Tagged: cassettes

Grotesque Mandarin Splashback

Fans of absurdist low-key acoustic mummery should tune into the zig-zag waves emanating from the skewed mind of Daniel Spicer and his album Ylvmlvy (SLIGHTLY OFF KILTER sok045), whereon eight brain-slices from his unique cerebellum can be chewed and savoured by the curious tooth. Some will enjoy his free-form poetry recits, often executed with the help of Tom Roberts’ acoustic guitar, and his wayward disorganised delivery method which seems to involve Mr Spicer wandering shambolically about the recording space while he utters the poems, armed with strange acoustic instruments and percussion, letting the mic pick up what chance fragments it may – in fine, a more benign version of Mark E. Smith’s studio anti-method. Elsewhere, friendly jazzers Caines, Garside and Pyne join in for a lengthy and enjoyable free-form blaster that gives ample evidence that more people should engage and play improvised music, rather than leave that genre in the mouldy hands of the established old-guard professionals 1. An even stranger “jam” session – and it’s refreshing that Spicer is not afraid to use the word “jam”, a term usually frowned on by prissy proper musicians with scratchy beards – is called ‘Cake Shop Power Breakfast Jam’, featuring Shurdut, Fontanez, Maxwell, and Janas in a truly freaky collision of unhinged minds; in my alternative universe, this is the sort of loopified music we should have heard on The Goon Show interludes, rather than the stuffy and respectable jazz of Ray Ellington. Perhaps weirdest of all are the two ‘Sans Titit’ tracks, short but delicious episodes of Dadaist poetry composed of strangulated and fragmented syllables and phonemes, which Spicer treats with all the seriousness you’d expect from a dignified professor presenting an inaugural lecture at The Royal Academy. Even the album’s title of compressed consonants participates in this game of private language and insane information-scrambling malarkey. All this, plus a violin duet with his eight year-old daughter. Very high recommendation for the work of this approachable and user-friendly Brighton loon-boon. From January 2012.

The great Katherine Young is a member of Architeuthis Walks On Land and Civil War, among others, and she plays the bassoon and composes all the music for Pretty Monsters on this self-titled record (PUBLIC EYESORE 120). I have the impression (see interview in TSP#21) that she likes small ensembles which work with a very judicious combination of instruments, and the instrumentation on offer here – Owen Stewart-Robertson’s guitar, Mike Pride’s drumming and Erica Dicker’s violin – makes for a superbly realised, vibrant and unusual sound. Coherent and ingenious in its dissonances and consonances, there’s not a single note played here that isn’t memorable in some way, well-defined and as three-dimensional as a living painting. The music just leaps off the printed page like a team of wild animals from a picture book, even when the printed page in this case is a compact disc. Young’s other music which I have heard may have veered towards the introspective or the soothing (in a very twisted way, like an old bough curlicued around near a Japanese lake at sunset whose water is slowly turning pink under the sky), but the somewhat rock-music-ified elements here of drumming and electric guitar give Pretty Monster an additional force, transforming the imaginative and unpredictable melodies into even more mind-melting possibilities. By no means an ego-trip for Katherine Young alone, the album gives plenty of space to all the players: Dicker’s violin work on ‘Crushed’ is particularly strong, reaching remarkable heights of controlled frenzy. For fans of the brown, creaky, leathery qualities of the bassoon (a sound which in Katherine’s hands becomes pure flaked tobacco carved in huge ancient chunks), I also recommend ‘For Autonauts, For Travelers’, a cut where that woodwind beast truly burbles and growls in plangent tones, enriched with her unique playing style, and enhanced by electronic treatment. All of this music is just solid enough to eat with a fork and spoon. May I propose that listeners investigate and hear as much of Katherine Young’s music as is humanly possible. Lovely cover art by Rob Patterson. From November 2012.

