Tagged: electronic

March 9, 2014

Upset Twilight

From 12 March 2013, fabulous cassette in a mostly black package from the swell Fang Bomb label of Goteborg. As you may know Fang Bomb is a personal favourite of mine for some reason. Maybe we share the same sense of the macabre. If they were a printing or engraving workshop, they would etch their lines deep and use a black ink of the deepest hue, resulting in evil tomes which, when opened, would give the reader forbidden glimpses of an ashen world and induce nuclear-holocaust strength headaches. Imaginary Forces is the London composer Anthoney J. Hart, who comes to us from a background shaped by 1990s drum and bass music, and whose Begotten (FB022) is a very rich piece of complex dark ambient music, with multiple layers – “environmental field recordings, the chug of train on rail, percussive chatters, insect song and whipping wind” all fed into its creation, selon thequietus.com. The fact that he was approached by Anthony Di Franco for a collaboration may also help you to situate his work. That and the fact that Begotten is based on his own personal obsession with a movie of the same name. I expect he’s referring to the 1990 experimental horror film made by E. Elias Merhige, which looks like it could be a mind-searing experience. Ironically, Hart spent a lot of money getting hold of a copy of this deleted item, but for the non-squeamish among you it can be viewed on YouTube now. The music of Imaginary Forces is compelling, not quite as “bleak” as much emptied-out dronery I’ve heard in this area, where the creators insist that we accept and participate in their sense of futility, and endure the aural equivalent of sub-zero temperatures that numb the brain. By contrast, Begotten gives us a lot to listen to and in its subtle layering often appears to be spinning in four directions at once, its elements shimmering and shuffling apart like decrepit tree limbs slowly withering away before our eyes. Yet it also retains an insistent and mesmerising power. Hart seems to have found a way to suffuse and disguise his pulsations so that they have the same impact as an entire week spent in a club with high-volume dance music, yet remain almost imperceptible in the mix.

Here’s CD 2 of the mammoth P16.D4 box set Passagen (MONOTYPE RECORDS mono58) which we broached some weeks ago. For Distruct, the trio of Ralf Wehowsky, Roger Schönauer and Ewald Weber were joined by Stefan Schmidt, Gerd Neumann, Thomas Memmler and Peter Lambert, for these 1982-1984 recordings which were released by Selektion on LP in 1985. RLW had been given the idea – by Harry C. Poole of Smegma – to do a remote collaboration; Poole proposed to send across tapes from America for P16.D4 to complete, without having to meet up. Apparently the American found the idea of a thousand-mile distance extremely appealing. This kind of thing is fairly commonplace nowadays, especially since file-sharing has been made easier by the internet, but I suppose it was an innovative and bold step in the early 1980s. Although Smegma don’t actually appear on the finished item, RLW went ahead with the idea anyway, and with his characteristic productiveness organised collaborations with numerous international names from the “noise” and “industrial” music areas. Consequently, you can hear contributions from Bladder Flask, DDAA, De Fabriek, The Haters, Merzbow, Nocturnal Emissions, Achim Wollschied and Nurse With Wound, plus many others. Even an anonymous submission was used for this ambitious postal project; on ‘Aufmarsch, Heimlich’ you can hear a choir from a tape sent to the band from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Said tape has of course been severely mangled by RLW’s unusual treatments and deep slices as he wields the scissors of truth. Impossible to summarise the intense and wild music on this release – every track seems to exhibit a different approach or inhabit a new sound-world – but one thing they all have in common is that they produce very disjointed, broken and difficult listens. The rubble and bracken of unpleasant noise is jumbled and rehacked every which way, resulting in an extremely uncomfortable ride. Truly radical deconstruction techniques at work here. While admirable and important, it’s not much fun to listen to with its general air of nihilism and misery, although I found some respite from the grimness on ‘Les Honteuses Alliances’, whose success might be attributable to the fact that it’s a multiple collaboration: Merzbow, Bladder Flask, Nocturnal Emissions and Phil Johnson all supplied elements to the work, although once again it’s mostly Wehowsky putting the materials into the frame. A very clever and elaborate frame it is too, one made of robust wooden struts and held together with dovetail joints and screws. The CD release includes a couple of related bonus tracks, which have only been available previously as part of a subscription-only Vinyl On Demand box set.

