I’m impressed to learn this subtle, but texturally rich, collage of layers and textures was made from sampling and processing old movie soundtrack LPs, an area of music and record-collecting that’s been growing in interest for the last 20-30 years now. As with previous detailed sample-and-stitch endeavours from the Sheffster – the 2017 cassette Polarities, with James Eck Rippie, is but one example – the effort spent in trying to transcend his sources is really starting to pay off, and there’s no fetishisation of the original music score nor the vinyl on which it was pressed (although we are advised to listen out for juicy moments of surface noise being folded into the whirlpool of colours). Fittingly, the original presentation of the sound was accompanied by a film, one hand-made by the creator and likewise using vintage cinematic moments as its starting point, and examples of same can be seen in the evocative monochrome near-abstract blurs on the artwork here.

Christian Marclay is another who has, in his time, interfered with both LP records and movie footage, but he’s far more histrionic and attention-seeking than the measured tones that emanate from Moments Lost. Sheffield claims – or at least the label does – that a part of him is reaching out to the past and attempting to layer it into the future, using sonic archaeology – and invoking meaningful nostalgic emotions without becoming sentimental or tawdry. In this, he’s not far apart from our UK electro-acoustic tape-salvaging genius, Mark Vernon. Very fine. (15/11/2024)

Today’s item Broken Allures (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR339CD) follows their trusted pathway – all performances, voices and instruments subjected to twisted studio treatments and processes that induce maximal madness and distort all rebakes and rope ladders into nightmarish dimensions, in as much time as it takes a French chef to whip up a pink macaron inside a smoked trout. Fenech on guitars, bass, drums, sequencers…Epplay filling in on synths, samples, and diabolical tape recordings, sound effects and field recording captures…label is correct to hint at some form of “musique concrète” approach in the final mix, but even this clue doesn’t convey the unhinged genius found in these splicing touchettes, where spontaneity and crazed imaginative skills are privileged above the mode of academic pondering and deliberation of the IRCAM school. As such, Berrocal remains true to what I regard as his post-punk hero influences that have helped mould his jazz improvisations since the 1980s – and just check out that recent Catalogue record if you’re inclined to doubt this – and he still embodies the vocal loopery and zaned-out terrorthons that Stapleton evidently admired (and could never imitate successfully, try as he may).

Speaking of “that period” from English underground music, Cosey Fanni Tutti (of all people) is also here, adding chilling lyrics sung in equally unsettling voice on two tracks, and electric guitar on a third – ‘Viva La Hacienda’, as it happens, one of the stand-outs on the whole set and we’d like to think a nod in direction of Manchester and Joy Division. Speaking of Public Image Limited – which we weren’t exactly – Jah Wobble also surfaces from 20 fathoms to add his bass blorrks to the title track, and indeed it might be that element that so cheerfully drives this strong piece down its death-disco inflected dubby pathway back to the rocky beach. With Berrocal’s echoplexed trumpet writhing on top like three deep-sea fish about to be fried in the pan, we’ve got a harshoid-horror studio mash that Martin Rushent would only have dreamed about, and even the ghost of Teo Macero raises one toenail from his perch in paradise. To lock the case up tight, the opening track was inspired by ‘Warszawa’ by Bowie and Eno, and on ‘Coiffeur Pour Vince (Tu Sais La Mort)’ we have, wouldn’t it be fair to say, a deliberate throwback to Berrocal’s immortal ‘Rock’n’Roll Station’ from 1976, that surreal re-imagining of early American rock and roll – which this time around throws in an additional verbal salute to Johnny Burnette.

