Tagged: cut-ups

Magic Only You Know


I think we last heard from Neil Campbell / Astral Social Club as one half of Iibiis Rooge, a duo who produced an extremely trippy and de-centred experience of cluttered dronery for Dekorder around 2010. Fans of that LP should tune in to Generator Breaker (DEKORDER 055), a 2011 solo record by Astral Social Club, but it’s frankly hard to believe it’s just two sides of 33 RPM groove, since there’s probably enough information and layering packed into the wax here to fill at least a triple album box set. It’s thick and dense as lead-lined marmalade…Astral Social Club’s method, if I can attempt analysis for a second or two, is to blend drones, rhythms, melodies and beats in ways that should not really work, as if creating a three-dimensional art painting on sheets of perspex in a deserted aircraft hangar, with results that magically always look fantastic no matter where you’re positioned as a viewer. Even Ellsworth Kelly woulda turned in his shingle at that. High sounds, low sounds, big bass and tiny tinkling details – enormous ranges of aural saturation are welded together with great craft and skill. At moments during this album, when the layers slightly shift and drop away leaving us glimpses of other source materials through little sound-windows, I was reminded of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, a record which for ages had a reputation of being merely random noise when in fact (as was recently uncovered) there are speeded-up tapes of a musical sort shrieking their heads off inside the chaotic and inhuman mixture. Astral Social Club ain’t inhuman though, and to be sure he makes highly compassionate and luv-enriched droneathons fit for listening by happy humans. But he also flirts with chaos in an exciting way, accreting his layers and additions until you think the impossible structure can withstand no more weight. Then he puts a dollop of whipped cream on top, and amazingly the gigantic sonic sundae still stands, wobbling its way to your table. I never heard any of Psychic TV’s excursions into Acid House dementia in the late 1980s, but I would like to imagine they were as thickly intoxicating as these brews. (03/10/2011)

Last noted the talented Ashley Paul in January 2012 with her single for the Emerald Cocoon label. It’s a pleasure to receive Slow Boat (ORANGE MILK RECORDS), a full-length album of songs. She sings and plays all the instruments, apart from some assistance with percussion from Eli Keszler. Once again she produces an opaque, poetic and deeply personal statement, entirely on her own terms. I enjoy her approach to music very much, although I can also see how some listeners might find it somewhat challenging listening. It’s very hard to make out the words she sings, the album proceeds at a very slow pace, every note played seems uncertain and vague, and there isn’t a recognisable melody in sight within this brittle atonal zone. But these qualities are Ashley Paul’s strengths. She is pushing herself out on a limb the entire time, working hard to refuse any sort of conventional sound or over-familiar turn of musical phrase. She has distilled her work – both words and music – to an essence, where nothing superfluous or unnecessary remains. While this might lead her at times to appear mannered and stilted in her vocalising, you only have to listen for three minutes to discern the absolute conviction of this artist. Net result is an album that, in terms of its sound, is genuinely unique and original. If so inclined, you could separate out some of the sounds and find consonances with minimal avant-garde jazz in the clarinet and percussion effects, but soon other weird sounds haunt the track and you’ll find that comparison will not stand for long. What is Ashley Paul’s message to the world? I think it could be summed up as “life is uncertain”…1 the cryptic and allusive lyrics she mouths so hesitantly are one clue in that direction, and another clue is the still-born caution in each performance; every track is performed by a frightened steel-wire puppet, not knowing where the next step will lead. And the abiding atmosphere is underpinned by further groans of unknowing from the percussion section, which is sometimes capable of yielding a heavy sigh that makes you think the world is about to end in five minutes. In all, I really do think Ashley Paul has many profound things to say, but she herself isn’t entirely sure what they are; so she works out her uncertainty in public, on record, taking baby-steps out of the comfort zone and into the bleak world of unknowable powers. She makes music to find out why she wants to make music. 2

Vapor Gourds has made an entertaining and innovative record called Dagger Magic (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FRT086). If lo-fi and raw electronic mish-mash are elements that feed potassium to your inner plant life, then seek out this marginal curio and plant it in your flowerpot. This first came out as a cassette in 2008 and has now been repressed as a vinyl item by the Feeding Tube Records label, keen to spread the waywardness a bit further than the original broadcast. Jake Meginsky is Vapor Gourds, and also works in Slaughterhouse Percussion and X.O.4, beside being a percussionist, DJ and sound engineer. Dagger Magic is very much an assembled album, rather than a performed one, but it’s hard to tell with any certainty the tape loops and samples from the live electronic components, if any. I enjoy the rough collaged edges and slightly mismatched elements, giving Dagger Magic the lively feel of a thrown-together experiment instead of a product that’s been cooked to death through overdubbing and studio technique. Some tracks work as a form of minimal dub-electronica, all tasty micro-melodies and snappy beats; others are inchoate noise, barely responding to the rule of the “near-subliminal pulse work” that is laced through the album; much more of it is impossible to identify in any way. It all adds to a distinctive, tinny, barely-works flavour; no wonder the label invokes comparisons with Voice Crack on that account. I like the honesty and simplicity of Vapor Gourds on this outing, he has the spontaneous creativity of a sculptor working in coloured plasticine, whose lumpy figurines instantly harden into silver-plated miniature robots.

  1. See A.E. Housman’s “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy”. ↩
  2. OK, that’s another lift. It was written by James Sallis about his experimental science fiction work, in Again, Dangerous Visions, which is where I read it. ↩
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Vinyl Venisons Part 2


Jamka / Urban Failure / RBNX
Urbsounds Collective
SLOVAKIA URBSOUNDS COLLECTIVE 10 LP (2004)
A nice vinyl compilation from the Slovakian underground electronica team. This one showcases early work from Jamka, Urbanfailure, and RBNX, recorded in late 2003 and 2004. The five tracks from Jamka are all live recordings made with various synths and sequencers, each one presenting an overloaded surface of near-chaos, scattered liberally with squiggly noise and frantic scrabbling. A recognisable pattern of beats, or pulsations, barely emerges from the frenetic activity of the duo of Monika and Daniel. It’s hard not to love their intuitive, near-primitive approach to the way they hammer their devices, and they regard their music as a response to everything around them and a piece of collaborative teamwork which could only be performed by them. (They are friends of mine and they commissioned me to draw a T-shirt, so I will declare an interest). Urbanfailure has a good dose of the same happy amateurism in his music, but his cuts feel much sketchier and half-finished; I don’t feel the same drive or passion in these rather random collisions of minimal drum-machine programs with errant keyboard stabs and yoopling electronica, but ‘External Clock Jitter’ is a great title and quite descriptive of his “machines going wrong” approach. Like Jamka, he seems determined to subvert steady patterns with his beats and tries his best to disrupt linearity. RBNX just has one track. His work takes a while to get going. Random pieces of electric noise, mistakes, doodles and jumble are fished out of a storage unit and stitched together according to a highly illogical scheme. For this very reason it is also quite endearing, though it’s almost impossible to follow the creator’s line of thought, if indeed there is one. A true bedroom mixing-desker.

