the bloodstream, mosquito-like, whenever someone is detected as having unhappy thoughts. People willingly submit to body searches and biochemistry assays via in-built doorway surveillance systems every time they enter or exit a building or public space: thieves are immediately tagged with an electromagnetic disc they cannot see and everywhere they flee they are tracked and pursued by tracker micro-drones that can fire paralysing pellets with unerring accuracy into a designated spot on the body. Citizens are permanently plugged into the city’s central database and anyone who ducks out of the system for even a few minutes is regarded as suspicious and possibly criminal. Such will be life in the Megatechnopolis. If you have a headache from all this, take your choice of chill pills: the red one or the blue one.

Or you could listen to this nine-track patchwork snapshot of what your lives will be like in a decade or so: heavily reliant on looping textures, rhythms and effects, the music is essentially static all the way through and offers no point of vulnerability in its steely carapace. Particularly impressive is “sixmenacetwo”, a lumbering behemoth of hard-hitting, hard-edged beats and digital effects with a dubstep rhythm. The aforementioned ”R.F.I.D.” is another awkward clunky beast. Final track “Detritus” reveals an unexpectedly danceworthy rhythm beneath humming drones of analog noise scree. Even in the midst of a tightly controlled techno-society there may be allowed pockets of individual rebellion that masquerade as obedience, though it’s just as likely that the powers in control recognise that people need outlets to let off steam and provide and moderate channels of harmless rebellion.

The album seems fine as it is though overall it seems a bit blank and one-dimensional in a way and several tracks hold potential for a more thorough and thought-out work-out of layered noise and rhythms.

Contact: 3by3, Baked Goods

March 14, 2013

Rosemary and Garlic

Manitou (ALREALON ALRN034) by Blue Sausage Infant arrived here 21 May 2012. This is the gifted instrumentalist Chester Hawkins of Washington D.C. joined by various friends and collaborators, whose additions grace what I take to be a largely solo LP with a production by Robert L. Pepper of PAS…Hawkins here performs a fine balancing act between wild and divergent emotional states, at one moment thundering against the world with his almighty musical bombast, at others wandering abjectly in a self-imposed mental quagmire of unfathomable proportions…I think at times he is more genuinely “surreal” in his strange music than the oft-referenced Nurse With Wound, plus Hawkins creates much more full-bodied and convincing music with his multiple boxes, keyboards, guitars, and baskets of noteworthy fruit. In terms of mental hysteria and relentless sense of inescapable dilemmas hemming you in, turn to ‘Hosebag’ and ‘The Moss Takes Over’, both powerful examples of how to structure a track such that it accumulates energy and mass in a tightly-wound fashion, on the brink of spinning out of control at any moment…a motorised rickshaw on a very narrow metallic highway being pulled by a robot with hydraulic legs…said legs growing longer in their reach with every second…Hawkins here provides good object lesson in how to drip-feed us the excitement rations, all music sewn up in a cloth bag where the drumbeats are strict, martial and cruel, presenting a force with which we cannot argue…

Then for more tender or ambiguous mood, turn ye to ‘Abdominal Frost’, an almost lyrical barrage of droning synth drift likewise planed together in plywood layers which hovers over your head like an angel of black snow; and for reprogramming that lost nightmare state your body craves in the small hours, ‘How To Achieve Somnambulism’ is the correct prescription, one of the few tracks to make sparing use of sampled TV voices (a cliché fer sure, but handled here with expertise and assurance) to create a short but troubling vision of tall manlike beasts wandering among us, snarling dogs or human bears, Bigfoot scenarios clouding all your dreams…Hawkins finds lyrical beauty in paranoia. Unsurprising to find that the noble Jeff Surak, a past master of cultivating evil mind-flowers in the greenhouse of the soul, contributed to this track with the notable credit of “turntable bacon radio”. We also gots the epic ‘Yggdrasil’ which in tone and tenor could match wits with any given slab of proggy Euro-synth vinyl from 1979 or 1982, while limning an accurate portrait of a Max Ernst decalcomania landscape populated with uglified monsters and nocturnal blooming plants secreting drug-like vapours.

