Tagged: cassettes

Maniacal Meditations: extreme death metal invades microtonal realms

Last Sacrament, Maniacal Meditations
Last Sacrament, Maniacal Meditations, Microtonal Records, cassette MR003 (2011)

In my immediate previous review (Jute Gyte’s “Discontinuities”), I mentioned that JG man Adam Kalmbach used a guitar that had been retro-fitted to accommodate a 24-tone scale by Ron Sword who happens to be guitarist for a Florida death metal Last Sacrament. This band uses a 16-tone scale to play its particular brand of extreme precise death metal. At this time of writing, Last Sacrament had only this demo release to their name; a full-length album “Enantiodromia” is in the works with a release any day now.

On first hearing, the 4-song set appears no different from most maniac death metal – probably because my ears have heard a fair amount of microtonal music in the past so the quirky aspect is lost on me and much of what I hear is deep slurping swamp-monster vocals, militaristic blastbeats and grinding bass against a steely cavernous background. On second hearing though, the difference becomes apparent: it’s in the band’s sound which is deep and oily, and in the dream-deranged chaos of the lead guitar breaks.

“Emergence of Opposites” can be a fairly flowing track with near-flighty percussion breaks and squalling lead guitar that literally takes listeners into another sonic dimension. “Self-Deceit” is slower and for its first half unremarkable DM; it’s only when we reach the lead guitar instrumental that once again we’re whacked clean round the bend with other-worldly flighty guitar melodies. Oftentimes these sound more like analog synthesisers or special effects cooked up in the past by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for old Doctor Who TV programs.

“Tyrants of Pain” features extended passages of flowing yet demented screaming guitar trills and tones that wash and flush out the brain cells like nothing I’ve ever heard before and will probably never hear again. “Post Human” sees the band lifting its game for one last shot of lavaging those quivering synapses: crunchy bass rhythms and insane nuclear-powered percussion go all-out to support the lead guitar which now flies around the shop like a posssessed demon pursued by other possessed demons whenever chance permits.

I suppose this being the band’s first release, “Maniacal Meditations” needs to err on the conservative side and let everyone know that this is a death metal recording first and foremost and experimental music second. For the most part the innovative aspects are kept strictly on the leash and are let out now and again but only for short periods. The lead guitar does its whirling-dervish dance at some distance far in the mix on most songs: I do not know if this was intentional or just a quirk the musicians hadn’t anticipated. The level of musicianship is consistent, precise and very much what should be expected of technical death metal. Likewise, the lyrics aren’t out of the ordinary for death metal, dwelling on humanity’s failure to safeguard its freedoms and prevent its fall into enslavement followed by society collapse and planetary apocalypse.

Even so, a track like “Tyrants of Pain” demonstrates in a couple of short instrumental passages the potential for extreme microtonal death metal to race off in the exotic outer-realms of hell, space or other virtual dimensions. I’d like to see these guys adopt a far more improvisational and experimental approach in their music so that they can bring out the full potential of microtonal music in an extreme metal setting.

Contact: Last Sacrament

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Condensing Clouds

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From Göteborg in Sweden 1 we have a package of tapes produced by the label Native Parts Records which arrived 1st June 2012. The DIY collage covers looked promising and the website follows a similar aesthetic, configured so that the scrolling takes place on the horizontal plane instead of the vertical. Skugar is Johannes Brander and his solo tape is Magic / Khands (NPR02) which is quite pleasing although I found the first track wittering on for too long with its dreamy synth runs and rather pointless droning. What don’t I like? Hmmm…maybe the root note is a bit too ordinary and the overall tone is a shade too nice, as if the music were trying too hard to please an audience. However the B side (if indeed that is correct since the sides are unmarked) is darker and more engaging. Fairly sinister edge and lots of unknown quantities. I find myself being gently pulled into a bewildering maze of slightly distorted rumbling and keening noises, a faded jungle of imaginary plants and wildlife. Skogar seems to work best when he allows himself to meander in this echoey electronic murk, a gaseous entity which is almost beyond being abstract, so lacking in definition it be. Yet there is a core of some living matter within the cloud. Pulsate! Pulsate! Skugar also exhibits some interest in psychedelic or proggy tunes, as suggested by his cover of a Bardo Pond piece, an American band whom we would associate with that early 1990s upsurge interest in “space-rock” and latterday psychey droning with guitars. Skogar works well for me when his inner skeleton is acting sullen and weird, and he should force himself down that path of incommunicative obscurity more often, perhaps by putting his head in a cloth sack 2. Also we like his interest in malfunctioning or broken equipment which was used to make the record. Strange cover art shows men in sun hats like 1930s Mexicans or Paraguyans, being dwarved by enormous plants, maybe some form of gigantic sugar beet or other local crop. There is also a luxury art edition of the release which comes with a unique painting on wood. It’s an old-ish release from 2010 but is still available.

Brander’s an able painter as shown by the symbolist cover art 3 he produced for Verfver‘s tape which is Animi / Animus (NPR24). A solo tape by Johan Gustafsson who is also associated with Tsukimono, Blessings, and Scraps of Tape. We like him well as Tsukimono, under which name he produced the memorable title ‘Moan Jar’ for a compilation. This tape doesn’t quite produce the desired chilling / pessimistic / bleak visions however. Distortion and lo-fi recording are the guiding lights behind this scrapbook of musical episodes, pages and cuttings torn from the eyes and mind of a restless soul. Verfver does manage some pleasing moments in this eclectic array of ambient, drones, tunes, piano fugues, and rhythmic avant-rock tunes, but there is too often a deficiency of conviction or weight behind his musical utterances. I’m sure there is a way to turn these wispy tones into the sort of plangent and heartfelt melancholic wails to which he aspires. He has certainly managed as much in his Tsukimono guise.