Sculpture
Toad Blinker
GERMANY DEKORDER LP (2011)
First heard from Sculpture with the 2010 release Rotary Signal Emitter, about which we enthused mightily. Now here’s more of the same, another gorgeous 45RPM picture disc with the music by Dan Hayhurst and visual by Reuben Sutherland and an art object that in some respects conjures up the live performances of this unique and very creative English duo. Apparently it is possible to recreate the zoetrope effect of the picture disc when it’s rotating on your deck, but only if you capture it on a camcorder from just the right angle. Hayhurst’s music is an irresistible melange of cut-ups from old records, beats, analogue squelchiness, and sources that would baffle us if the truth were known. Perhaps he uses a time machine and rescues old singles pressed onto cardboard cereal packets from the 1960s. All is thrown together with a bric-a-brac carelessness, a right-first-time boldness of gesture, qualities that would surely have endeared him to Claes Oldenburg. In fact I could easily see a record like Toad Blinker making a very good soundtrack for a visit to an Oldenburg exhibition full of glazed plaster casts and brightly painted papier-mache assemblages heaped up in disorder on the rickety wooden tables. Sculpture may have one foot in club culture, but like our urbsounds friends above they find ingenious ways of sabotaging the four-square tyranny of the beatbox, and any over-familiar or trite keyboard sounds are likewise disrupted and denormalised by the hyper-busy collaging technique. Hayhurst has the nimble fingers of a Carnaby Street tailor cutting a paisley shirt for some rich Kensington hippy in 1968. I may have noted this before with Sculpture, but these movie-picture disks represent a highly integrated art statement that puts all of their strengths into a single portable package of audio-visual information.

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003

Hippogriffs


We heard from Sula Bassana in February when he contributed to the monstrous Electric Moon LP The Doomsday Machine…we first gained the impression that Dark Days (SULATRON RECORDS ST1204-2) might, in title at least, be following from that depressive slab in a similar vein of blackened, thundering, ultra-heavy psychedelic space-rock…on the contrary it turns out to be a generally uplifting and sometimes mystical album of mighty guitar riffs, supremely steady drumbeats, and cosmic flurries of synth-winds howling around every corner. Apart from percussion assist on a couple of tracks by Pablo Carneval and vocals by David Henrikkson, this is totally a solo album by Bassana (i.e. Dave Schmidt), also assisted to some degree by Komet Lulu who did the sleeve paintings of orange, brown and green mosspit-shapes crawling from the belly of the universe, said images being used in turn by the musician to influence and shape his playing as he scoped these impasto swabs of lurid smearage. Another strong album from this retroid genius, a man so besotted with Krautrock he is capable of dipping the genre in gold, while condensing all his favourite Pink Floyd moments into intense hits of overamped smokiness…this outing contains the memorable 20-minute ‘Surrealistic Journey’ which sends the listener on a “far-out trip” in line with the aspirations of any given album by Gong or Hawkwind, while for those who prefer something punchier we have the very strong opening cuts ‘Underground’ and ‘Departure’…only place where the mood sags a little is on ‘Bright Nights’, a meandering odyssey into brain cells best left unturned, resulting in shapeless noodly guitar lines and, ultimately, dollops of rather pointless noise…and I’m not so keen on the frenetic beat-loops of ‘Arriving Nowhere’ which sometimes seems to be turning its ageing grey hippy head in the direction of Techno music and misunderstanding what it sees. From 20 June 2012, also available as a double LP.

Got a large bundle of curios from the Spectropol Records label in Bellingham (Washington State)…first picked out from the envelope was Elle Avait Raison Hathor (SPECT 11) by Vincent Berger Rond. He is an electro-acoustic composer based in Quebec, and presumably appears on the back cover in his winter garb standing besides an ice sculpture of a female head and shoulders. The winter wear is our first clue that this is difficult and inhospitable music for seasoned hardy outdoors-types only, on which more shortly. Meanwhile any attempt to stare fixedly at the image of the woman in order to decipher her features will simply result in even less definition, as it gradually recedes from your intelligence evasively. The whole album, you see, is a conceptual composition addressing “notions of womanhood” and doing so by filtering its music through an understanding of mythological treatments…Japanese, Greek, Inuit and Egyptian texts are found within the booklet, dropping hints that are somewhat less than lucid, yet strangely illuminating. Circe is the well-known enchantress from The Odyssey, but in a few lines you learn more about her meaning and symbolic resonance than you could have wished for. We’ve got a female vocalist Laura Kilty on the first track, where she intones her own settings for the poetry of Rond, but after that the remainder of the album is instrumental. It features strings and piano as you might expect from classical chamber music, but also synthesisers in a couple of places, electric organ, and the multi-dubbed electric guitars of Fred Szymanski. But none of this knowledge prepares you for the sheer weirdness of the distorted soundscape – the whole record just sounds completely bizarre. Vincent Berger Rond’s technique involves a lot of cutting up, editing, reshaping, modification and recomposing, such that Szymanski’s improvised guitar lines, for example, are completely recast into incredible, impossible shapes. The notes also refer to the composer’s “spasmacousmatic” method, which is a highly evocative term suggestive of a deeply radical and idiosyncratic approach to this contemporary form of composition. Not easy to listen to, but he plays fair; the work has clearly been assembled with great care and commitment to the form, and each piece, though at first bewildering, clearly adheres to an internal logic. The womanhood theme is not really explained in detail, which is a relief to any readers who are doubtful about long-winded explanations of an artist’s intentions, but Rond provides terse informational notes about this and would probably be very pleased if we did some research into the area for ourselves. From 13 June 2012.