The potential hit single track for anyone’s money ought to be ‘Catoctin’, a confident Krautrock pastiche aided by the guitar of Jeff Barsky and the drumming of Jason Mullinax, where the steady axe-riffing is undercut by a moany spaced-out keyboard wail approximating the tin-man rebuild of Damo Suzuki’s voice, an effect many lesser teenagers have been aiming at for years. As you recall both of these fine musicians played on the title track of BSI’s Negative Space LP from 2011, which we noted here. One should also give mention to ‘Aphid’s Lament’ as just a wonderful slab of grisly half-melodic noisy gumlike texture, and ‘Sodom Is Risen’ as another example of how Hawkins updates and enriches the monotony and drudge of 1980s Industrial Music in his imaginative manner. A beautifully crafted and well-honed album of beat-driven electronic music and heavy drones, redolent with tasty mental knife-twists. I would imagine it’s one thing to tramp into a studio and let your guts hang out through spontaneous primal-scream and abstract expressionist type malarkey, but Hawkins plans his taut compositions meticulously and performs them ruthlessly, as if working to a map. The results are like eating solid lumps of compressed hallucinogenic brain tissue.

March 7, 2013

Kuopio: cool electronic minimalism gets a nervy beat-driven treatment

Vladislav Delay, Kuopio, Raster Noton, CD R-N 144 (2012)

I only hope our man Sasu Ripatti knows what he’s doing naming his Vladislav Delay project’s albums after various Finnish towns; looking at a map of Finland, I see he has his work cut out for the next several decades. I’d happily listen to albums named after towns like Alavus, Kaskinen, Orimattila and Savonlinna though, as long as they’re not factory towns where the main industry involves pumping strange-smelling coloured smoke into the air or equally strange-smelling coloured water into the river. As if VD would do such a thing!

As always, these recordings have a beautiful if (almost classically so) cool minimalist style, a wonderful ambience that’s hard to describe but which to me seems warm and a little stand-offish all at once, and those 3D sounds that peel off the disc in sculpted curves or flubby little blobs. On “Kuopio”, the music acquires a new sense of urgency: the tracks are jittery and nervy even though the nudges of sound appear smooth and reassuring. The tracks are repetitive with constant looping providing the only structure to the music. “Hetkonen” is a highly varied piece with a pleasingly jagged and scrapey edge at times when the music sometimes threatens to smooth over to the point of banality. On the other hand the maddeningly repetitive “Avanne” isn’t much to talk about other than for me to observe the relief I have when the track fades out quickly.

We’re into the second half of the album: “Osottava” leads off with a deadened percussion-like rhythm that recalls Ripatti’s first career as a drummer. “Kulkee” is uncharacteristically heavy-handed in treatment and leaden-footed in pace and beat; at least it still holds its head high. “Marsila” would be equally monotonous if there weren’t that little scraping loop in the background and that other loop of high-pitched rounded tone dollop melody; the track eventually develops a happy skipping routine with some interesting little effects here and there, all crunchy, tinny and shlubby. “Hitto” has a deranged air and veers close to madness, disorientation and chaos.

This beats-driven album with the spastic rhythms and choppy tunes may sometimes drive a listener up the wall over the maddening monotony. It might be saying something about Ripatti’s mood or whatever was happening in his life at the time of recording; it certainly doesn’t sound as if he was relaxed or happy when he made it. I know he has had health and other problems in the past and sometimes when I play his albums I find myself fretting that he’s running himself into the ground. “Kuopio” is sure to satisfy a crowd eager for more techno-oriented dance rhythms; I on the other hand would have preferred something more flowing, mysterious and with varied, shifting moods.

