Tagged: electroacoustic

May 20, 2013

Two Intrepid Dentists

Luciano Maggiore & Francesco Brasini, How to Increase Light in the Ear
ITALY BORING MACHINES BM040 CD (2012)

Two long, intense electro-acoustic interrogations from these two exploratory Italians. Instruments are self-built guitars, Revox tape machine and electronic devices. High-frequencies are the stated and actual order of the day. The approach is tightly focused and ruthlessly restrained for the most part. Ploughing determined furrows extruded filaments of frequency needle and itch. Mic-feedback whines are pushed through hair thin cracks. Constant high frequency level activity and agitation demands listener attention and denies any comfortable zone-out in the listener or the music.

The first track resembles a recording of an introverted dental drill in close proximity to, yet studiously ignoring, the cold metal curves of an anaesthetic gas tank. As it moves through its twenty-odd minutes the clipped and controlled high-frequency activities, presumably generated by the ‘electronic devices’ noted in the credits, are gradually, very gradually, joined by simple lower register frequencies whose tones start to beat against each other. Eventually these harmonic conglomerates start to acquire almost ecclesiastical shadings. The drones beneath the drill shift as this illusory organ adjusts its stops by itself before fading away to stark and simple high frequencies again without reaching any sort of conventional conclusions. This track has admirable scouring ability and should be appreciated by religiously minded dentists everywhere.

Track two, even longer at nearly half an hour, is another slowly unfolding drama incorporating many seeming wrong turns and cul-de-sacs, appreciation of the whole piece reveals an inexorable progress towards some sort of dénouement, however. Weedy high tones set the stage, beating and fluttering unstably against each other, pitch manipulation I assume is courtesy of the Revox tape machine. High mosquito-pitched tones are utilised, and then an almost melodious drone is gradually introduced, lending the piece a less restless and dissatisfied tone than that of the preceding work. The middle of this second track sees the introduction of some remarkably piercing tones which sound filed to a point and thin and flat enough to slide beneath your mental window casements. Tremeloed, reedy sounds continue to wisp and circulate around each other in palpable atmosphere of focus and tension, you can almost hear our intrepid dentists’ intent gazes. Little by little over its long course the track fleshes out into a (kind of) triumphant and (sort of) expansive mode, providing a more confident base for more pro-active frequency prods and what sounds like a rumbling piano (possibly self-made guitar derived), all of which adds variety to the previously restrained sound palette, the piano/guitar sounds being especially effective. Our dynamic duo even deploy some big (in this context) gestures notching up the pace and adding a sense of purpose or direction. The end of this piece is relatively bombastic. A crescendo, even. Dynamics? Worry not, as it tails off once again into inscrutable high frequencies, still whirring glassily.

April 6, 2013

Hippogriffs

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

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

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

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

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

April 2, 2013

Meet Me in a Fog

Kayaka is the lovely Japanese creator Kaya Kamijo whom we last heard from with her CDR Operation Deep Freeze in November 2011. Now that I think of it, Mantile Records in London has reissued that item with added bonus tracks on cassette in January this year. Kayaka sent us her Bass Clarinet Songs (SOI 065) in June 2012 and while she sent it from an address in Spain (she used to live in London), the item is released on a tiny Russian label called Spirals of Invention. “This album is simply dedicated to my bass clarinet and last period I stayed in North London in 2012,” she writes. On seven gorgeous and innovative cuts, her woodwind instrument is overdubbed, processed with echo, and overlaid with cluttering and clattering sounds effects – everything from trains arriving and departing, to a whirlwind in the kitchen cupboards, a neighing horse on ‘Lancelot’, and a typewriter on ‘Three Goats’. Truly moving and beautiful music, at times as alien and unsettling as the best electronic tones you could wish for, and through her understated juxtapositions she arrives at a form of sonic surrealism. She plays with the unfettered joy of a child with a large paintbox colouring everything that moves in red and purple shapes, and the world around her becomes magically transformed when she blows her instrument. Kayaka’s sheer love of life is what impresses us most strongly on these instant compositions, and her determined primitive creative strengths make a mockery of more refined musicians with their swanky improvising and composing ways. What a total delight!

Pat Gillis last wrote to us in January 2010. Now here’s another package from his HC3 Music label, the full-length Held To Account (HC3 TLCD3) which he created as TL0741. It’s a good name to work under. I used to think we’d all have numbers instead of names in the future, but now that seems a positively benign fate compared to what’s clearly going to become of us as we are ground to mulch by the inexorable wheels of monopoly capitalism. Our man Gillis may not share my bleak outlook on our existence, but his sonorous digital groanings and writhings on this outing do not betoken the mind of a fully contented man. He uses synths and tape manipulations like he was kneading bread dough mixed with solid concrete, trying to tame the slimy white filth much as the scuba diver wrestles with the vicious octopus. No root notes, no repetitions, no pulsations, no recognisable shape to these livid slabs of murk – just slices of menacing viscera torn straight from the flanks of a gigantic ox-like creature. Gillis performs everything live in one take, and regards his work as “unsettled dream music”. Purchase and spin this hallucinator and a palpable and unignorable presence will pour into your listening space like five-and-twenty unwanted fat ghosts, slobbering at the jowls. From 13 June 2012.

