Tagged: computers

Horn Beam Fantasmas


Loopy and intense noisy jazz rock blurt from Cactus Truck, a trio which showcases the saxophone malarkey of John Dikeman as much as the tangled guitar lines of Jasper Stadhouders, while drummer Onno Govaert urges these two rabid loons to propel themselves over the cliff edge. Their album Brand New For China! (PUBLIC EYESORE NO. 119) has a ten-minute opening salvo which will let the listener know instantly if they’ve the stomach to stick around for more of the same. These “spiky” fellows have caused much agitation in and around Amsterdam where they are based (this was recorded in a Netherlands studio), but many improvisers and veteran jazzmen on the international circuits also tip their hats to Cactus Truck. They make sure to put on gardening gloves first, though. I’d like to report a melange of Albert Ayler lines on top of Beefheartian blues rhythms, but their ultra-aggressive music favours surface sound and technique over structure. Not that you’ll notice as you succumb to the joyous free energy on offer here. (09/07/2012)

From the Belgian duo NDE we have Kampfbereit (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR146CD), their second release which in typography and cover art at least is “disguised” as a Black Metal album, but turns out to be a wild experiment in suffocating, extreme noise – situated in the “Death Industrial” sub-sub-genre, as the press notes would have it. As they hurl around their buckets of distortion, hammering percussion, and excessively filtered screaming vocals, NDE also prove they can do dynamic changes pretty well, and the album is designed almost purely as an extreme listening experience, where we are given few clues or map points and the listener’s imagination must work hard to process the scrambled information. A few quieter tracks paint “bleak and empty” vistas of desolate misery, but most of the content is simply intolerably repellent and over-layered loud noise. A painful and torturous journey to the depths of a Pandemonium-styled Hades. (28/07/2012)

Is it too early to say Northern Spy Records are taking up the slack from ESP-Disk? The latter label used to make a point in the 1960s of signing up eccentric performers from rock’s margins, some of them recruited direct from the street, and gradually made history thereby (even if they sold few records at the time). I’m getting a similar vibe from Diamond Terrifier, although my impression is based largely on the photo inside the gatefold of Kill The Self That Wants To Kill Your Self (NORTHERN SPY RECORDS NSCD026), and I may be misreading it completely. This odd record is a one-man show by Sam Hillmer, who exhibits untrammelled raw passion when playing his saxophone, recorded in strange ways and at strange times, with minimal (or zero) accompaniment. That woodwind instrument has rarely sounded so other-worldly. It’s not just microphone placement, either; Hillmer is reaching down into a very deep personal place to extract these hollow bellows and loosing them into the ether like mind-drenching fog clouds. Diamond Terrifier, who cutely expresses his name as <>T, is a truly original primitive. This is his debut record; will the world allow a second release? P.S. – the fauvist version of the American flag on back cover is a nice touch, clues us in to the “alternative” universe of Mr. Hillmer. (19/07/2012)

Blindshore is James Adkisson, a Texas guitarist who used to play in Seven Percent Solution. Hollow (SELF-RELEASED) is a solo album on which he plays everything, and freely owns up to his influences – some of them rather conventional, such as Adrian Belew or Brian May, along with his first loves Fripp and Sonic Youth. The results are agreeable and competent modern rock music, but given his proclivities for progressive rock and melody (no bad things, I hasten to add), Blindshore is unlikely to be mistaken for a carbon-copy of solemn post-rockers such as Isis or Red Sparowes. Adkisson’s vocals are a tad thin, but he uses the singing voice as another instrument in his very thickened mixes, where no space is left unfilled and there is barely space for the listener to move. (18/07/2012)

Attacca are an improvising trio based in Berlin active since 2010, who declare O’ The Emotions! (SCHRAUM 15). Two German players, the trombonist Mattias Müller and the bassist Axel Haller, are joined by Canadian Dave Bennett, a refugee electro-acoustic student who has made his home in Europe’s financial capital and contributes guitar to the trio’s sound. Attacca seem to be all about the very rich sound they make together, rather than owing much of a debt to jazz or even improvised music, and don’t wish to draw attention to their respective techniques. Instead, we hear a compelling and integrated combination of tones and textures, with repetitions and patterns arrived at by very natural means. The ebbs and flows of this watery gelatin suck us in like so much quicksand. The “emotions” of the title are thus very hard to name or identify, and clearly they can only be processed by the players through their exploratory work. (12/07/2012)

More splendidly sickened and corrupted computer noise from dsic, the New Zealand expat who lives in Bristol and whose LF Records netlabel rarely disappoints. Public Benefits, Private Vices (LF020) is one of his more aggressive concoctions, seething with hateful noise for most of its duration, and feeling entitled to pummel the listener’s head with cruel buffets. When this punch-up with a street drunk subsides, we are left with curious passages of disaffected half-noise, which pulsate and sizzle like an angry insect poised to strike again. The only variations to the above scheme are found with the final track, a soothing potion of pure tones deployed in random fashion; and the curious voice loops which last for 36 seconds on track two. Whole album could erupt into violence at any moment, creating a tense and invigorating spin. When I grow tired of “polite” and well-manicured laptop music, I always turn to dsic, a man who’s never afraid to show his Samsung just who wears the pants in his house! (24/07/2012)