Contact: Raster Noton, Vladislav Delay

March 7, 2013

Discipline: an efficient electronic pop machine lacking in soul and originality

Electric Electric, Discipline, Herzfeld H26 CD (2012)

French trio Electric Electric plays a highly rhythmic and dance-oriented electronic art-punk style of music inspired in equal parts by post-punk /new wave, techno-industrial, ritual and tribal folk genres. “Discipline” is as the band says it is: relentless and repetitive looping electro-pop tunes atop insistent and quite complex tribal polyrhythms that force you to dance, and dance for as long as the music determines you will! There are some very pleasant little melodies played on what seem at first to be folk-oriented instruments but are actually synthesised approximations of the originals. The tracks run with a regimented order all their own and the overall impression I have is an efficient machine in which everything is well co-ordinated and running smoothly, and it hums producing sounds and noises in preplanned combinations and patterns to order. Several pieces start at medium-fast pace and quickly progress to frantic hither-and-thither as though the musicians were being pursued by sinister android police or hostile warriors of a long-lost tribe. The songs give an impression of disorder yet if you listen closely enough even the apparent chaos has all been programmed in advance.

Most songs are quite enjoyable although after about two or three minutes they become soulless automatons allowed to run riot in their own little ruts. Any singing present is located back in the mix and seems drained of all life. The title track is not too bad but after four minutes of mad dashing about in a labyrinth of narrow street alleys, dead-end bazaars and passages of shut wooden doors in a distant city in the Orient, it settles in a boring groove of ever-more frantic to-ing and fro-ing. The gamelan novelty that is “Exotica Today” is briefly bewitching but the repetition is overdone.

At this point I start feeling that my occasional predilection for the traditional folk musics of faraway lands is being not so much exploited for commercial gain as continuously ground and steamrolled to death by the sheer weight of repetition and lack of subtlety and wit on the musicians’ part. I don’t want to hear constant Keystone Cops chases either; I saw enough of those in the Indiana Jones films. If indeed exotic cultures are on the mind, they’re likely to be those of clubs in tourist-oriented beach strips where Westerners hang out all night long binge-drinking, snorting strange substances and dancing to tired disco music of 30-plus years ago after all-day shopping and surfing. Also having to hear snippets of different styles of folk music from places around the world thrown into an electronic pop meat-grinder with no apparent thought given to what they have in common and completely out of their original cultural context, resulting in something that sounds false and lightweight a lot of the time, tends to bring the red mist down before my eyes and before I know it, I’ve done serious damage to an innocent disc.

Contact: Herzfeld

December 7, 2012

Black Mamba: a strong and consistent album of darkly sinister hard techno / ambient / dance electronics

Cut Hands, Black Mamba, Very Friendly / Susan Lawly, CD VFSL102 (2012)

Since Whitehouse split with the departure of Philip Best some years ago, William Bennett has wasted no time with his new musical venture Cut Hands which includes a very strong and intense rhythmic percussion element due to Bennett’s interest in traditional styles of music from western and central Africa and the hand drums used in those styles. Given Bennett’s past musical pedigree, one might expect Cut Hands to feature strong harsh electronic or industrial music elements in competition with the African drums cooking up an Almighty sonic racket; Bennett offers instead an amalgam of musical styles all his own making, ranging from mellow minimalist / ambient to a hard-edged dark techno almost kin to folks like Actress and Submerged, and once upon a time to Porter Ricks and Techno Animal. The atmosphere on the album can be soft and benign with just a hint that something is a little bit sinister; at times though, you feel you have to be alert for something, like a leopard creeping through tall blades of grass that all but obscure its presence. The songs play like real songs with a mood and feeling all their own and not like long rhythm texture parts of something much greater.