Luke Younger used to be part of Birds Of Delay. Now he operates solo as Helm and we have a copy of his Impossible Symmetry (PAN 27) LP sent to us 1st June 2012. Five long tracks spread across two sides of vinyl, where it seems the starting point was a live performance using acoustic elements to some degree. Through persistence, duration, and some quite extreme manipulation, the unusual sounds are treated until they go completely bonkers. Each track occupies a very distinct and tangible world; the insane model railway set of ‘Miniatures’ is a strong opener, but ‘Liskojen Yö’ is even more powerful and drags us into a subterranean world where lurking demons may be present hiding behind every stalagmite. The percussive and pulsatory components to this half-lit wonderland are pretty suffocating – Younger is just relentless in his persistent repetitions of small loops and fragments. Like its predecessor, this cut goes off the rails according to a pre-planned gradual scheme of attenuation, while an insistent gurgling high-pitched voice that sounds like a drowning animal in dire straits is gradually pushed forward to occupy the foreground. ‘Arcane Matters’ might be rather formless in comparison, but it’s got that full-on “fire and brimstone” effect that painters of the Underworld have been attempting to steer their palette towards ever since the glory days of John Martin, and it finishes up by flattening the listener and knocking all the air from your lungs. The sizzling ‘Stained Glass Electric’ is the bastard offspring of avant-techno music wreaking fatal havoc in Club Catastrophe, and only ‘Above All and Beyond’ seems to offer a remote sign of hope in this very contemporary vision of the urban apocalypse. Even here, Helm’s take on “soothing ambient drone” is one laced with unpleasant surprises, where even his cold rice pudding is served with a dollop of human blood instead of raspberry jam. An impressive collection of chilling electro-acoustic experimentation. Between the luxury editions of the Pan label and the numerous goodies emanating from Editions Mego, this is a good time for the vinyl-buying fan of electronic music.

March 24, 2013

Consider Yourself Dissolved

Pity me…I’ve been ill with a nasty strain of flu twice this month, and it’s putting a crimp in many of my plans. If you were expecting a radio show this week, sorry to disappoint you, but it’s this rotten illness what did for me last Friday, when I should have been on the air but was instead stretched out like a numb cadaver on my rack of pain and coughery. Now for some CD releases.

Jan Klug and Kasper van Hoek recorded Music Played On A Monday (HEILSKABAAL RECORDS HK021) at the Mohr Institute. Just fourteen minutes of music from these worthy Netherlandish fellows on this mini CD. The event or occasion was “Max Meetup”, a kind of musical swap meet where I suppose musicians, laptoppers and tech buffs all compared notes about their use of the Max / MSP software. One of these days I really must find out what this transformative software actually does to sound, and try to understand why so many musicians are attracted to it. On this recording Klug plays woodwinds, Theremin, and the famous Crackle Box invented by Michel Waisvisz, while the prolific Van Hoek has his home-made stringed instruments. It’s fair to say the experience of a Monday which they present is much the same as that of many people – lethargic, uncertain, and laced with a certain dread. Some interesting sound effects pour out of the churning aural melange, but the music is rather unstructured and refuses to amount to much more than just interesting combinations of tones and textures. This is another Monday morning effect, well known to anyone who works in an office, where your thoughts just cannot connect and you flit miserably from one incomplete task to another. From 11 June 2012.

Boy Fruit‘s Demonology (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL079) promises plenty with a Satanic title and cover images of eyeless lost souls, but the music turns out to be routine mashups of beats, hiphop, techno and funk, occasionally messed up with spoken-word fragments from FM radio announcers; nowhere near as crazy as it would like to think it is, its looping daftness grows wearisome quite quickly. Not enough effort was spent by Jay Harmon of Cincinnati to transcend his sources, and what he creates is virtually indistinguishable from what he cuts up. From same label, Firstdog‘s Corecore (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL077) is slightly more successful, with its illogical streams of video-game music going completely nuts. Jack Rodriguez, making his full-length debut, takes “wonkiness” as his guiding aesthetic and attempts to tame his inherent melodic waywardness by setting it to minimal dubby beats. When he released this, he had a much better name (First Dog To Visit The Center Of The Earth) but has now curtailed it to Firstdog for some reason. These both from 6 June 2012.

