Tagged: dark

May 19, 2013

Unfolk + Live Book: psychedelic journey and call for justice in folk music adventures

Alessandro Monti, Unfolk + Live Book, Diplodisc, 2 x CD DIPL 005/6 (2012)

News reached me the other day of a young software engineer Amanda Ghassaei who etched a Radiohead album with a laser cutter on a wooden disc. She’s also etched other audio recordings onto acrylic and paper. Phooey, you all say, a wooden music-playing record has been made before. WHAT?! I had to find out and sure enough one Heracleum Ipotesis had done it way back when in the High Middle Ages to preserve his “unfolk” music compositions – or so says one Alessandro Monti who with his Unfolk Collective music combo have had their “Unfolk” album from 2006 remastered and reissued with a bonus CD of reworked songs from a previous album “The Venetian Book of the Dead”.

Most tracks on the remastered “Unfolk” disc might have Italian-language titles but the music draws influences from Irish folk music traditions, Indian ragas, Arab and Venetian mediaeval Venetian lute music among other music genres. The journey through the disc is an interesting one: it’s as much a tour through Western contemporary popular music turns on “folk” and tracks like “Aerofolk” feature mind-expanding space cosmic music played on electric guitar, synthesiser and other electronic keyboards, giving a soundtrack that wouldn’t be out of place in the corpus of works by the likes of Can or Amon Düül 2. Speaking of “Aerofolk”, I think that’s becoming my favourite track here the more I listen to it for its sense of wide-eyed wonder and joy in exploring inner and outer space. Generally the happier the music on the album sounds, the better it is; the music that’s melancholy, brooding or contemplative tends to come across as a bit ordinary. One curious coincidence I note is that the violin melody on track 11 matches, note for note, the violin tune on Swedish 1970s space / folk rock group Älgarnas Trädgård’s song “Children of Possibilities” from that band’s first album; I think it’s likely both bands have used the same mediaeval tune.

Disc 2 “Live Book” sees a different set of musicians around Monti playing live in Mestre near Venice and in Leicester in 2011. About half the tracks from “The Venetian Book of the Dead”, referring to the workers and people who lost their lives to cancer and other diseases as a result of industrial accidents in areas around Venice and Mestre during the 1970s and 1980s, appear here. Subordinate to the lyrics, the music adopts moods appropriate to their message: dark, smoky and urgent (“Someone is always screwing someone”) and blunt, blaring and impassioned (“Forgive”). The best track here though is an excursion into a nostalgia for various 20th century music genres that had their roots in Afro-American oppression, poverty and despair: “Bedroom discotheque” gets its soulful, wistful emotion from the beautiful acoustic guitar and electric cello melodies and changes in key that bring on an extra layer of dark desperation to vocalist Kevin Hewick’s singing. Through repetition of the lyrics, Hewick tries to push back an enormous and relentless advance of ice that threatens to wipe out an entire structure of music historical and cultural memory. His lyrical venture into hiphop seems awkward and ill-advised though, as if he can’t quite figure out how this music, born in poverty and violence-ridden ghettoes, and others like it came to be unashamed whores for the global music industry. The music is a mix of unfolk, blues and rock with a slight dominance by electric guitars and other electrified musical instruments.

Some very good music is featured on both discs but there are also passages of quite stodgy instrumental music, especially on the latter half of Disc 2 where the music takes a more pessimistic and embittered turn with tracks like “The radioactive man”. Monti’s quest for social justice in his music hasn’t quite reached the stage where he might start tackling the true sources of oppression in our society, going after banks in their usurpation of control of global economies and their links with corporations across the world including the arms industry, and the media, both “conservative” and “progressive”, alike for pulling huge chunks of wool over our eyes; and then generally calling for people to take back their power and do whatever they can under their control, no matter how small or petty, to create or recreate a fair world. I’m hoping he’s moving in that direction.

In an age in which most music produced these days is under the thumb of global media corporations and even the music of traditional societies from the past or in the current present is shaped and packaged by the music industry as an endless array of exotica, divorced from its original contexts, for consumption by tourists, Monti’s concept of unfolk music may be intended as a challenge to such concepts.