I am always happy to receive these small gobbets of American weirdness from Amalgamated, a project looming from Spring Valley in Illinois. The deal is that the four-piece Klampe, Newell, Bengtsen and Richards perform their unusual brand of crazy rock-improv-ambient music, then allow D. Petri and Gus Kumo to rebuild and reshape the recordings in the mixing room. Short but intense bursts of energetic and erratic avant-rock noise emerge from these experiments, and two of the tracks on the mini-CD Spark II (INTANGIBLE CAT CAT-17) have additional instruments dubbed in to thicken the rhythms, spice things up with unexpected saxophone toots, or just contribute to the general air of mayhem and directed madness. ‘Musst’ works exceptionally well; one suspects it’s an assemblage of many takes and edits contrived into a single eight-minute slab of Faust-like loopery and pre-planned auto-destruction, but what isn’t? Many great rock records have been assembled from many elements to one degree or another; it’s a question of which gifted hands are doing the cutting and pasting. These talented American goops also believe in producing a very rich and generous sound, never stinting on treatments and effects; the end results are as warm and tasty as a handcrafted cheeseburger. From 14 November 2012.

Two intriguing examples of underground electronica-instrumentals by solo acts Charlatan and Clathrus on their self-titled split tape (FULL OF NOTHING fon36). Sides are unmarked on the cassette but I simply threw the item into th’ player and let it spin. Assuming that this is Charlatan whose noise greets me first, then we’re hearing the music of the famous Brad Rose, the man behind Foxy Digitalis and a fellow with not a few solo aliases in his career. Both ‘Grotesque Social Grid’ and ‘New Millennium’ are fascinating mantra-like constructs whose charm works by using much repetition and looping of very simple phrases, yet never once does it become standard-issue techno-loop trance or boneless ambient. There’s intelligence and imagination abounding in this dense & steely machine-like music, which incidentally is also sunny and upbeat enough (almost psychedelic in places) that it will not be mistaken for “bleak industrial”. I was impressed how busy Rose has been under this name alone; about a dozen Charlatan releases since 2009. The Russian Clathrus is in fact Dmitriy Vlasov, whose Billiam Wutler Yea guise (insanely mutated loop-based gunk) appeals to me mightily. Some of that same intense, determined dementia shows up in the grain of ‘Manitoba’, ‘So Long’ and ‘Zond’ on his side of this C49 tape. He’s certainly keen to show off his transformative skills wherever possible, reworking synth sounds and drum-boxes into unrecognisable utterances, but I suppose his real triumph on these three tracks is the illogical construction of his tunes; they follow crazy paths, make unexpected dives, and disappear down rabbit holes in a highly inconvenient manner. To bewilder the listener in entertaining ways appears to be Clathrus’ plan, and like Charlatan he too manages thereby to avoid the pitfalls of the obvious and keeps us alert at all times. One of many tapes received from this Russian label in September 2012.

  1. This piece in particular calls to mind the clattersome glories of The Vitamin B12, another Brighton project. ↩
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The Angelic Conversation

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

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

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

  1. This gag borrowed from Lawrence Burton. ↩
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Crossing The Border

The great Aki Onda released South Of The Border (IMPREC309) in December 2012 on the Important Records label…only nine years after the first two volumes in his Cassette Memories series. Nobody could peg this imaginative and free-thinking artiste as “simply” a field recording / phonographer type, even though his exploits in these areas surpass the work of many…one of his distinctive hallmarks is his use of cassette tapes, and hand-held devices like Walkmans, rather than “super-accurate” digital technology…in his hands, the audible soul of a place passes directly onto oxide tape, retaining a depth and meaning which is beyond the reach of a portable high-res digital recorder. Needless to remark Onda embraces mistakes and flaws in the process, which enhance his work with additional patinas of unplanned noise and glitchery. The rumour is that he’s taping constantly, never seen without a machine operating in record mode and capturing whatever ambiences and chance events may come his way on his exciting adventures beyond the seas.

