Tagged: electronica

June 19, 2013

Grievous Bodily Charm: a patchwork of hooky tunes that manage to be dull

Mr Vast, Grievous Bodily Charm, Spezialmaterial Records, CD (2013)

A kooky retro-Eighties Eurodisco lounge lizard recording this promised to be to my nonplussed eardrums. The cover art is reminiscent of old DIY-punk cut-n-paste and the symbols on the back cover suggest old advertising motifs for a long-forgotten computer brand. The music starts briskly with a ditty of faux Cockney ska-lite tunes and mock David Bowie vocals in parts and the pace doesn’t falter over the entire album. Our tour travels through synth-pop clunk, some laid-back blues (“Atlantis”) and electrified country pop (“Teflon Country”) among others but overall the recording is much like a homage to a period in the 1980s when Casio and Fairlight synthesisers became the rage and “I’m the operator of my pocket calculator” was a Kraftwerk anthem; people then vaguely remembered how to write proper and occasionally (or accidentally) witty lyrics that actually made sense though they might not all have been politically correct. Mr Vast makes an ill-advised foray into lite low-fat metal and tongue-in-cheek sexist lyrical guff (“Henry the 8th”) and as the album progresses the music and the playboy theme get sillier and plough deeper into increasingly tired and stereotyped music territory.

When the last track has played out, all that has made an impression is a patch-work of hooky tunes delivered in a mass assembly dream factory way that drains any life out of the original style the music draws inspiration from. Probably the only decent song to be found in “Ecstatic Caravan” which for once is a sympathetic treatment of madness and the lack of connection and alienation felt by those so cursed (or maybe blessed). The Cockney and other English accents that may feature fail to rescue the songs from a mechanical and ersatz retro-Eighties hell that apes the style and obsessions of the period but ignores the context from which such concerns bled into the popular culture of the time. Possibly there is an element of satire that I’ve missed. The 1980s are racking up as a period which, more than the preceding decade of fatuous and over-hyped Zeppelin wannabe stadium-rock, culture and good sense forgot and were replaced by superficiality and a kind of cunning and predatory streetwise mind-set.

Contact: Mr Vast, Spezialmaterial Records

May 26, 2013

Vinyl Venisons Part 2

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

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

May 20, 2013

Regional Surrealism

Konx-Om-Pax, Regional Surrealism
PLANET MU RECORDS ZIQ323 CD (2012)

Although I have since determined that the title probably refers to local (Scottish) colour rather than, necessarily, to lesser-known British Surrealist painters, the promise of allusions in that direction initially piqued my interest in this release. Further investigation and closer scrutiny of the cover art proves this not to be the case; however, if we consider the 90s heyday of bedroom electronica, the associated hermetic synthetic productions of the various pale and furtive residents of the less cosmopolitan fringes of these grey isles, a form of regional surrealism ¹ (and let us do so, just for the purposes of an extended and mixed metaphor), then this album can be viewed as a latter-day take on that canon. One that evinces some sense of a personal take on the form and which also incorporates glances towards other, more distant musical waters.

Aquatic metaphors are wielded by the press release, names like Drexciya are mentioned. While the watery references are for some tracks apposite, a more obvious set of sonic antecedents would be Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. Konx-Om-Pax’s personal twist on these inspirations being, apart from post-laptop-revolution production techniques and sound, a focus on the ambient potentials indicated therein. A gentle untethering of various archetypal Aphex-inflected melodies to be left to unspool at their own languid paces with slightly left-field accompaniments. Here a synth part is layered with a cryptic slowed-down monologue, there with a digitally mutating sound effect. The mode remains pretty much beatless although not arrhythmic, there are gentle arpeggiations and delays throughout the albums length, the moods are diffuse and subtle, with a couple of exceptions. ‘Pillars of Creation’ has a brassy heft to it which surprisingly (or not if you consider that there are one or two stray techno genes lurking somewhere in here) contains hints of mid 90s Carl Craig de-coupled from beats or any particularly techno inclinations. Other tracks nod towards the cross-genre sound palettes of, for example, latter-day Boards of Canada or Broadcast, all coloured with a general ambient wash.

‘Glacier Mountain Descent’ is presented as a rhythmic ‘reimagining of the start of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre’. In other words, Popol Vuh’s magisterial and truly mystical soundtracking of that scene. This unfortunately invites unfavourable comparisons to the original, despite being enjoyable enough on its own terms. Ash Ra Tempel are also invoked in the press release, to similar effect. It’s good to see Kosmische ripples still potent, still expanding their way through the collective unconscious. Krautrock isn’t a set of stylisms to be tacked-on and referenced, however, rather a state of expanded inspiration, striving towards the unknown or faintly apprehended. Surrealism likewise, British or otherwise, and whatever latter-day Dali might have you believe.

The abiding impression is of a de-anxietised drift through muted pastel clouds of coloured Teflon gasses or of Jan Hammer hits played underwater by a jellyfish on a sponge laptop. An unerringly pleasant listen if not freighted with too much (unrequested) expectation; and while not as cranky or weird as it could be by any means, it still exudes a certain quiet sense of individuality and could perhaps be good for a daydream or two of an afternoon whilst contemplating shifting grey British skies and their watery constituent elements; and who knows, maybe a slyly surreal experience may manifest during such a moment of abstraction?