Just heard from Alfredo Costa Monteiro yesterday, and here he is again as part of an ad-hoc trio called 300 Basses, with Jonas Kocher and Luca Venitucci. Sei Ritornelli (POTLATCH P212) was recorded in late 2011 when the three of them were on a residency in Switzerland. Although I personally would welcome the formation of an orchestra of 300 musicians playing only the upright double bass (and hopefully doing so at the Hot Gates), the music of 300 Basses is in fact predicated on the accordion. Continuing to pursue his radical, deconstructionist approach to conventional instruments, Monteiro attempts to refashion the very workings of the accordion according to his own diabolical schemes, rethinking the respective purposes of the bellows, keys and buttons. If applied to to the fields of biology or zoology, I suspect his “what-if” approach would lead to his being banned under various international anti-vivisection agreements. The resultant horrors are laid bare on this extreme record, where to my ears the accordions simply seem to be begging for mercy under this cruel and unusual treatment. Still, that’s clearly the intention. Kocher used to make me a little impatient with his earlier slow-moving minimalist releases like Materials and Solo, but there’s a little more fire to be heard in this collaborative work. (09/07/2012)

Share on Myspace
012

Miniature Candies


The Replace (EDITION DEGEM DEGEM CD10) compilation was put together by Marc Behrens for a Berlin label. He poses pointed questions about the many ways in which modern electro-acoustic music seemed to promise artistic utopias in the 20th century, and whether this notion still has any currency today. 14 modern electronica artistes (see image for full list of names) contribute to the debate in both musical and annotated form, covering topics such as philosophy, landscape painting, YouTube, spirituality, colour and geometric forms, and a chess-playing machine. Ambitious in scope, but so much of the music feels drab, unfinished, and half-baked.

A similarly difficult conundrum about modern life is posed by the ever-active Francisco López on his Untitled #284 (CRÓNICA 066-2012). He asks questions about reality, virtual reality, and the disappearance of real things, wondering about what it is we might actually be perceiving, as we flit about from coffee shop to shopping mall. Is it the real thing that is missing, or are we just feeding off our memories of reality? Armed with these Cartesian sentiments, and to further this poignant discussion, he reprocesses some field recordings he made in Lisbon in 1992. The accoutrements and blandishments of the modern urban world – if that is indeed what we are hearing – have rarely sounded so threatening, chaotic and alien. Looks like López peeled back the mask which cloaks reality, and didn’t like what he found.

Assured and entertaining retro-rock from Vibravoid on their Gravity Zero (SULATRON RECORDS ST 1201) album. If only they’d been operating in the UK around 1988-1989, then Spacemen 3, Bevis Frond and Sundial would not have enjoyed quite the same monopoly on lush psych-influenced muscular underground rock music. This album benefits from the rich additions of mellotron, Theremin and other far-out instruments to the punchy mix, but these Europeans also know how to compose a decent chord-filled song and stick to it. Their update on H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The White Ship’, one of my personal faves among bad-acid dirges from the late 1960s, is one of many highlights.

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay is one of many Canadian electro-acoustic composers showcased on the empreintes DIGITales label who enjoys having their work presented as a 5.1 surround sound experience in stereo, pressed on a DVD for improved audio quality. Quelque reflets (IMED 11109) contains a number of his meditative and philosophical musings in sound form, of which I most enjoyed the tripartite opening number ‘Reflets de notre société crépusculaire’, with its title highly suggestive of an unpublished Edward Gorey book. Tremblay endeavours here to express his feelings of powerlessness in today’s world. Similar ethical dilemmas are expressed on the other works.

FilFla‘s Flip Tap (SOMEONE GOOD RMSG013) is a collection of short and concise instrumental pop tunes put together by the Japanese composer Keiichi Sugimoto, and an instalment in the ’10 Songs in 20 Minutes’ series, this label’s plan to celebrate the joys of avant-pop music. Sugimoto evidently has the skill of compression and his deftness in creating these upbeat and jolly episodes with their near-perfect production sheen is considerable. If only there were some actual melodies one could sink one’s teeth into. Seconds of high-pitched and extremely pleasant electronic miniaturised candy shapes fly by, but without much apparent song-form structure to underpin them. I’d imagine this is like watching a day’s worth of Japanese TV commercials in the space of half an hour.