May 19, 2013

Empty Worlds

: Michael Idehall “Sol”

: “Edifice Of Nine Sauvastikas”

: Trepaneringsritualen “Roi Perdu”

: “A Somatic Response” by Soma Sema

Four cassettes from the Swedish Beläten label sent to us by Thomas Martin Ekelund, who may also be the label boss. Beläten produce “post avantgarde pop” and align themselves with things apocalyptic, transgressive, esoteric, and pagan. Even the catalogue numbers are somewhat recherché, using characters from the Hebrew alphabet. Industrial music has clearly cast a long shadow since 1979. I seem to be one of the few music fans who never heard a single record by Throbbing Gristle but I continue to experience the long-tail fallout from that cultural event, as reflected in tape bands like these. Even the fact that they express a preference for cassette tapes is a statement, expressing allegiance with the “glory days” of tape trading and mail art of the early 1980s. And guess what…the label is based in Gothenburg, home of the finest gloom music in all of the Nordic realms. All of these items (which arrived 20 July 2012) existed in tiny editions of 50 copies and have probably all sold out, although downloads are available.

Michael Idehall produces 10 sullen, inward-looking episodes on Sol. Electronic pulses with a sinister bent are repeated with a single-minded dedication to monotony and dreariness, while a cracked and muttering voice utters its broken phrases, to create sensations and emotions very suggestive of an inner desolation and multiple disasters. To accompany these inner journeys, additional synths bark and toot in distinctly inhuman fashion, or provide snarling and sizzly textures to add to the general discomfort. The cumulative effect tends to present Idehall as a haunted figure cursed under a malevolent spell, a supernatural dimension which is not denied by the magick and pagan themes running through tracks such as ‘Snake Messiah’, ‘Serpent Wand’ and ‘Language of the Birds’. Clunky and hesitant in places, his music nonetheless creates powerful ceremonial effects with a Hammer Horror undercurrent.

Edifice Of Nine Sauvastikas is a split tape. Æther and Trepaneringsritualen each create a ten-minute drone piece dedicated to an esoteric reference, paying their respects to Yung-drung Gu-tzeg ¹. Æther’s interpretation of the hermetic theme results merely in a plodding and overlong drone of rather wearisome solemnity, but I’ll admit there is a dynamic at work which allows a gradual build-up of slow-burning terror as reflected in the increased distortion and deepening of the tones, plus they manage to emulate the sound of chanting monks quite effectively. Trepaneringsritualen recently had a single out on Fang Bomb, and he’s a pretty cool doomster. In fact he’s also Thomas Martin Ekelund, the man behind this label and also the excellent Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words. While that former incarnation was fixated on the afterlife in a semi-mystical and speculative fashion, Trepaneringsritualen is all about the futility and the doom – mixing it up with quasi-religious and supernatural elements to further add to the black cloud of uncertainty. As such, his work fits in perfectly with this label’s aesthetic. On the cassette he contributes a murky clashing percussive sound with layers of hideous grind and eerie whisperments, instantly evoking a terrible inhuman landscape. What strikes me with this track, and indeed all the music spun so far, is how it’s not afraid to stay in the same place, working obsessively with the same limited range of tones and sounds until they grind them into a handful of dust.

Now here’s an entire tape by Trepaneringsritualen called Roi Perdu. I should be careful what I wish for. What a nifty cover too, a simple skull with a crown on it, yet it’s an image that induces instant suicidal feelings with its stark message of futility. This one was originally issued by iDEAL Recordings in Sweden and constitutes a reissue. The album also has an intriguing theme, slightly more historical in nature as it explores myths and legends of medieval Europe. I thought it might be a dark ambient update on the Fisher King and the Golden Bough themes in The Waste Land, but it seems Trepaneringsritualen have their eyes on the Merovingian legend. Four tracks of increasingly abject futility, with the ultra-slow bleak music proceeding at a leaden pace with its processed ambient drones weighed down by four anchors stapled into its dorsal muscles. The voice elements, as is customary, are likewise treated until what ends up on the tape is the monstrous groanings of a tormented creature. This may not appear very engaging from my description, but Trepaneringsritualen (like most of Ekelund’s music) has a cathartic effect on the listener, and you’ll expunge many an inner demon if you can make it to the other end of this turgid field of grim murk. Of all items in this batch this one has the most cohesive vibe, a composition that is planned and sequenced for maximum effect.