Japanese-American Onda has also been known for his remarkable edit-technique (to the uninitiated, it might seem an exercise in near-random assemblage); on his other works this has resulted in sound events transpiring before your ears which, although strictly documentary in nature, are astonishingly surreal and dream-like in their effect. The editing / collage method is not (as far as I can tell) emphasised so much on South Of The Border, but the listening experience is still a heady and mesmerising one. Turns out Onda feels a personal bond with the country of Mexico, where the raw material for the work was taped. From his youth, he cherishes early memories of the vivid images of Mexico recorded by his Dad on camera and super-8mm film. Carrying these primal pictures around in his head, the personal mythology for him was only deepened when he saw that exemplary piece of Magical Realist cinema and guaranteed brain-fry movie, Jodorowsky’s El Topo. When he finally got to visit the country in 2005, would he be disappointed by the reality compared against the mystical wonderland he had created in his imagination?

On the contrary…he reports that he “was amazed that everything was as I had envisioned” and that “the boundary between reality and imagination disappears” when you’re in Mexico. Aki Onda doesn’t shrink from the difficult task of conveying this impression to the listener, and the uncanny recordings on this CD, while they may not at first listen appear to be the mind-blowing hallucinogenic explosions that you might expect, will amaze and beguile you with their subtle, compelling timbral shifts and ranges. Small fragments of recognisable human elements (voices, machinery, street bands) will leak into an otherwise abstracted and distorted swimming pool full of sonic fragments…in time, that swimming pool becomes an ocean…it engulfs and drowns you, filling lungs with an intoxicating brew…the distortion elements are made even more delicious due to simple fact of malfunctioning machinery, since Aki Onda took three Walkmans to Mexico, and two of them broke down (tape head and motor damage), but he went on using them anyway. Not since Monet and the Barbizon school persisted in painting their canvasses En Plein Air whatever the weather, have we seen such dedication to the craft! My personal attachment to this great CD is of course increased tenfold because Aki Onda personally sent me this copy, signed and dedicated. He tells a story of bodies that change, where the sun clings to the earth and there is no darkness. Prepare for an hour of sheer amazement!

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Redundant / Rotary / Rotations: running the gamut of electropop, dark minimal techno and harsh noise

ttw61

Wouter van Veldhoven, Redundant / Rotary / Rotations, United Kingdom, The Tapeworm, cassette (2013)

You’d be surprised to discover, as I was, that all the music you hear on this tape was made with 24 reel-to-reel tape recorders and an analog modular Doepfer A-100 synthesiser: everything here initially sounds like proper electronic music in its various guises and reveals very little of the origin of the found sound recordings used in the creation of this music. The sound sources utilised by van Veldhoven include a faulty TV set from the 1950s, sine wave generators and a broken valve radio.

The music can sound reminiscent of Kraftwerk during their glory electropop days of the late 1970s / early 80s; not surprisingly actually as Kraftwerk have roped in a Doepfer A-1oo synth into their range of instrumentation in the past. Don’t worry too much about trying to identify individual tracks. The mood can vary from playful to quizzical, remote to curious and experimental, eccentric to boisterous – and that’s just on the A-side alone. Rhythms are often very busy and some have a breezy cold abstract air that might be found on a lot of dark minimalist techno / industrial lite recordings. The B-side is especially rhythmic and industrial-influenced and there is a greater variety of more experimental music as well.

An early highlight is the track “Second”, a fairly long piece with a lot of activity that approaches the bombastic. This is followed by “Fondness for Broken Mondriaans” which is a crackly, crumbly, deep-fried noisy piece with a spare percussive rhythm. Flicking over to the B-side, we come across an extended passage of droning power electronics and industrial noise on “Bricks, Corners, Cul de Sac”.  After this wondrous piece, we retreat to safer and more friendly (sometimes child-friendly) territory that features playful flubby melody and rhythm loops and toy-like tones. A later track features choppy staccato rhythms that change tone throughout while little effects blink and travelling noises buzz and zing.