I’m not a serious soundtrack music collector, but I gather there has grown up a rich subculture where individual composers of library music for KPM, De Wolfe, Chappell and others are being identified and celebrated after the fact, elevated from their formerly rather anonymous positions, while original pressings of the records are eagerly collected by covetous fans and DJs. Perhaps a similar mindset informs Sid Chip Sounds: The Music of the Commodore 64 (ROBOT ELEPHANT RECORDS RER013), an extremely unusual compilation which gathers examples of music for computer games designed for the Commodore 64 home computer system, first launched in 1982. Bob Yannes is named as the pioneering maestro who made this possible through his development of the SID Chip, and a number of composers – among them Martin Galway, Matt Gray, Ben Daglish, David Whittaker and others – are all showcased with examples of their musical endeavours. The games, including Last Ninja, Gauntlet 3 and Comic Bakery, are likewise namechecked. Musically, the album may feel a bit undernourished and the annoying limitations of the squelchy electronic sound may start to grate on some ears after only 10 minutes of play, but there is much interest to be derived from the inventive ways in which the musicians learned to overcome those limitations, to produce bouncy and entertaining music. That said, I think to call them “revolutionary composers”, as per the press release, is a massive overstatement. This release plugs into a whole retro subculture of young DJs who grew up with this material as part of their personal soundtrack, and are now restating it through assorted lo-fi subgenres such as 8-bit, chiptune, and gabba. Issued as a CD and double LP; only the packaging is a massive disappointment, and I’m not sure why it couldn’t have featured some colourful screengrabs from the games (licensing problems perhaps).

Florian Hecker compiled the double 10-inch LP set with the elaborate title 2/8 Bregman 4/8 Deutsch 7/8 Hecker 1/8 Höller (PRESTO!? P!?018), and the fractions involved in that naming scheme are to do with the amount of input from each contributor. It would be interesting to apply that degree of calibration to the thorny problem of composers’ rights, so maybe Hecker should consider contracting his skills to the international rights societies for music. Forty minutes of music are thus spread across four sides to be played at 45 RPM. The first two sections seemed to be nothing more than just minimal and extremely irritating digital sequences played randomly at high speed; anonymous ringtone music. But the third and fourth segments are slightly more engaging with their looped repetitions of a short vocal sound, which could be a micro-second sampled from the voice of a female announcer and reduced to a single syllable. Doubtless, if we listened to them for long enough we would experience the aural hallucinations which Disinformation has termed “Rorschach Audio”. These represent updates on the classic Steve Reich tape loops of voice segments, although our man Hecker evinces no interest whatsoever in the human emotions, politics or spirituality evidenced on ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ and ‘Come Out’. Instead, the entire work is trying to make a marginal point about sensory perception and the psychology of hearing. Accordingly the press release comes with a reading list of academic books and papers on the subject, to assist us in our investigations. I recall feeling equally unengaged and alienated by Hecker’s Speculative Solution from 2011, and sadly this one isn’t doing much to reconcile me with the current scientific directions of his work.

All the above arrived at TSP headquarters in February and April 2012.

Share on Myspace
001

Synchronisms


I think we last heard from Noah Creshevsky with his 2010 album Twilight of the Gods, released on the Tzadik label, and there is also the 2008 item Favorite Encores where he teamed up with If, Bwana. Now here he is on Al Margolis’ label Pogus Productions with Rounded With A Sleep (POGUS 21063-2), containing seven recent-ish examples of his dazzling and impressive “hyperrealism” compositions. Creshevsky is a meticulous electro-acoustic maestro who uses an extreme form of editing, cutting and pasting together sounds from multiple sources; on this record, he does it using the recorded performances of numerous musicians, so we have a rich array of musical notes and sounds from clarinet, voices, guitar, banjo, steel guitar, cello, bass, and improvised piano music. Twilight of the Gods went all-out for the wow-factor with its intense and utterly impossible layered compositions, its runs of notes rushing past at ridiculous speeds, and a generally breathless tone throughout most of the album. Rounded With A Sleep feels somewhat more manageable than that tornado, and its keynote to me seems to be an intimate contemporary form of chamber music. This may be simply because there aren’t as many instruments to listen to, but this outlandish composer does not skimp on the “can such things be?” factor, presenting us with a lavish feast of layered, cropped, varispeeded and intricately assembled musical phrases, the like of which hasn’t really been heard since Frank Zappa overworked the Apostolic Studios board on the Uncle Meat album in 1968. This is particularly evident on the clarinet and keyboard interplay on ‘La Sonnambula’, and the astonishing recastings made out of Stuart Isacoff’s piano work on ‘What If’, which is like a surrealistic walkthrough the history of classical European keyboard music. If I knew more about the field, I might be able to identify resonances with Bach, Mozart and Haydn with more confidence, but as it is I can only effuse my vague ill-informed impressions. I’m on slightly safer ground with the guitar-based piece ‘The Kindness of Strangers’, which offers us a virtual trio of guitar, bass, lap steel and banjo players, refashioned in the studio to create an utterly mangled form of anguloid country and western music, where not even the singing voice is spared the full Creshevsky treatment. One is usually left somewhat exhausted by listening to only ten minutes of this dense music, but it is clear Creshevsky is not simply out to surprise or stun the listener with a zillion cultural references and juxtapositions in the manner of many plunderphonics artists over the last 20 years. On the contrary, he aims to advance music. His sleeve notes here offer a robust critique of the norms of classical music performance, highlighting the “bad economics” of paying “good wages to a live performer who merely sings a 10-second coda at the end of a string quartet”. Creshevsky’s hyperrealism, and by extension any music that has been collaged in a studio through judicious selection of the best performances 1, offers a viable alternative to that old 19th century concert-hall based model. However the composer is not out to completely junk the past, and he is driven by traditional musical values of virtuosity, sonic palettes, and the production of an expressive musical language. His edits produce a form of super-virtuosity from the work of the already highly-capable musicians he works with. If his music seems exaggerated to us, it’s because he feels he also has to compete with the excesses of the information age, where we have been exposed to so much culture that he fears the power of music may be diminished. Creshevsky’s response to the situation is far from pessimistic; he devotes himself to creating energised and uplifting music, that truly refreshes the sensory passages. From 17 February 2012.