A Somatic Response is a compilation put together by Soma Sema and featuring the music of Blitzkrieg Baby, Television Set, Vita Noctis, Club Amour, Kord, Lust For Youth, Goz Mongo Alliance, Xiu & Soma Sema. This is mostly variants and strains of minimal electro-pop music shading into a genre which I believe is called Cold Wave. Melodies, lyrics and vocals feature more prominently, and in many instances we have a self-important male voice chanting about alienation and coldness against the beat of a drum machine. But I do like ‘Slugs’ by Estroboscorpio with its twisted and poisonous synth lines, Makina Girgir‘s ‘Alpha’ for its sinister air, and the sheer shrieking insufferability of Nimam Spregleda‘s ‘Fire’. In distinction to the above doomy ambient music, this is more upfront, aggressive even…the underlying message of many songs is that we’re on our own in a cruel world and nobody will protect us from the forces of evil.

It’s the name of a mountain also called Mount Kailash, and figures largely in an ancient Tibetan spiritualist tradition. ↩

May 12, 2013

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)

April 23, 2013

Cold of Ages: a grand and epic black metal / doom fusion recording

Ash Borer, Cold of Ages, Profound Lore Records, CD (2012)

Ash Borer’s second album could very well be their breakthrough release: it’s at once highly atmospheric, cold, dark, incredibly focused and energetic. After a brief lilting introduction, the music springs full-bore into all-out aggression and depressive darkness. If Ash Borer were strongly associated with the Cascadian black metal scene in the past, they’re moving away from it with a strong and distinct style that plumbs deeply into darkness and nihilism. There is still a nature ambience near the album’s beginning but increasingly it’s being replaced by melody and riff, speed and a song-writing and playing approach that emphasises a huge range in sound dynamics.

Opening track “Descended Lamentations” is a heady combination of melancholy doom grandeur, black metal chaotic fury and ominous Gothic ambience. Trilling lead guitar lines are mixed up with sharp buzzy riffing and the vocals are equally varied, ranging from reverb-cloaked monster growls to phantom cries and howling. The heights and depths of this fusion of black metal / doom / psychedelia are mined for their riches in melody, tone, mood and atmosphere to produce an epic music mammoth – and still there are more treasures that Ash Borer offer up.

“Phantoms” initially runs on a slower track but picks up energy and speed very quickly. Before you know it, it’s careening madly about the joint as if trying to find an escape and discovering none. The tones are less bright and the mood is urgent. On and on the piece goes, raging against everything hurled against it by an uncaring universe. Defeat is at hand however and the mood becomes more sullen and despondent.

“Convict All Flesh” might well be the best track here – it’s truly an example of how to write and play an operatic work of black metal doom existential melancholy. Spider guitar riffs spin into an arching glittering network over sludge drum thunder and slavering vocals. The grand edifice falls away before an interceding choir of sweet-voiced angels but the Lord of Chaos charges in to claim what’s owing to him and the track thrashes about in hopeless frenzy. Guitars blaze away, drums bang and crash and those phantom voices groan and growl in the distant background.

The band could be forgiven for a forgettable and lame closing track but “Removed Forms” does not do badly at all. Beginning as a muted minimalist piece performed on a solo guitar in the manner of a Japanese koto being plucked to the accompaniment of sorrowful female ghost voices, the track erupts into a hysterical race against the encroachment of annihilation.

Parts of the album could have been edited for length: “Convict All Flesh” does overstay its welcome in its latter half and the coda to “Phantoms” could have hurried up a little so that “Convict …” comes sooner rather than later. A section of “Removed Forms” is clunky and lumbering. All four songs are similar in their structure, beginning slowly and coasting for a while before blasting into frantic and furious BM chaos. Hardly any time to take a breath at all! Arguably also the album manipulates listeners’ feelings and emotions in the way all four songs roller-coaster through quiet and loud sections.

Overall though this is a grand and epic recording, and the Ash Borer members give the album everything they have in energy, musicianship and inspiration. The music brims with urgency and a sure knowledge that life is brief and filled with pain, and death does not necessarily bring relief.