Lastly we have Crystal Crypt‘s II (NPR21). Crystal Crypt is another alias for Johannes Brander, and again the package is adorned with clippings from National Geographic magazine to form the collage cover art. The titles here certainly indicate a more “cosmic” Pink Floyd type outlook on man’s existence, with ‘Beyond’, ‘Worlds Apart’ and ‘Future Past’ pointing to his aspirations to journey into the metaphysical zones. Realised I think mostly with an electric guitar, feedback and an echo unit, though there is also percussion and other things going on. Works best when it wallows in maddening repetition and remorseless exploration of raw guitar tones. The music he makes here can also appear lonely and isolated, so perhaps at one level these tunes and their ponderous titles are metaphors for an inability to communicate 4. Although still formless, woolly and self-indulgent in places, this cloudy and clanging music does have the same sort of “Roman wilderness of pain” vibe as the Skogar tape, a mental state which Brander would do well to cultivate and explore even more fearlessly on future experiments with his psychological axe. A 2011 recording which the creator wishes to associate with ‘Heart of Darkness’, the Conrad novel which was one of the texts which fed into Apocalypse Now, still the movie of choice for all dark-hearted outcasts and pariahs of society. I often think a lot of these musicians wish they could remake the soundtrack for this film, and this tape may represent another entry in that ongoing catalogue.

  1. Also the home of Fang Bomb Records, our favourite label of angsty and grating Swedish noise. ↩
  2. I make this suggestion simply as a cheap and practical way to achieve sensory deprivation. More sophisticated methods are available. ↩
  3. It depicts a cathedral blighted by a witch in the guise of a black spider with multiple arms. ↩
  4. At times the music put me in mind of another Göteborg depressive, Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, who likewise despairs of making himself understood by the rest of humanity. In that instance the creator suffers from borderline personality disorder. ↩
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The Fabulous Shirley Bassey

Seesaw of Dreams


Great package from Darren Wyngarde aka Filthy Turd…no-nonsense English noisemaker of prolific proportions…active and social he be, engaging with noise in a physical and sweaty manner, aided by fellow oddballs, not footling around with computers or antiseptic conceptual notions…arrived here in May 2012…two cassette tapes, wrapped up in a magazine spread (and I use the word advisedly), with some underfloor felt / debris / muck thrown in, hopefully lifted from under one of his fetid carpets…neither tape is titled that I can see, although one of them might be called URDWYG THE GOLDERR – CASSETTE PSYCHIC VOLUME 1 …this one is made from a recycled musicassette, wherein El Filtho has recorded his dire diablry over top of pre-recorded elements but not allowed any remnants of original to survive…such cassettes are probably impossible to give away even in charity shops now, who have turned their backs on VHS tapes long ago…the deal with this release is that the item is not for sale or manufactured in conventional sense, and to hear it you must send a tape in your possession to the warlock himself, whereupon he will refashion and refit it with his grim horrors, hand-making all covers, each one unique…at same time guaranteeing to wreck your equipment…a potent spell then…seems he has already enlisted over 50 subscribers to the scheme, each man willingly signing up for a walk to the gallows tree…so far a pretty convincing raid from under the floorboards, subterranean spirits and demons surfacing to take what is rightfully theirs among the sweepings, the leavings, the dust, the neglected cobwebs of England’s collective murky psyche…obvious clue to remark on here is the sex-magic undercurrent, as bejudged by the magazine pages ye see, but also perhaps to some extent by the choice of musicassettes that have been assaulted by the hands of Senor Turdoo…Shirley Bassey, Charlotte Church, Nana Moskouri are among the celebrity victims of this demented stalker in sound…some might read that enterprise as a nasty form of “aural rape”, but I think it’s more like a demonic possession, an inhabiting of female bodies…not to say that is any more wholesome…also a concerted effort to erase and wipe out all forms of bourgeois good taste by any means possible, dubbing over tapes of Mum and Dad music and effacing printed information from record company by means of blue magic marker…two enemies disposed of in this way…the second tape is also hard to identify like any good criminal renegade walking abroad should be, but the word UR is ensculped in middle of the case…would be possible to read title as 90-O-UR-O-A if wrecked on strong drink at time of scoping…it contains subtle but unsettling looping and murmuring effects, quickly degenerating into a pile of echoed and uncertain wail-noise that can freeze the hearts of strong men, many of them blanching or fainting at the prospect…continuous noise with scads of ghastloid vocal elements, which may morph at any time into a devilish prayer or chant, and certainly no good is boded if screams on tape are evidence of anything…now let us turn to the Cassette Psychic item for ear-trial….of course I was not a subscriber to the plan so Darren the Monstro sent me the Shirley Bassey palimpsest on his own account…wrapped in silver foil…note title inside scrawled in blue biro and torn from notebook of a muttering loon…it is disturbing to hear…again surprisingly at first a departure from the intense and caustic noise wall which previous outings from the Northern climes may have prepared us for…instead a low-key and muffled sound disguises some potent and radical tape experiments with voice, echo device, electronic oozings…still a foul and unpleasant experience, reaching into this bucket of earwigs, worms, and other garden effluvia…what will my hand touch next?…edited and hashed up for maximum disorienting factor, one illogical splice after another, baffling documents and sleep-talk wrenched from the mind of a four A.M. insomniac…at times almost comic, but instantly warping into grotesque and amateurish anti-art, with distorted microphone effects and vari-speeded effects, trivial fragments of sound that even the most hard-bitten cassette band of 1982 would have distanced puny selves from…is this making sense? It is unmaking sense…these scrawls and doodles on magnetic tape could be secret messages intended for your ears only, if you can realign your inner radio antennae onto the wavelength. By writing “Stuff For You” to me and drawing red witch on verso, Darrenacious has succeeded once again in casting the runes on me, sealing my doom.