Ranging from kiddy electronic pop to the most forbidding harsh powwah electronix, with plenty in-between that recalls and recreates some of the grander moments of Seventies / Eighties synth-pop, Nineties isolationism and current forms of techno, this cassette could well become the modest mouse that roars in years to come as a minor classic. Redundant some of the recreation might be – it could be cleaner and more crispy if done on modern digital machines – but there’s a small-scaled warmth and even intimacy on some tracks that can’t be replicated with a lot of the technology in current use.

 

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Moon and a Mask

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

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

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

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

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Three Rotary Roarers

Boy, are things frustrating me lately. Maybe I just need a half of minim…mind you there is nothing like starting off a crisp autumn morning with some twisted and alienated guitar noise, and that’s exactly what is on offer from Clifford Torus, a three-piece whose self-titled cassette (DRID MACHINE RECORDS DMR4) in a lurid orange dayglo cover was sent to us on 19 October 2012. I felt much better after immersing my bonce in these rich metallic shrieks for 30 mins. The guitarist Horacio Pollard has made his electric-shock presence felt to us on at least one CDR of his scalding and bittersome electric noise, but here he’s opting for a slightly more traditional avant-garde rock setup. For this activity he’s aided by two of the best like-minded players a man could hope for: the bassist Kjetil Brandsdal from Noxagt, and Anders Hana who drums for MoHa! That’s a dream team in anyone’s book. Just six tunes on this little power-pack, but it’s enough to recharge the flagging batteries of any jaded nightclubber as they stagger back from Vauxhall on any given Sunday morning. This trio’s particular take on the excessive amplified doom-noise thing meets many of our exacting standards: monotonous, flailing energy, mumbled half-screamed vocals when they appear, and a continual sense of teeth-grinding alienation underpinning every moment of luscious grind. Kjetil is an asset, rarely departing from a single root note for most of th’ tunes; he almost hammers his bass like a percussionist. Although only guitar, bass and drums appear in the instrument credit roster, there are occasional burstings of strange and unidentifiable screech which somehow leak into the sounding-box, at times resembling a mangled saxophone or a crushed synthesizer. Maybe Pollard is just very well-equipped with hideous FX pedals purchased from planet Jupiter. Only sometimes does the energy level droop a little, and I wished they coulda sustained that power for a few more minutes (especially on the crunch-worthy opening number) but when these three lads get into their “groove”, it’s obvious they are mesmerised by a higher power from the dreadful zones, and nothing short of a steamshovel will ever dislocate them. When this tape was sent, it seems the threesome were about to play a free gig at Bohemia in Hackney. True to form, this blog is a year late with the hot news!

Here’s another fine cassette, also realised by a trio, but this time the players weave a somewhat more abstracted and dynamic form of electronic noise. Destruction Des Animaux Nuisibles #1 (ALTERACTION ALT01) features our good friend Xedh (i.e. Miguel A. García), the Prince of Spanish experimental music who has proven himself a nonpareil when it comes to realising fatalistic nightmares and uncanny experiences in sound, often with a grim caste. Here he is joined by Enrique Zaccagnini, the two of them forming an eerie backdrop of sinister electronic purring and grisly loud noise, tempered by the unsettling vocalising of Marta Sainz. I suppose it is she providing the strange whimpering sounds on side one, a ghastly sobbing effect which arouses our empathy as much as it sends tremors of terror running up and down our spinal columns. We could be hearing the voice of an exiled ghost, doomed to replay the same traumatic moment in her life for all eternity. Enrique and Xedh produce an accomplished tapestry of complicated noise for this after-life symphony, where the startling eruptions into ear-splitting volume are reined in and controlled, forming part of a fascinating and constantly-changing slow-motion whirlwind of textured sound. The B side feels a tad more pedestrian somehow, not as “composed”, and emerging as a jumble of clatter and screech which is heaped up into a pile rather than arranged in a garden by architects using rakes and blueprints. Even so it doesn’t stint on serving up the manic energy that noise-freaks go for. Marta’s excessive vocals make it clear she’s aiming for a gold medal in next year’s Junko-soundalike contest, to be held in 2014 in Budokan. Lastly we have the grisly cover image of ten dead rats caught in traps and apparently pinned up for display in a shop window in France. Since the title of this release translates into “destruction of harmful animals”, evidently we’re supposed to use this cassette as a cheap alternative to mousetraps or cockroach poison 1.