A great piece of electronic analogue noise from Jason Soliday, here billed as J. Soliday on his first proper CD release, Nonagon Knives (CIP CIPCD027). CIP label boss Blake Edwards would put his own head on a guillotine to make sure that Chicago music gets the recognition it deserves, and in print form he’s waxing lyrical about this album until he froths at the mouth. No wonder, though, since Nonagon Knives is a real slicer. Soliday has a lot of the violence and force in his work that makes noise music attractive to so many sickos and masochists (indeed a lot of the audience often begin and end with the violence), but he also has a strong understanding of how to manipulate the stereo field in his favour. At times he pulls off tiny miracles of mixing and panning, situating his barbs, bombs, and boulders at marked points in the imaginary listening space with remarkable assurance. We also find much to admire in his very varied textures, which run the gamut from barbed wire necklets to scalding jets of acid in the mush, not forgetting the layers of painful igneous rocks which sear our running feet. To cap it all off, there’s Soliday’s impeccable timing and dynamics, executed through a powerful mix of lightning reflexes, ultra-sharp editing skills, and sheer instinct; he makes these shocking events collide and germinate with terrifying precision. This music was all generated with modular synth systems, instruments which (I would guess) are much harder to control than their digital counterparts, so this may be another index of Soliday’s great skill. I think the label is correct to compare him with modern electro-acoustic composers; in purpose and method, he has more affinities with the extreme end of the INA-GRM label than he does with Merzbow. Stern, rigid music with a core of pure titanium; an exciting and invigorating listen which I recommend. Only the sleeve image is kinda drab, though I suppose it strikes a suitable keynote of darkness and ambiguity with its digital abstractions. From 25 June 2012.

Equally thrilling is A Congregation Of Vapours (FARPOINT RECORDINGS FARPOINT 038), from the Dublin sound artist Fergus Kelly. This talented fellow gets his effects from combining feedback, home-made electronics, digital processing, field recordings and lumps of metal, plus he makes judicious use of the no-input mixing board as promulgated by Toshimaru Nakamura. The first thing we note about Kelly is that he’s some way from being a pure minimalist, and the best parts of this album just roar out at you with the barely-controlled rage of ancient giants playing quoits or whatever it was they did in ancient times in mythological Éire. We also note that Kelly will never leave a black space on the canvas when he can cover every surface in sight with a luscious abstract drone of some description. The third point in his favour is the very naturalistic / organic vibe to his music, which is intended to be as bracing as rain or seawater in the face, and it refreshes the mind as surely as a good icy March wind against yer cheeks. It’s not just the layered field recordings of the wind and the rain, at times the music itself is as forceful as the very weather that inspires it. Paul Hegarty contributes notes to this release, and while at first I thought we might have another potential noise artist poised for release on Hegarty’s DotDotDot Music label, in fact the abiding keynote here is one of restraint. True, the album gets off to a feisty start with the exhilarating ‘Freefall’, but thereafter it tends to settle down into slower and more meditative music, revealing Kelly’s attention to detail, the way he can discover an inner pulsebeat in the most seemingly inert and unlikely places, and bring it to life. Some of the titles allude to tools we can use to navigate our way around space, both interior and exterior spaces – maps, patterns, sonar, horizon points and so forth, while titles like ‘Pressure Drop’ and ‘Heat Signature’ also feel significant somehow in this regard; a well-attuned human being might be able to use their sense of ‘pressure drop’ to determine how many people are packed inside an auditorium. Perhaps we’re all blind men stumbling about the world, with need of music to steer us like ancient navigators used the stars to steer their vessels. Perhaps also Kelly has an interest in revealing invisible things, like an aural infra-red camera. Kelly is a successful collaborator and composer with numerous activities to his name, including radio broadcasts, public performances, festivals curated by him, and a teamup with the UK improvisers Mark Wastell and Max Eastley. The man even runs his own CDR label. Considering that this method of working is quite commonplace now (I mean especially the mixing of field recordings with everything) it is all the more testament to Kelly’s skills that he produces music of such distinction. One might be tempted at some point to compare him to another Irish electro-acoustic grandee, that is the famous Roger Doyle, but Doyle had a bit more interest in narrative I think. From 11 June 2012.