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Negative Reversals


A curiously depressing and moribund piece of abstract noise from Jason Crumer. Let There Be Crumer (SECOND LAYER RECORDS SLR016) is the first I heard from this Oakland, California creator, a man who seems to court death with a rather oblique and multi-layered sophistication, as if wooing the Grim Reaper in calf-skinned gloves and tricorne hat. The music he makes is structured as a tripartite suite, which works admirably when auditioned from head to toe, leading the listener through multiple tunnels of decidedly mixed emotions, not all of them unpleasant, but somehow hard to fathom. Even the beautiful ambient music has a heaviness and bittersweet plangency to it, that somehow prevents our full enjoyment of the moments of respite that exist in Crumer’s otherwise rather bleak universe. It’s a bit like seeing the pallid sun rise at dawn through an array of grey rainclouds, while we are floating on a sea of polluted liquid in a coracle. Then there’s the triple-gatefold sleeve, almost worthy of being exhibited as a concept art statement in its own right. The internal triptych depicts stages of a violent cockfight in Asia, showing what’s at stake; agitated and desperate men, unsmilingly clutching banknotes in the cockpit as they place bets, and a dismal shot of the final outcome. I thought this final image showed dead birds littering the floor, but now I’m not sure – could they be enormous rats? A pessimistic view, which suggests human existence is both a colossal gamble and a squalid struggle to the death. Plus there’s a grisly designer cake photographed on the back cover which induces the same queasy feelings as the death’s head drawn on the disc, and as a visual analogue the cake is not too far away from that skull – if we read the coloured buttons as a row of bared teeth. The inner sleeve is also printed with surreal anecdotes set in a tiny font, just to send your brain spinning into the last stages of delirium. And if that is Mr Crumer on the cover, note how the image is treated to present a lurid visage of washed-out despair, heavily rimmed eyes to suggest lack of sleep or drug use, with an expression that still seeks understanding…the exact inverse of a James Taylor cover shot from 1971…and showing us what has become of the singer-songwriter dream that captivated a million hippies in those innocent days. The album also exhibits a strong and affecting contrast between the compelling and almost tuneful stretches of drone abstraction and the more brutal walls of extremely harsh grinding noise, but I gather that many of Crumer’s releases fit this profile and push the crazy-dynamic aesthetic as far as it can go. In short you won’t know where to put yourself, nor where to set the volume knob on your amplifier. Recommended to fans of John Duncan, particularly if you like his releases such as 1994′s Send.

Neptune‘s msg rcvd (NORTHERN SPY NSCD021) is another glorious oddity. Last heard from these American weirdnuts with their fine album Silent Partner which was the one to introduce me to their unusual world of percussion-and-electronics music, although the band has been promulgating their unique style of music around the Boston area for almost 20 years now. Time to get over the shock of those home-made instruments, which are one of their signature keynotes; let’s just accept that Jason Sandford is a sculptor, musician and just plain wayward visionary type of fellow, here providing the guitar, vocals, feedback organ, oscillator and amplified gas can to the trio’s exploits, accompanied by drummer Kevin Emil Micke and second guitarist / keyboardist Mark William Pearson. Besides the thrilling fractured-rock and electrifying pulsations of ‘Luminous Skull’, we have the more bewildering mental outing called ‘Dark Report’, a minimalist recit of unsettling poetry with only the barest percussive backdrop and shocking noisy shrieky interruptions to punctuate its odd rhythms. This track alone will separate the true believers from the drop-ins who have come in search of more oddball Krautrock-influenced music; ‘Dark Report’ is a genuine existential spooker, and grim enough to have been recorded by the original 1978 Alternative TV. Another major cut of note is ‘Negative Reversal’, a splendid bone-rattler of ramshackle metal, cracked drumming, and unpredictable oscillatory bursts, all used to deliver another cryptic lyric filled with images of skin, anatomical details, and underground-movie styled theatrics, almost a murder mystery story spat out in broken images. The closing number ‘dstl sgnl’ isn’t very uplifting either, with its forlorn spartan drumming and desultory guitar strums, again hewing close to the spirit of near-formless randomness that is the underlying trend of this record. In all, a lugubrious tone may abound on msg rcvd, but the abiding strength of Neptune is their cohesion as performers; they form a tight unit, each leaving space for the others to spread their blackened wings, and have trained themselves to be on guard against the many clichés of improvised and rock music. Particularly so in the drumming department, where they never settle for four beats to the bar – instead, these are rhythms that could wrong-foot any given herd of running giraffes or mountain goats. Neptune also understand how to use noise sparingly and expressively, thus assisting in the depiction of the uncertain emotional states hinted at in their opaque lyrics. Very strong and unusual work which deserves your listening time. This one from 29 February 2012.

The trio Grampus are from Los Angeles, and already on their debut album Ilk Ilk (PFMENTUM CD068) they make theur improvised utterances with rare assurance. The cornerstone of their sound is the modifications wrought upon brass instruments by the ever-reliable digital processor, Max/MSP. Both trumpeter Louis Lopez and trombonist Daniel Eaton go to considerable lengths to disguise, mutate and reorganise the fundamental pitches of their instruments, resulting in colourful alien tones where about 85% of the sound is totally unfamiliar to human ears, the only recognisable element being the traces of human breathing encoded in the music. The percussionist Michael Lockwood negotiates his path around these crazy, ever-expanding shapes, and his brittle attack is a stark contrast to the soft, bulbous blobs of the brass duo. Grampus certainly succeed in creating an unusual sound, and their track titles have a spiky humour. I look forward to hearing a bit more collaborative effort on their next outing, because not all these tracks cohere fully for me, sometimes descending into flabbiness too quickly. From 17 May 2012.

Mag Resistance is the duo of percussionist Mark E. Miller (Toy Killers) with the fab Matthew Wascovich, vocalist and songwriter from Scarcity Of Tanks, our favourite Cleveland band. On the cassette Voice Studies 06 (MY DANCE THE SKULL), they both provide voice elements while Miller does evil things with his mixing desk, and two splendid ten-minute rants are the result. ‘Future Of Futures’ and ‘No More Shadows’ are like political diatribes snatched from a television set broadcasting in 2026, the distorted barking tone yapping out slogans, harsh, clipped statements, and paranoid repetitions to the background of a clunkoid robotic box, sparking on all six. You gotta love the bold simplicity of this approach, like an even more stripped down version of rap music, with no tunes and no strict rhythm. In fact “megaphone and grumbling static noise” just about sums it up. But it’s the scary authority of the speaking voice, which I assume is that of Wascovich, which really makes the hidden subordinate inside of you sit up and take notice. If you listen for long enough you might just find yourself obeying any order, no matter how ludicrous. A strong and abrasive listen with a wiry core. This reminded me a lot of Uns. In fact I think these fellows need to team up with Z’EV as soon as humanly possible; the resulting project could be enough to topple the existing world order. Another from the batch of tapes received from this label 11 May 2012.