We’ve also been sent four cassettes in a box from André Foisy in Chicago. As well as playing in Locrian, it is he I suppose who masterminds the Land Of Decay label and blog, specialising in doomy rock and noise that inculcates decrepitude and ruin. Cultus Sabbati – another trio – have about five albums released at time of writing, not to mention a few video works whose titles betray an interest in the written works of Poe and Lovecraft. This anonymous band conceal their work in a fog of mysticism and cast about references to ritual trance magick, witchcraft, and Norse mythology, revealing little of their musical methodology as they foregather in unknown locations to emit strange dark ambient drones. Thanks to Sunn O))), pretty soon every metal band in the world will end up sitting in a circle in a lonely forest wearing cowls. To some extent all of this does cover ground already well-worn by many other projects in this and related genres, but The Hagiography Of Baba Yaga (LOD 039) does evince some powerful moments of doom and horror in among the general murk and turgidity of its throbbing drones. Echo and reverb effects are used with scant regard for good taste, and evidently Cultus Sabbati believe in saturating every other musical utterance with as much artificial enhancement as they can generate from their small black boxes of evil, undercutting the swampy sludge with whispered chanting vocals and crazed guitar solos so acidic you could use them to unclog a kitchen sink. Track titles like ‘The Attestation Of Vasilissa’ or ‘Koschei The Deathless’ are like the titles to lost Lord Dunsany stories, and when raging at full stretch, the threesome can produce music that will either instil a deep supernatural fear in the listener, or suffocate us within the writhing coils of a deathly inescapable curse. Nice typography on the cover with its saturated golden-brown autumnal colours, images of forests and deadly mushrooms, overprinted with runes and magic circles. From 17 October 2012.

  1. Savage Pencil also used this trope in the 1990s for the noise band Ultrasonic Attack Wave Pestrepeller. ↩
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Creamed Coconut

Bossetti and Chris Abraham024

So, with CD player newly repaired and listening once more free from the shadow of equipment failure let us see if this newly de-stressed set-up has had a benevolent effect on my reviews:

Let’s consider Alessandro Bosetti and Chris Abrahams matt varnished digifile opus We Who Had Left (MIKROTON RECORDINGS CD 19).

Instrumentally it’s all about piano and electronics, approached with an appealing sensuousness which touches on such worlds as jazz and sound poetry. Chris plays piano in The Necks, I gather. I haven’t actually heard The Necks, but the internet told me that and I thought I’d save you opening any extra tabs by passing on the information.

The first track, ‘We also dress today’, doesn’t give too much away, a spare but approachable construct consisting of the piano riffing on one note, loose-connection bass pulse coyly flirting with being a kick-drum and a sprinkling of pattering, looped polyrhythm. The second track, ‘We arrange our home’, is more representative of what the duo have to offer: light, silvery runs up and down the keyboard backed with electronics, in this case an electronic wandering bassline shadows the piano while breathy samples which sound to me like down-tuned whistles are mixed into a gauzy background wash, giving a hovering flute-like exotica tinge. In this Exotic Forest you half expect some Martin Denny birdcalls to start up as you pass the next tree. It’s a coolly strange environment, like Ballard’s crystal jungle relocated to Tahiti and populated with silent Gauguin beauties.

‘We cannot Imagine’ introduces vocals, softly spoken and Italian-accented, slowly repeated and unpicked phrases unravel over the course of ten minutes whilst they are tentatively wafted into song by gentle puffs of piano and the quiet electric whistle-flutes, floating softly around the listening space. Quite a lovely effect, very delicately performed. Bellisimo.