Contact: Ash Borer, Profound Lore Records

April 22, 2013

Regnum Saturni: flowing, raging, hypnotic black metal noise intensity

Fell Voices, Regnum Saturni, Gilead Media, 2xLP RELIC45 (2013)

Fell Voices is a black metal band based in Santa Cruz (California) but often associated with the Cascadian black metal scene (northwest US / southwest British Columbia, Canada). ”Regnum Saturni” is the first album of theirs that is not named after the band or left untitled; the band has a demo and two previous albums that went without titles, which would have caused some discomfort to distributors and fans alike. Especially as songs on previous albums also had no titles! Well, on “Regnum Saturni” those little problems have now been fixed: the songs that feature now bear titles which together suggest a theme of transformation from a lower level of existence to a higher one. Listeners may well be divided over this release: whereas previous releases had definite melodies and riffs, this album may come across as unstructured and intangible, and the music appears deliberately difficult and remote. Life is not easy when you’re under the spell of Fell Voices!

All three tracks are long and on the double LP version each takes up one side of the record. This means that Side D contains nothing at all. (One would think at least it might have an interesting recording of forest bird and insect noises.) Opener “Flesh from Bone” tiptoes in quietly for a bit before suddenly plunging listeners into a roaring whirlwind of sharp guitar noise which pulses with a grinding chainsaw rhythm. Vocals can barely be heard unless they are wailing or screeching in agony. Yet the music isn’t an endless self-indulgent exercise in black metal noise drone and chaos; there is change from noise and anguish to passages of stillness and solitude, dark though they are. However such interludes are soon swept aside by more scourging music from which lead guitar riffs might arise and glimmer briefly before they are engulfed in the fierce storms.

We segue into Track 2 “Emergence” with the faintest of breaks but the mood and energy level remaining low and restrained. Soon we are tossed into a long extended black metal noise drone world, one featuring a wavering feedback drone and constant repetitive drumming. The effect can be very hypnotic even though the mood is far from serene: in fact it’s aggressive and hostile. Voices scream in pain and torment continuously, guitars wobble as if sharpening their strings on whet-stones and the percussion continues its banging rhythm without rest. This time there’s no let-up, no rest from the torture. Towards the end, the percussion becomes more thunderous and emphatic, voices still scream and the heaving guitars hang over the track.

“Dawn” is a powerful thundering track of attacking percussion and denser-than-ever clouds of black metal guitar. Whining drone, rousing drums, more howling and keening voices and that ever-present boiling guitar noise atmosphere fill your brain from ear to ear. This is a highly suffocating experience. Although the music overall doesn’t stray from the very straight and very narrow, there’s enough variation in its details to keep some, if not most, listeners tagging along. The best moments come in the last few minutes of the track: the drumming consists of thunderous rolls, the screaming becomes unearthly and the shuddering guitars assume a quieter air as gradually the track loses its pent-up fury.

The album can be an exhausting experience to hear all the way through and perhaps there was no need for it to be so long at 61 minutes. The introductions and codas don’t need to be as stretched as they are, as they are joined with only the slightest of breaks. What is most impressive about the album is its raging intensity and the musicians’ utmost dedication to their craft. They obviously don’t care about pandering to all their fans’ preferences; the music is relentlessly single-minded and its scope is very narrow. The band that springs to mind as a point of comparison is Nadja whose music in the past has been similarly noisy, intense and powerful if unvarying.

I can see this album enjoying fairly limited success among Fell Voices’ fans. I can’t see though that the band is prepared to return to a more melodic and less underground style.

Contact: Gilead Media, Vendetta Records

March 21, 2013

Fabriksampler V4: winding its way through different musical territories of Elektronikopia

Various Artists, Fabriksampler V4, Pharmafabrik, PFCD020 (2011)

Featuring acts from several countries in Europe and from South Africa, this is a lively collection of artists engaged in the multifarious arenas of electronic-based music. The expected genres of noise electronics, ambient, industrial, minimalist and dub-influenced styles are all to be found here. On both discs, tracks are arranged to bleed into or meet one another so the overall effect is of a continuous mega-work that winds its way through several musical territories, moods and atmospheres.