EDIT: Toy Killers added at 19:45

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Texts For Nothing


Got another couple of outlandish cassettes from Bryan Lewis Saunders which arrived 12 April 2012. I will declare an interest because although we never met, we collaborated on a book called Protective Geometry. This very extreme performance-art / writer / poet / painter from America knocked us for a loop-a with his drug-themed LP called Near Death Experience, and, making a rare appearance in the UK, he performed last month at Bristol Arnolfini and in Milton Keynes at the Secret Anarchy Garden 2012. These tapes however are to do with his ongoing project to express the workings of his hidden brain centres by recording his own sleep-talking while asleep, then transcribing the results, verbatim, onto the page. Accordingly these Streams Of Unconscious are being published in serial form as he finds suitable sound-art collaborators to contribute to the project. First three volumes in this series were noted here.

On Volume 5 (SUT-13.5), the A side ‘White Surrealist Nihilissmus’ is disrupted by the hyper-busy electronic scratching of Yoshihiro Kikuchi, who scrambles his insane electronic data through a clapped-out computer which he subjects to further abuse with his sharp fingernails and bony digits. These vicious and attenuated sounds are so thin and mean they almost etch themselves into your forehead. Kikuchi plays percussion too, beating his cymbals in the sort of urgently obsessive manner that betokens the soul of a thwarted volunteer fireman who only ever wanted to raise the alarm. Throughout, the voice of Saunders murmurs and whispers his menacing texts implacably. Sheer nightmare, only relieved slightly when the electronic din subsides into a slightly more manageable burring and whirring.

Flip over for Christopher Fleeger‘s additions to ‘Dolphin’s Revenge’. Fleeger works exclusively with field recordings here, but his choice of locales and sound sources is far from conventional – in his list, we have American burger joints, an Australian beach, a European haunted house, and something called the “wave organ” in San Francisco 1. And some river dolphins, aptly enough. Most field recording phonographer types like to celebrate the glories of nature and tend to bring us uplifting and optimistic views of the rich environments in the world. Not Fleeger, who on this occasion creates grim sonic vistas of an unparalleled bleakness, where all the world’s resources have been used up, there’s zero movement or signs of life, and a horrible stillness abiding in the atmosphere. A more fitting accompaniment to Saunders’ texts is hard to imagine. He’s whispering in a cracked voice as though he were the last man alive on earth. Without a doubt this is a truly apocalyptic 21st-century update on Krapp’s Last Tape.

On Volume 4 (SUT-13.4), we first hear ‘The Severed Head’ with a musical backdrop by Love, Execution Style. This Tennessee musician has been wreaking his mutant form of far-out experimental music for 18 years like a cultural terrorist, only taking an interest in pop as a musical form he can hold hostage in his diabolical compound, and even managing to expand his work into film and TV soundtracks. Everything about LES, including the name, suggests a faintly pathological approach to life, and one senses the creator can’t rest until all his enemies are dead. On this cut he plays a combination of musical instruments and domestic objects, including the clothes dryer and the pork chop. It’s not that the sound he makes is particularly unusual here, but the most striking aspect is the extreme disjunctiveness of the performance – events just tumble out in deliberately haphazard and eccentric manner, and nothing makes any coherent sense. Again, this is apt for Saunders if I may say so – it’s music that comes close to matching the fevered half-connections of his short-circuited cerebellum activity.

The other side is tenanted by two improvising names from the UK – saxophonist Adrian Northover, and the godlike genius Adam Bohman. The suite of sound here is called ‘Squirrel Party at Sally Fields’, and given that both of the Englishmen are supplying additional text and voice elements to the piece it can at first seem as though Saunders is almost being side-lined by his own special guests. But instead these jumbled layers of vocals create a strong sonic conflict, a very distinctive taste. Bohman intones, as ever, in his very splendid sonorous creaky voice declaring little-known and overlooked facts about South London matters. Then American Saunders suddenly slithers into the arena like a sibilant snake, overbreathing his surreal texts into the microphone. Northover’s elasticated sax tones can be heard in the small intervals adding small touches of sweet squeaky improv tootling to the strange and dream-like quagmire of noise. I guarantee you won’t have heard anything quite like it.

Both cassettes are once again very nicely presented and all the texts are printed in full in dinky little booklets designed by Alice Lane. Good luck following the words. You’ll need whatever navigational help you can get when you’re adrift in these stagnant backwaters of the brain!

  1. It turns out to be an acoustic sculpture sited on the bay. ↩
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Castles in your Heart


Here’s a highlight from February 2012, Age Of Energy (NORTHERN SPY NSCD020) by Chicago Underground Duo – a glorious CD of electronics, jazz cornet, and solid rhythms. No upstarts are Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek, who have in fact been playing together in various manifestations since the late 1990s, and in turn grew out of a renaissance of improvised music in Chicago which had been burgeoning since about 1990. They’ve had a lot of records released on Delmark and Thrill Jockey (this is their first for Northern Spy) and as this is the first I heard from them, I think that a back catalogue investigation is in order. Album contains ‘Winds and Sweeping Pines’, 20 minutes of beautiful electronic tones including perhaps some treated cornet sounds, and a piece which goes through about a dozen shifts and changes in completely unforced fashion, evoking joyous moods which contrast with more introspective and wistful emotions. Testament perhaps to their non-prescriptive and unprogrammed manner of making music. The drumming is spectacularly inventive throughout and never settles for a tedious motorik or disco beat. We only hear some recognisable cornet tones at the very end of this epic canvas, at which point the Billy Cobham fans will be leaping into the lively arena to grab a piece of this action. More suffused and understated is the track ‘It’s Alright’, a pulsating and inventive drone of textured distorto-electronica used as a platform for Mazurek’s brassy utterances. There’s also the title track, which is probably the cut most likely to appeal to listeners still seeking their thrills from 21st-century updates on Krautrock-inspired music. The rich drum sound here is something most technicians would give their right arm to achieve, smashing against the rippling waves of electronic genius-blather with zesty abandon. But it’s the tricky rhythmical base which once again is so creative, showing Chad Taylor doesn’t take coffee breaks in his mind when sitting behind his kit, and that he’s more in the lineage of a Sunny Murray than a Zappi Diermaier. Chicago Underground Duo were namechecked by the UK duo Warm Digits as one of their major influences, and you can take that to the savings & loan. Warm Digits have not slavishly copied the sounds of the Duo, but successfully emulate their passion, drive and joyful élan. Recommended. Released in March 2012, our copy received 29 February.