All tracks are good and have a very intense interior mood to them so I’m singling out the really outstanding ones: “Krokodilo” (spine-tingling silvery synth tones create a sinister demonic church ambience against an insistent hard drum rhythm); follow-up piece “Nzambi Ia Ngonde” with similar but warmer droning synth and a more peaceful, contemplative and floating ambience; “No Spare No Soul” (this is the kind of hard electronic dystopian techno that would not be out of place on something by Submerged, City Surgical, Justin Broadrick or the Hyperdub label); “Brown-Brown” (a spoon-playing rhythm meets near-hysterical chrome drones); “54 Needles” (the only really soothing song on the album with a spare hand-drum rhythm and undulating if cold tones); and “Nine-Night” (a bendy talking-drum beat that appears to be interrogating itself against a backdrop of shimmering jewel tones).

Several songs are distinctive enough that they could stand alone as dance-floor or dark ambient / techno singles, if Bennett were inclined to do that. Not that he needs to: I venture to say that once upon a time the album might have sold like a single, so strong and consistent are the songs and their inventiveness. Who’d have thought that, after the end of Whitehouse and an era of ear-splitting, piercing, howling power electronics, Bennett would bounce back and re-create himself as a hard-techno / ambient / Afro-beat electronics DJ?

Some people might be upset at Bennett’s apparent appropriation of African rhythm and percussion styles to embellish his music but his use of African instruments seems sincere to me. If anything, the use of African drums jibes perfectly with his own style of electronic techno and opens up new musical vistas for those instruments. Those who complain are perhaps the same people who whine about “The Black and White Minstrel Show”, that used to air on TV decades ago and which featured white guys in blackface singing musical numbers while white women in glittery body-stockings and strategically placed ostrich feathers dance in the background, for being racist; yet those complaining are happy to line up to buy tickets at $300 a pop to watch concerts in which a lone white woman in corset and fishnet stockings sings and gyrates with bent legs apart while behind her a huge chorus line of black men in bondage leather and PVC gear cavorts in perfect choreographed unity.

Contact: Cargo Records

October 16, 2012

Astromancy: outsider avant-rock / pop with hiphop and funk rhythms and film-noir ambience

Fastest, Astromancy, Galaxy Records, CD (2012)

Misfit one-man band Fastest returns with his seventh original full-length album to deliver yet another sermon to the world. The music is a strange mixture of deliberately awkward and lumpen funk rhythms played on old cheap electronic keyboards from thirty years ago, synthesised percussion from the same period with hiphop influences, a declamatory vocal in near-gruff tones, sonorous brass orchestration, weird effects and lite-metal guitar. A curious smoky film-noir atmosphere hovers over most songs; the Fastest man’s voice might be that of an extra hard-boiled detective who’s seen too much unpunished crime, too many corrupt police commissioners, too many duplicitous blonde babes and too many gangsters with their feet in concrete thrown over bridges into rivers below. The songs are usually quite short and tight in their delivery with not many instrumental passages, and this gives the album a lot of urgent energy.

“Fantasy II” is a strong start to the album with its clarion-call introduction, stuttery drumming and hurried vocal delivery. “Southern Mankind” mixes up the pace by switching from one set of rhythm and melody to another and back or to another. “The Wind” features for once a beautiful acoustic guitar tune, only for it to be mussed up by another bumptious rhythm loop, some pumping tuba sounds and thumpy synth-drum noises. “Cruelty” features some scrapy metal sounds that attempt to imitate barking dogs, more stuttery drumming and hoarse Christian Bale / Batman singing, if indeed Bale’s Batman can sing. “Through your Eyes (Vannesa’s Secret Version)” is a surprisingly dance-worthy piece albeit with a rather dark distorted vocal and the track could almost fall into the current dark techno scene. In “Divine”, the Fastest guy decides he wants to sing more like Tom Hardy’s Bane character, if indeed Hardy’s Bane can sing with the gas mask off. “All that’s left” comes closest to being a mood song with plaintive 80s-style synth tones.

Final track “Katrina” with its faux harmonica tones and stop-start rhythms is Fastest’s reference to the hurricane of the same name that ravaged New Orleans in 2005. It’s less angry than I thought it might be and it fades out in a hurried way that doesn’t do the album much justice to my mind.