March 7, 2014

BlakesianWilliamness: a heady noise psychedelic journey of inner space

Holism Gaea, BlakesianWilliamness, Heart & Crossbone, CDR-HCB042 (2013)

As its title suggests, this debut album by new duo Holism Gaea is inspired by the British poet / artist William Blake, in particular his early personal philosophy as expressed in his work “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. I must admit I know very little about Blake and have not read that work but I hazard that some of its ideas on dualism in art and human existence prefigure Friedrich Nietzsche’s later concept of the development of art and culture in Western societies, revolving around two polarities of Apollonian order, structure and authoritarianism on the one hand, and Dionysian spontaneity, inspiration and creativity on the other. To be honest, I get very little sense of Blake’s early dualistic worldview from this recording and I think your enjoyment of the music need not depend on knowing any of the writer’s corpus.

The music is a mix of noise, tribal and space ambient, and post-industrial. “Antares Fall” leads off with a sinister beat against a weird spitting and hissing space-travel noise / electronica background. Cold sculptured tone effects form a repeating melodic motif while wubbly electronic sounds erupt and bubble continuously. The track develops into a lumbering majestic opus of mesmeric spooky voodoo rhythms and beats, runaway electronic thrills and flips, and echoes of a distant alien god looking over its cosmic creation and voicing more commands as galaxies and nebulae spring into being and fly out to the farthest reaches of the universe. Altogether this is a most strange and impressive opus that could well stand on its own as it draws in listeners and takes them on a trip through huge vistas of space at the speed of light. “But into the Wine Presses” is a more mysterious piece of spiralling noise and frothing texture over which sharp pin-prick tones dance lightly. “Ah! Sunflower” is a wonderful track of both early shuddering noise storm, eerie UFO lift-off effects and warm gentle cosmic-space tone ambience over which the Blake poem of the same name is recited.

More deliriously cosmic trance music, highly immersive to the point where it might be overwhelming and suffocating, follows: “The Argument” especially is a dark and sinister psychedelic mindfuck of wobbling rubber drone and abrasive texture crunch and shuffle. A robot voice detracts from the music which is forced to assume a more passive role while the vocals drone on but whenever the speaking stops, the noises and tones are able to fly as sky-high or as deep in the bowels of Sheol as they like. The album concludes with another epic space voyage that takes listeners deeper into realms and sub-realms of the extended universe as its branches stretch ever further into infinity. The sounds and textures quickly overflow the limits of restraint and boil into exaggerated clouds of noise chaos. The structure collapses and cannibalises itself, staving off final implosion where it can. But Dark Nemesis claims her own eventually.

This is quite heady music, highly absorbing especially when the singing or chanting ends and allows the instrumentals to launch themselves as far into the firmament of the heavens as they can. At times though some passages of music can become a bit comical possibly because the musicians let themselves go with the music and it flows or falls into excess. A lot of the music here is not exactly original; most parts will sound familiar to people already steeped in epic space-ambient psychedelia and it seems as if Blake’s early philosophy provides a convenient excuse for an all-embracing space-voyage soundtrack. But if you simply want music to transport you away into inner space, there are few recordings that can match this one for its consistency.

March 6, 2014

Toxic Beach Party

Old Komm
Ventspils EP
UK DISCREPANT CREP08 EP (2013)

Latvia’s sixth largest city, Ventspils, has been a shipbuilding history that goes back to the Sixteenth Century. The port’s ice free harbour still makes it an important transportation hub today, so a record which presents electronic music derived from field recordings made in various locations around Ventspils promises a vaguely maritime listening experience, or so I first thought. This is not the case. I failed to recognise any obvious sounds derived from water, ships, heavy plant, cranes and so forth.

An intriguing 12” ep here. Old Komm declare the presence of field recordings, broken synths, found sound and church pipe organs. The first side is peppered with vocal samples like “no other attempt was made” and CITE. Tones could have been supplied by machines from a dental surgery or the cardiology ward of your local hospital. Vintage voltage-controlled synthesisers boosted with Warfarin. The beats are minimal and sullen; they seem from another world on this side, helping as they do only to propel the sinister bass frequencies. After this, there is an interlude with what sounds like the auto-accompaniment feature on one of Leslie Crowther’s massive old one-finger Kimball home entertainment keyboards.

But then things get a bit more abstracted.

From the robot cat purr paired with feedback samples played on a broken midi keyboard on an ironing board for a stand (perhaps) could be the source of the following musical development here – and musical it certainly is – despite their heavy use of samples and field recordings, these sources are arranged in a similar way as if they were traditional musical instrumentation.