Disc 1 kicks off with Japan’s KK Null with his particular approach to creating music that sounds positively inhuman and machine-like in a deranged and repellent way. This turns into a warmer, more balmy and soothing though no less pointillist piece under Neven M Agalma from Slovenia. Other track highlights include Yoshihiro Kikuchi’s bubbly and cheeky effort (Track 4) which once upon a time would have qualified for a Mego or Editions Mego release; Mutant Beatniks’ rather demented murk piece “Whiteout!!!” with faux sinister and dark wobble drones and eerie noises; and Vega Stereo’s mysterious and brooding “Morning”. Of the rest of the ten tracks on offer, they’re not bad but some can be very repetitive or simply revel in being as baaad-aaaasss as they can and pay no attention to volume dynamics, texture or structure.

Disc 2 seems a quieter, more ambient and better behaved collection although that impression could be due to the opener “Transmortorium” by Velge Naturlig: this has a slow and steady droning low end anchoring a skeletal sputtering high-pitched sound. While the overall effect may be discomforting sometimes, this is a warm and quite beautiful and enchanting piece with warm bell-like tones near the end. Other notable pieces include Astma’s very sparse “IgE”, Analog Concept’s quietly chirpy “Aliens Love This Melody”, Cezary Gapik’s “#0466″ (highly atmospheric minimalist machine droning) and Mike Browning’s complex and layered “Phantom Space” that combines an paradoxically warm yet slightly chilly horn loop, a female vocal and a busy background of simmering effects.

Hmm, there seems to be a bonus track on my copy: the album sleeve states there should be nine tracks on the disc and mine has ten listed. This unnamed piece turns out to be the best track on the entire double set: well over 10 minutes long, it’s a veritable soundtrack to a mini sci-fi / horror flick about some slithery alien menace.

On the whole, Pharmafabrik does a better job selecting which ambient-oriented artists and their work should feature than they do with some other acts. The label probably should have mixed up the genres more but it did aim at connecting like with like which is why each disc sounds different. The set is a hefty one to hear all the way through – most tracks have a lot happening on them – so I suggest each disc should be played at different times of the day, depending on your own moods and what’s occurring around you. Disc 2 is definitely the better of the two and the domination of ambient-oriented electronics here gives it greater versatility as a soundtrack to quiet periods of the day or helping to while away burdensome chores.

Contact: Pharmafabrik

March 14, 2013

Rosemary and Garlic

Manitou (ALREALON ALRN034) by Blue Sausage Infant arrived here 21 May 2012. This is the gifted instrumentalist Chester Hawkins of Washington D.C. joined by various friends and collaborators, whose additions grace what I take to be a largely solo LP with a production by Robert L. Pepper of PAS…Hawkins here performs a fine balancing act between wild and divergent emotional states, at one moment thundering against the world with his almighty musical bombast, at others wandering abjectly in a self-imposed mental quagmire of unfathomable proportions…I think at times he is more genuinely “surreal” in his strange music than the oft-referenced Nurse With Wound, plus Hawkins creates much more full-bodied and convincing music with his multiple boxes, keyboards, guitars, and baskets of noteworthy fruit. In terms of mental hysteria and relentless sense of inescapable dilemmas hemming you in, turn to ‘Hosebag’ and ‘The Moss Takes Over’, both powerful examples of how to structure a track such that it accumulates energy and mass in a tightly-wound fashion, on the brink of spinning out of control at any moment…a motorised rickshaw on a very narrow metallic highway being pulled by a robot with hydraulic legs…said legs growing longer in their reach with every second…Hawkins here provides good object lesson in how to drip-feed us the excitement rations, all music sewn up in a cloth bag where the drumbeats are strict, martial and cruel, presenting a force with which we cannot argue…

Then for more tender or ambiguous mood, turn ye to ‘Abdominal Frost’, an almost lyrical barrage of droning synth drift likewise planed together in plywood layers which hovers over your head like an angel of black snow; and for reprogramming that lost nightmare state your body craves in the small hours, ‘How To Achieve Somnambulism’ is the correct prescription, one of the few tracks to make sparing use of sampled TV voices (a cliché fer sure, but handled here with expertise and assurance) to create a short but troubling vision of tall manlike beasts wandering among us, snarling dogs or human bears, Bigfoot scenarios clouding all your dreams…Hawkins finds lyrical beauty in paranoia. Unsurprising to find that the noble Jeff Surak, a past master of cultivating evil mind-flowers in the greenhouse of the soul, contributed to this track with the notable credit of “turntable bacon radio”. We also gots the epic ‘Yggdrasil’ which in tone and tenor could match wits with any given slab of proggy Euro-synth vinyl from 1979 or 1982, while limning an accurate portrait of a Max Ernst decalcomania landscape populated with uglified monsters and nocturnal blooming plants secreting drug-like vapours.