February 9, 2013

Making of Rainbows

Nine Inch Snails

Slugfield may be a pretty repulsive name, and an album title like Slime Zone (PNL RECORDS PNL008) isn’t guaranteed to attract many potential fans from the ranks of Radio Norge listeners, but any musical endeavour which involves three Norwegian underground supremos (Marhaug, Ratkje and Nilssen-Love) deserves your warmest embrace, no matter how big the slug may be, nor how wet and slimy its trail. These 2010 recordings were enacted during a jazz festival in Oslo, but the mucus which this trio of gastropods produce is more in the nature of improvised electronic noise. Lasse Marhaug does it with his turntable and electronics set-up, while the very gifted and much-in-demand Maja S.K. Ratkje uses her voice and more electronics. When this pair are zooming together in the “zone” and carving out hefty slabs of richly buzzing atmospherics, Paal Nilssen-Love is able to exercise considerable self-restraint and pull away from his percussive kit, but once he picks up his steel mallets and starts a-hammering then he’s every bit as untamed as two separate Andrew Cyrilles. Ratkje is of course capable of singing like an angel when required, but in this particular milieu she brings wordless abstract screeches and gulps to the conversation, half-swallowing and half-vomiting her near-inhuman streams of vocalese data as if possessed by the Norwegian equivalent of “Old Nick”. An exciting and varied record; the textural dynamics reach all the extremes, and it’s not simply a free-for-all bluster-bout of self-indulgent high volume. The positive qualities of this release can be garnered from the longer tracks such as ‘Bring ‘Em On’ and ‘Happy After Party Dance’, where the players sustain high energy and much complexity for lengthy tussles of unbroken blastage, without any audible signs of flagging. Note sturdy “mini-album” gatefold cover with pastedown artwork for this CD release. From May 2012.

Drum’N'Cello

Peter Gregson performed all the cello parts for Cello Multitracks (NONCLASSICAL NONCLSS014), an album showcasing the work of UK contemporary composer Gabriel Prokofiev. It’s a strong collection which whole-heartedly embraces modern music in two ways: (a) the use of sophisticated multi-tracking studio methods, and (b) a strong influence from dance and remix culture. The former is shown on the first four tracks, a suite for nine cellos whereon Gregson overdubs himself and produces astonishing effects. You may have expected a morass of tasteful minimal droning, but this player has remarkable attack in his bowing and plucking techniques, leaves enormous gaps in the music, and creates a diabolically clever net of exciting dynamic music. The piece ‘Jerk Driver’ alone seems to have the potential to close the gaps between dub music, post-punk and classical composition, while ‘Float Dance’ has enough dissonances to satisfy any hard-core Serialist yet still retains the snap and crackle of dance music, as if a solid rhythm pulse were encoded in its DNA. We could say the same of ‘Tuff Strum’, where the cellist seems determined to recreate an acoustic chamber form of drum’n'bass. Gregson’s skills transfer well into the live environment too; he played his live parts against a bank of eight loudspeakers playing pre-recorded material when the music was premiered in 2011. The electronic dance influence extends to the remaining nine cuts, which are remixes of the music created by various luminaries of DJ culture, with at least one of them (DJ Spooky) hailing from the more “arty” end of that spectrum. These remixes are apparently representative of musical styles that are a closed shop to me, including dubstep, hip-hop and techno, but the use of reverb, loops and drum machines is rarely used to swamp the foregrounded cello sound, which consistently emerges as sharp as shards of broken glass painted black. A thrilling and innovative record. Some classical composers have made complete ninnies of themselves through dabbling in popular music or contemporary forms, but it’s completely different with these two fellows, who are already steeped in the milieu; “Peter makes his own electronic music and has a lot of studio experience,” reports the composer, explaining why they had such an immediate rapport and achieved such productive results. Recommended. From 16 May 2012.

The Water Synth

Enchanting and delicate percussive effects on Ombrophilia (APOSIOPÈSE NO NUMBER), by the Japanese composer Tomoko Sauvage who despite her “wild” surname is about as gentle as a Buddhist baby lamb on these recordings. The process she used involves porcelain bowls, presumably being struck by wooden spoons and making use of metal wire strands in some way. The bowls are filled with water and recorded using hydrophones. There are no melodies or tunes as such, but complex arrays of percussive notes performing like a broken mechanical street-piano. Some of Tomoko’s titles, such as ‘Raindrop Exercise’ and ‘Amniotic Life’, indicate her respect and love for nature, and the entire system is sympathetically described as a “natural synthesizer”. LP format only and limited to 500 copies (mine is a CDR promo). Arrived 04 May 2012.

Petals Fell on Petaluma

No less natural in its approach to electro-acoustic music is the mini-CD Aposiopesis (LF RECORDS LF026), 20 minutes of superb “airy” drone from Petals, the performing name of Kevin Sanders. Very coincidentally, the title here matches the name of the French record label which released the above LP ¹. From what I can gather, the Petals music here is a live taped recording of a set-up involving violin strings, metal bars and elastic bands, creating a feedback system with the actual resonances of the four walls where it was recorded. A delicious combination of room sound, musical drone, and ambient feedback, all colliding with the recording process in subtle ways. Sanders also runs a record label called Hairdryer Excommunication, where he is dedicated to “Pluralising Minimalism”. If that involves enriching impoverished minimal music with added passion, heart and beauty such as we hear on this little gem, then I’m all for it. His website contains images and videos which may illuminate the matter further. From 30 May 2013.