As with previous outings by the trio, the music seems (to me) to be taking place in near-darkness, and the poetic surrealist sound-poetry of this great man Berrocal both confuses and illuminates the mind like a green candle. Recommended! (10/10/2024)

The finished results are raw and unfinished, and in places quite hesitant, but these personal touches add much to the charm of this fine release. In places, he comes close to transforming the landscape of Lausanne into something quite magical and odd, if that’s indeed his intention. Grimaldi professes an interest in “(psycho)acoustic phenomena”, which may overlap with other creators who delve into the murky terrain of “hauntology” and hope to capture spirits, ghosts, and foreign bodies on magnetic tape. (31/10/2024)

We heard their Causal EP from 2023 which didn’t make much of an impression with its empty, distant murmurings, but that might be the key to understanding the aesthetic and motivations of this creator. Today’s record does have much more substance, grain, texture, and even some eventful moments – admittedly very small and hard-to-discern. If these are collages, as we’re informed, it’s hard to see the joins in the continuous purr and empty buzz. Fletina has a broad sweep and wants to capture indoors and outdoors, tiny rooms and large countryside or urban scapes, small household objects as well as entire cities, hillscapes, and other geo-features; they like the grind of machinery, although often they want to push it into the background.

All of this has the strange effect of pushing human beings out of the picture too; each of these seven audio snapshots seem, to me, to depict a world now bereft of mankind, everyone dead or mysteriously vanished after an alien event on a grand scale. (Although some muffled human voices do briefly waft in from the other side on ‘Temporal Installation’.) Come to think of it, if put together with a carousel slide show of suitable images and shown in a darkened room, Seen To Remain would make a great art installation. (31/10/2024)

While this Zoharum label likes to promote Polish talent, it’s not so insular as to exclude other European talents from its roster…such a one is b°tong, a new name to me, but the solo genius behind it Chris Sigdell of Switzerland has been active under this name since 2005 and notched up 30 albums in that time. Sigdell also used to be in NID and Leaden Fumes, the latter a famed Swiss doom-sludge band who grew out of the earlier band Phased, one of the original stone-core groups of that Alpine region. Actually Sigdell is a 1980s veteran with an impressive pedigree. On today’s item Mass (ZOHAR 326-2) – sometimes printed in curly brackets – he presents a double-disc helping of incredibly atmospheric, ultra-layered drone, somehow managing to evoke infinite stretches of time and space with his delicate, but well-constructed, music. Where mediocre droners dream of glimpsing “the beyond”, they can produce suffocating and flat results with their unimaginative settings, but b°tong is the real deal. There may be guitars, vocals, synths, samples and field recordings buried in these scaperings, but one isn’t concerned to disentangle the harmonious blends, rather to wander lost inside them for the next few decades. I’d like to say that the title Mass implies a holy rite from a lost Eastern European strain of extreme Catholicism, but the underpinning meanings to this work are far from clear-cut; there are some simple contrasting images, such as the Goddess of Light telling us “Behold the Sky is Black”, and a fleeting reference to heavenly signs, but our man remains gnostic and unknowable in his intentions. “Together they form a coherent whole”, so the label informs us about these two sessions recorded one year apart, and also indicate that a story is being told across the two discs. If they are right, it’s a very slow-moving epic, but a compelling one.

Ulesa sailed across the Baltic sea in 2021 with their debut, a not-unlikeable set of loops and voices swaddled in the usual ambient blacktiude that this label relishes so much. We noted their mysterious non-identity and no-title strategy back then, which continues with their second offering, except we now learn Ulesa are a mystery trio and the vocalist (on today’s record at any rate) is Ania Grąbczewska from Szklane Oczy, the under-performing coldwave rock group from Poland. The music on II (ZOHAR 331-2) is shrouded in fogs and soft edges, with even the percussive beats muffled by these heavy grey clouds, but that makes a change to being slammed in the ribcage by the beats of Larmo and others of that ilk. It’s nice when a trumpet or voice suddenly emerges from the murk to greet you in the morning air.

Brume here with Synchronicity & Wandering Current (ZOHAR 338-2). Myself, I never really went overboard for this French solo act by Christian Renou, although he’s well regarded and has smothered all of Europe with cassette releases since 1985 or earlier. Operating somewhere to the left of industrial hideosity and an update on classic musique concrète, Brume has managed to hammer out his own railway through the untamed territories of abstract sound. In my ignorance I thought he’d retired or otherwise given up long ago, and was half-expecting a long and stern droning episode on this single-track 57:54 minute item. Instead it turns out to be a very inventive and imaginative sound collage thing. The source materials are fascinating and odd and very surprising, and evidently assembled with tremendous care. The suite divides into three named ‘chapters’, and one can credit the idea that a layered narrative is being assembled, albeit one more informed by Burroughs and Beckett than by John Grisham. That comparison may suggest a tendency towards absurdity or mind-scrambling nonsense, but we’re very far away from Bladder Flask’s ultra-random cutup technique here. Amazingly, Hastings Of Malawi (who’s been enjoying a purple patch of creativity lately) is a contributor, adding voice and electronic sounds; there’s also Pat’ Blanch and Patrick Mazaltarim on saxophone, whose toots occasionally lift us out of crazy-sampling tape-edit genius into a free improv region. As for the cover art! Well, those nudes come from the scrap-books of Françoise Duvivier, who also makes dolls and masks, and has done quite a few covers for Brume over the years. Excellent release.