A very nice item is Flux (SPECTRUM SPOOLS SP010) by the American composer Robert Turman, an album he originally released on cassette in 1981. Turman’s earliest known work includes a 1979 single Mode Of Infection / Knife Ladder which he realised with Boyd Rice of NON, and because of this and Z.O. Voider he became associated with 1980s industrial music. Flux however is not abrasive grinding noise, comprising six long tracks of very gentle, melodic and understated minimal music made with piano, kalimba, tape loops, and drum machine. It’s beautiful music and the muted sound arising from this rescued cassette tape adds considerably to the charming, dream-like and restful aesthetic. A sort of less strident version of The Residents around the time of Commercial Album, mixed with Brian Eno’s ambient sensibilities, particularly Music For Airports. The press release points out the ingenious cross-rhythms in play, and praises Turman’s skills in realising this complex music while overcoming hurdles presented by the limitations of the equipment available to him, which is now regarded as somewhat primitive. Since 2009, Robert Turman has enjoyed a productive partnership with Aaron Dilloway who released albums for him on the Hanson label, and provided the scans of the original cassette for this reissue. One of the better releases from this label. Released as a double LP on St Valentine’s Day 2012.

The team of Lull, Beta Cloud and Andrew Liles all collaborated to produce Circadian Rhythm Disturbance Reconfigured (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR139CD), a concept album which aims to suggest the effects of insomnia through sound; in fact the creators were mostly concerned with how the affliction of sleeplessness can affect the thought processes of the human brain. It might be viewed as a vaguely sinister experiment about the effects of sleep deprivation, but also an attempt at a psychological probing of those areas of the consciousness often neglected or overlooked. We received this in February and at first approach, neither ears nor brain nor sleep-sensors were particularly engaged by its empty-seeming surface, but today this album is just right; a clouded-up fogfest of supreme fugginess which leaves the listener adrift in a supremely ambiguous zone for over 20 minutes and hence meets all the requirements of unsettling music in the “dark ambient” genre. Lull is Mick Harris of Scorn, whose 1990s ambient texturising I always enjoyed when I was immersed in the field where every other record was mastered by James Plotkin, and the Isolationism compilation was my touchstone. Beta Cloud is Carl Pace, the American musician whose Lunar Monograph from a few years ago sounds intriguing. Together this pair made the original Circadian Rhythm Disturbance and released it as a three-incher in 2008; now here it is again in full, along with an Andrew Liles remix of same. Liles transforms the original completely, filling it out with horrifying explosions, scalding jet aircraft engines, sinister crackling fuzz and many other unpleasant incidents, completely undermining the menacing yet strangely soothing mood of the original near-blank murkoid statement. If we compare the two, I suppose Lull / Beta Cloud ask interesting questions about the nature and effects of insomnia, while it seems Liles is hell-bent on contributing to or even exacerbating the condition.

Got another bundle of psych-revival music from Dave Schmidt in late February 2012. Electric Moon‘s The Doomsday Machine (NASONI RECORDS 118) was not in fact released on his Sulatron-Records label, but Schmidt features as a main player of this band in his Sula Bassana guise. Throughout, muscular and dense psych-rock music in the Spacemen 3 vein. We’re warned that The Doomsday Machine is “enveloped by a gloomy atmosphere”, which may be true, but to me it’s the kind of energised and flailing gloom as typified by certain favourite apocalyptic songs of King Crimson, Andromeda, or Second Hand when they made ‘The World Will End Yesterday’ or Death May Be Your Santa Claus. The album’s title track occupies all of side one and relentlessly chugs away in a minor key with its thick, clotted sound. The drumming summons an army of skeletons, the throats of the vocalists are stuffed with palpable despair, and the wah-wah guitars in particular produce an inhuman screaming sound that is highly appealing. The rest of the album may not be as crushingly heavy as that supreme downer of an opener, but there are highlights like ‘Spaceman’, a strong contender for matching Richard Pinhas’s soaring sci-fi guitar longform excursions, and ‘Stardust Service’ which ought to bring tears to the eyes of fans of the early Pink Floyd. Ulli Mahn’s overwrought artworks are an integral part of the release, and Electric Moon have made it their personal project to reinterpret these elaborate paintings in music, thus also forging a link with the past (the painter is the father of band member Komet Lulu). All of Schmidt’s projects and releases may stand accused of having both feet firmly cemented into “retro” genres, but he and his bands do it with such conviction and pleasure that I for one cannot resist. Available as a CD and a double-LP with extras.

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Gossamer Albatrosses

The Tower Recordings

Subterraneanact is the duo of Henk Bakker and Jelmer Cnossen, and their debut Subterraneanact (Z6 RECORDS Z6399699) is an unusual piece of studio assemblage created in Rotterdam. The album is a distillation of recordings made in the studio. The recordings have been edited, mixed and remixed; then subjected to further sampling, remixing, and rebuilding processes. At all times the duo were working to their own private sets of compositional and improvisational rules; the aim seems to have been to transform the sounds of their respective instruments as far as possible, resulting in an “atmospheric and expressive sound environment”. Considering the source material was mostly acoustic, i.e. clarinet and drums, it’s a truly extreme example of what intensive reprocessing can do to taped sound. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a purely electronic album on the surface, although there are printed credits for live electronics and sampling using the “Ableton” device. Despite the wild, crazy and sometimes ugly remanipulations of sound, the original clarinets and drums continually show their growly, thumpy faces at various portions in the entertainment, surfacing like live deep-sea fish in a well-cooked bouillabaisse, and about as welcome. The clarinettist Bakker studied his instrument in Utrecht some 20 years ago, has an interesting history of performing, composing and doing radio, and is now associated with WORM in Rotterdam. Cnossen the drummer (also known as Malorix and JC) has drummed in a variety of bands and, of the two, seems more conversant with the sound-recycling process represented here – most of his Malorix work is executed through his personal take on the laptop-plunderphonic-meltdown approach, utilising discarded music from old compact discs and tapes. The screen-printed cover unfolds into an unsettling perspective of an impossible iron tower being built under the earth’s crust, gradually poking its long neck out through a mineshaft opening. This image emphasises the “constructed” nature of the music, but also its sheer impossibility – what we hear sometimes defies rational thought. It’s not that it works by juxtaposition of shocking sounds, but by a form of reworking that feels almost manual when you listen to it. The composers are kneading dough and working plasticine between their fingers. A very hand-knitted and cottage-industry approach to electro-acoustic, resulting in loud, primitive and lumpy musical forms. Arrived 13 April 2012.