We noted eRikm‘s Austral in November 2012 – at any rate, the audio dimension of it, which was released by Room40 as part of the Transfall album. Now here it is again as a DVD (DAC2031) from D’Autres Cordes Records, reminding us that the composition is a mixed-media work, combining electronic music with video. The visual side to the work was also created by the composer, and shows him weaving electronically-generated abstract shapes across the screen in shades of gray, green, and red, which multiply and germinate in jerky animated fashion. These images used photographs of cities as their starting point, taken from his journeys to South America. The music is played by the Laborintus Ensemble and remains a sharp snappy piece of atonal chamber music, sounding even better in this DVD presentation. But the visuals are rather banal, very process-heavy, not much more adventurous than a first year art student exercise. From 15 June 2012.

Fractures (DEBACLE DBL076) is a perfectly pleasant record of electronica / beats music by Rainbow Lorikeet. I like the “dubby” construction of the music that emphasises the heavy beats and the spaces in between, reminding me in places of Techno Animal – which I’ll admit is one of the few points of reference I have for this musical genre. Lorikeet’s electric sounds are not very distinctive or inventive though, and I find my attention wavering very quickly after only a few moments of this over-familiar crunch-and-squelch morass.

Anita‘s Hippocamping (WILDRFID RECORDS WLDRFD006) is more successful as an example of inventive and personalised electronica. We’re not given much reliable information on her technique, but I have the impression she’s something of a mosaicist, piecing together musical fugues out of very small fragments of sounds, tones, and whatever shapes she can find lying around the floor of the workshop to pick up and add to the collage. Resultant album is a highly textured listen – you can feel your ears being dragged over a thousand different rugs, textiles, vinyl floors, coconut matting, and assorted soft (and hard) furnishings. While she doesn’t abandon form completely, Anita has very little interest in composing a tune, and would prefer to leave you spinning in an unfamiliar micro-landscape for three or four minutes at a time, while she makes a cup of coffee (small black espresso, natch) and admires the results of her labours with a wicked smirk. What’s also impressive is the very firm and muscular core to these steel-belted monstrinos; Anita is never content to settle for a comforting decaffeinated drone when she can tie you up with eighteen yards of fencing wire. Track 11 is titled ‘L’Ultimo Yogurt’, which is precisely the sort of dessert I’d expect to be served if I was invited to a dinner party by this mysterious woman. This exists as a limited LP with a screenprinted cover and insert provided by visual artist Sofy Maladie.

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Four Vinyl Vamaritans


The Bunwinkies LP Maps Of Our New Constellations (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR062) is a collection of acoustic songs from these fey American types who play plenty of acoustic guitars and sing, adding many pleasing instrumental touches from the piano, slide guitar, autoharp, melodica. They are particularly good with the percussion which ornaments in spare and original ways. So far we have like a model version of a country and western backing band, only reduced and updated for the no-nonsense 21st century. But there is also the strong singing voice of Beverly Ketch put to the fore, a voice which once it’s heard will bring a ray of sunshine to every tear duct. Her lyrics are about flowers, colours, life, skies, countryside, the weather, the seasons, the grass and the trees, and such. Mainly about the joys of looking at beautiful things and what we can learn about life thereby. Only a miserable bitterling could complain about that. Another telling song on side one is celebrating the values of the family and the simple country life, as opposed to being ruled by the tyranny of the clock and working for another man, presumably in the city with a huge pocket watch strapped to the back. This is sung by one of the male Bunwinkies. Apparently they like to project the idea of a rural family 1, even if the band members aren’t all quite related. The production is direct and clear. I like the very simple and plain arrangements – nothing is “hidden” or occluded under studio cloaks, and all the plain instrumental technique is there on full display. Pieces of homespun furniture might adorn the living room of this rural family if we ever visited. If carping, I might say their tunes are not especially original or memorable, and often the singers (the men in the band also vocalise) default to rather obvious melody lines which are already implied in their chord changes. But it’s still a jolly and assured sound they sing out with as they swagger and swing along the country road, without any free-form burbling or off-key nonsense that has oft-times been associated with lesser entries in the “free folk” genre. The album is a pleasant piece of non-weird Americana. From December 2011.

The Ship Chop LP (DEKORDER 059) is edited by Daniel Padden, the talented and visionary Glasgow composer who is also known as a member of Volcano The Bear. His Pause For The Jet LP for this label remains a fave in these quarters. This newie is a cut-up special, the result of a pro-active guerrilla raid on a record collection, perhaps his own, of ethnographic recordings. Apparently when he started his labours, he began keeping careful notes of sources, dates, countries, and other salient details that fell into his sampling sack, and then found that the work he produced was taking on a life of its own, at which point he decided the notes became superfluous. Or at any rate they were a degree of administrative detail which hampered the creative process. I take this to mean that he started out with an interest in significant geographical connections between the history of indigenous music, and then grew more interested in creating these exciting and weird collages that are a law unto themselves, coiled with an internal logic that only a Padden can explain. The results burned onto the vinyl are certainly rich in content. At any given time across these 11 tracks we could hear recordings from “at least three different countries”. Samples, snatches, loops, overlays, cut-ups, and multi-layered playbacks are among the techniques used to create this impossible fantasy of world history, expressed in tongue, foot, hand and arm. A great deal of ingenuity has been used in building these musical juxtapositions. Melody lines from weird bagpipes and horns, vocalists intoning in foreign or lost tongues, and invented rhythm patterns made perhaps from gamelan and drum samples. Unlike Ghédalia Tazartès say who would make it his mission to use ethnographic music history to terrify us with its strangeness, Padden takes a more approachable view and arrives at a sort of latterday Exotica concoction, applying the mannerisms and stylings of Martin Denny and Les Baxter as he boils and fricassees the record collection in the hard drive. He completes the assemblage (and emphasises the artifice of it all) by adding wonderfully contrived fragmented titles, some of which read like lost counsels from the writings of a wise Chinese philosopher, while some of them are just shopping lists of objects which might feasibly have been found in 1930s Africa, Peru or Thailand. Arrived November 2011.