The American composer John Bischoff studied with Robert Ashley at Mills, and was also a member of the League of Automatic Music Composers. The latter team of experimenters made use of early (late 1970s-early 1980s) computer technology to generate random electronic music in endearingly home-made ways. On Audio Combine (NEW WORLD RECORDS 80727-2), we hear five of his more recent works dating from 2004 to 2011, which are broadly related in their use of physical objects or instruments being employed to trigger electronic sounds. There are subtle variations to do with the use of amplification, timing patterns, and attempts to subvert or re-order the original time sequences by ingenious methods. Most of this very process-heavy music seemed uneventful to me, but I enjoyed parts of ‘Sidewalk Chatter’ which was made using the STEIM crackle box 2 and effectively documents some sort of interactive hands-on dialogue between the performer and a computer, via the exposed metal circuits of the box. ‘Surface Effect’ is also sporadically exciting and works on similar principles, that is the interaction between a trigger device and a computer program, but this piece makes more extensive use of pre-planned random structures and allows, in a control-freak sort of way, the oscillators to create unpredictable patterns. A complex form of a detuned and unstable synthesiser, if you will, which benefits from being entirely hand-made by Bischoff. From 20 February 2012.

Trophies is the oddball project of the Italian composer Alessandro Bosetti, a vehicle for his complex prose-poem concoctions which he intones rather emotionlessly on top of a free-form musical structure provided by the drummer Ches Smith and the guitarist Kenta Nagai. Bosetii also adds uncertain electronic tones, colours and washes, and Nagai’s guitar is fretless, meaning he is able to make music while avoiding constructing familiar riffs or tunes. These strategies add to the deliberately obtuse contours of the sound and the open-ended nature of the compositions, producing sensations in the listener that are very hard to explain. Six examples of this perplexing music can be heard on A Color Photo Of The Horse (D.S. AL CODA #4), all recorded in Brooklyn in a single day in 2010 under the production guidance of Alex Waterman. Trophies music is always a bit daunting and overwhelming to listen to. For starters, the music is half-familiar, half-unfamiliar; at times it almost resembles a form of dissonant experimental jazz-minimalism performed without any sort of underpinning rhythm or pattern, and at other times proceeds with the urgency of a tricky Trey Gunn riff from a latter incarnation of King Crimson. Mostly, it is dissonant and unpredictable, wriggling about the turf like a structural-materialist centipede. Then there’s the equally tricky lyrical content, a jumbled explosion of prose verbosity which may sometimes repeat certain phrases, and which occupies some halfway mark between Samuel Beckett and Lenny Bruce. As soon as I think I stand on the verge of grasping the meaning of these breathless texts, they almost instantly collapse back into a sea of absurdity and gibberish. The situation is not helped by Bosetti’s studied ambiguity as he performs his half-musical recits, at times almost parodying the emotional dramas of a soul singer or operatic diva, but mostly rattling through his forests of words with the speed and efficiency of a human typewriter. True meanings are masked in this post-modern diatribe. Make no mistake, this is a truly fine art piece of business – conceptual art trammelled up with music in ways that make Laurie Anderson sound like pop music. In some ways this could be the closest we’ll get to hearing a Raymond Pettibon drawing in sound. This release is one of numerous oddities, including some DVDs, we received from this inscrutable art label in January 2012. All of them are packed in sleeves which cannot be unfolded.