Sound-wise this isn’t quite the Doobie Brothers, but there is a certain smoothness, more evident in some tracks than others, a quietly polished finish you might actually expect of an ambient album. However, when Chris Abrahams strikes or rather caresses a chord or note, ably counterpointed by Alessandro Bossetti, it is mighty enjoyable whatever burnishing methods may or may not have been applied.

‘When they are overhead’ starts a little like Charlemagne Palestine writ medium accompanying a clog-dance and Google party thrown by Santa’s elves. It certainly has the potential to achieve elevation and hits a nicely rolling green-ness towards the end. If you’ve ever seen the BBC Krautrock documentary where Iggy Pop drills a coconut (a fine cultural moment) while describing the music of Neu! you will recall he uses the phrase ‘psychedelic pastoralism’ while sunset silhouetted pylons recede field by field as seen through a car window. My pleasantly wandering mind was reminded as this track progressed of a similar sensation to that evoked by this scene.

Our journey finishes with a cover of a Bill Evans tune, Waltz for Debby. Debby is ceremoniously draped in a belligerent sinusoidal lap-top as our romantic Italian croons and serenades the album away over a seductive tinkle of the old ivories. That’s amoré!

011

Kakawaka
Ein Fröhliches Lied Auf Den Lippen Den Wandersmann Kann Nichts Erschüttern
NO LABEL MC CASSETTE

What have we here? A short but sweet cassette (the mini hi-fi system which includes the aforementioned CD player also has a tape player, conveniently), two 10 minute-ish sides. Seit ein: blind munching of psychotropic worms, bursts of computer overload, pitch shift metallic glissandi, the frog chorus and Michael Caine’s heel hitting the concrete in a deserted East Berlin basement, unt so on. Crude methods yield deceptively crude results. Vignettes change like clicking the button on one of those red slide-viewers with the slides on a carboard disc that you used to get. In the background those worms are munching in the dark, converting rainforest decay into putrid phosphorescence. A lesson we can all surely look to apply in our daily lives.

The insect life returns in the second of our sides wherein a flea-bitten, moth-ridden, valve-driven, ragged organ vamp is nibbled on the toes by beetles. Uneasy reposes occur, always while the mandibular chatter soothes away those aches of the day. A muffled noise like a plucked double bass loops away somewhere under the floor like Poe’s tell-tale heart thumping in a bath of mellow vibes. The beetles (John, Paul, Ringo and Jaws) organise a hunt, paint their concave carapaces carmine and set out in slow motion across a shifting carpet, their horns echoing lugubriously. Enchanting and finger-snapping, needless to say.

All in all, very relaxing and swinging and suitable for your next cocktail evening or canasta party if James Last Non Stop Dancing fails to deliver the goods.

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The White Cube

Christoph Limbach / Pierce Warnecke
2 (3) Incomplete Triptychs
GERMANY EMITTER MICRO LIMITED 001 CASSETTE (2012)

Nice little thing in a perspex box is a cassette tape which arrived from Berlin in April 2012. It’s the very first release on Emitter Micro, a tiny DIY label from Berlin. Pierce Warnecke and Christoph Limbach prepared three separate recordings but decided to release only two of them; the decision was to do with the limitations of the C30 cassette, and rather than compromise on a matter of such mathematical precision, they elected to keep the third piece in reserve as the unseen and unheard part of this “incomplete triptych”. The decision to pack the item in this see-through box only deepens the riddle of inaccessible and inscrutable music in some way. I had half expected the package to be welded tight or sealed with superglue, but as it happens I was able to pop the lid quite easily and soon had the all-white cassette spinning happily in my machine. After I took it out I noticed that the title has been inscribed on the shell in “blind” (using laser etching), another near-invisible component to the work. The duo haven’t missed a trick in assembling this conceptual home-grown art object, no aspect left unpondered. It’s also very good to listen to, when you’re prepared for a good facial scrub of late-night scrapery and unexpected electronic blastage. Realised using just a prepared drum kit and live electronics, this is music that starts out strangely minimal and uncertain, only to turn violent and abrasive at the turn of a screw, then subside into sullenness just as suddenly. It’s as though the two players were studiously trying to avoid treading directly on any known modern music genre, and set out to walk the self-imposed tightrope with the aim to avoid the major pitfalls presented by free improvisation, “reduced” improv, and table noise – to name but three. I do like the unexpected moments that erupt out of this set-up, and some of their high-volume sounds are just spot-on as headache-cleaning solvents or industrial cleansing agents. They also sent me a CDR, their second release, not yet heard at time of writing but I’m glad to have it because both of these existed in tiny editions – 30 copies only – and it’s probably no surprise for you to learn they are pretty much sold out at the parent website. However, they also organised a music festival in May this year, with some substantial players on the roster – which gives one hope for the future, if they can leap from making very limited pressings to setting up a three-day art music festival in a capital city in just one year. Many thanks to Pierce for sending these.