The Premature Burial

Subterraneanact create a “virtual” underground space through their studio work. We could say that the American death-metal industrial project T.O.M.B. take things one stage further on UAG (CRUCIAL BLAST RECORDS CBR94), by putting themselves physically into bleak and hostile environments to realise their music. The basic tracks were recorded in assorted locales of horror – abandoned sanatoriums, asylums, morgues, and deserted crypts. It seems they did everything but lock themselves in a cemetery in pursuit of their art. Granted, the music has been reworked in a studio after the fact, but it’s the recording in that selected psychic zone that adds the extra dimension of sheer black terror. Once inside their chosen sanctum, T.O.M.B. would play back their tapes and field recordings at loud volumes to allow reverberant shocks to vibrate from the cold walls, and progress the ritual through drumming exercises, often hammering on the very walls themselves. UAG, an acronym for Uncovered Ancient Gateways, thus assumes the proportions of performance art, as though the CD were a document of unholy and extremely morbid rites; the theme is extended visually in the enclosed booklet of monochrome photos, providing absurdly dramatic reimaginings of these lugubrious seances. Their track titles make multiple references to the grim delights of the “bone orchard”, spicing things up with snippets of witchcraft, bloodletting, moon worship, and various invented ritualistic procedures; and the whole package is topped off with that lurid green-tinted cover art with its fearful symmetry, its runic letters, its hints of sado-masochistic costume, and inverted liturgies. But sonically, this is all quite some way from conventional black metal or industrial death music, and T.O.M.B. (whose name unpacks into Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) serve up strangely compelling and powerful atmospheres on this album, eschewing anything to do with song form in favour of continual tones of abstract oppressive noise, underpinned by frenzied and horrifying drumming. While undoubtedly satisfying to bloodthirsty fans of the respective genres it inhabits, this grisly and claustrophobic record works equally well as extreme experimental noise. Was released in January 2012, I think we may have got our copy in April.

The Senors of Seek

Sent to us by Murray Ward of Cardiff is a splendid split cassette (HI/LO029) by The Failed NASA Experiment and Ø+yn, and it’s released on a terrific micro-label called The Lows and The Highs Records. Their website contains further oddities which look worthy of investigation also. The Failed NASA Experiment turns out to be Murray Ward himself playing solo music with occasional help from Euan Rodger, Alex Williams and Matthew Lovett. Mysterious electronic tones, clattering percussion and random noise bursts, plus extremely heavy psychedelic drones and circular riffs, where the amplified distortion and sense of relentless forward-chugging motion has prompted comparisons with the Faust of the 1970s. TFNE presents a delirious and acid-fried experience, with many puzzling moments inserted into and between the tracks, and concluding the suite with a pastoral acoustic guitar riff that almost makes this tape a lo-fi update on any given Pink Floyd album. The track titles are lyrical and beautiful. This music has the refreshing Celtic tang of well-crafted Welsh magic, enacted by drawing chalk markings on the floor of black-timbered chapels in the hillside.

Ø+yn are an Argentinean five-piece of underground noisemakers, with Cinco Cantos a la Virgen de Satrostramocha on their side of the split. Superficially they may seem to be questing after the same hallucinatory and revelatory states as Mr Ward and his chums, but they pursue their quarry in a much more mysterious way. It’s an offbeat and delirious form of trancey acoustic drone-folk, featuring violins, guitars, percussion and whiney solo lines made with a nasal chanting and wailing voice or equally nasal wind instruments of some sort; many non-western harmonic scales and modes emerge from the improvisations, and at times the music could almost be mistaken for an ethnic oddity from the Folkways catalogue. In some ways this might be seen as a variant of the sort of loopy thing the Finns used to do so well, except Ø+yn are nowhere near so cluttered musically nor (thankfully) as eccentric in the vocal department. Instead, the instrumentation is pared to bone, the recordings are intimate and private, and even the trance-rhythm patterns are rough-hewn and occasionally wobble off the path like a less sure-footed mountain goat. The team may have cinematic aspirations, building their albums in line with the logic of a Jodorowsky film, and even sample a snippet from a Roman Polanski movie for one track. The excellent artworks are collages by Murray Ward, with overlay drawings by Ian Watson. Quite delightful all round; many thanks to Murray for sending this.

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Shining Pillars of Anti-Beauty


Got a couple of cassette tapes from the Vermont label Notice Recordings, which landed here 08 March 2012. Waterwheel•Windmill (NTR022) by Windmill•Waterwheel came out in 2011, but the recordings by Kirk Marrison and Charlie Nash were made in 1997 and intended for release on the Alley Sweeper Records label. Nash is the guitar player from New York who consents to have his instrument’s sounds reworked by the hands of Marrison, and some very pleasing texture-heavy abstract experiments are the result. Michigan-based Marrison (ex Fibreforms) was evidently very good at keeping the elements separated out, instead of allowing a barrel of frequencies to coalesce and melt like comestible goodies on the gigantic pizza oven that is his mixing desk. Drones, noise, shifting layers, harsh tones and prepared guitar mangling and steel-string scraping actions are all set into spinning motion across these imaginary aural planes, sometimes set to minimalistic semi-industrial beats. 56K‘s Generations Lost (NTR021) is the synth music of Josh Burke; several varied approaches, including ambient murkiness, sprightly melodic tunes and filtered drones. Not especially innovative music on the evidence of this outing, but Burke’s approach does at least indicate that craft and time has been spent on the construction of his music. He’s made about 3 dozen releases under his own name, and many more under at least 10 aliases; expect to see one of his limited edition cassettes resurface via Spectrum Spools any day now.