The term is something to do with unfinished sentences. Luckily, it’s not as severe as aphasia. ↩

January 6, 2013

Miniature Candies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 28, 2012

Synchronisms

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

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

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

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

December 8, 2012

Monopoles and Nightingales Walk these Hills

Nothing’s Gonna Touch Ya

Nice modern instrumental music from Trapist on The Golden Years (STAUBGOLD DIGITAL 19). This is the Vienna-based trio of Martin Siewert, Martin Brandlmayr and Joe Williamson, on the face of it comprising a guitar and piano jazz trio of the sort that Blue Note Records would not have kicked out of the studio in the mid 1950s. But in sooth what we hear would have caused the sacred eyebrows of Kenny Burrell and Joe Pass to knit together in consternation, for nowhere do we hear performed music with the taut energetic punch of post-bop modal playing. Instead the entire threesome move as though they’ve been dipped liberally in a tin of Tate & Lyle’s finest, which is probably why percussionist Brandlmayr is nicknamed “the man with the golden arm” ¹. The sound is also very contemporary: the guitar has sometimes been treated with live electronics, there is evidence of skilled production technique on the record from its engineers Christoph Amann and Siewert, and the eminently eclectic musicians are informed by a huge range of musical styles, including touches of light glitchy noise that occasionally roars its way into the fold like models of small wolves entering the parlour full of sheep, and there are uncertain tone clusters produced by bowed strings and bowed percussion which float like evil Darmstadtian clouds over the planned pastoral picnic. With ‘The Gun That’s Hanging on the Kitchen Wall’, Siewert allows delicious and even tasteful chords to strum their way across the canvas of slow-moving ominous narrative, and through its deliberately leaden pace and title I cannot help but think of this as a missing track from the 2005 Earth LP Hex ². ‘The Spoke and The Horse’ likewise seems to pick up the vaguely-suggested “wild west” theme, although if this trio were producing a seminar on that subject, I would expect fleeting images from a John Ford movie to flicker across the presentation in a washed-out, subliminal manner. ‘Pisa’ is the one live track in the otherwise studio-bound album, and it concludes with ‘Walk These Hills Lightly’, where the trio push their already-subtle approach into an even more diffuse zone of unobtruseiveness. Here the bass strings and the guitar strings could be said to be sketching out the construction lines for the skeleton of a tune, perhaps with the expectation that the listener complete the tune, or simply enjoy its uncompleted state. These Austrian mellow-mites have been producing this extremely stripped-down form of semi-melodic quasi-structured improvisation for many years now; Siewert and Brandlmayr we remember from their 2003 release for Erstwhile, but they’ve been going for longer than that.

Seen III, Took 4

Subtlety is also a keyword to bring into the classroom as we approach Scènes (EMPREINTES DIGITALES IMED 11111) by Pete Stollery, an electro-acoustic composer who studied under the great Jonty Harrison and is now a Professor at the University of Aberdeen, where he is a strong advocate for new music in Scotland via the agency of InvisiblEARts. Since Radiophonic Music is never out of fashion, readers may initially be drawn to the six minute track ‘Serendipities and Synchronicities’, which was composed for a stage play about Delia Derbyshire. In it, Stollery attempts to express his personal affinities with Delia’s work, by refracting it through his own very similar compositional methods. There are also two pieces excerpted from his ongoing Gordon Soundscape project, which is a plan to compile an aural map of Aberdeenshire, through collaging field recordings and processing of same; his chief aim as gazetteer in this instance is to identify and record endangered sounds, such as certain activities found within the dying distillery industry. He also aims to map Paris in like manner, on ‘Scènes, Rendez-Vous’ which has its origins in his childhood memory of a 1967 Claud Lelouch documentary, and uses information from the film as rules to govern his sound-gathering and compositional actions. ‘Fields of Silence’ is also based on field recordings, themed around the intriguing idea that a field of grain falls silent “after it has been harvested”. This very much reminds me of a Ray Bradbury story ³. Or that Roald Dahl story where an inventor is able to hear the cries of plants being cut by secaturs ⁴. Stollery somehow manages to discover sound events and textures within the mown stubble itself, as well as collaging in “before and after” sound events from combine harvesters. In all Stollery seems to be a thoughtful and gentle composer, one who wouldn’t want to impose anything on the landscape, but rather cares to ask interesting questions about our relationship to our sonic environment. In some cases I find his explanatory notes more interesting than the sounds he produces. This is particularly so with ‘Back to Square One’, where he writes with something approaching passion about the excitement he feels when listening to the “musicality” of sports commentators on the radio and telly, yet very little of that passion or excitement has found its way into the muffled, pedestrian music.

Drums Along the Mohawk

The Hamburg based drummer and percussionist Sven Kacirek has been working steadily producing commissions and compositions since 2001, occasionally finding time to realise his own solo albums in the lucid gaps. Scarlet Pitch Dreams (PINGIPUNG 32) is one of them, released in April 2012. Many of his commissions have, unsurprisingly, been employed for contemporary dance and theatre projects, although on the strength of this album I think he should also look into film soundtracks as another career strand; many of these tracks resemble cues from a suspense drama or a police-procedural TV show shot in grainy blue and silver hues, but there are also lighter and more melodic moments, some of them even slightly humorous in tone. Stylistically, it’s mostly the sound of very clipped piano notes or vibraphone runs picking out the tunes, layered on top of swishy jazz-like beats and cluttered rhythms.