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Don’t Eat the Grass


Another odd entry in the Bryan Lewis Saunders Stream Of Unconscious series of cassettes where contemporary sound artists interpret the dream-diaries of this very extreme American performance artist. On Volume 7 a lot of leeway is clearly given by the creator to his collaborators, and these two contributions are indeed very free and imaginative interpretations of the source material. On ‘French Spies’, Joke Lanz may or may not have been given an original tape recording of Saunders’ sleep-talking, but he has elected to re-record the text using his own speaking voice. That alone kicks things off in a fairly unsettling fashion. It feels decidedly odd to be listening to the American’s speech patterns and slang words recast into this rather formal sounding vocalising, as if Joke were acting out the role of a rather strict and stuffy Swiss official like a schoolteacher or customs officer. This contributes no end to the utter surrealism of this fragmentary and illogical story involving broken bones, a French family, eating grass and cooked eggs. Natch, Joke Lanz is no stranger to extreme performance art himself, need I tell you…I gather that you’d be safer letting a firecracker explode in your face that get near this man when he’s in full spate in an underground bunker armed with his noise devices and microphone. For this recording though, he tones things down to an almost glacial degree, and his additions / interpolations in terms of sound effects and tape manipulation are relatively subdued, all in the service of making the text appear as strange and unnatural as possible. Odd giggling effects and bodily-function burbles, perhaps making a passing reference to the granddaddy of all literary sleep-journals, Finnegans Wake. 1 In short, although the actual recorded voice of BLS may be missing from this experiment, his inner core of warped dream visions still hit home, regardless of which voice may be speaking them…

The B side is even more triumphantly surrealist. ‘It’s Parents Like You That Are Flies on the Horse’s Face’ is credited to Dylan Nyoukis, although Elkka Reign Nyoukis also contributed vocals, and various friends who were also captured in the tape machine of this eccentric Scots genius who lives in Brighton. Nyoukis has created a turgid tape collage that’s as thick and swampy as ten-day old porridge, and laced the brew with potent hallucinogenic drugs. Within this completely insane swirling melange, we hear creaking, musical fragments, muttering voices, bird song, snatches from TV or movie soundtracks (perhaps); but mostly unidentifiable and puzzling sounds. These are stitched into place in erratic fashion around whatever segments of the original Saunders tape Nyoukis has managed to salvage in what (I hope) was a gloriously untidy and somewhat dangerous exercise, involving tape splices made with razor blades on the breakfast table while the family were still trying to eat breakfast, and the splashes of blood were indistinguishable from the raspberry jam. Through his wild-eyed and half-mad method, the artist succeeds completely in capturing the crapulous effects of a nightmare, by turns horrifying, hilarious, and mostly just plain bizarre. Whether this matches Saunders’ original intent is irrelevant, as his crackpot texts are Grade-A bughouse to begin with, and in any case the curious reader can decipher the transcripts printed in the enclosed booklet as needed. Animals, insects, drugs, and a strange scenario about a school day trip are among the many elements in this tangled tale. On the portions where we can hear Saunders muttering, he sounds like a more tremulous version of Tex Avery’s Droopy. For the rest, he’s just one more player in the cast of thousands that constitutes the psychotic inner world of Dylan Nyoukis. Another essential entry in this cassette series!