  1. By which I mean anything from George Martin with The Beatles to Teo Macero with Miles Davis. ↩
  2. The instrument has its origins in an invention of Michel Waisvisz, who made an LP of it for FMP records in 1978. The device was also used briefly by Derek Bailey on Domestic and Public Pieces. ↩
Share on Myspace
004

Transitive Axis


Last heard from Parisian-based electroacoustic musician Éric Cordier in 2009, with a batch of items from his own Prêle Records label. Here he is with a mini-CD La Cité Du Bruit (UNIVERSINTERNATIONAL UI-CD016) which arrived here 1st March 2012. In about 18 minutes, Cordier proposes an aural comparison between the sound of jet engines of fighter-bomber aircraft, and the sounds made by small river insects. He calls it a “confrontation” rather than a comparison. I for one would welcome a set-to between these roaring instruments of death and the harmless benign winged ones of the Loire, so that we could finally settle this long vendetta once and for all. However being of a technical nature, Cordier is more interested in the contrasts between large and small sounds, between loud mechanical noise and gentle organic whirring. In any case this binary approach to the matter leaves out the third element in these recordings, which is something to do with microphones going wrong – at any rate the discharging of electrons inside a condenser microphone, an event so microscopic I wonder if it can even be said to have occurred at all. Apparently it did though, and this CD contains the hard evidence. In case any listeners were hoping for a miniaturised version of powerhouse noise in art-music form, I may need to point out that this work is rather quiet and restrained, despite containing the word “Bruit” in the title and featuring the said Chasseurs Bombardiers and arriving with a Futurist-styled cover image highly redolent of noise, speed and power. Our listening interest derives from Cordier’s ingenious editing skills. The word “seamless” comes to mind when faced with these subtle collisions of unrelated sounds – in fact it’s almost like he’s melting the edits together like a glassblower with an acetylene torch. Presumably computer software makes this kind of smooth edit eminently possible, compared with the old days when musicians had to splice their magnetic tapes together by hand with a razor blade and a roll of tape. As he tottered around the cafés of the 8th arrondissement, Pierre Schaeffer frequently used to declare you weren’t worth beans as a musician until all your fingertips were raw and bloody 1. Now the worst dangers a musician faces are RSI, WRULD, eyestrain or backache.

On Ley (ENTR’ACTE E125), we hear the team-up of trumpeter Andy Diagram and Keith Moliné. The album is a stitched-together jumble bag of rags and oddments, and has a foreboding complexity and denseness you wouldn’t believe. They started with recordings of their own improvisations performed with trumpet and guitar (and tubes, bowls of water and other miscellaneous items) which were pretty idiosyncratic to begin with – they did it in the back garden with no amplification, and tried to enact that form of disconnect that is so valuable to creators, to get away from self-consciously “creating art” or evade the over-familiar patterns of playing. Then the recordings were subjected to further malarkey from programs running on Moliné’s computer. Along with the original recording data, he threw some “wild” data into the mix, apparently derived from digital image files and text files. This practice, by which I mean the repurposing of JPEGS, TXT and other non-audio file formats into something which an audio editing suite can process or play, seems to be cropping up quite a few times lately, so maybe it’s starting to enter the lingua franca of experimental music. On Ley, the process may not be directly used to generate sounds, but it has been used to trigger certain digital instruments and contribute to the overall process. This has resulted in a listening experience that is extremely chaotic and unpredictable. I do like the fact that Moliné’s method has blurred the edges almost completely between real-time improvising and post-hoc computer mayhem, and there are sound events taking place in the fabric of this music that are almost shockingly unfamiliar and strange. At the same time, I’m hard pushed to find any logical train of thought in these compositions; it’s as if the “wild” elements have taken over for 90% of the time, and the computer’s errant patterns of behaviour are guiding everything, making sonic mincemeat of the material. Put a madman behind the wheel of a very fast big truck, and wait for the fun to start. With this two-pronged approach to randomness, this pair are certainly trying to take aleatory composition to a new level, even at the expense of creating a rather indigestible music.

Another refreshing album of solid instrumental music on the Hubro label, this one from Ballrogg with their Cabin Music (HUBRO HUBROCD2515). The duo of Klaus Holm and Roger Arntzen (woodwinds and double bass, respectively) started out with a mission to render the music of Eric Dolphy in a more minimal, pared-down way, positing an alternative history where that lively free-jazz hooter had somehow come under the influence of Morton Feldman instead of Ornette Coleman 2. Ballrogg’s project then is to rethink jazz as “subdued chamber music”, and their efforts are recorded in crystal clarity across four long instrumental tracks here. On this outing they are joined by the guitarist Ivar Grydeland with his banjo and acoustic guitar, but also his pedal steel guitar which adds mournful and plangent notes to the already melancholic, wistful music. I like most of the album and only ‘Breakfast Music’ misfires, with its tasteful chords shading into easy-listening modes and producing music that more resembles Stan Getz with Kenny Burrell than Dolphy with Mal Waldron. For the most part though, this is a studied and focussed exploration of long saxophone / clarinet tones and precise, skeletal bass plucks, with entrancing results. Look out for Grydeland’s solo album on this label as well.