The potential hit single track for anyone’s money ought to be ‘Catoctin’, a confident Krautrock pastiche aided by the guitar of Jeff Barsky and the drumming of Jason Mullinax, where the steady axe-riffing is undercut by a moany spaced-out keyboard wail approximating the tin-man rebuild of Damo Suzuki’s voice, an effect many lesser teenagers have been aiming at for years. As you recall both of these fine musicians played on the title track of BSI’s Negative Space LP from 2011, which we noted here. One should also give mention to ‘Aphid’s Lament’ as just a wonderful slab of grisly half-melodic noisy gumlike texture, and ‘Sodom Is Risen’ as another example of how Hawkins updates and enriches the monotony and drudge of 1980s Industrial Music in his imaginative manner. A beautifully crafted and well-honed album of beat-driven electronic music and heavy drones, redolent with tasty mental knife-twists. I would imagine it’s one thing to tramp into a studio and let your guts hang out through spontaneous primal-scream and abstract expressionist type malarkey, but Hawkins plans his taut compositions meticulously and performs them ruthlessly, as if working to a map. The results are like eating solid lumps of compressed hallucinogenic brain tissue.

March 7, 2013

Amesoeurs (self-titled): one and only album is inconsistent black metal pop

Amesoeurs, self-titled, Code 666, CD (2009)

At least in a very short career, truncated in part by the unexpected success of Neige’s main project Alcest, Amesoeurs released its one and only full-length recording. The self-titled album is a wide-ranging work in expression and musical style from soft melodic pop to harsh and grim black metal to near-abstract guitar noise. The band takes as its inspiration the bleakness of modern urban life and the stress of day-to-day living in an industrial environment; in this respect, Amesoeurs is the dark twin of the lighter, more fantasy-inspired Alcest and it may be no surprise that the name “Amesoeurs” can mean “soul sisters”.

The album starts off on an optimistic note musically with “Gas in Veins” and “Les Ruches Malade” though there is the shadow of dark things to come on the second song. Gradually the album becomes rockier behind Audrey Sylvain’s fairly bland vocal. With “Recueillement”, the black metal heritage finally emerges with Neige’s raw screaming vocal and music with a hard noisy guitar shower edge though it is dominated by an urban blues style of playing and melancholy riffs. The lead guitar could almost pass for rather sorrowful banjo or mandolin, it has that doleful tone. “Faux Semblants” seems a fairly happy and carefree song (although the lyrics might be about isolation) but there is a dark soul within that puts it in company with the kind of material more northerly European bands like Lifelover and Circle of Ouroborus (both also BM-crossover bands) do.

On the whole the first half of the album is ambiguous with soft feminine pop-punk mixed in with some black metal / hard rock influence. The second half is a more schizophrenic beast, roving from harsh black metal guitar noise to the sweetest, most saccharine melancholy pop, starting with “Trouble (Éveils Infâmes)” which as black metal pop songs go is embarrassing: only the instrumental part at the end, all screaming noisy power-electronics-styled feedback is the song’s saving grace that makes you forget what came immediately before it. It’s as if Audrey Sylvain and Neige have backed into their respective corners in a musical boxing ring and are trading blows that result in some very wild swings from one genre to another and back.

The next three songs swing Audrey Sylvain’s way for the most part apart from a frantic screaming second half to “La Reine Trayeuse” which comes as a shock to what had just been a fairly relaxed piece. This song is more remarkable for the distorted treatments applied to Sylvain’s vocal which affect the ambience of the music. Final track “Au Crépuscule de Nos Rêves” is very much a post-rock / black metal fusion piece featuring for the third time Neige’s black metal vocal as the main voice, at least until we reach the coda which turns out a stiff robotic techno-industrial looping rhythms with sinister falling guitar tones and a ghostly alien spaceship factory ambience in the background.