Digital water drips, digital cowbells patter, handheld digital hard-drive recorders capture rain splashing on hot tin roofs. What’s interesting here is that Old Komm have an undoubted talent for production; for example, there are some cheap-sounding general midi-type sounds here but they are buried so low in the mix that their very nature is changed from the banal to the exotic. More vocal samples but detourned this time around – only vaguely reminiscent of human speech. A colossal, possibly the world’s largest, Leslie Rotary Speaker eventually comes to rest in a power cut while a Soviet politician rants and a “choir of angels” synth preset (038 on the Roland JV1080 or similar), while a car politely beeps its horn. Something extremely low-end attempts to shred my speaker cones before the sounds of waves breaking on a beach merge with the sound of fluff on the needle on a run-out groove (not mine – I checked), in a kind of post-apocalyptic beach party for the infected.

As I turn the record over, I’m expecting more of the same on side B, but am surprised to discover a completely different view of the city.

More heavy on the field recordings, but this time heavily processed and with a melodic low-register element hung off them. Its clear field recording techniques have been employed in the pre production, but the result is open, narrative and cinematic only without the detail and verve of Mecha/Orga or David Velez, for example. But these are perhaps unfair comparisons – Old Komm present themselves as an electronic act and not field recordists exclusively.

The nicely laid out sepia-toned cover is festooned with detailed photographs by Sergey Gorsky of Ventspils port itself, and the inner sleeve displays a series of shots of the interior of a ruined building presumably somewhere therein.

A vinyl edition of 250.

Discrepant

February 21, 2014

Bristol’s Event Horizon Presents…

Ensemble Skalectrik
Trainwrekz
EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 169 LP (2013)

A Proust moment! Dropping needle on this unknown, recollection of past experience swiftly follows: fortunate was I to witness the silhouette of Ensemble Skalectrik aka Nick Edwards (on the night) along with Mordant Music’s titular Baron hunched over a portable lab at an ‘F.C. Judd Reinterpretations’ launch last year. About six other people attended that fog-filled flight of the supernatural. Six. The next night a packed-house went crazy over some lame-ass indie rock showcase from London that I made the mistake of taking a punt on. What the hell is wrong with these garbage-chewing idiots? Lapping it up like so much milky tea. I split during the first act: a stoned trio of Coldplay wannabes who couldn’t muster feedback without piercing every eardrum in the room; and still the hypnotised applause. Score one for mediocrity.

Said cognoscenti would have grimaced (and good for them) at this fine follow up (of sorts) to Nick Edwards’ Plekzationz LP (as Ekoplekz, also on Mego), which forsakes the latter’s long form format for far shorter, improvised and individualised, studio-born homunculi that nonetheless bear familial resemblance to that double LP’s weightier portions of black-dimensional slithering, and for which many reviewers were unsparing in their admiration. I suppose qualifiers such as ‘side project’ and ‘sketches’ might raise a supercilious eyebrow or two, but they needn’t. Of the three jam sessions that yielded the contents of this record, we have but six, supple, post-produced tracks, not one of which I would advise to diet or take more exercise (several hours’ excess fat splodged the editing suite floor, presumably). One might regard this as an exercise in ‘spontaneous’ creativity after the compositional rigour that yielded the non-linear, musically concrete elder sibling. Perhaps even – gasp – a tip of the hat to Edwards’ home-taping halcyon days!

In any event, fans will not exhibit a jot of surprise upon learning that the Radiophonic influence is just as strong on Trainwrekz; syphoned from the deeper and darker end of that hallowed gene pool albeit. (In fact, when my girlfriend remarked thus during the first spin she received an immediate, looped cry of ‘DOCTOR!!!’ by way of reply; and who am I to gainsay a synchronicity?) Along with allusions to our favourite vintages of Time Lord, this swirling atom soup ripples with all sorts of supernatural sounds summoned from selected grooves of his ritually abused record collection, from the mean-spirited, marauding grind that opens to the comparatively pastoral, delay-drenched whirl of closer ‘Wreksikz’ (yeah, all the titles feature a ‘Wrek’); ever adorned with vari-speed wobbles, rattles and ruler rumbles. In this dark Fantasia, the studio comes to life in accordance with the capricious will of our sorcerer’s apprentice, and at times the sickening loops look likely to rend the fabric of space itself with roll after cavernous roll of reverbed matter timewarped from the B-side of White Noise’s Electric Storm LP, or from somewhere deep inside Mr Bungle’s ‘The Bends’, or even from Daphne Oram’s bubbling cauldron, which inquisitive listeners of ‘Oramics’ might have been allowed to pop over to see if they’d had the presence of mind to take her up on her end-of-album invitation. But I digress. I would recommend this album most to those least likely to enjoy it. We can all benefit from the odd dose of existential dread in helping us get to grips with who we are. Why should it be wasted on those of us who will simply derive pleasure from it?