French musician eRikm has always been welcome here with his imaginative and bold use of the turntable in improvising situations (even though he mostly does it with a CD player these days). I was impressed to find on Transfall (ROOM 40 RM449) he’s now expanding his visions into something which could be termed a species of contemporary classical composition – at least the first track, 21 minutes of ‘Austral’, fits such a profile and was performed under his direction by Ensemble Laborintus. Two players from that group, notably the harpist Hélène Breschand and the clarinettist Sylvain Kassap are familiar to us from their work with Franck Vigroux, and indeed have made at least one duo record for his label; while the Ensemble as a whole has tackled the music of Stockhausen, Luc Ferrari, and François Rossé. ‘Austral’ has some surface connections to 20th-century composition with its generally atonal approach, crazy percussion and wild twists of compositional logic, but I’d like to think there’s also an improvisatory element happening somewhere in the midst of its open-ended structure. Is it just a coincidence that the title is very close to Cage’s ‘Etudes Australes’? Remainder of the CD is I think mostly eRikm’s solo electronic and electro-acoustic music, including the foreboding shades and textures of ‘Batfox Park’, or the ferocious alien insanity and menacing near-silent hisses of ‘Klein Surface’ – both of which are laced with the toughness and sullen attitude which this man has made into one of his trademarks. There’s also ‘Pavlova’ which incorporates some piano music supplied by Frédéric Blondy to produce a very sombre tone painting in multiple shades of black, using backwards-tapes, layering and digital judder in a fascinating update on more “traditional” musique concrète methods. Arrived 5th March 2012 and also available as a download.

  1. He never said any such thing. ↩
  2. This isn’t too fanciful a scenario when you remember that Dolphy attended the same college (LA State) as another composer who would later go on to scale the wall of minimalism, La Monte Young. ↩
Share on Myspace
029

Desks of Steel


Gimlet Eyed Mariners are the English duo of Michael Fairfax and Barry Witherden. On Dark Secret Love (SLIGHTLY OFF KILTER SOK040) they offer us four examples of their all-improvised, no-overdubs and one-take approach to making music using two Korgs, guitar, percussion, computer, and other keyboards. ‘In the howling storm’ has a nicely aggravated edge to its bleak and slightly formless soundscaping, but ‘Great Central Lake’ is somewhat more structured, arriving at a sort of open-ended melody which unfolds for 11 minutes on top of a simple keyboard pattern. This one reminds us of a very long Residents tune or a less-polished version of a lost track from the Sky Records label circa 1982. So far what they have working in their favour is a very “quirky” sound where the unadulterated voices of wonky synths shine forth with little attempt to file down the edges with some “tasteful” filter effects, which is generally a good idea for synth combos who don’t want to end up like Colin Potter has done. GEM also keep all their “mistakes” in the final product, thus proving they aren’t really mistakes at all. Next to be scanned by the laser device we have ‘Fifi catches the Voodoo Up’, which is a deliberate joke on the famous Miles Davis title. In fact the band consider this 15-minute whirlamaroo to be their “Miles Davis” piece. Reading this prepared me to expect some sort of harsh 70s evil funk, but it ends up as an endearingly British version of lo-fi bedroom warped disco with barely a danceable moment to be had in among the awkward avantish blocks of noise. Percussion loops clatter like tiny bracelets and synth lines swirl and wobble in crazy doodle shapes. After all that fun-loving rodomontade, the title track returns us to their version of “dark industrial murk”, with its semi-comical distorted murmuring and gabbling voices and shudderingly wayward dronescapes pulled out of the intestines of the synths with many gasping protests. This track could well be the one that earns them the Nurse With Wound comparisons, if they wanted to tread down that route for their next release. Mr Witherden wrote the notes to this release, and he is at pains to stress the absence of pre-conceived ideas in their working methods, pointing out that the track titles are only added after the fact and are not intended to colour our views of the music in any way; the music, he insists, is only “about itself”. Fair enough, but I remember when I was 19 my art-college buddy Albert tried the exact same line about “no pre-conceived ideas” with regard to his paintings. The tutor, Harry Weinberger, was having none of it and responded with a long lecture about how that was completely impossible, that every visual stimulus you see influences you in some way, and there was no such thing as this sort of “free painting” ideal. This one arrived 17 January 2012, and the duo are described as “more mature music makers”, who are also evidently quite literate and draw some inspiration from the writings of William Blake.