It’s to be expected with such wild extremes as the two genres of music featured that “Amesoeurs” isn’t a consistent work: on several songs the combination of gritty black metal and Sylvain’s smooth singing doesn’t really gel together and the black metal pop is awkward in an almost self-conscious and embarrassed way. Even more purely black metal tracks like “Trouble (Éveils Infâmes)” have a half-hearted air about them, as if something essential to the song hasn’t worked out the way it should in spite of Neige’s efforts to perfect it. (And if Neige couldn’t do it then I doubt few others can.) The balance is roughly about two-thirds melancholy pop and one-third black metal: I’d have preferred a stronger and more equal blend of the two styles with a greater distortion of Sylvain’s voice and a stronger emphasis on mood and varied ambience. The wide open urban blues space that appears in the pop-oriented songs is effective in expressing the singer’s feeling of isolation and anomie but it also stresses the distance between the pop and the black metal so that the joins between the two are showing their stitches. This could have been a great album if the genres were in equal proportions and the production of the songs had emphasised moods particular to each song.

Pity in a way that Amesoeurs had to break up as this album really sounds like a warm-up to what could have been a better fusion of the two genres … though it’s equally likely that the black metal influence would wane even more and be little more than some edgy noise guitar in parts.

Contact: Code 666

February 22, 2013

Fragments from the Aethyr: black ambient experimental soundscapes teamed with near-hysterical solo violin wanderings

Funerary Call, Fragments from the Aethyr, Crucial Blast Records, CD CBR100 (2012)

A celebration is in order for Crucial Blast Records with this album from Vancouver-based act Funerary Call, this being the label’s 100th release. Suitably the figure on the cover of this 6th album for the black ambient act is celebrating a well-earned rest, about to drink heartily of his mead; Cernunnos is the horned one’s name and it’s appropriate that he appear on this album as he was one ancient pre-Christian influence (he was originally a nature god of Celts living in western Europe) on the concept of the Devil in early Christian mythology. While Cernunnos relaxes, Funerary Call man Harlow Macfarlane conjures up a world of mediaeval hellfire from the manipulated sounds of guitar, violin and other instruments, electronics and field recordings. The music rumbles and stutters close to hysteria and insanity, and the atmosphere is cold and often dark.

There are just three tracks totalling 39 minutes and they probably describe a ritual of some sort. “Libations” and “Fragments” both feature deranged violin virtuoso performances from Lashen Orendorff while other musicians defer to his screechy delivery and provide consistent support for his maddened mewlings. The ambience on “Libations” is cold and alienating while Orendorff scrabbles furiously on his instrument; if it could speak, it would probably turn out traumatised from the abused strings.

The middle track “Fragments” is the core around which everything pivots. Macfarlane gets busy laying out electronics effects to create a mystery space void in which dark invisible entities float and lob about, rumbling deeply, groaning and farting, just so you know they’re not to be trifled with. In comes Orendorff’s violin bravely, questing in this indifferent space, appealing for answers to its questions of existence, sometimes being rebuffed, other times finding answers that yield yet more questions and conundrums. The track and its predecessor acquire their distinctive characters from the interplay between solo violin and its accompaniment. We follow Orendorff’s violin-playing respectfully and with some fear: the terrain to be traversed is uninviting and sometimes downright hostile, and we can never afford to relax in case unseen forces come and steal our souls forever. Even the violin acquires a dark and sinister edge as though the longer one spends in this subterranean hell, the more corrupted one’s soul becomes. As the track progresses, guitar echo effects start to take over in the background as the violin merges with other acoustic instruments.

Final piece “Transference from the Void” includes some very sonorous throat-singing from Ross Birdwise whose very name suggests someone who communes with nature and the spirit world as readily as the rest of us tweet or hit Facebook or Skype. Spirit beings squeal or moan in the background. This is a much more vocal piece than the previous two but strangely less creepy: the voices sound off against one another but it seems nothing of great consequence is happening here.

At times this is a suspenseful album of delicacy and beauty with a lot of thought put into the construction and delivery of sound fragments and snippets around the violin melodies and guitar effects. The tracks have a definite mood of cold rarefied black ambience. Even so, by the time we reach the end of the album, I feel we have travelled a lot in circles and covered the same parts over and over. The album is chiefly memorable for Orendorff’s violin soloing and the guitar bits which can be quite affecting.

Contact: Crucial Blast Records

February 17, 2013

Negative Reversals

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

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

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

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

EDIT: Toy Killers added at 19:45