February 20, 2014

Akkord (self-titled): pulling in a huge range of influences for a spacey dark techno album

Akkord, self-titled, Houndstooth Records, HTH015CD (2013)

If you’ve been following my reviews obsessively – in which case, I would advise you all to get a life or see a shrink – you’ll know that I have a soft spot for dark minimal techno electronica and anything that comes close to it. This self-titled debut by the Manchester duo Akkord (who also DJ separately as Indigo and Synkro) falls within the event horizon of that genre with its mysterious and perplexing mix of sinister space ambience, tribal rhythms, dance grooves that turn out not to be very dance-y at all, trance-like loops, jazzy skitter, techno, house and dubstep among other genres.

The scene is set by “Torr Vale”, an amorphous piece of abstract space-atmosphere drone that draws listeners into a black hole with a beguiling rhythm, low-end bass wobble, a delicate beat that transforms into a booming second rhythm loop. It’s deep and ominous, reminiscent of some Lustmord ambient space recordings I’ve heard in the past, though with a nod to the musicians’ dance club backgrounds. In “Space Circle”, we find ourselves observing a ceremony paying electronic dance homage to dark gods who demand a bloody sacrifice from their worshippers. It’s a spooky music tour and you start to wonder what the folks back at home will make of your travel souvenirs. Worry not, “3DOS” and “Folded Edge” bring some familiar techno-dub sounds and stop-start electronic rhythms of the kind Techno Animal and Porter Ricks might have patented 20 years ago.

Subsequent tracks are a sop to the more hedonistic dance crowds touring with us: they’re very strong on undulating rhythm loops and weird wobbly noise effects. “Navigate” has some interesting flubby noise effect loops that conjure up an image of an alien jungle oasis grooving to its own insectoid noises on a lonely asteroid. “Undertow” marks our return to space base “Torr Vale” (track 1) with its heavy breathing and clanky industrial rhythms.

It’s an interesting debut with a huge variety of influences and input from different music genres, some of which I’m not at all familiar with or have only the vaguest idea about: techno, jungle and dubstep are definitely present and there may be some grime as well. All these styles are pulled together with a definite shadowy and sometimes forbidding if airy atmosphere and a remote attitude. Parts of the recording have a very unearthly beauty and hint at something much greater than what is actually heard.

February 18, 2014

BOT Commands

APO33
BOT: Compositions Continuums des Machines
FRANCE FIBRR RECORDS fibrr011 CD (2013)

There always seems to be those out there who shamelessly choose to flout convention. When presented with review CDs like Compositions Continuums des Machines, I always like to know just who exactly is responsible for the sonorities on offer, and, dear reader, in this case, all is not as it seems. After looking at the rather impenetrable crib sheet a few times, I now realise that I just might have the measure of things. Y’see it transpires that BOT isn’t the name of the artist or collective, but is the name of a series of listening posts that are active in the Nantes, St. Nazaire and St. Sebastian districts of France. And… scanning the sleeve’s small print can reveal that Julien Ottavi, Romain Papion, Jenny Pickett and Jean-Francois Rolez (aka APO33) are the obscured/blurry figures behind the processing of audio data for this rather unusual entry in the field recordings canon. And rather fine it is too.

Coming from Fibrr Records (“a copyleft label since 2000″), this 48-minute plunge into certain aspects of the livelong day is a busy collage of bell-tones, nature sounds, urban bustle and shortwave transmissions. A certain composerly ear hovers over the proceedings too, as colour, shade, presence and at times, industrially-voiced dynamics are all in full evidence. I’m reminded of a couple of late seventies U.K. bedroom experimentalists, where a Dada-informed imprint of Bizarro world laced with a warped sense of humour were integral and telling ingredients. So…advance Bladder Flask and early N.W.W. offshoot, Hastings of Malawi. Their non-linear scalpel-meets-tape reel constructions seem to have some foundation within the BOT universe. That same “seat of your pants” approach seems very much an attribute of shadowy foursome. Perhaps it’s the toot of factory (?) klaxons that’s pitched alongside a plethora of birdsong? The latter sound source having distant echoes of Jim Fassett’s extraordinary Symphony of the Birds album of yore (reissued on EM Records of Japan). Though in this case, this avian broadside soon appears to take on a shrill mechanized edge, much like the massed chirpage of a roomful of nineteenth century caged automata. Bless their tiny metal beaks…