Contemplations (empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24189) is a survey of electro-acoustic compositions by Emma Margetson from Derby (UK), dating from 2015 to 2022. Mostly she used very simple means – close-miked objects, concentrating on one subject per composition, no especially radical changes and no foregone conclusions about what the work “means”. By the time of 2019’s ‘Sketching Froanna’ she attempts an ambitious eight-channel composition, responding to the lines and shapes of an artwork by Wyndham Lewis. If there’s an underlying theme to Margetson’s observations, it’s about introspection and reflection, linked to the passing of time. Some pieces might be prosaic and descriptive, but I like her understated outlook on the world.

Canadian France Jobin is more than just a musician – she wants to occupy large spaces, and does gallery installations and film work, perhaps even overlapping with architecture in some way. Her Infinite Probabilities (Particle 2) (ROOM40 RM4234) continues to explore her ideas about quantum mechanics and string theory, including deep ideas about physics and dimensions. These scientific areas are unfamiliar to me, but it seems she too admits she was out of her depth, yet compelled to keep exploring from her sense of restless curiosity. She had an epiphany – “feeling adrift and perplexed isn’t a hindrance but rather an advantage” – and perhaps endeavours to share it on this record. Impressive; there’s a real sense of tremendous weight and depth to these minimal tones, and we can truly feel the excitement of the journey as the piece advances.

Let’s enter the “overload zone” for new releases by Stefan Goldmann, one of which is a five-CD box set. First we have Alluvium (MACRO M77), a single CD of 12 tracks from this German-Bulgarian DJ and electronica artiste, based on “research” in various parts of the world including his home Berlin, Istanbul, Sofia and Thessaloniki. No field recordings from those locations (in case you were expecting same); it’s all electronic, and he’s exploring the potential combinations of machine-created rhythms, set down in irregular patterns that mess up any sense of a “grid”. It’s the third such release in his series of “metric assymetry”. While this might be mistaken for some form of experimental Techno, it’s highly conceptual in nature and expressly designed to confound the listener’s expectations. Goldmann states his thesis with the ruthless precision of an academic presenting a scientific paper, but it’s still highly listenable.

All the above from 2 April 2024.

73 very short segments – each one 60 seconds or less in length – emanate from a remarkable array of talents, only a few names familiar to me, and they might not all be artists, even. I think the intention is not to survey the Koln techno or glitch “scenes” in yet another worthy but boring comp, rather there’s a plan to give us a glimpse of the pulsing heart of the city, through all forms of music (electronics and acoustic improvisation), sounds, voices, bizarre events, and maybe even field recordings – it’s very hard to say. The cumulative effect is what’s important, and mirrors the way I assume the modern tourist absorbs culture these days – always in a hurry, on the way to something else, pausing just long enough to snap something on their smartphone and post it on a TikTok.

It might make more sense to situate this hard-core marshmallow in the context of the wider reiheM project – which is mainly a concert series “for contemporary music, electronics, and new media”, and Mark e.V. is the organiser of it all. There’s already a 750 page book of texts and images surveying their achievements since 2009. Plenty of detail packed in the booklet too – the credit roster and instrument lists take longer to read than it does to listen to each track, plus there are oddly drab photos which can’t decide whether to foreground the urban wonders of motorways and blocks of flats, or the greenery that surrounds them. I assume we’re being deliberately positioned far away from the tourist spots of Cologne, in favour of these détournements. The booklet text also contains musings and philosophies on the “meaning” of noise in modern environments. (02/04/2024)