Unusual and striking experiments in song form called Always Already (ASH INTERNATIONAL ASH 10.1) by Purity Supreme. I like the way the package presents a stern countenance explaining very little, assuming that we all know the parties involved; already the release feels like an odd riddle. Two songs on the A side. The main attraction to the listener is the singing-intoning voice of the lead fellow singer, who may or may not be the French half of the act. Cracked and dusty his their vocal cords be, whether through mannered device or naturally desiccated, trying to convey the effect of a dissolute and broken man person. Just right for followers of Wm Burroughs we might think, but this sort of prose-speak-sing also shades into areas once occupied by Nick Cave or Michael Gira, as does the lugubrious and dense content. The lyrics are highly ambiguous, even when they seem straight to the point and use plain English at all times. I like to hear multiple repetitions of slightly mysterious phrases in songs and Purity Supreme does this trick very well. The first song keeps saying “It’s Nice To See You”, when the mood of the singer and indeed the music itself is expressing the exact opposite of that sentiment, and it’s a song that wishes we would just go home and stay there. Angst-ridden steel strings and a relentless drum pattern make this snarky item a vicious twin brother to Leonard Cohen’s later works. The second song is slightly more recognisable as something a weary Lou Reed might have recorded at any time between 1975 and 1988, and with its basic guitar and drum sound could almost pass for any decent slab of indie art-rock music. On the flip, even more words and more repetitions in the two remaining songs. So many words, these songs are more like recited poems or short stories really, very much like a slightly nastier Tom Waits or what we might hear if Charles Bukowski turned his throaty husk to song. Indeed the words are privileged by appearing in full on the front cover. And there’s a very strong cinematic component too, with vivid film noir images somehow encoded in the very sound of the record. Narrators alluding to scenes unknown, to backstories we cannot know, and delivered with a snarling curl to the lip at all times. The creators here are the French musician Christophe Van Huffel, and the American writer-composer Leslie Winer. Quite unusual, muscular, and opaque music from these offbeat modern beatniks.

[Updated above review 16/01/2013: I think I got genders wrong and misidentified performers.]

Big Shadow Montana (HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY HMS020) is a rich abstract droner from BJ Nilsen teaming up with Stilluppsteypa. As electronic ambient mood music goes this is surprisingly rich and full of hidden information. A lot of hidden layers are buried in its vaguely shifting masses of treated sound, and odd segments bob to the surface until we can make out their shapes in the cauldron, at which point they vanish below again. Heavenly choirs, church organ, opera singers, and even some sitars are among these semi-occluded elements. The record even manages to morph into some musical passages now and again, rather than simply meandering around the textured fields of digital linoleum in padded Turkish slippers. To yield these results, much judicious selection and assembly of sources would have been a requisite discipline, methinks. A great deal of time spent by the creators listening and editing. Nilsen is very good at bringing a multitude of field recordings and samples together into a small space and somehow getting them to tell a story, in very loose terms. This one is like a psychedelic sleep-walk episode through a dayglo Tibetan landscape. It is divided up into subtle little episodes, and moves forward on its sluggish feet from one ambiguous stepping stone to the next. Lots of keyboards in evidence, in case I didn’t mention that. And a knack for breaking into a little pop melody when you least expect it. Arrived here 16 February 2012.

  1. For other examples, perhaps see The Grateful Dead and the verso of their Aoxomoxoa LP cover; and Quicksilver Messenger Service, with their outlaw ranchhouse lifestyle. ↩
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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. ↩
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013

Deliberate Mistakes

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The latest entry in the Vernon & Burns catalogue sees this Glasgow duo teaming up with Lied Music, the duo of Luke Fowler and John W. Fail. Lost Lake (SHADAZZ SHA.11) is one of the stranger and darker emissions from these talented creatives, particularly if you care to compare it with the sometimes more playful assemblages of V&B, or the deliciously offbeat melodic avant-pop tunes created by Fowler as part of Rude Pravo. At first spin the record is a near-bewildering toasted-cheese sandwich, a concoction which contains at least a zillion ideas apparently thrown together any which way. Faced with such an array, discerning avant-LP listeners may want to reach for The Faust Tapes as one touchstone, but another credible precedent is the unearthly Bladder Flask LP 1, that ne plus ultra of cut-up sound art put together by a teenaged Richard Rupenus as if possessed by some fevered desire to surpass the worst excesses of the lunatic fringe end of the United Dairies catalogue. But the Bladder Flask release had the underlying sinister aim of sending all those who heard it mad, through highlighting the complete absurdity and futility of everything. Lost Lake has a more benign mission, thankfully. The album has been very carefully crafted, using sets of recorded improvisation sessions produced by the four players, aiming to resculpt the near-chaos of that source material into a coherent structure. Within that structure, fractured songs and equally fractured stories emerge; yes, a scrambled form of a radio listening or cinematic experience, which is an effect Vernon & Burns have striven for with a good deal of their work (and have produced many items expressly in radiophonic mode). As to the cinematic, Fowler is also a film-maker. There is a logic to this scheme, but it is hard to follow and weaves its way around in a highly secretive and intuitive fashion, like an errant underground stream full of eccentric fish and darting river-insects stained in unnatural colours. We could account for some of this quirkiness by pointing out that all four creators were involved in the refashioning process, rather than a single editorial hand behind the editing knife; one can imagine the clashing dynamism generated by four powerful personalities, each of them bending the path of events in their favour. Additionally, the source material itself was not exactly straightforward music to begin with, but created using the now-virtually-standard set-up of the modern improviser, that is amplified instruments, toys, found tapes, field recordings, and live electronics. From this rich stew, voices and tunes emerge from amid a varispeeded and highly layered humid aggregation of extremely strange sounds. And yes, like the Rupenus LP, it is quite absurdist, but I like to think it’s a fun and cartoony absurdity, rather than bleak and Beckett-like. That said, this aural bric-a-brac crawls out from a dark attic of the mind, and is as much an unsettling listen as it is entertaining. Corin Sworn’s cover art encodes all the above information quite perfectly. Using collage technique (naturally), it depicts a figure sitting on a sofa surrounded by hideously “tasteful” drapes and furnishings. This image of bourgeois normality is thoroughly disrupted by replacing the outline of the figure with fragments of urban horror and machinery, then further scrambling the visual schema with concentric rings and diagonal bars, suggesting the power of the aural emanations on the record. The album is, we are told, a sequel to a 2006 release called Lied Music vs Boy-Band Tax Returns, which we reviewed in our Vinyl Viands issue.