Another bracing dose of difficult avant-garde classical composition courtesy of the excellent Carrier Records label. Californian composer Alexander Sigman has achieved numerous scores at an array of international festivals and venues with his live performances and electro-acoustic installation pieces, besides finding time to win awards, work as a composer in residence, co-edit an academic new music journal, and co-found a music academy in San Francisco. Nominal / Noumenal (CARRIER 014) is seven pieces which can be heard individually or as part of an interlocking cycle of work. The music is operating on a level that’s about seven miles above my head, but I suppose it’s fair to say he favours a percussion-heavy approach; even those works not scored for percussion have a very percussive flavour, particularly in the way the strings have been ordained to play with a very angry scraping attack on the third piece, and the solo cello work on track four is characterised by frequent plucks which erupt with as much sonic violence as this genre of music will tolerate. I have the sense it’s not all that common for a classical avant composer to get down and personal with the techniques of the players who perform the music, and perhaps Sigman is actively taking an interest in this area. Not that we would know; the grandiose themes of Nominal / Noumenal are apparently of far more interest, and have been inspired by surrealist poetry, the typography of Eric Gill, the behaviour of biological neurons, and visits to “industrial wastelands”. Further degrees of complexity are evinced in his track titles; the use of rounded and square brackets implies intertextuality and compressed meanings within meanings. Sigman’s polymath capabilities are clearly beyond cavil. To realise his unique visions and austere musical craft, he engages the services of three heavy-duty playing ensembles (among them, Les Percussions de Strasbourg), the countertenor singer Daniel Gloger, and the cymbalom player Françoise Rivalland. But the instrumentation is sparse to the point of severity, generally allowing only an average of three to five players per piece. Plus, it’s almost all acoustic; electronics appear on ‘Detritus I’, but the remainder of this brittle and stark music of ambiguous, post-modern conundrums is realised through percussion, woodwind and strings alone. The dynamics of Sigman’s scores also indicate the channels of thought of his teeming brain, and the paths of musical information zig-zag and circuit in highly unexpected fashion. Very tough listen, but I like the compactness of this music, even if I understand none of it.

For another approach to the pleasing aural combinations of woodwinds and strings, try Screw and Straw (VETO-RECORDS EXCHANGE 004), an improv record where the American cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm meets up for a musical conflab with Christoph Erb, the Swiss tenor player. Ten tracks were recorded in a single day at a Chicago studio. Where Sigman’s compositional approach yields a very dry recorded sound, these two free improvisers are full of juice and hot gravy in which to dip their respective biscuits, and a very warm and friendly record results. A large range of extended techniques are used to keep the dialogues fresh and eccentric, and the duo are clamped together in a happy exchange of atonal gibberish inflected with long tones, insatiably itchy sawing motions, skittery plucks, animalistic barks, low growls, and crazy freewheeling rhythms that are discarded and abandoned almost as soon as invented. It’s a fascinating conversation between two enlightened enthusiasts, and one you’ll be glad to overhear, if not actually participate in. Beautiful rich and loud presence to the music, meaning not a single nuance of sonic invention is missed. The playful titles are another nifty feature. They are like fractured chapter headings from the story of imaginary outlaw characters Screw and Straw and their picaresque adventures; we can’t help reading the tale of these two freebooters as one of violence, blood, lust, and fatal adventure, with a dash of occult mystery thrown in.

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The European Canon is Here


These hand-made cassettes on the Staaltape label arrived from Rinus van Alebeek in a parcel 9th March 2012. This Dutch creator living in Berlin is relatively new to us here, but we encountered one example of his highly unusual approach to working with tape on the Cycles Des Souvenirs CD for the Bôlt label, where he interpreted the music of Luc Ferrari. He’s a very imaginative and determined man with his own well-articulated raison d’etre, a uniquely developed set of aesthetics, plus a clear understanding of the properties of what can be done with cassette tapes, and why he’s interested in doing it. This strength of character is reflected on all these releases, even those where Rinus is not directly involved or not a contributor. All three of these tapes are real head-scratchers, instantly puzzling and almost confusing tracts of sonic information which do almost nothing to explain themselves, served up with Rinus’ hand-written notes on raggedy scraps of paper which are wrapped around the cassettes. The beetles of intrigue are already rolling their snowballs of golden dung across my mind, and the spiders of surprise are spinning their platinum webs.

Berlin Tape Run 2 is a compilation featuring Midori Hirano, Erik Levander, Seiji Morimoto, Der Tapeman, Joke Lanz, Bandrekorder ’59, Coco and others. It’s an inexplicable jumble of interesting audio captures. Have to say upfront I don’t know the place where this is at, but I like it. It’s much more lively and spirited than your average over-processed “field recording” genre of music. The latter seems so overly concerned with producing a pleasing aesthetic experience that it sometimes bleeds the life out of its subject matter. Not this audio merzbild of arbitrary pits and beeces. Despite large number of contributions tape holds together as a coherent (incoherent, babbling) stream of data. Guaranteed 40 minutes of odd cranial stimulation with this white mouse of mayhem, where the banalities of life on the street are gradually and subtly remade into grainy patterns of truthful radio interference. Score one to the Rinus-Ring so far.

What the heck is this sprayed-blue thing now in its black paper clasp? Four Corners of The Night it be, another compilation this time showcasing Anton Mobin, Christoph Limbach, Pierce Warnecke, and Rinus. More odd field recordings gathered from specific places in Europe, creators in question stalking by foot or trundling on saddle of bike. The unifying element is that they all did it on the shortest night of the year, then the works were edited afterwards. Read all the contextual information you like about these performance-art like events, but nothing really serves as a map for navigating the low-key, nondescript experiences. Again, banality is another keynote and a general refusal of any form of conventional aesthetic grooming in favour of a directness and simplicity. An interest in “Cagean” chance compositional methods may also play some role as a subtext or guiding undercurrrent. Inexplicably compelling to listen to, although you have to give it some time to make its overall trajectory and shape more or less apparent; it could easily be the most beautiful or the most infuriating thing you’ve heard for weeks. But I’m drawn to the fulcrum of this cosmos like iron filings to a magnet, and what’s left of my cerebellum is forming into ring-like patterns in sympathy. The unusual and elliptical process was continued to some degree after the tape was released, and each of the creators sent a copy to a friend who never normally listens to this sort of thing. Their reactions and responses were invited, and they have been compiled and published on the staaltape website. Of such things are new maps made.