February 8, 2014

Doll on a Music Box

Hair Police

For a record of dedicated single-minded droning music, you could do worse than dip your fuzzy face into a bowlful of the NAR LP (BORING MACHINES BM045) from DuChamp. This Italian composer is based in Berlin and has devoted her debut LP in search of a sound that evokes the memory of her mother. This Proustian quest is focused on a single sound, that of her mother’s hair-dryer, which she studiously attempts to recreate using musical instruments (keyboards or guitars) to create drones, and each of the five tracks approaches this psychological task in a slightly different way; some are comforting, some are dark, most of them are extremely hypnotic in some manner. It’s as though DuChamp were lying on the psychiatrist’s couch and putting herself under a hypnotic trance, the better to delve into hidden memories. What confessional revelations might she revelate? Not much, as it turns out, as none of this music makes much effort to transcend the simple mechanics of process art, despite her high-minded aspirational titles such as ‘A way to grasp joy immediately’. I’m all in favour of retrieving childhood memories however, so maybe this record has a personal dimension for its creator which could qualify it as a success. She herself has not been in pursuit of exorcising family demons, and she speaks of a feeling of comfort; she associates the hair-dryer drone with compassion and stability. The actual sounds she makes have a lot of weight, and a conviction which arises from the way these drones don’t vary much for the duration. I particularly like ‘A worship’ with its very simple three-note motif and the creator’s heartfelt ritual chanting; it’s a strong combination of the stern and implacable meeting up with the delicate and wispy. DuChamp is also a scientist who works with the NMR Biosensor and curates an annual music event called Occultofest. From February 2013.

Doll By Doll

Dolls Come To Life (NO LABEL) is a team-up between the singer / pianist Michelle Cross and the experimental composer Joe Frawley. We’ve followed Frawley’s solo works for a while and regular readers will know we have a lot of time for his exquisitely-rendered miniaturist dreamscapes. He seems to be the ideal co-creator for this album of wistful and enigmatic songs and tunes, which expresses some poignant observations about the human comedy through the metaphor of dolls, marionettes, and other playthings refracted through a slightly darkened view of childhood. Both artistes are clearly concerned with narrative themes in music (a characteristic which many 20th century modernists tried to destroy), and are incurable romantics on a par with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The album is structured around Cross’s songs, and while she may not have the gift for a memorable melody, there is much craft in her playing and her singing voice is distinctive. Her take on the old chestnut ‘My Favorite Things’ is one highlight; her voice is husky and desolate, and she sounds like a cross between a recovering junkie and a psychopath, acting out the role of the creepy family member they keep locked in the attic. Julie Andrews fans would probably wither into a raisin when they hear this rendition, but it’s got an astringency that fits the keynote of this release. Frawley’s contributions are the arrangements and sound collages; he takes the album off into the realms of dreamland with his unusual electronic compositions, and the snippets of spoken word which leak into the fabric in his characteristic manner. Even the singer’s voice is passed through his sampler, allowing him to weave fantasy versions of the songs. His compacted melanges of sound are never less than beautiful and always highly evocative. Rather than opt for the all-out surrealist experience that he has concocted on previous solo works, he uses his effects very sparingly, in service of the themes and narratives suggested by Cross. It’s true the storyline is allusive and doesn’t have any clear payoff, so what happens when Dolls Comes To Life isn’t exactly clear, but that’s where your own imagination comes into play. Guest musicians Win Ridabock and Tracy Kroll add flutes and percussion, and Brandy Pudzis did the cover art. From 14 February 2013.

Tonka Toys

English improviser Kev Hopper has his solo electronic music compositions collected on Tonka Beano (LOR037), released by his friend and collaborator Richard Sanderson on Richard’s Linear Obsessional Recordings label. English improv veteran Hopper constructed all the music using Reaktor, which is unusual music software in that it allows (positively encourages) its users to take the modular parts of the system apart and reassemble it on their own terms, thereby arriving at wholly unique settings, samples, interfaces, and music-generating scripts. On the face of it, this seems a very creative and artistic alternative to simply settling for pre-sets on a keyboard or using any given music-manipulation software out of the box. To his credit, Hopper has certainly succeeded in devising some highly unusual blipperies and blopperies here, and he aligns or overlays them in eye-popping combinations, using a lot of good humour in the process; as if aware of the vague nausea that can be induced by such odd digital emanations, he names one track ‘Indigestion 2012’. There are atonal tracks and melodic tunes (the latter even have a pulsebeat sometimes), and Hopper exhibits his knowledge of musique concrète and glitch music of the 1990s. Even so, I regret to report I found the album mightily unengaging; there isn’t enough spirit or force in the compositions or the execution, and each track toddles on its path in a disappointingly polite, ineffectual manner. Each tune seems boxed-in, unable to break out of its virtual flattened existence in the machine. One sincerely wishes that Hopper would exhibit more boldness, a touch more of the fire and passion we associate with his bass-playing in the band Stump. If purchased as a download, you get a 22-page booklet of explanatory notes and screenshots of the Reaktor settings; the physical limited edition CDR was issued with inserts. From 18 February 2013.