Pedal to the Metal

A promising experiment in steam-driven innovation is the one-sided 12-incher by DJ Mistakes (PHASE! RECORDS PHR-81). The two creators are Casey Farnum and Elliot Hess, who built a complex apparatus allowing them to power their turntables using bicycles; the cover art and the enclosed drawing, as if torn from the pages of the English comic illustrator Rowland Emmett, give some indication of the set-up and its concomitant paraphernalia. These drawings also reminded me of the sketches Hans Reichel used to include on his early FMP albums (e.g. Bonobo Beach), indicating how he assembled his own hand-built guitars. On the record, we actually hear live recordings of the infernal machine, made in Brooklyn in 2006-07 and also using gongs, microphones, a mixing desk, and of course records on the turntables. The artists may be slightly poking fun at the conventions of DJ culture, but also intend to put more spontaneity back into the artform, and they hark backwards to the time of the hand-cranked Victrola, harbouring a certain intellectual nostalgia for an undefined early modern period when “gears and bicycles were the stuff of aural and physical revolutions”. If I were a writer of the Ken Hollings school, no doubt I could bring forward numerous references to the place of the bicycle at key political moments of the Russian revolution, the First World War, or in the films of Eisenstein, thus making ingenious connections across political and cultural history. Farnum and Hess may even be attempting to begin that undertaking with their front cover collage, which although let down by rather murky printing, does suggest a darkened industrial landscape where the bicycle wheel on the horizon resembles part of a mining operation, and the two men in old-fashioned suits have their heads replaced, John Heartfield style, with objects which I assume are bicycle seats. Unfortunately, the record itself doesn’t live up to much of this promise, and is merely odd and amusing where it could be radical and wild. Some unusual moments can be heard, but it is mostly a lot of wobbliness and speed variations, which is pretty much what you’d expect. This arrived around June 2011.

The Charred Rise

The double LP Atonal Hypermnesia (MEGATON MASS PRDUCTS PIKADON002LP) by French avant-metallists P.H.O.B.O.S. is their third release and arrived here in June 2012. We last noted them in 2009 with their album Anœdipal, and this new release provides an even more remorseless manifestation of their craft. They began life in 2000 using the “conventional” four-piece set up of guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, and vocals, but from the start their driving mission has been to create a degree of sonic intensity that transcends the conventions of the many generic labels that are flung in their direction, including Black Metal, doom, stoner, sludge, noise, industrial, etc. As a matter of fact the principal creators are proud of their “maximal” approach to amplified noise, which while it may use a lot of churning, droning effects is arguably more “eventful” than any given release from the Sunn O))) school of imitators. They also aim to structure their tunes, rather than merely reverberating their Marshalls into infinity. Stefan Thanneur once again provides the cover artworks, but where the Anœdipal record made provocative use of religious icons, the keynote this time is heavy abstraction, a restricted colour range which allows only black (lots of it) and silver, and an allusion in the direction of geological formations, intended to suggest this is music that causes earthquakes or was engendered inside the crater of a volcano. As a listen, it’s very heavy going; treated guitars, much studio fog and choking drone effects, solemn vocal grunts, and relentless hammer-blow drums throughout. In fact I can’t stress enough how inescapable these drum beats are. They strike their way into the very fabric of the music like geologists’ mallets, and serve mainly to illuminate how trapped we are by the cavernous walls of this extreme sound. These drums make the entire sonic environment sound hollow, and start to make me feel hollow inside too. As to the guitar and electronics (if indeed that’s what we hear), they produce endless, clotted clumps of noise, and to endure them is like eating lumps of burnt coal or solidified nuclear waste. Certainly this is very well-crafted music and is quite some way removed from the more primitive end of Black Metal (e.g. Striborg, Bone Awl, and Beherit), and the elaborate titles such as ‘Solar Defrag’ or ‘Necromegalopolis of Coprolites’ point to a strongly intellectual influence on the work, adding additional layers of context to what is already an extremely dense statement.

  1. One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling, originally released in 1981 on Orgel Fesper Music. ↩
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019

Three Vinyl Vostigans


First, long overdue notice for the latest Dancing Wayang Records production which we’ve had in the vinyl rack since May 2011. Anna Tjan oversees all aspects of production of releases on her label, always doing the recording in her studio, and in this instance the visuals too – the silkscreen cover was done by her and Midori Ogata, and she provided the insert photo too. Anicca (DWR 006) is a meeting between the English improvising vocalist Phil Minton and the cellist Okkyung Lee, a Korean-born player whose name is new to me, but she has built up a fine array of collaborative / solo records and performances, most recently on the Cold/Burn LP for Feeding Tube Records. On these 2009 recordings, both musicians are concerned with pushing their respective instruments to testing limits, in the process finding new ways of operation which result in sounds that are alien, terrifying, and fascinating all at once. But it’s collaborative work too, so the challenge for them both is how they wrap their complex mental contours around each other, each bringing respective unknown pasts and hidden dangers to the equation. Yes, every new improvisational collaboration is like a musical blind date. Lee and Minton have an elaborate sympathy-antipathy thing going, which can result in this LP’s most exciting moments of friction. To do this performing live in an all-acoustic situation where you have virtually nothing to hide behind and all mistakes are in the open is a fairly daunting proposition. As with a previous release on this label, the Corsano-Edwards release Tsktsking, Tjan’s task is not to edit or produce or amplify this meeting of minds, but simply to document it. And I have the feeling that “being simple” in the studio is not as easy as you might think; it’s always to Tjan’s credit that she achieves such credible results from the strict disciplines of basic documentary recording. Martin Davidson ought to be proud of her. 1 Like Tsktsking, Anicca can be a restrained and minimal listen at times, but it leaves you face to face with the stark drama being enacted before your ears. Perhaps it’s best just to stick with Christian Marclay’s sleeve note, with his long list of descriptive (and very accurate) verbs followed by the admission of defeat, “words are powerless when it comes to describing what Lee and Minton are doing here”. 350 copies were pressed.

