Tagged: drone

May 18, 2013

Foreign Greys

Fukushima! (PRESQU’ILE RECORDS PSQ004-2) is a compilation themed on the Japanese nuclear disaster of 2011, caused by an earthquake and leading to multiple reactor meltdowns. Otomo Yoshihide went on a lecture tour to raise awareness, and his appearance at the University of Tokyo in April 2011 was the direct inspiration for this two-disc set. I would imagine that Otomo gave a very direct, honest and impassioned account of the situation, if his music is anything to go by. He doesn’t appear on the compilation, but there is much modern avant performed music to savour. Disc two is dominated by star players from the Berlin reduced improv sphere, notably Burkhard Beins, Annette Krebs and Ingar Zach, plus similar minimalists Mark Wastell, Greg Kelley and Michael Pisaro. Their accumulated tracks put the listener in a suitably sober mood, and are politically contextualised by Krebs’ field recordings of a Berlin street demonstration. The main event is on disc one, a 34-minute John Tilbury piano solo from a composition by Dave Smith. It’s like listening to a very coherent argument made by an intelligent and assured wise man, which is exactly what it is. There’s also some alarming tones from Magda Mayas and a superbly baffling performance from Joe Foster of English with the Korean players Jin Sangtae, Hong Chulki and Choi Joonyong. Overlong, uneven, but this fund-raising comp is in a good cause. (19/07/2012)

Psykisk Tortur are the Norwegian combo, currently down to a duo of founder member Nicolaysen and Ronny Waernes, missing original member Tore Nilsen. When these maniacs began their unholy career in 1984 they became notorious for physically dangerous performances involving industrial machinery and metal percussion, thus aligning themselves with the early Faust, Hanatarash, and Einstürzende Neubaten – and although I’m not sure if the Norwegians ever succeeded in destroying any venue in which they played, they were certainly in receipt of numerous banning orders and they never ate lunch in Bodø again. On Nightrider (GO TO GATE RECORDS GO TO CD 022), their intense noise has mutated into a grotesque form of heavy metal rock, where mad electronic gibberish takes the place of squealing guitar solos, and the drumming is every bit as intense as a thousand Slayer tribute bands. It’s especially memorable when a “song” is attempted, as on ‘Stille Er Morgen’, where the monotonous chant is solemnly intoned against an insane cataclysm of heavily-distorted amplified wildness and remorseless drumbeats. Those who crave more outright “experimental” noise are advised to spin ‘Lettmetall’ to experience the more free-form tendencies of this powerful team, while rest of album is sufficient to satisfy any crazed Napalm Death fans. Very percussive and metallic throughout; the album virtually builds an iron suit around your whole body while you wait. As Robert Pepper astutely noted, “Psykisk Tortur rules!” (06/07/2012)

Matt Earle is an Australian musician and label owner, who has improvised with Guthrie and Guerra in his home country and recorded electronic music as part of Stasis Duo. Muura is his solo outlet, and the object simply titled Tape (ORGANIZED MUSIC FROM THESSALONIKI T19) is a cassette of process drone music that crawls from the speakers like over-baked ectoplasm escaping a desert climate. It’s built up from layered recordings of by-products of the electric guitar, including amplifier hum, feedback, and other “mistakes” generally considered undesirable by normal men. From this swamp of friable material, Muura impressively manages to build a hefty brick wall – a compelling experience of solid, throbbing abstract sound. The B side may have employed the same processes, but is somehow hollowed out and subtracted to create an extremely bleak and negative effect. Ultra-drone. (19/07/2012)

We last noted the Irish noise duo Safe in late 2010 with their Bare Life release. Now here’s their fifth item Crop (DOTDOTDOT MUSIC DOTDOTDOTCD010), where Hegarty and O’Shaugnessy supplement the group with four collaborators who add guitars, synth and toy instruments to the melee on this live recording. And it’s a continuous 40-minute assault, so civilians should approach this toxic area with caution. What may appear at first to be an indistinguishable howl of unpleasant frequencies slugging it out inside a tight arena of hate will reveal itself to be much more complex, and as deep as an aquarium filled with unusual marine life. The usual relentless Merzbow-chug power blast which Safe favour has been slightly subdued to act as a rhythmical backdrop to the instrumental lines of Langan, Condon, O’Brien and Lynch, guitar and synth eruptions which mew most plaintively. When you get this many noiseicians gathered together in a live situation, it can sometimes be a guarantee of unlistenable, sloppy chaos. But the musicians here reverse that trend, cohering strongly and sustaining interest unflaggingly for all 40 minutes. (24/07/2012)