MetaLanguage

From Switzerland, the Insub Meta Orchestra release a rather marginal experiment on the CDR archive#2 [insub40]. By marginal, I mean they seem to be exploring these pathways chiefly for their own purposes, and probably use the information as part of their private “archive” to assist with continuous improvement. On ‘Line 1’, they hold a single tone for 18 minutes, doing their best to gradually increase the “timbre and spectrum” of the drone; although this slow-moving exercise threatens to be a completely sterile non-event, the music suddenly catches fire for the last five minutes, and the players come close to generating the “sonic micro-climate” they are aiming for. They see themselves as sonic scientists perhaps, creating tiny worlds with their own atmospheres and galaxies. There’s certainly enough of them to equip a well-funded laboratory; 45+ musicians from Switzerland and elsewhere are reckoned as members of the Meta Orchestra. On one level, they get results simply by aggregating so much sound in one place at once. ‘Line 2’ is another long and continuous piece, divided into two or three episodic “blocks”; the semi-structured nature of the work will only reveal itself through changes and shifts that pass by at a dreary, glacial rate. None of the sounds made by orchestra members are particularly noteworthy, but this may be a deliberate strategy; rather than allow “superstars” to indulge their technique, there may be an agreed compact to dissolve one’s identity in the shifting nebulae of clustered sounds. This collective approach means the band are unlikely to be nominated for the “Best Espousal of Ayn Rand Philosophy” prize at the next Mercury Awards. This year-old item is probably the last piece of “tangible product” we’ll get from the Insubordinations netlabel, since they’ve taken a completely digital path since then. The last physical object I got from them was an empty screenprinted package. From 5th February 2013.

January 23, 2014

Strata: documenting sound worlds within nooks and crannies of urban landscapes

Tarab, Strata, Unfathomless, CD U18 (2013)

For years the Australian artist Eamonn Sprod, working under the project title of Tarab, has been collecting field recordings and turning them into albums that explore and document the secret audio histories of vacant spaces in and among urban landscapes where ecosystems of plants and animals arise and thrive unseen and unnoticed by the dominant human inhabitants. His most recent album “Strata” focuses on the sounds of vacant and deserted lots and their surroundings in an area in northern Melbourne. Factories and warehouses back onto these forgotten areas on one side and on the other there is a small creek. A highway overpass runs overhead. Photographs, admittedly treated, of these places in the album sleeve design show a forlorn, almost post-apocalyptic desolate landscape in which feral grasses threaten to cover over evidence of a past human civilisation. The detritus of culture, discolouring and rotting and reverting slowly into scraps and dust, lie strewn over the ground, lacking any function and meaning for whichever life-forms still survive in this barrenness.

The album has a very dark and foreboding air and the sounds therein intimate that the natural world is biding its time until such time as when it can reclaim the city-scape for itself again. There is a sculptural and dynamic quality to the noises that appear: among other things, we hear wind, the crackle of dry leaves, rusting industrial machinery ambience, distant thunder, aeroplanes buzzing in the distance, the vibrations of pylons and of what cables may be found beneath the concrete epidermis. The border between man-made and natural dissolves, everything inanimate takes on an animated quality and aspects of the natural world seem as machine-like and forbidding as does the traffic on the roads and in the sky. The microphones used to record the sounds are themselves featured on the album as they were often dragged around the ground and over the garbage and rubble or buried within pylons.

It feels quite intimate and the entire tone of the recording for the most part is very soothing with few abrupt or jarring moments (one major exception occurring about the 22nd minute when a hail-storm suddenly erupts). The production is clear which allows the sounds, even quite distant ones such as a choir of barking dogs, to be heard with great and precise clarity. The album has an amazingly polished feel without seeming to be precious. Even though individual field recordings are carefully spaced apart so you tend to hear one or maybe a couple of things happening, the album seems very rich in terms of texture, mood and volume dynamics.

This isn’t simply a collection of sounds from a particular small set of forgotten or spurned locations in Melbourne; “Strata” is as much an artistic composition as it is a document.