Now here’s a tertiary item. Wrapped up it be in tissue paper like a mummy. It was glued up at seam so I thought I would snap a photo before I broke the seal. Now the wrappings have fallen from the bones of Paris Tape Run 2. On here we have a cohort or cadre of Parisian tape artists, led or directed to some degree by Anton Mobin or Julie Rousse. It’s a process piece with instructions, a game not unlike a Fluxus piece perhaps (except those gonks never really did anything except write the texts, then sat back feeling smug about it). The tapes are gradually filled by an aggregate process of passing it from one hand to another. The important rule to observe is that the tape was never sent in the post. The physical act of meeting is part of the process, the tape functioning as part of the audio handshake among these creators. Looks like they even used a special cloth pouch for the purpose, like an avant-garde equivalent of a diplomatic bag. This one features a lot of fascinating subtle electronic and radio-wave type music. And maybe some field recordings, fragments of spoken word. And other offcuts of found detritus, picked up from the mental streets of Paris and spun into gold. Like all the music on these tapes, it presents a slightly unreal quality that I find very enchanting. Or maybe it is a sense of heightened reality, encountering small glimpses of the truth in broken images. Of the three tapes here, this Paris item does contain perhaps the most content identifiable as some form of music, and if uncertain it may be the place to start your own investigations like a detective on foot who down these mean streets must go.

Recently I waxed lyrical about the raw non-aesthetic of Nick Hoffman’s tapes. In a similar-different way, these staaltape items present the unfinished quality of vegetables newly dug up from the musical earth. About half of the catalogue has sold out now (the editions are tiny) and I would recommend ordering up what you can find; as you can see the prices are quite reasonable too. A real pleasure to receive these genuine, hand-made and vital pieces of radical avant-garde art.

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Seeing Cassettes, Hearing Slides

Sound Waves

Here’s the final two items from the December 2011 Gill Arno package. We have Diary (UNFRAMED RECORDINGS UFCS1) by Aki Onda, the Japanese sound artist who lives in New York and is widely recognised as the Lord High Emperor of cassettes, due to his monumental collection of daily tape captures – he’s been doing it everywhere he goes with a cassette Walkman for over 20 years now, bringing in aural snapshots of his international travels to the point where he’s pretty much done for phonography what Andy Warhol did for camera-snapping. At a recent exhibition of Warhol (Headlines) I learned that he produced a phenomenal number, perhaps thousands, of documentary images with his obsessive Instamatic and Polaroid ways. The Diary item is perhaps more of note for its wonderful booklet, presented as a nifty limited artist book with its embossed cover and band around the spine. Flip the pages to scope the faboo images of labels from Onda’s tape mountain, some with colour dots applied referring to a private classification scheme, or with handwritten notes (even his calligraphy is charming), stick-on images, and remains of torn-off former labels. A mini art gallery in itself. Also there are three pages of notes by Onda about his practice, which he freely owns is “obsessive”. After a few years of building up this personal library of aural information, he began the process of inserting new recordings into his old tapes, overdubbing some sections and arriving at remarkable chance events which cause instant wig-out when played back. And for about ten years now, he’s been using the tapes in his live performances, where you imagine the devastating effects they would have on the average audience, being fed numerous batches of mixed signals and stratified, mismatched blankets of data. Aki Onda has become his own walking sampler with a databank and memory of prodigious size. Can’t say that the actual tape that comes with this release reflects any of the above delicious chaos, in case you were hoping to buy into a slice of that 1. Instead it is a C60′s worth of gentle field recordings, with side A possibly being the ocean and side B some more ambiguous nocturnal rumblings. Which isn’t to say it’s not a beautiful thing, the graininess of the recording process adding considerable enhancements.

An Amplified Process

Also from Gill we got a nice DVD of his mpld work. mpld represents an integrated performance work with a set-up of slide projectors, fans, and laptops, where the sounds of the fans and projectors are amplified and processed, and when enacted it becomes a time-based installation piece with images and sound (and even a sculptural dimension, according to the creator). Lacunae (WINDS MEASURE RECORDINGS 24) is for me at least the first chance I’ve had to get a more complete sense of what it all means (just listening to the audio from an mpld event is rather puzzling to say the least). Gill Arno had a video tape made some years ago, but it was really intended as a working document for his own purposes, so he could see what it’s like from the audience viewpoint. When asked by Ben Owen to release the videos on Winds Measure Recordings, he agreed to do it even though these blurry video tapes are not a perfect document of the real thing, But Arno decided he likes the imperfections, in much the same way that Marcel Duchamp was quite philosophical when The Large Glass 2 was accidentally shattered; after a lengthy and painstaking restoration, he grew to like the breaks and decided they added something to the image. Accordingly on Lacunae we have layers of grain, fuzziness, errant colour blotches, and a very severe flickering effect for our eyes to burrow through. The projected still images of landscapes, in themselves not especially artistic, are transformed unexpectedly into visual schemes of great richness and beauty. The projections are accompanied by a compelling and quite subdued chattering and rumbling sound, fed through gently varying filters, and the combined effect is a mysterious and haunting wonder. Evidently, even the most process-based works can still be highly productive and trigger imaginative and associative responses from an audience. Arno himself speaks of the processes of “obsolescence and decay” that are manifest on this release, and he indicates that “memory and loss” are the underlying themes to mpld; these video-based artefacts that have been introduced into the work now serve to deepen and enrich that meaning. The cover and postcard insert are the result of a collaborative printing session with Ben Owen (mixed inks, so that each individual print is colour shifted and unique) and the image shows the mpld setup as a compacted son et lumière arrangement that delivers simultaneous sound and image from a table top. The 40 minutes I spent watching this beautiful DVD will probably be the highlight of my day today!

  1. Try looking for releases in the series of Cassette Memories. ↩
  2. i.e. The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even ↩
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