May 11, 2013

I Am A Statistic

UK marginalista Hari Hardman‘s cleverness consists of stating his themes in short bursts of electronic drone-noises that stimulate the mind for only a few minutes at a time, in contrast with many excess-merchants who overegg their puddings and outstay their welcomes. The Tyrant King Supports The Sacrificial Vessel (HARI HARDMAN PRODUKTS HH0024) is more approachable than his earlier harsher burst-a-plosions, and indeed you may enjoy losing your way in the curvulated paths he maps so eccentrically. Highly generous on the absurd visuals too, booklet and insert produced with high-contrast photocopier and typewriter technology. (25/07/2012)

Puzzling thing sent from Sparks, Nevada in the US, maybe from Isa Tanaka. The name of the act and CD are rendered in runes I cannot reproduce, and the tracks have odd names such as ‘Rakine Hugoniot Relations’, which perplex. The front cover states “Ambients”, but this may be misleading information. On the CD are the most enigmatic stretches of low-key white-noise hoover-drones I have heard for a while. Some are possibly environmental in origin (a clinical shopping centre mode), some have vaguely musical elements. May seem unappealing, but I enjoy its inscrutable continuousness. (24/07/2012)

UK composer Martin Ayres has produced his Harmogram Suite (BURNING SHED BSHED0111) as a 5:1 surround sound DVD and as a regular audio CD. Not one to stint on hard labour and meticulous assembly, his work contains 140 layers of overdubs, with all parts played by Ayres himself; he’s also paid close attention to recording methods, set-ups, and different playing techniques, the better to simulate the richness of a full orchestra on this one-man show. Languorous strings drone slowly, and the work is suffused with melancholy astringency. (03/08/2012)

Mika Vainio will be an electronic musician I personally associate with a time in the 1990s when electronica was punchy, abstract, and brutal. His FE304 – Magnetite (TOUCH TO:86) thankfully contains some trace elements of these desirable features. With six track titles that incorporate the word “magnet”, he may be trying to tell us something profound about the world, even more than these stark, ultra-dynamic throbbers of pulsant noise reveal on first spin. Angry firebursts, puzzling silences, eerie distilled silver tones, deathly precision. An air of stern grimness abounds for album’s length, which is fine, but Vainio also relaxes into pedestrian mechanical drone once too often for my liking. ‘Elvis’s TV Room’ is a great title though, and it’s a good piece of mausoleum music too. (19/07/2012)

An uncanny oddity of terrifying beauty is Polin (MATHKA NO NUMBER) by Ireneusz Socha. Produced just with sampler and electronics, plus the voice of Jaroslaw Lipszyc and the bayan of Jaroslaw Bester, it tells you more than you want to know about Polish and Jewish history, and does so in just 20 minutes. An intricate “hörspiel” miniature, it took Socha several years to complete, which is unsurprising as, at the core, it’s a detailed assemblage of samples borrowed from a sound archive. Religious and political themes underpin the work, blended with speech recordings and cabaret or klezmer music, but ultimately it’s a transcendent art statement that takes the listener on a profound and fascinating journey. Bolstered with a concise essay “An Uneasy Rest” written by the composer. Very recommended! (13/07/2012)

Fêlure (ORGANIZED MUSIC FROM THESSALONIKI T18) is an item from two maestros of the school of non-musical object-based minimalism, Pascal Battus and Alfredo Costa Monteiro. Battus has done great things with his strange droney sounds based on “rotating surfaces”, which I assume are decommissioned potter’s wheels and broken cake-stands. Monteiro has taken his reductionist philosophy one stage further by playing “amplified paper” on this album, an action which presumably involves rubbing or stroking the grain in interesting ways. Atmospheric creaks, haunting hoots and sibilant rumblings abound. (03/07/2012)

Worsel Strauss decided one day to surrender his will to the way of the machine, and produced the music on Unattention Economy (VICMOD RECORDS VMDL16) using self-generating electronic devices including a Buchla synth, along with a deliberate refusal on his part to interfere with the pure course of automatism. The liner notes robustly defend this approach, ruminating on the psychology of fear and ideas about loss of control. Lest we think the resultant album is a sprawling mess of doodling synth noise, in reality the process has been carefully refined through listening and editing. Strauss found that the set-ups were incredibly labour-intensive, and even more work was involved in finding strong moments of structured or partially-structured music buried among the hours of chaos he recorded. His strenuous efforts are reflected in the 12 shortish tracks we now hear, some of which are quite good. I’m all in favour of editing, but doesn’t that strategy somehow undermine his “loss of control” philosophy? (04/07/2012)