There’s so much on each and every song that the danger here is that the brain just can’t take it all in and so the album might pass in a blur of awkward rhythms, bursts of drumming, weird hushed vocalising and dark secretive ambience. The songs are all very consistent in their ornery nature and energy though after seven albums I’m starting to wonder whether Fastest has got himself in a bit of a rut and needs some friends to help him find an undiscovered part of himself, something that perhaps he’s repressed for too long for fear of being thought weak and vulnerable, that would enhance his music.

Contact: Aquarius Records

September 16, 2012

The Killer: not quite the killer techno dub experience it should be

Shed, The Killer, 50 Weapons, 50WCD08 (2012)

Well you wish this could have been the soundtrack to that John Woo film of the same name that starred Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-Fat in which he and another guy as mafia hit-man and maverick police officer respectively engage 300 gangsters in a church and demolish them all including the church. Shed aka Rene Pawlowitz probably wishes so too but as that movie was made so many years ago, he settles for a soundtrack of dark dubby techno to an imagined nightmare future world in which robot police stalk the streets 24/7 looking for anything that faintly smells of sedition and millions upon millions of humans huddle in fear in their panopticon polis spread out over a flat land where once giant mountains and deep canyons existed but were equally razed and raised into a massive monster megalopolis. “The Killer” is at once gritty, distant, cool, blissful, abstract and heavy in its rhythms, like a darker and more detached cyborg version of Actress or Vladislav Delay without the warmth and optimism. In parts it approaches the heavy dub of Techno Animal and its short-lived side project Sidewinder.

An early highlight is “I Come By Night”, combining an insistent jungle-beat machine rhythm with a constant flow-n-ebb of needling acid shower and wonky metal bell tinkle and malfunctioning screws in the background. By contrast, “Gas Up” is a delicate and blissed-out dreamworld of revolving flute-like angel drone over light and fragile hiss.

Less appealing tracks like “Day After” are very repetitive and simply emphasise the fact that all tracks here are basically rhythm-texture pieces that really don’t go anywhere; as long as they sound good or original, then that’s fine but if not, then that’s a bummer with this recording and many others in this genre of heavy dub techno. Generally the more atmospheric, dreamy and blissful pieces like “Gas Up” and “The Praetorian (LP mix)” are the best part of the album; the latter track in particular feels very much like angelic digital ectoplasm shower falling on us as grace for believing in this genre of techno. Several tracks feature hissing and buzzing drones reminiscent of massive hordes of robot bees released each day to spy on human activities and record them for the benefit of the overlords governing the city.

It is uneven and at times not nearly as sharp, rugged and tough as it should be in sound and attitude; I think if an act like Actress were unleashed on these tracks to remix them, he’d inject something sassier and more knife-edged into the music. Overall “The Killer” is a pleasant techno dub experience.

Contact: 50 Weapons

August 5, 2012

Sculptures, Tapes and Bats

The Jacques Lasry Effect

Some quite nice percussion effects from Marcello Magliocchi on Music For Sounding Sculptures In Twenty-Three Movements (ULTRAMARINE RECORDS UM011). He’s playing metal sound sculptures created by Andrea Dami. There aren’t any pictures supplied with this cassette release, but I found a good photostream on Flickr. The sculptures are boxes or cylinders of steel, the latter perhaps converted from oil drums; one of them is a little tree of cymbals using what looks like a large metal sieve for a plinth. One of them is even more elaborate, incorporating what looks like a large metal lute into its design, while another allows a mobile of smaller percussive objects to be dangled above it. As can be seen, Marcello uses sticks, mallets and bows to draw forth the range of sounds on these “instant compositions”. There are some rich and solemn sounds here, but the performances are rather static and lacklustre for me; it feels like an aural tour around the sculptor’s workshop, rather than a musical improvisatory set. What Eddie Prevost couldn’t have done with these sculptures, eh?

Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus

Silvia Kastel with her Love Tape (ULTRAMARINE RECORDS UM010) is from the same Italian cadre and has connections to the guitarist Ninni Morgia. This is quite a short tape with just seven tracks, and it’s a little gem of snappy experimental tapework. The main component is her own manipulated voice, mostly run backwards, cut to pieces, and played at odd speeds, and she sings, moans and murmurs in a strangulated fashion the better to convey her fractured visions. But there are other odd sounds in here too. Such music we hear is minimal, fragile and half-completed phrases simply looped into a basic pattern, be it a skeletal synth melody or awkward drumbeats. I get the feeling she has assembled this work with tremendous economy and intuition, allowing the complexity and interest to bubble forth naturally from the juxtapositions of a few simple elements. I would like to think of Love Tape as a form of inverted pop music as done by a fine artist, always a reliable sub-genre of experimental music. Kastel’s titles could almost be out-takes from an old 1980 session by Bow Wow Wow. At that point the analogy collapses though, because Love Tape is a disaffected and troubled vision of modern love, an arena fraught with doubts and uncertainties, where once-whole people are reduced to incoherent and mumbly ghosts of their former selves. Fine item! Sorry to have left it languishing in the bag since September 2011.

Bat and Person Dyning

Have you ever heard of a bat detector? The UK’s Bat Conservation Trust knows all about them, luckily, and it turns out there are a wide variety of these electronic devices which can allow us to hear the ultrasonic sounds made by these little black-coated gentlemen with their lovely leathery wings. The devices work in many ways to make audible that which is normally inaudible, including time expansion (slowing down the original bat sound) and frequency division (dividing the frequency rate of the sound); but all of them use the principle of heterodyning, that is mixing the original bat frequency with another frequency, and (through some clever method of sums and differences) presenting a sound that is within the range of the human ear. Every home should have a bat detector, even if you don’t have bats in your garden nor anticipate encountering any in the park. Eisuke Yanagisawa (film-maker, researcher and field recordist) has used one to make the record Ultrasonic Scapes (GRUENREKORDER Gr081). He started off with bats right enough, but soon applied it to cicadas, and thence to all sorts of electrical devices found in the street – including automatic gates, street lights, TV sets…in fine, just about anything that emits ultrasonic frequencies. Some of these sounds he blurts back at us are really intense and surprising, like particularly harsh forms of digital noise music, and even when not so intense they have a very compelling presence. Given its rather serendipitous nature and general lack of structure, you could never mistake this for electronic music, but on a purely aural level I can sense it would appeal to anyone who enjoyed what Stockhausen did with the ring modulator in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s also a rather process-based approach of course, and sometimes it seems more like a demo CD for a bat detector. While I personally would have liked to hear more utterances from the bats and the insects, the street noises are quite impressive too. A good listen – fascinating material which reveals an unheard world that is all around us, yet largely unknown.

July 27, 2012

Archer Heights

Split for the Coast

The eleventh release on the Spectrum Spools label is Soft Coast by No UFO’s, which is the work of Konrad Jandavs from Vancouver. Once again John Elliott rescues an obscure piece of music from a small-run cassette label origins, and reissues it on luxury vinyl. I like a good deal of what Mr Jandavs is doing here with his synths, beatboxes, sequencers and filters, especially those cuts which maintain a good solid beat to support the layers of droniness. In some ways it’d be nice to hear him try out the long-form La Dusseldorf thing and see what part of the melodic backwoods his Winnebago takes him, but there’s also a lot to be said for his generally economical approach here, curbing any tendencies towards wallowing in self-indulgent filtered ecstasy. No UFO’s also has an uncluttered and fresh approach to the construction of each piece, such that we’re not wading through layers of overdubbed fug; there’s a simplicity and directness which appeals, even if the melodic figures are not especially strong or original. From December 2011, and likely to grow on us with time.