Improvisation of another kind now from the duo of Rhodri Davies and Mark Wastell. The Welsh harpist Davies is forsaking his usual stringed instrument to manipulate his live electronics set-up on these old-ish (2005) live recordings, from Melbourne (the small English market town, not the Australian city). Mark Wastell likewise has left his tam-tam at home and is electing instead to play lots of close-mic’ed objects, along with his CD player, mixing desk, and electronics equipment. We don’t hear so much of this kind of playing in the improvisation world these days. At one stage there seemed to be a minor upsurge in the incidence of players seizing inert materials like plastic bags or blocks of polystyrene, rubbing them together, and using small contact microphones to amplify the results. Often the results were quite boring, in spite of all that avowed “experimental” activity. Live In Melbourne (MIKROTON RECORDINGS MIKROTON CD 10), I am happy to report, is very successful on the musical front, contains a lot of incident and interesting sounds (no long pauses or pointless silent contemplations), and above all is clear evidence of strong musical skills and an outstanding rapport between the two players. 36 minutes of intense and absorbing abstract micro-shuffling mixed with controlled feedback drones and high-pitched whining sounds. From Russia, this arrived 31 January.

Another item from the bundle of Unfathomless CDs is Aguatierra (U06) by Juan José Calarco. It’s two long suites, mostly captured from the Xohimilco Ecological park in Mexico City, where the artist pursues his interest in canals; there are also sounds from a nature reserve in Argentina, and a collaborator Pablo Reche assisted with parts of the work. As the title suggests, the sound is an elegant and seamless blend of water sounds and earth sounds. The cover artworks also achieve this blending; they were assembled by Daniel Crokaert, using artworks by Calarco. I like this one better than the previously noted item from this label; Calarco seems less “mystical” and more plain-spoken in his artistic deliberations, and the work has a clarity and simplicity that can’t fail to appeal to lovers of the “phonography” genre. Purchase this for a relaxing and slow journey through a very calm and serene landscape / waterscape, with the gentle songs of birds and chirring of insects to pass the hours.

The diametric opposite of calm and serene is that strange inhuman noise offered by Keroaän, on a mini-CDR called Daunting In Its Variousness: First in a suite of an Indeterminate Number of Pieces (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYR03). This crackling and human-crushing diabolical noise may have had its origins in computer code, if the notes are anything to go by; they refer to Keroaän artificial intelligence, developed by Ian M. Fraser and Reed Evan Rosenberg. The actual music of course is performed by Keroaän itself “without any human intervention whatsoever”. Give yourself time to work through the unfamiliar and near-painful sensations afforded by the gritty surfaces here, and eventually you may be rewarded with near-musical swipes and unearthly screams of complaint issuing from the bowels of this huge chunk of code as it passes through the functions of a media player. The performance is also chopped apart into segments that incorporate heart-stopping silences in among the grunckering brattlements, acting in a grotesque parody of conventional musical dynamics. It may seem stilted and unnatural at times, but the achievement here is the glorious impossibility of it; no human being could ever bring themselves to the point where they might conceive of making noise music in this way, let alone have the courage to execute it. Proof once again that the machines are taking over, and they will win. Fraser and Reed may one day manage to write a machine-readable script that acts as a simulacrum for a virtual Merzbow. Note also the use of the Cagean term “indeterminate”, and the painterly brush work on the disc adding a splash of fine-art loft-scene vibe. From 16 January, another nifty slice of marginal New York experimentism.

Share on Myspace

Grey Lunar Seas


The Peregrine (EXPERIMEDIA EXPLP020) by Lawrence English came out in 2011 as a vinyl LP, offering two sides of virtually non-stop ambient drone electronics of an overpowering richness. I can see some sense in the press release’s notes about “saturation”; this is the kind of very full sound that can drench a listener, and to step into this environment is to emerge dripping head to foot with strange digital washes and thick syrupy gloop in your gumboots. The second side is slightly more introverted and bleak than the first, but it’s all the kind of whirlpool-quicksandy anti-matter than English not only has made into one of his readily-identifiable signature sounds, but is also music that’s steeped in melancholy and wistful emotions. He based the work on a book called The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, finding musical inspiration not so much in the flights or predatory activities of this hawk-like avian monster, but in the book’s descriptive passages which apparently expend much prose on the environment, the land, and movement within it. This is also expressed by visual analogue on the cover, in Eugene Carchesio’s painting which depicts said bird in front of a row of empty musical staves.

Also on vinyl LP is Mark Fell‘s Periodic Orbit Of Dynamic System Related to a Knot (EDITIONS MEGO 133) which came out in late November 2011. It’s a very percussive-heavy set of electronica which proceeds at a fairly relentless pace with rhythms and cross-rhythms that would be impossible for anything but programmed machines to execute, and despite Fell’s consistently minimalistic approach to production it’s a fairly exhausting listen. I think this is due to two main factors: (1) remorselessness, as the beats start to feel more like the blows of a surgical hammer working its way through the shell of your cranium to attack soft brain tissue within; and (2) complexity, because Fell consistently refuses anything so obvious as four-beats-to-a-bar, preferring to programme his devices to deliver odd syncopations and trip-wire booby-traps that can entangle the feet of the unwary. Anyone attempting to dance to this music will indeed find themselves “related to a knot” in a way they hadn’t quite anticipated. His electronic melody lines (for want of a better term) are vaguely familiar enough to strike a chord with listeners conversant with more user-friendly dancefloor music, but the avant-garde manner in which these elements are set forth is unlikely to be mistaken for Saturday night entertainment. The album was compiled from a range of things lurking in Fell’s digital grab-bag, including out-takes, live work, and unreleased records, and is seamlessly presented here as two side-long suites executed with merciless precision and timing.