May 4, 2013

Fistula: a complex and temperamental sound beast of many moods

Sujo and Sun Hammer, Fistula, Inam Records, CD 107 (2012)

“Fistula” is a medical term describing a passage between two organs that normally aren’t connected and, while I think it’s one of those topics that inspire surgeons to tell each other war stories and jokes at post-conference cocktail parties, I can see the title is an apt metaphor for the music, a collaboration between noise / drone guitarist Sujo (Ryan Huber) and ambient soundscape designer Sun Hammer (Jay Bodley). Seven quite beautiful atmospheric tracks of shimmery guitar fuzz and buzz drone, digital noise, musique concrete, industrial, ambient and post-rock are featured here. The various genres weave from one to another to create a network of passageways that result in a complex and temperamental sound beast of many unpredictable moods.

All tracks can be heard as movements (heh-heh) of one over-arching work or separately. Though they all include noise and drone as essential elements and can be harsh and abrasive in tone and volume, several tracks (especially later ones) can be very serene and blissful. From track 5 “Hari” onwards, the music can be introverted and brooding with little attempt made to find a way of resolving the darkness and tension arising from deep within its wells.

The album might not be as long as I’d like – a few pieces here and there feel quite cramped for room and time and deserve to be more expansive and exploratory – but the tracks exert a strong pull on the consciousness and quickly mesmerises and initiates the listener into its self-contained universe of sculptured noise / drone and moody dark ambience. The album has quite a distinct character, being energetic and strongly hard-edged in style in its first half before the aggression gives way to quieter and more introspective mood music.

Contact: Sujo, Sun Hammer

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

April 20, 2013

The End of the World News

Koji Asano remains as productive and as enigmatic as ever. This Japanese emperor of distorted drone released Travel Coupons (SOLSTICE 047) in June 2012, his 47th new record, and I know for sure there’s another new release from him awaiting me in one of the forthcoming bags. This one has a travel-themed title and a couple of touristy photos from unidentified locales on the cover, plus it comes with a free pack of Koji Asano paper tissues, the kind of complimentary gewgaw you used to be given on airlines. The front cover is, we have to admit, a shade less impenetrable than the average Koji cover – with its attention to framing and composition executed in a manner that might almost satisfy the demands of a renaissance painter, its use of primary colours, and the incidence of a number and two road signs,all giving us signs – potentially loaded semiotic information we might stand a chance of decoding into something useful. No such luck with the music though, which remains nebulous and evasive, obdurate in its refusal to give out with the clues. For a change we have two tracks instead of the usual Asano ploy which is to conquer the listener’s resistance with a single hour’s worth of strange music which pretty does one thing. Track one is the usual faceless electronic drone music treated with wobbly reverb effects to induce travel nausea, which I think Koji has done to disarming effect on another release in the last few years. The second track is rather different though, a kaleidoscope of spinning layers of abstract blurriness which don’t quite overlap. The listener keeps hoping for the shapes to resolve into a meaningful pattern of some sort, but we’re kept on the edge of expectation for 48 minutes. It’s as though Koji had been to a week-long avant-garde music festival which featured several large orchestral works by Stockhausen, and was enjoying a drunken memory of the music he head heard on the long flight home as he slumped exhausted in his seat.