Well, he’s not averse to making sounds either – and here as Z.B. Aids he turns in a collection of his far-out experiments using just a guitar and a Walkman, so results are mostly degraded guitar sounds combined with a very singular approach to improvisation and free playing, and (I assume) crazy treatments of magnetic tape. This particular genius commands our respect for his deep underground credentials – few know about him or his work, even his supporters and friends – and despite art exhibits, art books (see above) and a record like this one, it is highly unlikely that the raw unrefined art of Hengray will ever reach the hungry audience it deserves. Or any audience at all, given current international trends intent on snuffing out art in all its forms, and replacing it with ersatz, meaningless pap. Michel Henritzi sums up the achievement of this great man in a single word – “alienation” – and remarks on his “aesthetic of disappointment and entropy”, qualities which are particularly to be savoured in today’s world of bland smiling faces, unearned positivity, and expectations of high-achievement.

If we can believe the testimony of the creator himself, his sole ambition is to be an outsider – abstract himself from society completely, live alone in the woods, make grotesque sculptures out of wood for his own satisfaction, and even recklessly fire bullets at inanimate objects in an act of nihilistic elan which aligns him with the Surrealists. But it seems the culture, the environment, and the circumstances are unwilling or unable to vomit out this anomalous growth in their midst, and so he operates in this very exciting interstitial zone striving hard to produce what he may and issue such statements as can be wrung from the neck and strings of his long-suffering guitar machine. I myself have never heard anything like this LP – ten tracks of unclassifiable outpourings, whose sincerity and deep truths cannot be doubted, yet will be rejected instantly by many listeners who fear its awkward, ungainly, ugly forms, shunning it just as they once shunned Quasimodo. I can only suggest you grasp a copy, rub your belly against the ‘Glauque Flamboyant’ and prepare for a lifetime of warped brain-damage and tormented dreams, but you’ll be all the better for it.

Limited to 150 copies and still in print at time of writing, with a poster included. Recommended; a truly unique statement from the DIY deep underground. From 20 Feb 2024.

In these aims, he’s ably supported by the artworks of Evan Crankshaw, who I see has provided visuals for him before, on releases with evocative titles such as Beauté de Mirages and Expedition. Crankshaw assembles exquisite collages from photos and old engravings, like Max Ernst without any of the menace, or Joseph Cornell without the poetry. To add a further layer for the busy mind to decode, The Dead Mauriacs have included a short fiction-text in the booklet, alluding to a “dangerous game involving agents, observers and parakeets in a park” – all of which sounds promising enough, like Fantômas and Juve meeting in the Parc de Bruxelles, and the detailed text adds further accretions to his skewed, alternative history of Europe between the wars.

All of these hints and clues are cultivated to perfection, yet they amount to very little of substance in the end, and the entire effect is very mannered. But even so it’s a diverting enough listen, like an hour spent in a garden maze being followed by a sinister man in a bowler hat, with the promise of croissants and patisserie at the end. (30/04/2024)

As Modelbau, this hyper-productive creator from the Netherlands made over 100 releases since about 2011 or 2012; his method was mainly to work live in the studio, playing tapes in real time I suppose. After ten years, he or somebody else compiled a big book of Modelbau and all their recordings, at which point de Waard decided on a change of emphasis. He had every single Modelbau recording in his personal archive (presumably including all the unissued portions), and decided to move away from the real-time approach and try some overdubbing and layering techniques. The results of that action are now issued as Extricate. Its contents have been drawn from the 2020-21 segment of the archive and he mixed it all together in 2022.

Frans de Waard is no stranger to the idea of “recycling”; you might find this urge to repurpose, transform, and reuse recorded sounds in almost all of his projects, which since 1981 all represent his own very personal and productive update on the traditional precepts of musique concrète. For this item, he’d like to stress the natural “flow” of the piece – although there may be fourteen separate movements, there’s nothing dramatic to mark the changes between them, and his watchword of the day is “always moving”. There are very few, if any, recognisable landmarks or reference points to guide the listener as we drift through this slow and heavily abstracted zone, in places quite unsettling in its nightmarish hue and deep fog of uncertainty. (30/04/2024)