I’d particularly consider the works of, for example, Anthony Manning in this respect. ‘Chromium Nebulae’ and ‘Islets in Pink Polypropylene’ on the Irdial record label exemplify an individual, weird non-generic 90s electronica. See also various misfit emissions from the Rephlex label of a similar vintage e.g. Kinesthesia’s ‘Empathy Box’. ↩

May 11, 2013

I Am A Statistic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 2, 2013

Stereo Space: ruminating on modern life and how it breaks people

Pilesar, Stereo Space, self-released CD (2012)

Piloted in the main by Jason Mullinax, responsible for vocals, keyboards, programmed percussion, most guitars and electronics effects on “Stereo Space”, Pilesar is a band of shifting personnel who create alternative mainstream melodic pop electronica of a sort that brings out the Devo fan in people of a certain generation. The songs featured here are short sweet affairs ruminating on aspects of modern life, particularly its disappointments and how small it can make people feel.

Early highlights include the reggae-tinged “Everywhere is Beauty” and the slightly dark, angsty “Wifestink”, both of which contain some unexpected but very unassuming gems in their rhythms, manipulations and subtle effects that suggest slight anxiety. From then on, the music sweeps by rather too briskly as though Mullinax insists on packing as much complaint into the space of 54 minutes as possible. A brief pause with an admission of emotional vulnerability appears in “Pinky Swear” but the song still feels hurried along, and a connection between song and listener only goes so deep (which is not much at all).

The mid-album sag inevitably arrives with songs notable more for fussiness or having that quality of you the listener having been there and heard that so let’s move right along to the next track. After doing time out in filler wilderness the album perks up with the instrumental “Things Break” which has some interesting texture effects snuck into the background. Final track “Are We Happy Next?” restores some semblance of the bright eccentricity and whimsy encountered at the album’s beginning but with that familiar air of being older, wiser and more guarded about the ups and downs that life always throws at you.

The album will be sure to pick up fans among its target audience of 20 – 30 years of age: the kind of people who enter the world factory bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with heads filled with ambition and wanting to change everything for the better but who come out of the sausage-making machines with dimmed spirit and perhaps bitter about what they’ve been through, railing at life’s injustices and never really questioning why the mass assembly line had to be there in the first place. But the paths “Stereo Space” treads though have already been heavily travelled by other pop acts, many of whom have done a far better and deeper investigation of the territory of emotions, relationships and disappointments experienced along the way.

Contact: Pilesar

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.

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.

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 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.

November 11, 2012

Dream Seeds: too bland, poppy and smooth for very dark subject matter

Extra Life, Dream Seeds, Northern Spy Records, NSCD 022 (2012)

That album cover has that curious and creepy look that I associate with the artwork for The Melvins’ albums but the music here is very, very different from those doom metal musicians’ work. Superficially poppy and intimate, as though made just for one person and that one person is you, the self-confessional album hides very dark fantasies and traumas, too dark to ever reveal to the light: traumas and thoughts that would see the unseen narrator-singer go into the slammer were they to be made public. “Dream Seeds” is the work of Charlie Looker who performs all vocals (which remind me of Depeche Mode in their pure strong choir-boy tones that suggest both innocence and self-torment), acoustic guitar and some synthesiser plus two other musicians on electronics, synth, guitar, percussion and backing vocals who make up Extra Life. The music emphasises awkward and deliberately clunky rhythms and beats, an epic and varied sound that takes in hard-edged pop-rock, moods of melancholy, fear, sorrow and despair, and synth-based orchestration.

To be honest, I find the music palls over the album’s running time: there’s something about it that’s bland and blunt and leaves me feeling remote and uninvolved. Perhaps the style of music adopted here is the problem: I guess I expect music this dark and personal to have some anguish and hints of self-examination, self-torture and pleading / bargaining with God that would be reflected in the very texture of the music – some harsh layers of sound here and there that would contrast with the smoothness of the singing. As the album goes, the emotion that should have been spread throughout instead comes in the last song and sounds very forced. I feel as though I’m sitting through some kitchen-sink drama that’s been done too often already and the burnt-out actors are simply going through the motions again.

The lyrics are the best part of the album and could stand apart as a monologue. Taken together, the lyrics form a narrative of guilt on the vocalist’s part for going ahead with an abortion or a few abortions in spite of his religious pro-life background and his fantasies about what he’d like to do to several children under his care as a teacher. Extreme abusive corporal punishment (“Discipline for Edwin”) and paedophilia (“Little One”, “First Song”) are hinted at. The last two tracks bring back memories of the abortions, controlling the unruly class of school-kids with a paddle and finally release from a particular mortal coil.

“First Song” is the best song on the album for its intense emotion and the mood of darkening cloud, a feeling that something very wrong is occurring, but apart from this, the music and singing just don’t seem to fit the subject matter well enough.

Contact: Northern Spy Records