The Sonic Laocoön

Convolution (TARTARUGA RECORDS TTRCD011) by Max Bondi impressed me in places with its simplicity and stern countenance. We haven’t heard from this fellow since a 2007 team-up with Ala Muerte which came out on Public Guilt, and I can’t seem to find out much else about him at this time. Some of the tracks on Convolution are just very basic electronic drones, with hardly any variations to ease their sullen disposition, and could be characterised by Max’s disciplined refusal to let them develop into anything resembling “ambient” or other pleasurable sensations. Bondi keeps his little pets on a tight leash, and feeds them only on scraps of tofu and raw turnip. For me these murmuring beasts are at their best when situated in the lower register, growling and humming in subsonic manner as if poised for the kill, or else beaming death-rays of hate across the nation. Two tracks which do this very well are ‘Kami’ and ‘Catoptrics’, although ‘Ori’ also has a strong dose of this anti-social poison laced within its broth. However, the last four tracks from ‘Faltung’ onwards follow a different path, and I think these are examples of the sequencer running a pattern through an electronic instrument. These tumbling acrobats are a bit too “bouncy” for me at the moment, but I think at other times in one’s day they would present an interesting monkey-puzzle for the mind to ascend; aye, a plate of sonic macaroni served with epoxy resin instead of grated cheese. Unravel the noodles as ye may. The sleeve art may have something to do with tessellations; it reminds me of an old board game I used to have, where the challenge was to use basic shapes like squares and triangles and form exact pictures of animals, and the only clue they gave us was a silhouette. I expect to puzzle over Bondi’s music in much the same way.

This joke comes from an old episode of Beyond Our Ken. ↩
Or Printing in The Infernal Method, SOUTHERN LORD SUNN48. ↩
“The Scythe”, 1943. ↩
“The Sound Machine”, 1949. ↩

December 7, 2012

Gossamer Albatrosses

The Tower Recordings

Subterraneanact is the duo of Henk Bakker and Jelmer Cnossen, and their debut Subterraneanact (Z6 RECORDS Z6399699) is an unusual piece of studio assemblage created in Rotterdam. The album is a distillation of recordings made in the studio. The recordings have been edited, mixed and remixed; then subjected to further sampling, remixing, and rebuilding processes. At all times the duo were working to their own private sets of compositional and improvisational rules; the aim seems to have been to transform the sounds of their respective instruments as far as possible, resulting in an “atmospheric and expressive sound environment”. Considering the source material was mostly acoustic, i.e. clarinet and drums, it’s a truly extreme example of what intensive reprocessing can do to taped sound. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a purely electronic album on the surface, although there are printed credits for live electronics and sampling using the “Ableton” device. Despite the wild, crazy and sometimes ugly remanipulations of sound, the original clarinets and drums continually show their growly, thumpy faces at various portions in the entertainment, surfacing like live deep-sea fish in a well-cooked bouillabaisse, and about as welcome. The clarinettist Bakker studied his instrument in Utrecht some 20 years ago, has an interesting history of performing, composing and doing radio, and is now associated with WORM in Rotterdam. Cnossen the drummer (also known as Malorix and JC) has drummed in a variety of bands and, of the two, seems more conversant with the sound-recycling process represented here – most of his Malorix work is executed through his personal take on the laptop-plunderphonic-meltdown approach, utilising discarded music from old compact discs and tapes. The screen-printed cover unfolds into an unsettling perspective of an impossible iron tower being built under the earth’s crust, gradually poking its long neck out through a mineshaft opening. This image emphasises the “constructed” nature of the music, but also its sheer impossibility – what we hear sometimes defies rational thought. It’s not that it works by juxtaposition of shocking sounds, but by a form of reworking that feels almost manual when you listen to it. The composers are kneading dough and working plasticine between their fingers. A very hand-knitted and cottage-industry approach to electro-acoustic, resulting in loud, primitive and lumpy musical forms. Arrived 13 April 2012.