The unclassifiable Tetrix from Calgary send us their new item 28 June 2012. it might be called Tetrix 11 or T11, unless that’s the catalogue number, and it’s their version of a radio play. On this sprawling and bewildering work, their experimental music and fractured avant-rock songs are interspersed with sound effects and cut-ups of radio jingles, plus distorted fragments of real or imaginary radio announcers, cars driving while playing car radios, and tiny excerpts of little plays within a play. Radio play concept albums are an intriguing device, and one that I sometimes wish more musicians would make use of, but when they do they often descend into pretentious concept-album nonsense. In the electro-acoustic area, the most successful example I can think of was Roger Doyle’s Babel / KBBL from 1999. Predictably, Tetrix have a very oblique approach to the task, and their original concept of a radio play is likewise pretty deranged from the get-go. They create a highly compelling and textured sound-jumble full of confusing scene-changes and corresponding acoustical shocks that succeeds admirably – if the aim is maximum listener disorientation. Eventually however a science-fiction story of some sort emerges, including what might be their own spot-on impersonation of War of the Worlds by the Mercury Theater, and this develops into an end-of-the-world scenario relayed through dramatic snippets, including the clever device of characters within the radio play learning information from listening to the radio. Throughout the enfolding apocalypse, Tetrix maintain a cheery and upbeat vibe to the work, and it’s often hard to know when their tongues are in their cheeks or how to separate out the parodic elements in this elaborate mash-up. Even the innocent-looking retro Space Invaders on the cover art somehow assume a slightly sinister bent. With this release, Tetrix may have just found the ideal form of expression for their bonkers multi-faceted style of music: their obvious facility with many musical modes, which apparently grates with some audiences, fits perfectly into this loosely-structured narrative framework. And even if you don’t appreciate either the songs or the story, this release succeeds purely as a sound experience; the wealth of detail and “busy-ness” is quite astounding, with wild dynamics, dramatic changes, tasty textures, filters and studio treatments layered on with relish. And of course it is issued in a suitably gimmicky cover, although by their past standards this one is positively restrained in its colour scheme and use of foldouts.

Time for another item from Italy’s Lisca Records. Culver & Karst serve up a single 33-minute track on Mile High Volcano (LISCA 009), which proves to be no more than an dull and inert rumbling sound, largely unvaried for its duration. It doesn’t have the force or energy to qualify as Harsh Noise, and while the title promises some form of explosive orgasmic sensation, the actual results fail to satisfy.

A large number of musicians are gathered together as the Insub Meta Orchestra, recruited from parts of Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe; about 40 of them may be heard on Archive #1 (INSUBCD04), which I think is the first attempt to release some of their collective experiments after about a year of working together. The six tracks here were distilled and selected from three days of activity during the summer of 2011 in Geneva, and d’incise – who also plays in the Orchestra – released this as a download and physical item on his Insubordinations Netlabel. Given the scale of the enterprise and the large number of instruments, including quite a few electric guitars and electronic musicians, the listener might be expecting chaos, an unkempt, roaring noise. Instead Archive #1 is the document of a very restrained and subdued mass-encounter between sympathetic exploring musicians. It seems many of the participants were likewise anticipating an unholy mess to be the result of this project, but instead a mutual respect developed and a subtle movement towards some form of shared consciousness was a noted phenomenon. By a mixture of unspoken agreements, free improvisation, and semi-structured conduction techniques, this quiet and slow music was created. This is not the mystical massed droning of The Taj Mahal Travellers, nor does it have the tautness and rigour of any given “Onkyo” or “Reduced Improv” ensemble. But there is a genuine commitment to exploration and experimentation, which is refreshing to behold even if the players are sometimes tentative, and the results are somewhat flabby and inconclusive. There are some intriguing sonic combinations; a lot of it is produced by all-acoustic instruments or voices, which is encouraging (only a single laptop musician in the roster); and the album is not an unpleasant listen by any means. But the music still lacks direction, shape, and tension.

April 14, 2013

Walking Woods

Composer Daniel Stearns freely owns up to the peculiar mental state of “dissociation”, which manifests itself as unusual occasions or experiences in his life from time to time, strange visitations which have descended upon his psyche since as long as he can remember. He takes heart in the fact that other mystics, scholars, writers and musicians in history appear to have been subjected to similar episodes, among them William James, Emerson, Charles Ives, Sigurd Olson and the Outsider artist Adolf Wolfli. Now on Golden Town (SPECTROPOL SpecT 03), he attempts to find musical expression for the semi-visionary outlook he receives in his detached states, and fourteen tracks of decidedly strange and distinctive music are the result. From the first track onwards, the music evokes mental detachment and an uncanny sense of world-going-wrongness before your very ears. Stearns was encouraged in his project not only by Bruce Hamilton but by the composer Steve Moshier, whom he met through online social media. The CD appears to be linked quite strongly to Stearns’ visual effluvia, a tack which leads us to consider his interest in lo-fi photography (typically using cellphones) to create singular images that appear to be suffused with more meaning and hidden depths than their original subject matter ever contained. Reading the compelling sleeve notes on this release does start to engender a not-unpleasant mind-sapping sensation, as though the layers of reality are starting to flake away and small chinks appear in the fabric that separates us all from the Great Beyond. The music / sound art on the CD is likewise quite unsettling, a queasy mix of semi-identifiable field recordings with wobbly electronic music and some intensive post-production techniques. At its best Golden Town does indeed come close to ushering the listener into the private world of Daniel Stearns, which he describes metaphorically as “an insular place at the far end of a dark wood” which he arrived at after “walking down a mountain I never knew I’d climbed”, with its extreme disorienting methods and highly dreamlike, somnambulistic tone. The label praises the “trance states” and “hypnotic pattern layers” of this unusual record. From 13 June 2012.