  1. No, I never read it all the way through, but I understand that snoring, coughing and indigestion sound effects are all worked into Joyce’s prose. ↩
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Six states in search of a Voice


The fabulous Liam Stefani sent us a package in August 2012…you recall we heard him under his Skitter alias on the record Tone Chambers, where he transformed the accordion of Richard Sanderson into strange and unnatural tones. Through his mystery, he is doing equally twisted things to the voice and vocals of P6, the fellow who used to be lead singer in Stretchheads, the band who made some tasty-looking recordings for Blast First in the early 1990s…objects around which I must get my pale white fingers at some stage…P6 to gauge from available visual data is not a man to footle around with half-baked or commonplace remarks when he opens his maw to speak, and it’s fair to say that an hour’s drinking time with such a man would equate to about a year spent with anyone else. So we’ve got this seven inch single with layers of overprinting on the cover, murky brown and black colours, called simply Skitter + P6, and is described as “vocal improv in six emotional states with process”…said emotional states identified as ranging from joy to fear by way of sadness and disgust. Now I have oft maintained that the best music ought to arrive at doorstep of listener much like an alien invasion would – shocking, inexplicable, something from which the world never recovers. Skitter + P6 may broadly assent to that approach, based on aural evidence in these hot grooves. Voice of P6 mangled almost beyond recognition, but not a destructive change, because through this art a human truth shines through even more vividly. A fact as undeniable as human tripes and viscera, so cheerfully celebrated. Voice turned into a ray gun. Apparently if you were lucky enough to have seen Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band in 1969, then the drummer Ed Marimba would step out on stage and shoot a ray gun at the audience while intoning an appropriate chant. Matt Groening has witnessed this event and told the tale as a matter of record. As further evidence of the power of this particular charm, see Claes Oldenburg and his Nug Yar paintings. And also buy this uncanny record. 100 copies only!

Now let’s see, we also got an entire cassette of this far-out sonic mayhem of whoopery and electronic vocalised joy. This one is a split tape called P6/Skitter in a variation on above title and so happens to be derived from the same source material as featured on the seven-inch. Again we have the image of six heads of P6, this time in a painted version made by Hollis. Note profound alterations to his entire physiognomy as he passes through these mental states. Might not be too far out to draw a parallel with the sculptures of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, uneasy artefacts that occupy a mid-point between intense psychology and art, leaving many viewers walking away from the gallery in a state of consternation. P6 puts himself through the process as willing experimenter / performance artist, not unlike a post-punk Stuart Brisley. His side of the tape is sure to appeal to Merzbow fans and other devotees of wild noise, but mainly through use of loops and repetitions which are used to create unholy layers of very intensive and uncontrollable terror-joy states, laced with heavy-duty hallucinogens and powerful mind-altering stimulants. A true whirlwind in the human zoo it be, passionate and overpowering, but you are among friends at all times and the conclusions to be drawn are unfailingly positive and optimistic, not the lazy cynicism and despair of most industrial noise-drudgery. The Skitter side is far more nightmarish, a sinister crawl through lugubrious Clive Barker territories with The Golem and The Iron Giant as your escorts. Only Wolf Eyes have come close to evoking this palpable sense of dread and decay in sound, yet even they would blanch at the extreme depths to which Skitter is prepared to perform his spelunking. Especially affecting are the despairing sobs that appear around 6:00. I believe it was Ben Katchor who correctly observed that “nothing beats the sound of a weeping man”. I would highly recommend that you dive headlong into this cassette and bathe freely in the mechanised-humanoid tides of this rich art-noise, the better to renew your sense of what it means to be human and to reconnect with your buried primordial instincts. Once heard, you may never be the same, but you’ll be one of the lucky few who understands. Much recommendation for both of these heat-death blasters!

Available from the Skitter Bandcamp

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