The Premature Burial

Subterraneanact create a “virtual” underground space through their studio work. We could say that the American death-metal industrial project T.O.M.B. take things one stage further on UAG (CRUCIAL BLAST RECORDS CBR94), by putting themselves physically into bleak and hostile environments to realise their music. The basic tracks were recorded in assorted locales of horror – abandoned sanatoriums, asylums, morgues, and deserted crypts. It seems they did everything but lock themselves in a cemetery in pursuit of their art. Granted, the music has been reworked in a studio after the fact, but it’s the recording in that selected psychic zone that adds the extra dimension of sheer black terror. Once inside their chosen sanctum, T.O.M.B. would play back their tapes and field recordings at loud volumes to allow reverberant shocks to vibrate from the cold walls, and progress the ritual through drumming exercises, often hammering on the very walls themselves. UAG, an acronym for Uncovered Ancient Gateways, thus assumes the proportions of performance art, as though the CD were a document of unholy and extremely morbid rites; the theme is extended visually in the enclosed booklet of monochrome photos, providing absurdly dramatic reimaginings of these lugubrious seances. Their track titles make multiple references to the grim delights of the “bone orchard”, spicing things up with snippets of witchcraft, bloodletting, moon worship, and various invented ritualistic procedures; and the whole package is topped off with that lurid green-tinted cover art with its fearful symmetry, its runic letters, its hints of sado-masochistic costume, and inverted liturgies. But sonically, this is all quite some way from conventional black metal or industrial death music, and T.O.M.B. (whose name unpacks into Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) serve up strangely compelling and powerful atmospheres on this album, eschewing anything to do with song form in favour of continual tones of abstract oppressive noise, underpinned by frenzied and horrifying drumming. While undoubtedly satisfying to bloodthirsty fans of the respective genres it inhabits, this grisly and claustrophobic record works equally well as extreme experimental noise. Was released in January 2012, I think we may have got our copy in April.

The Senors of Seek

Sent to us by Murray Ward of Cardiff is a splendid split cassette (HI/LO029) by The Failed NASA Experiment and Ø+yn, and it’s released on a terrific micro-label called The Lows and The Highs Records. Their website contains further oddities which look worthy of investigation also. The Failed NASA Experiment turns out to be Murray Ward himself playing solo music with occasional help from Euan Rodger, Alex Williams and Matthew Lovett. Mysterious electronic tones, clattering percussion and random noise bursts, plus extremely heavy psychedelic drones and circular riffs, where the amplified distortion and sense of relentless forward-chugging motion has prompted comparisons with the Faust of the 1970s. TFNE presents a delirious and acid-fried experience, with many puzzling moments inserted into and between the tracks, and concluding the suite with a pastoral acoustic guitar riff that almost makes this tape a lo-fi update on any given Pink Floyd album. The track titles are lyrical and beautiful. This music has the refreshing Celtic tang of well-crafted Welsh magic, enacted by drawing chalk markings on the floor of black-timbered chapels in the hillside.

Ø+yn are an Argentinean five-piece of underground noisemakers, with Cinco Cantos a la Virgen de Satrostramocha on their side of the split. Superficially they may seem to be questing after the same hallucinatory and revelatory states as Mr Ward and his chums, but they pursue their quarry in a much more mysterious way. It’s an offbeat and delirious form of trancey acoustic drone-folk, featuring violins, guitars, percussion and whiney solo lines made with a nasal chanting and wailing voice or equally nasal wind instruments of some sort; many non-western harmonic scales and modes emerge from the improvisations, and at times the music could almost be mistaken for an ethnic oddity from the Folkways catalogue. In some ways this might be seen as a variant of the sort of loopy thing the Finns used to do so well, except Ø+yn are nowhere near so cluttered musically nor (thankfully) as eccentric in the vocal department. Instead, the instrumentation is pared to bone, the recordings are intimate and private, and even the trance-rhythm patterns are rough-hewn and occasionally wobble off the path like a less sure-footed mountain goat. The team may have cinematic aspirations, building their albums in line with the logic of a Jodorowsky film, and even sample a snippet from a Roman Polanski movie for one track. The excellent artworks are collages by Murray Ward, with overlay drawings by Ian Watson. Quite delightful all round; many thanks to Murray for sending this.

December 2, 2012

Rapture of the Deep

Australian musicians Thembi Soddell and Anthea Caddy effectively give us a good dose of music from the bughouse on their Host (ROOM 40 RM448) CD. Through clashing atonal cello music with ghastly stabs from a keyboard sampler, they bounce acoustical mayhem off the walls of our padded cell, inviting the blindfolded ear to guess at the shapes that are force-fed through our respective feeding tubes. To increase the sense of apprehension, the musical attack lacks any sense of continuity, and the information is spewed outwards randomly, in horrid fragmentary bursts that don’t fit together. Any patient forced to endure this cruel and unusual treatment will be a candidate for the rubber room in short order. Three long tracks of this mental torture are available on a CD whose almost-blank packaging contains basic geometric shapes to further confuse the mind of the mentally ill as they are unwillingly engaged in vicious parodies of a psycho-geometric test. The second track not only has the best title – ‘A Shut In Place’, highly vivid description of a mental ward – but is also the most ominous music on the set, easily rivalling most sick industrial drones from the 1980s that used to rattle on about depravity and decay like kids playing in a trash-heap. Thankfully this bleak vision lasts only 8 minutes but it feels like an eternity to the prisoner, condemned to writhe in their straitjackets and beat head against bars in futile manner. One of the most effective “bedlam” music records I’ve heard, and I’ve heard ‘em all. From 11 April 2012.