The lovely Dan Peck is the New York radical artist who has found the missing connection between jazz music and doom metal. He expresses this discovery using the tuba, playing in a trio called The Gate who we first heard on the 2009 LP Acid Soil with its great zombie skeleton cover. Now here they are again on Destruction of Darkness (CARRIER RECORDS CARRIER 015), Peck with his brass beast, the bassist Tom Blancarte and drummer Brian Osborne. Three lengthy tracks of depressing, intense and slow-moving sludge are created, almost unbelievably, through acoustic methods. I say “unbelievably” because in form and surface, this music is uncannily close to heavy sludge rock made with guitars and amplifiers. Stephen O’Malley had better look to his laurels! This micro-genre has been dubbed “doom jazz” by the experts, a fitting nomenclature, and The Gate do it far more convincingly than The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, even though the latter have the musical style embedded in their name. ¹ If you like deeply resonant bass and sub-bass tones that can slough the skin off a Burmese python at fifteen paces, with enough presence to flatten a mountain range into Play-Doh, then this is the record for you. Peck’s method, which incidentally is composed rather than improvised and partly indebted to the work of Hungarian composer György Kurtág, is horrifyingly effective when set to a relentless march beat as on ‘Aeons Of Decay’, but also doubly fatal on ‘Frozen Gods’ where for the first half of its 23-minute stretch, the tuba just sits there and growls menacingly in jet-black rumbling tones, its bad-tempered sighs sometimes joined by the equally disgruntled upright bass sawing out snarls and grunts from the lower depths. It’s not just the glorious sound of this record that’s so compelling, but the way it contains all the nuances of improvisatory rapport and compositional structure that makes it so satisfying a listen. I suppose ‘Buried Blasphemy’ is the liveliest cut here and is the one to spin to your extreme metal-freak friends with their strange haircuts and pieces of metal embedded in their noses and lips. ² If they arrive at the party clutching their boring records by Cult Of Luna, Neurosis and Mastodon in their heavily-ringed fists, then give ‘em a dose of this monster and watch ‘em drop dead. From 23 April 2012 and highly recommended.

When not working solo as TL0741, Pat Gillis is one half of Northern Machine with the bass player Bill Warford. The duo poured most of their energy into studio-based records for a while, until they found they could wreak their droning noise on stage and made a leap into releasing live recordings, staring with 2004′s Staalhertz. In Front Of The Crowd (HC3 MUSIC HC3NMCD9) is also live music, a compilation of ten examples of their craft made in the period 2005-2009, realised using keyboards, percussion, tape loops and various electronic effects; all the individual voices of these instruments, most especially the “singing metals” of Warford, do tend to lose some of their definition in the overall droney murk, sometimes resulting in rather nightmarish effects as the frequencies swirl together like nine types of liquid glue. I get the impression the pair are very good at working their way intuitively through the twin swamps of aggressive noise and effects-drenched drone, but the intention in the live work was to introduce some repeatable elements and a tad more structure to the enterprise. Unfortunately these good intentions appear to have succumbed to the compelling effects of loud amplification, and while the record has its moments of good solid assaultive chunkery and mysterious sojourns in a dreamy dark-ambient state, the music becomes quite samey and dull towards the end of the album. Despite the often compelling surfaces, I just don’t hear enough risk-taking or moments of real danger in the playing. One title at least, ‘Circuit Parasite’, seems indicative of their approach; one often has the impression of electronic equipment simply feeding off itself. From 13 June 2012.

Sadly they are an example of a band who cannot possibly live up to their own name. ↩
I of course have many such acquaintances in my coterie, to a man all named Zach and covered with so many tattoos that their arms resemble walking museums of scrimshaw work. ↩

April 10, 2013

Mother: ambient raw black metal in a vast and ancient landscape of flat plains, dry heat and the threat of fire

Cicadan, Mother, US, Eternal Warfare, cassette (2013)

Cicadan is a recent black metal act based in Cobram, located on the Victorian side of the Murray River in southeast Australia. Helmed by Shamus Toomath, Cicadan plays doomy black metal with ambient, drone and experimental / abstract music influences. “Mother” is the debut album, featuring three tracks whose titles suggest a description of a 24-hour period somewhere in Australia during a time when European settlers were yet to arrive and change the landscape forever.