Dead By Dawn

Now here’s a lively and spicy mixed-up morgeroon from Anders Hana, who’s a Norwegian loopoid from Stavanger associated with such fine acts as MoHa!, Noxagt and Ultralyd. Also Blodsprut, Circulasione Totale Orchestra, Clifford Torus, Crimetime Orchestra, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Quintet, Jaga Jazzist, Morthana, and Pokemachine. Matter of fact if there’s any far-out underground music going on in Stavanger it’s fairly likely that Hana will be involved in some way, either organising the venue where it happens or tearing the tickets on the door with a surly grunt directed at all incoming punters. On the single-sided vinyl object Dead Clubbing (DRID MACHINE RECORDS DMR2), he plays all the instruments including guitar, bass and drums, adding demented saxophone noise and groany synth passages, thus performing as his own one-man stoner-rock heavy-metal beat-jazz free-noise experimental-electronics combo. When you’re in the mood for something rich, thick and zesty, Hana is the man who’ll spread hot sauce over your French fries using a trowel for the purpose. Aye, nothing less than high volume and full-intensity performances will satisfy his creative urges on this salvo of grapeshot, and primary colours are the only oil paints he’ll deign to scrape with his nine-inch palette knife. What’s not to like? Well, only the slightly clod-hoppering and clumpy dynamic of the whole LP gives it a slightly awkward feel in places, like a Sherman tank stuck in first gear or a 30-foot giant with impaired motor functions, but that’s all part of the unkempt charm of Mr “no hairbrush for me thanks” Hana. The six dense pieces are generally short, obsessively repetitive and extremely – erm – direct. The label also operates as a fine-art screenprinting joint in Stavanger, and the actual artefact (I only have a promo CD) has visuals printed directly onto the vinyl and onto the PVC sleeve. 300 copies only of this drool-worthy red pancake.

Free Fall

Deeply impressed by Airfields (MAZAGRAN mz005), a new composition by Cypriot genius Yannis Kyriakides which we’ve had in the pouch since December. We noted his double-CD set Antichamber in TSP19 and I think it was around then we started to find a way into this dense work with its blending of acoustic chamber music with electronic sounds and strange effects, whereas previously it had seemed a bit daunting and unapproachable. This Airfields piece, a 12-part composition played by musikFabrik, an ensemble of classical players, with live electronics by the composer, really hits home – a very interesting take on spectral music, all players producing uncanny tones and unfamiliar sounds from their carefully-woven shrouds of woodwinds, strings, piano and percussion. In his notes, Kyriakides tells the story of how the piece came to be, and it’s a tale that involves a composition for the Siren Orchestra (who derive ideas from the futurist Luigi Russolo and the scientific theorist Heimholtz), and another composition for the Seattle Chamber Players. Since 2008, Kyriakides has been developing his own form of unusual graphic scores, working with photographs taken by satellites which he manages to recast into sonic information. As that technique improved, he found ways to render parts of these graphic scores by hand, translating the contours of these aerial views into scores which musicians could read. I like the idea that the musicians playing this unconventional sheet music are “put into a metaphorical orbit”, and it’s no doubt this methodology which accounts for the unusual, dizzying sensations of Airfields – sometimes we feel we are indeed falling through the sky in a semi-controlled way, taking a reverse parachute dive into another dimension. It’s entirely subjective, but I think this compelling and strangely melancholic music would make a perfect accompaniment while viewing Le Drapeau Noir, a 1937 painting by René Magritte. Further ghostly timbres arise in this, the third version of the evolving concept, through his placement of the brass section on the balcony of the performing space, to assist with the natural echo of the other musicians on the stage (a radical rearrangement of orchestral convention of which I’m sure Stockhausen would’ve approved). A live recording made in Amsterdam, the disc is issued with a booklet of full colour photographs.