Also more or less in the realm of improvised music, we have Sound Gates (ULTRAMARINE RECORDS UM009) from the Italian guitarist Ninni Morgia and the percussionist Marcello Magliocchi. Like the above record to some extent, it seems both players, Morgia in particular, are concerned with finding another “new voice” for the instrument, and making concerted efforts in that direction. But not doing so loudly, or dramatically. First impression of Sound Gates is an LP full of extremely subtle tones, and you have to burrow inside with your ears to pull out the platinum nuggets of invention. Morgia is admittedly using a few props and ladders to reach the high fruits on the improv tree, among them filters, effects pedals, and a bow on the strings; but ultimately it’s his innovative technique that matters, as he applies fingers to fretboard and strings of his electric guitar in such ways to coax out an impressive range of alien microtonal effects and variegated tones from that axe. Magliocchi taps his tuned drums with the grace of a mosquito landing on the leaf-pads of a jungle plant, applying himself with stern discipline and reining in the natural instincts of a drummer to play too many notes. Like Morgia he also generates far-out and almost disturbing sounds, oddly distant and almost inhuman metallic clangs which echo in a dismal corridor of loneliness. I’m impressed to learn that Magliocchi has a history of playing free jazz with some of the Afro-American greats, has recorded for the famous improv label Ictus (kind of like the Italian version of Incus), and has built and designed his own radical drum kits, objects which are as much fine art sculptures as musical instruments. The two players have put so much energy and effort into developing this constrained and almost forced technique that the actual recorded pieces can appear unfinished; there’s no real beginnings or endings or conventional rise-and-fall crescendo in the dynamics. You may think this makes for unsatisfying listening, but it doesn’t; all 11 tracks are like scattered pages torn from the notebooks of daring experimenters, and can set your mind racing with possibilities. This one is from Autumn 2011, released in September.

The picture disc item (CORE 003) is the third release on the excellent Corvo Records label, and it arrived in my clasping digits on 29 November 2011. The A side of this split is by Thorsten Soltau, cleverly manipulating turntables to create 18 minutes of ‘Grün Wie Milch’. I’ve never heard the turntabling method deployed to produce such interesting and sometimes uncanny results, but that’s because Soltau is an intelligent and exploratory artist, moving on from his previous efforts with digital sampling and actively trying to teach himself a new musical language and striving to get towards a form of musique concrète using this fairly limited set-up, which he describes as “two-dimensional”. By this, I suppose that it’s a method that doesn’t allow the range of control and experiment that you might get from editing tapes or sampling sounds, but once harnessed, the discipline can work highly in one’s favour. What we hear on the grooves is brilliant, controlled chaos, lots of loops, occasional wheeps of feedback from the tonearm, the usual crackling from old scratched discs, and grumbly layers of pure textural noise. Soltau allows the looped elements to work their rough mesmeric magic, but never falls asleep behind the controls as he is directing every second of this melded symphony; as a collagist, he leaves in all the rough edges of creation, as if showing us all the rips ans creases in the paper where he tore the image from the old magazine. The other impressive thing is that, despite using slowed-down voice elements, he scrupulously avoids the “narrative” trap that afflicts so many snatchers from old vinyl, and the work remains resolutely abstract. It’s like a form of broken electronic music, a barely-working but completely unique synthesiser with an unrepeatable set of programmed sounds. Fittingly, the graphics on this side depict a kind of crazy-paving visual effect, or the shards of broken information forming into patterns. Tremendous!

Preslav Literary School is Adam Thomas, a Berlin-based artist who also could be described as a sound collagist. His ‘Alamut’ was produced using tape recorders and electronics, and judging from the rather fey sleeve note is motivated by a very strong sense of time and place in the past, both lamenting and celebrating the fact that the past cannot ever be recovered. Nostalgia, to put it more simply. Certainly his slow pace and long sustained tones do evoke a certain elegiac mood, and at times may put you in mind of the work of William Basinski. The artwork for this side is a jumble of block-graphics that at first sight resembles a street map, which is revealed to be made up of smaller images of people, buildings, cars and dogs; the scrambled arrangement indicates the manner in which nostalgic memories can come to us in broken images. The musical interludes are punctuated with thoughtful stretches of near-silence, and it’s a much more spacey and contemplative work compared with the textural busy-ness of the flip. Preslav Literary School may or may not be using samples from records of orchestral classical music, or playing sustained chords on a keyboard, but he often arrives at the same sort of stately profundity as Tangerine Dream. The artworks for this fine release are by Armin Kehrer, and the item is limited to 300 copies.

  1. I’m thinking of his “music realistically documented” approach. For further reading, see here. ↩
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Staunchly into the past she stomps


At end of January we received the new CDR from Hearts Of Palm, the beyond-underground team of noise-improvisers based in Cincinnati. ballglovemask (NO NUMBER) exists in a run of just 50 copies and was recorded by the foursome of Chamberlin, Hancock, Renschier and Wilson at a studio in 2009. Outdoing even their own past efforts in terms of opacity and obscurity, these 30 minutes behind the veil represent some of the most remarkable examples of nebulous, lichen-encrusted miasma to have been unleashed to us in the name of home-made kosmische-inspired avant-improv. Impossible to describe much that’s tangible about this insane, layered, cryptical and mystic groaning noise with its eerie non-sounds and its unpredictable percussive bursts; just allow it to envelop you like the shroud of a Saint from above. Hearts Of Palm have now been active for 14 years and as far as I know still remain “unsigned”, not that it would make very much difference if they were otherwise. I think best just to leave them be and let them proceed with their self-appointed tasks and scoop up whatever holy effluvia you can locate with your beady, ring-like fingers. “The group…hopes to record and release several projects this year”, they write in their press. If that boast be true, then keep a watchful orb trained on that myspace page and maintain the PayPal account at a steady level, is my advice.