Cobram’s Wikipedia entry says its climate is a Mediterranean-type one with hot dry summers and cool wet winters averaging 300 days of sunshine a year. This balmy background would hardly favour the rise of black metal bands, let alone one as intense, powerful and sullen as Cicadan. Yet this first recording is a dark and smouldering one. The album is a creature of its surroundings: each track is topped and tailed with field recordings of the natural environment of Toomath’s home town. Chittering birds and insects like cicadas, from which the project obtains its name, and the deep stillness of the Australian bush form the underlying inspiration for the music. Something of the flat expanses of the Australian continent is captured in the album’s more meditative moments. Lyrics in all three songs hint at the endless cycles of life and regeneration of nature in a long history. Something about the lyrics reminds me of Al Cisneros’ writing for Om: it’s a bit hypnotic and a little remote, and there’s a hint of change that leads to a heightened awareness of nature’s connection to the cosmos.

“Day” has a hot and dry start of insects chirping loudly and birds sheltering in the tree canopy. The acoustic guitar introduction is lethargic under the weight of the heat. It soon weighs into the steely acid grind of the black metal guitar which falls like heavy rain across the sonic landscape. The pace is slow and majestic with powerful droning doom guitar and an ugly chanting BM vocal. “Dusk” is similar to “Day” in its basic structure: a soft melodic guitar introduction builds into a shimmering and malevolent piece with spiky lead guitar solo melody and muttering demon voice. Droning riffs add some variation and tension to the music. The track is creepy with a regular loop of reverb-touched clicks appearing early and gradually coming to define the song’s structure and atmosphere. It all becomes post-rock in a way reminiscent of the Cascadian black metal scene with a choir of ghostly voices and the sounds of nature following a melancholy lead guitar tune.

The real glory of the album is “Night (Dendronic Pessimism)”, the shortest of the three songs but the most varied and atmospheric. It’s very powerful in its long booming drone riffs against a background of burning black metal rhythm guitar. Quiet acoustic banjo or mandolin-like strings with night-time ambience and a spoons percussion rhythm feature for a brief time. The piece fades into crackling fire.

With a sound palette that includes BM-guitar rain showers, huge deep sonic bass booms and competent drumming that doesn’t appear to be programmed, Cicadan has a rich foundation for his music to really soar. At present the songs here aren’t greatly different from one another in their basic elements and structure, and their differentiation lies in the field recordings and the quieter, more introspective acoustic music sections attached to them. There is huge potential for Cicadan to become much bigger and more well-known outside Australia but he needs more music composition practice. Writing music in conventional song structure formats might be worthwhile to enable him to understand more about building up tension and emotion to maintain listener interest, and to appreciate better the freedom and limitations that unconventional music structures have. Sometimes in order to break the rules, you have to know and obey them first. A couple of tracks on “Mother” don’t have very obvious climaxes and the music starts to tail away too soon with the result that endings seem to take forever.

If Cicadan can improve his music composition skills and gain experience playing the music live, he will be an unstoppable force in Australian black metal, the equal of acts like Elysian Blaze and Striborg in their intense and idiosyncratic approaches to the genre.

Contact: Eternal Warfare

April 4, 2013

Condensing Clouds

From Göteborg in Sweden ¹ we have a package of tapes produced by the label Native Parts Records which arrived 1st June 2012. The DIY collage covers looked promising and the website follows a similar aesthetic, configured so that the scrolling takes place on the horizontal plane instead of the vertical. Skugar is Johannes Brander and his solo tape is Magic / Khands (NPR02) which is quite pleasing although I found the first track wittering on for too long with its dreamy synth runs and rather pointless droning. What don’t I like? Hmmm…maybe the root note is a bit too ordinary and the overall tone is a shade too nice, as if the music were trying too hard to please an audience. However the B side (if indeed that is correct since the sides are unmarked) is darker and more engaging. Fairly sinister edge and lots of unknown quantities. I find myself being gently pulled into a bewildering maze of slightly distorted rumbling and keening noises, a faded jungle of imaginary plants and wildlife. Skogar seems to work best when he allows himself to meander in this echoey electronic murk, a gaseous entity which is almost beyond being abstract, so lacking in definition it be. Yet there is a core of some living matter within the cloud. Pulsate! Pulsate! Skugar also exhibits some interest in psychedelic or proggy tunes, as suggested by his cover of a Bardo Pond piece, an American band whom we would associate with that early 1990s upsurge interest in “space-rock” and latterday psychey droning with guitars. Skogar works well for me when his inner skeleton is acting sullen and weird, and he should force himself down that path of incommunicative obscurity more often, perhaps by putting his head in a cloth sack ². Also we like his interest in malfunctioning or broken equipment which was used to make the record. Strange cover art shows men in sun hats like 1930s Mexicans or Paraguyans, being dwarved by enormous plants, maybe some form of gigantic sugar beet or other local crop. There is also a luxury art edition of the release which comes with a unique painting on wood. It’s an old-ish release from 2010 but is still available.