January 21, 2014

Frozen Lakes

Every so often we get musicians who decide they must get back to first principles and start asking fundamental questions about what their chosen instruments actually “do”; this can involve a radical deconstruction of said instrument, or even of the style in which it is played. Some of this line of thought may have fed into the construction of kopfüberwelle (ABSINTH RECORDS 024), where the players Chris Abrahams and Sabine Vogel ask each other some pretty pointed questions about the flute and the organ. They tend to ask these questions in musical form, and the enactments of these conceptual ideas are what we hear on the record, a fairly minimal and often beautiful set of pieces recorded in 2010 at a church in Zepernick. The study they make involves a comparison of the similarities and differences between the two, so we are treated to a fairly commonplace list of observations about air flowing through pipes and the respective limitations of the instruments. I suppose this could be fairly interesting, except I think it’s fair to say that old-fashioned classical composers have been aware of such characteristics for hundreds of years, and have reflected this understanding in their notated dynamics, the choice of instruments when scoring for the orchestra, etc. Where would we be without avant-garde musicians rediscovering the obvious for us? This gripe aside, the music here is enjoyable enough. Their most original discovery in this experiment is that the flute player is free to move up and down the performance hall, while the organist is not. This leads to some unusual acoustic sonorities as Sabine Vogel’s flute tone bounces off the wall of the church, or otherwise changes according to where he’s positioned himself. These process-based rules sometimes tend to dominate the work, becoming the primary reason for the performance, but the duo still arrive at some gorgeous sonorities, and do achieve the hoped-for blendings where you cannot tell one instrument from the other. Amidst all the poised and mannered droning, the track ‘Floating Head Over’ stands out for its slightly uncanny moaning voice, which I assume is Chris Abrahams generating a few head tones through his nose or mouth. If he’s doing so while also playing the flute, it’s a notable feat. (11/12/2012).

Nice blending of synthetic and acoustic tones on The Contaminist (INTANGIBLE CAT CAT 16), assembled by Homogenized Terrestrials (i.e. Phil Klampe). He does it by mixing recordings of synthesizers, percussion, field recordings and the human voice, until everything becomes a thickly wafered agglomeration under his processing tools. Much to his credit, he avoids numerous pitfalls of much ambient music, even when aligning himself with Brian Eno, Fennesz, or Robin Storey (as the press notes have it); he studiously rejects any clichéd or over-familiar sound. The other thing I enjoy is the eccentric structure of each piece; they don’t tend to follow linear compositional rules to do with beginnings, endings, and conventional rise-and-fall dynamics. Instead, Klampe succeeds in delivering genuinely open-ended compositions which float along like free-travelling bubble shapes in the ether, without succumbing to the usual problem faced by contemporary electronic music, that of pointless meandering with no end in view. In this context, his title ‘Gravity Reversed’ seems exceptionally apt. Not a track here outstays their welcome (most last around three or four minutes) and by completion of piece you experience a notable satisfaction and do at least feel like some useful information has been imparted. As can be seen from cover art, he likens himself to a bee collecting pollen. Or maybe the flowers themselves are like the music, and we as listeners must gather what we can, using our proboscis like an ear trumpet and bringing the golden tones back to the listening hive. Sorry about these over-stretched metaphors…From 13 February 2013.

My Dear Killer is the latest in a line of idiosyncratic and unusual musicians on the Italian Boring Machines label, with a solo album The Electric Dragon Of Venus (BM047LP). Like label mate Rella The Woodcutter, this singer-songwriter wields a jet black acoustic guitar which he strums in plangent fashion, his stark and clipped chords ringing out across a metaphysical void. On top of this spare framework, he adds his cryptic lyrics filled with many poignant symbols of alienation, disconnectedness, and melancholy. To make the listening experience even more craggy to your ears, there’s the decidedly odd singing voice; My Dear Killer is so apparently choked up with nameless emotions that he can barely complete a phrase, and the lines judder out of his tremulous throat in a deliciously broken fashion. Even though the lyrics are English, this intense affectation makes the words quite hard to understand. In short, this ghostly update on the acoustic Syd Barrett performs as though the recording studio were a prison cell, a confessional where he can disclose his most intimate thoughts in his inimitable halting fashion. I’m touched to learn that his previous LP – released many years ago in 2006 – was called Clinical Shyness, perhaps a diagnosis of the artist’s borderline personality disorder. To further crystallise the strangeness of this album, there are bouts of electric guitar (often scuzzed up with distortion and feedback) thrown in as occasional non-accompaniments to some of the songs, by which I mean these guitar lines bear no relation whatsoever to the metre, tone or mood of the song, and feel more like unwelcome mental apparitions, storm clouds on the mental horizon of the troubled singer. Then there are snippets of sound effects and field recordings which bookend most of the tracks; the sound of innocent children playing in the street has rarely seemed so forlorn and tragic. My Dear Killer’s sound is very much an acquired taste, but there’s no denying the sincerity of this album, nor the depth of his hurt. From February 2013.