Another curious item is My Favorite Tics (Z6 RECORDS Z6333666) by The Static Tics, sent to me from the Worm Shop in the Netherlands (an emporium that has been quite supportive of The Sound Projector Music Magazine). The madcap experimenters to credit here are Henk Bakker and Lukas Simonis, both making sport wildly and amusingly with their electronic set-ups, guitar, clarinet, samples, and the treated recordings of voices by visiting guests and friends who may have yapped knowingly or otherwise into concealed microphones. These 19 tracks are mostly gorgeous little fragmented explosions of sweet aural lollipops, most of them pop-song record in length, and all of them cheerfully subvert all our expectations about electro-acoustic music, sampling, and electronic music. The Tic-mongers have been active in their time (at least ten years) producing odd radio plays and audio magazine articles, and I think this CD compiles some of their very first forays into these areas, but is also “surrounded by material from later periods”. It’s massively enjoyable, delirious and puzzling chaos which I heartily recommend, especially to listeners who enjoy the great Vernon & Burns.

From Madrid, we got a copy of Early Summer (CON-V CNVCD 002) by the contemporary French-American composer Wade Matthews, on which he plays back a number of local field recordings made in that part of the world, processing and relaying them through his twin-laptop set-up over loudspeakers; I think what we hear is the document of a live performance of him doing this, hence the subtitle “improvised sound collages”. Among his concerns is an interesting in creating collisions, such as inserting small local sounds inside non-matching aural environments. He intends this as an aesthetic version of what everyone nowadays experiences when they play music through their earphones on a bus, unwittingly or otherwise combining string quartet music with the sounds of a bus motor and chatty passengers. He also wants to “play beyond or against memory”, by which he means he wants to explore and discover new combinations and play them back, whether or not they’re guaranteed to work. It’s all part of working against what you’re familiar with, which is good advice for any artist; but also shows Matthews’ commitment to spontaneity, excitement, genuine experimentation, risk-taking. All the above ambitions do show up in the work, but a brief skim has convinced me you need to be playing close attention to catch the multiple timbral inflections in this subtle and precise work. Very good.

Intense durational electronic minimalism on Aurora (PPLCD001) by Kamil Kowalczyk, the first release on his own label Prototyp Produktions. This young Polish-born composer carried out his first sound experiments in the mid-1990s, quite innocently experimenting with tape and cheap keyboards and creating his own brand of noise and drone music, unaware of anyone else’s work at home or abroad. After a few years releasing computer-based music on a netlabel, this is his first piece of tangible product. While Aurora may not be massively inventive music within the context of a genre that already has a fair abundance of exemplars, I have a lot of time for the simplicity and directness of Kowalczyk’s music, its very clean and “pure” delivery, the simple but effective use of high tones and low tones, the unhurried way it sets about advancing its basic structural forms, and the way it sort of envelops the whole body in sub-zero temperatures. It’s like a vast blanket of wool that chills your inner fibre instead of warming you up. If Kowalczyk’s intention on these two long cuts is, as cover art suggest, to send us slowly into the centre of a spiral-formed nebula in blackest deep space, he comes close to delivering on that particular KPI. Keep this alongside your Eleh CDs and albums, and check back in a few months to see which one is winning.

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Don't Dare Listen to this Music Alone


Gotta admit I’m developing a real soft spot for these groovy reissues of heavy jazz kitsch from the Righteous label. The latest emergence is Shock and Panic (RIGHTEOUS PSALM 23:35) by The Creed Taylor Orchestra, a CD which bundles together Shock Music in Hi-Fi with its successor album, Panic: The Son of Shock. With the printed health warning and vaguely disquieting cover photos of alarmed and abducted women, these late 1950s easy-jazz workouts may put one in mind of a William Castle schlock-fest such as The Tingler, but once spun they of course turn out to be quite mild and even vaguely hilarious. The ‘shock’ elements are completely tongue-in-cheek, each track presenting a different limp scenario narrated by Hollywood actors and actresses, and the corny attempts at humour in these goofy shaggy-dog stories have not dated well. Then there’s the outrageous sound effects, which contrive to turn each track into an episode from some melodramatic radio serial. No matter, as the overall combined effect of these voices and FX with the smooth, lush musical arrangements is just dead-on, providing the sort of eyebrow-twisting listening experience that soon persuade you why these “long-lost deleted gems” are so sought after by collectors. There’s a long list of reasons why Creed Taylor is a hero of modern jazz (starting with the CTI label and including Lalo Schifrin), but this oddity reveals another side of his unusual talents.

I wonder what a creator like Creed Taylor would make of People Like Us, the English cut-up creatrice who has just released Music For The Fire (ILLEGAL ART IA121) with her American counterpart Wobbly. The duo are collaborators of long-standing, and this fine item is the result of many years of effort. I’d like to think PLU has original vinyl copies of Shock Music and Panic in her extensive collection of wild and woolly easy-listening records (I seem to recall that she doesn’t actually have to collect anything any more; people just send her things). Like all her work, this “collection of warm and mellow mood melodies” is dark and subversive, cruelly parodying the innocent world of the 1950s and laying bare the hypocrisies of bourgeois society with fiendish glee. Wobbly adds his own touches of sneering nastiness to the surreal proceedings, and we admire the dizzying the ingenuity with which they combine radio and TV voices with fragmented, interrupted moments of the cheesiest, toe-curling musical honey-drippings you could imagine. To listen is like eating strawberry Jello laced with cyanide.

No sarcasm of any sort on Reflex (UTECH RECORDS URCD045), the new sombre and sober solo album from Switzerland’s RM74, a gifted studio technician whose ingenious layering of dense and droney overdubs has caused many a livid night of consternation in these four walls. Keyboards, electronics, synths, percussion and piano are used with ingenuity and imagination to create distinctive buckets of creaky, torpid atmosphere, and unlike the lightweight stylings of Shock Music in Hi-Fi, this material is filled with genuinely disturbing undercurrents. The presence of a bat on the cover reassures you that you’re in a safe pair of claws; the whole package could easily pass as an alternative soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre.