Brander’s an able painter as shown by the symbolist cover art ³ he produced for Verfver‘s tape which is Animi / Animus (NPR24). A solo tape by Johan Gustafsson who is also associated with Tsukimono, Blessings, and Scraps of Tape. We like him well as Tsukimono, under which name he produced the memorable title ‘Moan Jar’ for a compilation. This tape doesn’t quite produce the desired chilling / pessimistic / bleak visions however. Distortion and lo-fi recording are the guiding lights behind this scrapbook of musical episodes, pages and cuttings torn from the eyes and mind of a restless soul. Verfver does manage some pleasing moments in this eclectic array of ambient, drones, tunes, piano fugues, and rhythmic avant-rock tunes, but there is too often a deficiency of conviction or weight behind his musical utterances. I’m sure there is a way to turn these wispy tones into the sort of plangent and heartfelt melancholic wails to which he aspires. He has certainly managed as much in his Tsukimono guise.

Lastly we have Crystal Crypt‘s II (NPR21). Crystal Crypt is another alias for Johannes Brander, and again the package is adorned with clippings from National Geographic magazine to form the collage cover art. The titles here certainly indicate a more “cosmic” Pink Floyd type outlook on man’s existence, with ‘Beyond’, ‘Worlds Apart’ and ‘Future Past’ pointing to his aspirations to journey into the metaphysical zones. Realised I think mostly with an electric guitar, feedback and an echo unit, though there is also percussion and other things going on. Works best when it wallows in maddening repetition and remorseless exploration of raw guitar tones. The music he makes here can also appear lonely and isolated, so perhaps at one level these tunes and their ponderous titles are metaphors for an inability to communicate ⁴. Although still formless, woolly and self-indulgent in places, this cloudy and clanging music does have the same sort of “Roman wilderness of pain” vibe as the Skogar tape, a mental state which Brander would do well to cultivate and explore even more fearlessly on future experiments with his psychological axe. A 2011 recording which the creator wishes to associate with ‘Heart of Darkness’, the Conrad novel which was one of the texts which fed into Apocalypse Now, still the movie of choice for all dark-hearted outcasts and pariahs of society. I often think a lot of these musicians wish they could remake the soundtrack for this film, and this tape may represent another entry in that ongoing catalogue.

Also the home of Fang Bomb Records, our favourite label of angsty and grating Swedish noise. ↩
I make this suggestion simply as a cheap and practical way to achieve sensory deprivation. More sophisticated methods are available. ↩
It depicts a cathedral blighted by a witch in the guise of a black spider with multiple arms. ↩
At times the music put me in mind of another Göteborg depressive, Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, who likewise despairs of making himself understood by the rest of humanity. In that instance the creator suffers from borderline personality disorder. ↩

March 13, 2013

The Grain: country music was never so massive or monumental as this homage to wheat fields

Slomo, The Grain, Trilithon, TRCD05 (2012)

Here are two very stretched-out tracks of creeping, repetitive droning music that revolve around an agricultural theme, in this case, endless fields of rippling, ripening waves of wheat and wheat only. The longer track at 42 minutes is “The Grain” and the shorter is, surprisingly or perhaps not surprisingly, “Against the Grain”. I wonder what message the duo Slomo intended by those track titles: are they telling us that for all the seemingly endless ocean of wheat offered by the first track, there is something wrong and unnatural about the idea of vast swathes of countryside dominated completely by one species of plant – and possibly one with a small gene pool resulting from endless inbreeding through its generations – and that only one small virus or fungus might be enough to spread through all those hectares of cereal and destroy it completely?