Now for a good ocean-going record. This powerful maritime theme has been used by every musician from Benjamin Britten to Charles Hayward of This Heat, and more recently Isis. To be accurate Leaving Ocean For Land (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL075) is not exclusively set on the brine and is more of a transitory piece, depicting a nameless odyssey of doomed sea-dogs returning to the mainland with their scratchy beards and a poisoned cargo stowed in the hold. The suite is realised in seven parts by two important American doom-noise mystery merchants, Vertonen and At Jennie Richie. The former is Blake Edwards and has drilled inroads into the minds of many with his disturbing electric gougers, often released on his own Crippled Intellect Productions label. The latter act we have never been able to identify for certain, so reclusive is their identity, although their name is taken from the works of Outsider artist Henry Darger. On this joint work, the melded tones of queasy, nauseating electronic sludge are sewn together like eighteen rats in a seaman’s canvas bag. The slow glorp exudes a motion exactly like the swell of the waves on a sluggish Sargasso sea. Lurking in the mix are creepy disguised voices, murmuring unintelligible groans, rescued radio broadcasts from wracks and disasters. The seven parts segue into a compellingly nightmarish trip lasting 46 minutes, passing on the effect of being drawn slowly into an enormous maelstrom, or cataract. The evocative cover photographs depict a grim forgotten hulk ground ashore and encrusted with barnacles. The voyage did not prosper, methinks. From 17 April 2012.

For those who like a suggestive narrative undercurrent to their abstract music, you could do no better than bending an ear to In The Library of Dreams (POGUS PRODUCTIONS POGUS 21064-2) by Frances White. The album showcases six pieces of very delicate music by this award-winning American composer who has also been featured on soundtracks to Gus Van Sant films. The works have been realised by guest musicians, such as the string players David Cerutti and Liuh-Wen Ting, the flautist Ralph Samuelson, and the chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird. Small and mysterious sounds are one of her specialities, as shown on the two electronic pieces ‘Walk Through Resonant Landscape’ 5.1 and 5.2; they are simulated virtual worlds, replete with replicants of birdsong and insects, synthesised in a way that matches Pauline Oliveros and her Alien Bog. ‘The Ocean Inside’, scored for a small ensemble and using conventional acoustic instruments, is more romantic and melodic; but the same degree of attention is paid to tiny details, expressed in percussion and delicate woodwind-piano passages. The title track is the most evocative, both in its Surrealist title and loving execution, and Cerutti’s full-bodied work on the viola da gamba here is an apt soundtrack for wandering around the attic of the mind, a melancholy reminisce about clutching at near-lost memories. No post-modernist she, White is not afraid to imbue her work with meaning. From 17 April 2012.

Argentinian saxophonist Lucio Capece continues his explorations into long-form music on Zero Plus Zero (POTLATCH P112), on which four of the tracks are quite extensive (between 15-20 minutes) investigations into sound-generation. He does it by making unusual electro-acoustic interpolations between him and his instrument, for example the ring modulator, equalizers, cassettes, and applied objects; and ingenious use is made of cardboard tubes as well. That said, woodwinds only actually feature on two tracks here, the remainder being executed with the sruti box or by purely electronic means, such as sine waves or equalizers being fed through cardboard tubes. It’s a rather process-heavy album and sometimes I wonder whether the long durations are justified, but ‘Inside the Outside I’ is a truly heavy magnetized hum that could hypnotise a bucket of sand into thinking it was the Sahara desert, while its sister track ‘Inside the Outside II’ is an implacable throbbing beast, whose electronic pulsations move in and out of phase to suggest a vast reservoir of power. It is well that Capece has all this power at his disposal, but I’d also like to hear him do something a little more constructive with it than simply present this very static music. From 2nd April 2012.

We last heard from the London micro-label Foredoom Productions in May 2011 with four fine cassettes of abstract noise. This odd mini-CD is called -1 (FOREDOOM FD008) and is credited to VA AA LR, in fact the trio of Vasco Alves, Adam Asnan, and Louie Rice. The main event is eleven minutes of extremely puzzling digital noise, often very minimal and fugitive with lots of dropouts and empty segments, prompting the sort of “where-is-it” exasperation I normally experience when chasing the flies out of my bedroom. Gradually it turns into a highly abstracted digital glitch which has been rendered down into a strange pile of rubble. There’s a bonus track which delivers three more minutes in the same rubbly vein. Given how little actual content or variation there is on here, I’m inclined to wonder why it took three people to produce it. I would tend to characterise it as a slightly more refined version of the kind of intense digital mayhem we find on the label Copy For Your Records, only more approachable. The original release has sold out now, but most of it has been published on Soundcloud, along with more of their studio work. Received 10 April 2012.