July 3, 2012

Vacationing Beats

Somebody Else’s Nut Tree

American musician Andrew Weathers is not speaking lightly when he names his CD Someone Else’s Summer (VISCERAL MEDIA RECORDS VMR007). The music was assembled during a long and arduous house move where for a long time he barely had a bed of his own to speak of, no end to the ordeal was in sight, and his dreams were doubtless fervid and tortured. His response to this rather restless and uncertain season has been to create a 45-minute drone-work of the utmost serenity and calm, as if reclaiming his own “missing” months of sun-drenched happiness and fixing them in an artistic statement. It’s the ultimate wish-fulfillment action. This lengthy minimal drone may have begun as some form of acoustic guitar music, recordings of which were deleted from his hard drive; what we hear could be a sort of process of rediscovery and rebuilding in some way, making beautiful micro-chords and tones from lost fragments of sound. As it happens there is guitar music on the disc too; it opens with about 90 seconds of rather uncertain ripple-picking as of a home recording of someone trying to teach themselves how to play in the “Takoma” manner, which is exactly what Weathers was doing. The composition then concludes with nine minutes of something even more ambiguous, perhaps a field recording of an empty room with cars passing in the distance; but our attention is occupied mostly by a rhythmic and repetitive half-sound which might be the remnants of an air conditioner going on the frizz or two lumbermen sawing a two-by-four in a field about ten miles away. I love it. I would like to think this is a poltergeist tape, a ghostly impression of Weathers engaging with his guitar practice while his summer months dissipate away in the atmosphere, and a stern John Fahey looks down from guitarist heaven. From 11 January 2012.

Disco Dud

Frank Rothkamm‘s Reno (FLUX RECORDS FLX15) feels like a joke I don’t quite “get”. This German experimenter based in Los Angeles has excelled in providing witty tongue-in-cheek sleeve notes to his own releases of electronic music, sometimes so convoluted it’s impossible to tell when the joke leaves off, if indeed it ever does. Reno is no exception; the written insert would like us to entertain the notion that’s it’s music for a futuristic, superhuman ballet, and was executed using a program on an old Atari system connected to a suite of synths, drum machines and sequencers, which we are invited to view as an “orchestra”. Rothkamm refers in passing to rave culture in San Francisco, to New York downtown music producers, and to a genre laughingly called “Beefy House”, a term coined to express the idea that this music “has meat on its bones”. In spite of all this good natured and chortle-worthy contextualising, all I hear on the record is very average identikit disco music. Wha…? Arrived 5 January 2012.

The Great Pumpkin

Another nice item from PAS, sent to us by main man Robert L. Pepper of Brooklyn. This unusual and eccentric band of experimenters have released albums on their own PAS Music imprint, but Flanked By Women And Pumpkins (ALRN031) happens to have been picked up by the UK label Alrealon Musique. The notes here speak of “textures” and “collages”, and the music here does indeed taste about as rich as an overpacked pastrami sandwich from the Carnegie deli. The quartet of players never stint on layering on thick swathes of electronic and electroacoustic weirdness, and there’s not a moment of dead air or unfilled space on these 12 tracks of instrumental diablery, each one replete with the sort of surreal title that, if they’d been used for paintings in an art exhibit, would have culture-hungry freaks forming a line for ten blocks from the Guggenheim’s main entrance. PAS may not have developed a recognisable signature sound as yet, but I like the slightly rough edges to their music which I take as an index of their eagerness to explore and experiment, rather than spend 85 hours in the studio fruitlessly polishing the sound of a single synth track. A captious listener might complain about the half-finished meandery nature of these unkempt groaners, and start asking reasonable questions about editing or concision, but I think this is also a large degree of the charm of PAS. And while other releases of theirs have left me feeling a bit queasy with their indigestible sound, this Pumpkin record sweetens the deal with its peculiar and eccentric bursts of humour, both in the track titles and the occasional oddball voice sample which lets you know the creators are not trying to shock or offend you, just welcome you into their private worlds of half-creepy, half-hilarious antics. In short, imaginative goofball electronica with good pulsating rhythms, dayglo colours mixed with black gloss paint, and shades of Krautrock elements to boot. Excellent colourful images by Patrick Glassel too. Arrived here on 25 January 2012 but not released until April this year!