The title track is a vast, sprawling and repetitive piece notable mainly for its unrelenting and often tedious monotony but that may be precisely Slomo’s intention, to call our attention to the cereal-based monoculture that dominates Western agriculture and which itself contributes to many global economic, political and social crises facing the world today. The industrial feel of the ambient music alludes to modern cereals’ total dependence on petroleum-based fertiliser and manufactured pesticides, of which genetic modifications might be considered an extension, to grow and thrive. The deep rumbles might call our attention to the havoc such industrial props and GM cropping might be having on soils, soil quality and the underground ecosystems that nourish the soil, purify groundwater and help to maintain the water, carbon and nitrogen cycles.

“Against the Grain” is more mechanical and rather tense in its rhythmic whirrings. This might suggest a more intensive, invasive form of human intervention in the wheat’s production in the form of genetic manipulation. Ominous rumbling drones warn of the dangers that might strike ecosystems and the health of plants, animals and ultimately humans if GM cropping goes ahead without long-term test trials monitoring its effects on soil, other plants and humans when they are in contact with the plants. Or perhaps those rumbles suggest pesticide-resistant insects continuing to bore away into the grain’s husk, oblivious to any notion that hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent by companies on chemicals that were meant to blow the little varmints away. This starts as a mild track, initially calm if a little ambiguous, but gradually becomes strained with two parallel sets of drones, one very steely and strung-out, the other super-calm and suggesting a massive though vaguely defined presence in the music.

More likely to induce awe and respect than love, this music is monumental within its defined scope and structure. Perfect for lulling away quiet afternoons out in the countryside, watching grass sway in the breeze, thinking of insects feeding on grass blades or pollen and going about their business … All music is credited by its creators Holy McGrail and Howard Marsden to guitars, woodwind instruments and synthesisers.

Contact: Slomo, Trilithon Records

February 28, 2013

Go Back to the Sirius: voyage into multi-dimensional psychedelic realms

3841355101-1 — “A traffic jam of space-ships quickly develops…”

VagusNerve, Go Back to the Sirius, Utech Records, URCD073 (2012)

Are they serious? No way would you want to return to the “serious” world of reality after travelling to Sirius with these space travellers. VagusNerve is a Chinese-based duo of guitarist Li Jianhong and laptopper Vavabond and this is their second release for Utech Records. Initially this seems like just another very long and trippy psychedelic voyage into the deep inner space in our heads until the musicians turn on the full radioactive force of blaring guitar feedback and electronic drones, dolphin whistles, low-end buzz and ghostly phantom voices. In the background, coelenterate UFOs float, land on planets, arise and hover in the atmosphere, their fragile tendril-like tentacles wafting behind them. Barking seal voices reverberate in the black clouds and extended guitar drones reach out in all directions from an unseen singularity. A traffic jam of space-ships quickly develops: perpetual motion engines hum furiously, anti-matter drives are on the verge of exploding/imploding, thrumming vibrations and rapidly spinning energy vortices howl and wobble on the edge of chaos and diffusion through all the galaxies.

That was “The Memory of Light” alone and second track “The Exiled Life” is a bit more subdued but no less disorienting in its swerving highs and lows. Vocals are much less blurry and more forward in the track but still very watery and distorted as though Li was speaking to us from a multi-dimensional plane and our particular inadequate space-time continuum was cramming all the different dimensions into its own crude tunnel. This can still be a noisy piece but it appears less exuberant and more restrained in character.

However it’s the third and final track “Go Back to the Sirius” which is as hard-edged, penetrating and searingly hot as it is deliriously expansive and cosmic in scope and ambition. Laser death rays of attack guitar pass through all defences and scan all the cells in living organisms while faint background droning probes and collects fragments of DNA for future experimentation. Eerie and sinister alien communications pop in and out, sinuous effects flutter into view before disappearing quickly into the ether, and faint phantasms bark and whine while Li’s increasingly stuttering guitar drones command all our attention with their insistent howls and yelps. Eventually this work passes to another plane of existence and calms down considerably yet retains a hysterical edge.

This is a wondrous work if heard loudly late at night when the mind is relaxed and submerging into semi-conscious mode; at other times, the music can sometimes seem monotonous and single-minded, even cantankerous in its insistence on commanding your full attention. I have a sense that “Go Back to the Sirius” might win cult status for this act in years to come, not so much for the music but for its ambition and vision, not to mention the duo pushing their instruments and imagination to the utmost.

Contact: Utech Records