January 18, 2014

Metal Birds

I’m warming to the music of Noteherder & McCloud, an English duo who are really growing on me with their odd and inscrutable noise-filled approach to saxophone and electronics. Chris Parfitt does the strained hooting with his brassy soprano while Geoff Reader supplies the crackly boxes, and they both add voice elements too. We haven’t reviewed them since 2011 (their mini CDR Field Log), and I have the sense they can be pretty raucous and outspoken when the circumstances deem fit, but The Bottle Loose In The Drawer (SLIGHTLY OFF KILTER sok043) is slightly more reflective, subtle, and drawn-out; the full length album format gives a bit more space to their unique qualities, and each track stretches out into a puff-driven event showcasing the yowlage of the human throat or the metallic bell of a ghostly sax, accompanied with requisite doses of strange alien drone or bizarre electric twittering. The duo have a very eccentric and personal approach to instant music creation which I like very much. It would probably be a mistake to characterise N&M’s music as “jazz” or “improv” in any way, and to me it feels more like they are creating spontaneous sound-art installations, doing so in any environment in need of such an artistic statement. They change things for the better, wherever they play. To my mind, local councillors should sponsor musicians like this and send them out to any given spot in the city in need of attention, and give them free rein to cure the problem with sound art. Urban blight would soon be a thing of the past. From 24 January 2013.

Label boss of above release is Paul Khimasia Morgan, who walks everywhere in crepe sole shoes, so that none may anticipate his silent advance. He’s released a short performance piece called Eaves Drop (AURAL DETRITUS audet001) and it’s the first item on his own Aural Detritus sub-label. It’s taken from a Brighton concert where he performed with Jason Kahn, who also recorded it using the spindly tubes that grow from his forehead. 17 minutes of highly minimal slow music; there’s a piercing high tone at the start, overlaid in the middle with additional elements which might have been generated by a slow-motion underwater guitar played backwards with electro-magnets by dying turtles. Then we enter a realm of uncertainty, with small boxes being rearranged on an imaginary supermarket shelf of the mind. In a short space of time this impenetrably blanked-out sound art works itself through at least three or four timbral changes, which if closely attended will assume a certain dramatic flair. We’d hesitate to describe it as a “composition”; perhaps it’s more like the outline for a composition, presented in a short pamphlet where the pages consist of pencil notations that have been 90% rubbed out using a Staedtler Mars Plastic Eraser. From 24 January 2013.

Fancy cover, quality pressing, clever titles and grand ideas on Extant (THE GEOGRAPHY TRIP TRIP 002) the vinyl offering from OH/EX/OH, but only rather ordinary ambient drones within. Their musical plan is to offer a bleak and depressing experience on side one, with a slightly more hopeful message delivered on side two; this means we hear flat monochrome ambient music, interrupted only by a spoken-word quote which I suspect is a sample from a Planet of the Apes movie (it’s about a post-nuclear disaster), and a general sense that we are living through the last days of humanity with solemn music that proceeds at a leaden pace. The “Utopian Tones” of the B side make more prominent use of sequencers walking along at a brisk pace on ‘Close Encounters’, while on ‘With Nova A New Beginning’ we finally hear the identikit synth droning resolve itself into chords of some sort, instead of the usual nondescript blancmange. However, even this track is blighted with cliché, and feels like it should appear in a fourth-rate arthouse cinema film to coincide with a corny sunrise shot and a life-defining moment for the lead character. One would like to encourage this relatively new Manchester-based label (this is their second release), but this entire album is bogged down with over-familiar sounds and scant ideas. However the packaging, as indicated, is first-rate.

American players Steve D’Agostino and Ted Lee form the core duo of Zebu!, who have had their most recent record released by Feeding Tube Records – home to all that is currently bizarre in US underground rock noise. On Chill Wave (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR 082), Zebu! are clearly influenced by early 1960s surf music, a genre which was looked down on for a long time on account of its supposed naivete, but which has I think since been reclaimed into cultural appreciation, a process which may have begun with the Rhino Records compilations (The History Of Surf Music) in 1982. I’ll admit Zebu! exhibit plenty of energy in their rough music and evoke a suitably amateurish garage-rock feel through the flat recording, but I don’t like it much. They have no gift for a memorable melody, and their sloppy guitar work is an insult to the precision and care of The Surfaris, Dick Dale, The Challengers and Santo & Johnny (the creators of ‘Sleep Walk’), all of whom struck their guitar notes with a purposeful simplicity that these boys can’t hope to match. The saxophone work of guest player Peter Van Siclen is nauseating to my ears, and the band’s lapses into 1980s punk rock are embarrassing. “Classicist American instrumental ho-daddyism”, indeed!