Day Lineal scored a hit with former TSP writer Aaron Robertson in 2007 with their Sound Like You Mean It album. What Will You Become? (NO LABEL) arrived here 24 November 2011, and shows they’re not exactly a prolific entity – this is only their fourth release since 2001. What we have is ten charming and rather unpredictable instrumental pieces, which proceed down an imaginary garden path with tripping gentle beats and regular rhythms, even when their melodies are not particularly memorable. Day Lineal’s chief appeal resides in their distinctive sound, which involves a process of recording and re-recording, using dictaphones to add that vaguely distorted impression which studio technicians strive so hard to create with filters and other effects. Most of what we hear is the sound of the musicians playing along to their own lo-fi pre-records, sometimes layering in subliminal field recordings for added ambience, and the album is a warm and appealing set of percussion-heavy music with an intangible nostalgic dimension, like fragments of Gamelan music captured from times past and replayed in a sun-filled nursery.

Another one Mego last winter was MP3 Deviations #6+7 by Yasunao Tone (EDITIONS MEGO 125). I found the whole thing repellent and unlistenable, but don’t let that put you off as it’s intended as a serious experiment in electronic music and has a deep commitment to the methodical scrambling of digital audio information which, I suggest, has been one of this label’s consistent aesthetic benchmarks since its very earliest times. 1 Working with collaborators at the New Aesthetics In Computer Music and the Music Research Centre at York University, Yasunao Tone created these two long pieces in New York in 2011 as part of his quest to develop a new form of audio software through “disruption of the MP3″. As part of his work, he succeeded in corrupting a source sound file to the extent that he could transform mistakes that would normally be regarded as processing errors into a new form of automated sound generation. He also hacked into an application and did various evil things which play hob with playback speeds, pitch, and stereo channels. Net result is that Mr Tone is persuaded he has invented a novel form of digital playback software, harnessing the unpredictable results which come from feeding corrupt data into a mangled application; presumably, although this is not explicitly stated on the release, the unpredictable-ness is somehow made constant and repeatable. He has since used it for live performances in public places, so it must have reached a steady state by now. I’m sure it succeeds on technical grounds, and probably what we hear is as close as we’ll ever get to “hearing” the actual processes by which a piece of software acts on a stream of data. As music, it’s well-nigh impossible for human ears to endure: an absurd and chaotic spew of non-musical wheezes, whines, high-pitched squeals and inhuman digital grunts.

Symeta (RASTER NOTON R-N130) by Byetone fits right into the way today’s post is shaping up, with its ultra-precise electronic beats and dub-like pulsations. Unlike most of what we’d heard today however, Byetone still believes in old-fashioned ideas like musical development, and although incredibly minimal and mechanical, his avant-techno pieces tend to keep to the same beat rather than opting for the massively-syncopated approach of Mark Fell, and pleasing melodic progressions in tone and pitch are not ruled out of scope either. I gather that some listeners find Byetone’s work pleasing enough, but grumble that he strays a digit too far from the Raster Noton aesthetic of pure abstract glitch, and that his music isn’t much more than an update on conventional or tried-and-tested forms of electro-beat music that are already regarded as old hat. However, that’s an area that’s beyond my ken, and today I’m finding these monotonous hypno-throbbers a very pleasing spin. Although it’s mostly the sort of impossibly-perfect superdisco music that we might expect from this label, there are two tracks called ‘Helix’ and ‘Black Peace’ that are much dirtier and distorted, almost “heavy metal” with their repeated loops of grungeiness, and it’s here at least we can see where the Suicide comparisons are coming from. Olaf Bender is Byetone and has been making music since 1999; Symeta derives from his live work of the last two years.

  1. When I spoke to Peter Rehberg (who is named as the executive producer of the present release) in 2000, he indicated that he considered his work with software as a form of “unsponsored research & development” – it was a way of repurposing applications in a way that the proprietors would never even consider, but which led to interesting future possibilities. He also likened hacking to the John Cage prepared piano, which is a bit of a leap of faith when considering these MP3 Deviations. At least the prepared piano still remained a piano after Cage’s intervention, albeit one with the normal resonances of its strings severely disrupted. One senses that if Yasunao Tone worked with a piano, he would have a team of carpenters take it apart so he could completely rebuild it from the ground up, and transform it into a rolltop writing desk with ivory teeth, a steel-string nervous system, and hammers that worked as detonators for a string of high explosive fireworks. ↩
Share on Myspace