Equally lush in the aural area is the latest offering from Hearts Of Palm, Cincinnati’s best-kept secret of the US underground. Earth Headed Heart (FOR NOISES SAKE FNS 017) can sometimes give you so much substance and density to listen to that you think your ears are about to have a heart attack, swimming in golden lard and diamond-encrusted starch. For this single 31-minute stretch of bleakened diabolry and mystery sporting-events, the Palmsters are joined by C. Spencer Yeh, that superb violinist and noise-monger from Burning Star Core who has yet (in my view) to put a single foot wrong as he paws his way through the hinterlands. Where previous HOP releases have apparently comprised edits from longer performances, this time out we get the whole thing served up in one hefty man-sized dose, a wodge of such unknown quantity that ingesting it in one sitting could prove fatal. “We wanted to try something a bit more natural this time out,” blithely states one band member in the attached letter. Natural? If they call this natural, I’d certainly hate to go on a ramble in the Blackhand Gorge State Nature Preserve with these guys! At 75 copies, this is another limited-edition gem of completely twisted, kraut-psych noisy unholiness that wipes the floor with most competitors who aspire to lick salt from the same rocks…no website for this, mail enquiries to heartsofpalm@earthlink.net.

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Here Come The Intangibles


Nutloid item of the week from a UK combo called Perhaps Contraption, whose Sludge and Tripe CD is an exhausting listen of “clever” musicianship, rampant musical style-swapping, and quasi-surreal lyrics full of annoyingly cute little imagistic juxtapositions. The songs, mostly taken at 500 mph, have their lyrics half sung and half shouted in scary, offputting fashion. The sleeve and booklet continue the pastiching game, using 19th century type ornaments and old found graphics to further the cause of these “avant-rock quirk-mongers”, as they style themselves. Needless to say, the band dress in outlandish garb and pose for their photos in a quirky way, and they have funny names like Pimi (goodgirls) Mayfair, Dildo Widow and SquireSquier, who appears to be the brains behind the operation. There’s no denying the supreme technical musical skills of these extroverted UK contempo-progsters, who sound like a more earnest version of Jethro Tull fed on acid-laced fruit gums, but I found it very difficult to make inroads into this dense and elaborate,almost airless, CD. Everything just feels forced, contrived.

I turn to my recent package from Resipiscent Records in San Francisco, expecting a similar dose of music that’s high in zanoid quotient. Shadow Stories (RSPT037) by Ava Mendoza turns out however to be a crackling disc of superlative instrumental guitar work by this consummate musician from Oakland in California. She’s worked on avant-garde and improv projects (and also does electronic music), but this delightful record is a collection of fairly straight-ahead blues, country and jazz tunes played with such conviction, fire and infectious passion that you’ll be shivering with pleasure for its duration. Apparently it’s equally thrilling to watch her perform live (her body and hands twitch like jumping beans), and that energy translates directly onto the disc here thanks to the vivid recording quality courtesy of engineer The Norman Conquest. Back in the day, I think she would have been showcased on a rootsy label like Rounder Records or Arhoolie, but here she be on this outre experimental label cooking up a storm with her six strings and her warm, old-fashioned hollow-bodied wooden guitar. American traditional guitar craft at its finest! Total recommendation for this corking record from me, but then I’m also a fan of Sam Chatmon, Roy Smeck and Joseph Spence.

With Masaoka / Chen / Grusel / Nagai (RSPT036), I feel we’re back on the sort of scary and unknown territory this label knows like its own back yard. Four powerful and far-out improvising and composing players (Miya Masaoka, Audrey Chen, Hans Grüsel and Kenta Nagai) lock horns on a number of twisted, eerie performances recorded live in Baltimore at that High Zero festival, using koto, stringed instruments, voices and live electronics. Everything creeps slowly, spits and clocks along like gigantic reptiles with false limbs and forked tongues, spitting fire. Not every moment they play is packed with that degree of ghastly genius, but at their best this foursome capture all the danger and strangeness that you could expect from modern improvised music, reviving for me some of the sense of shock and vitality I used to feel at Derek Bailey’s Company Week. Hans Grüsel has made some noisy and very idiosyncratic records for this same label, but he reins in his indulgences for this outing and acts with considerable restraint. A record so steeped in its own exoticness that you can taste it at the back of your throat!

The amazing and irresistible Liz Allbee is one of the jewels in the coronet of this label. Theseus Vs (RSPT035) is only the second full-length for the label from this performer who has lent her weird trumpeting skills to Sun City Girls, Caroliner and Hans Grüsel. Here she lets rip with a series of undefinable studio antics, making electronic and trumpet overdubs into a sort of demented minimal pop music rendered with highly unusual sounds and diversions, and achieving effects on a par with The Residents. The alternative title of this release may be Theseus Vs The Ship of Fools, and besides dropping further hints with one or two maritime track titles, the whole thing is packed in a box with a piece of fake lambswool (not the Golden Fleece, as it happens). And there’s a two-headed lamb on the cover of the box. Many lesser oddball talents make the proud boast that they will invite you into their strange mental world and amaze you thereby. Allbee not only makes good on the promise, but she refuses to let you out again afterwards. I hereby dub her the Circe of the avant-garde music world, and I have now been turned into a pig.

Also visible in the photo, though not heard, is Liz Allbee’s Warm Marrow cassette (RSPT030) which exists in an edition of 44. This limitation is determined by the available number of piano hammers between which the release has been mounted. Arrived here July 2009, in a box with various coloured slips of paper.

What better to conclude our quirky afternoon outing than the new Mort Aux Vaches release, which has been provided by my favourite cut-up wacksters from Scotland, Vernon & Burns. With their genuinely odd and original approach to manipulating radio segments and old records, they were a perfect choice to make a radio piece for VPRO in Amsterdam. This is one of the most unsettling and baffling things I’ve heard from them, which while it doesn’t lack for a sense of humour is also deeply confusing and induces many a crinkled forehead in unwary listeners. One of the great things about these artists (who actually have experience producing conventional radio) is they are never out to shock people with crazy effects, like using extracts from interviews with mass murderers. Instead they create their beguiling effects slowly and patiently with relaxed smiles, using very every-day found materials, and gradually sapping our sense of normality. Packed in a folded and embossed sheet of copper with a sunburst emblem mounted on the centre, and originally recorded in 2007. 500 copies only of this must-have item!

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