Tagged: electronica

November 30, 2013

Grotesque Mandarin Splashback

Fans of absurdist low-key acoustic mummery should tune into the zig-zag waves emanating from the skewed mind of Daniel Spicer and his album Ylvmlvy (SLIGHTLY OFF KILTER sok045), whereon eight brain-slices from his unique cerebellum can be chewed and savoured by the curious tooth. Some will enjoy his free-form poetry recits, often executed with the help of Tom Roberts’ acoustic guitar, and his wayward disorganised delivery method which seems to involve Mr Spicer wandering shambolically about the recording space while he utters the poems, armed with strange acoustic instruments and percussion, letting the mic pick up what chance fragments it may – in fine, a more benign version of Mark E. Smith’s studio anti-method. Elsewhere, friendly jazzers Caines, Garside and Pyne join in for a lengthy and enjoyable free-form blaster that gives ample evidence that more people should engage and play improvised music, rather than leave that genre in the mouldy hands of the established old-guard professionals ¹. An even stranger “jam” session – and it’s refreshing that Spicer is not afraid to use the word “jam”, a term usually frowned on by prissy proper musicians with scratchy beards – is called ‘Cake Shop Power Breakfast Jam’, featuring Shurdut, Fontanez, Maxwell, and Janas in a truly freaky collision of unhinged minds; in my alternative universe, this is the sort of loopified music we should have heard on The Goon Show interludes, rather than the stuffy and respectable jazz of Ray Ellington. Perhaps weirdest of all are the two ‘Sans Titit’ tracks, short but delicious episodes of Dadaist poetry composed of strangulated and fragmented syllables and phonemes, which Spicer treats with all the seriousness you’d expect from a dignified professor presenting an inaugural lecture at The Royal Academy. Even the album’s title of compressed consonants participates in this game of private language and insane information-scrambling malarkey. All this, plus a violin duet with his eight year-old daughter. Very high recommendation for the work of this approachable and user-friendly Brighton loon-boon. From January 2012.

The great Katherine Young is a member of Architeuthis Walks On Land and Civil War, among others, and she plays the bassoon and composes all the music for Pretty Monsters on this self-titled record (PUBLIC EYESORE 120). I have the impression (see interview in TSP#21) that she likes small ensembles which work with a very judicious combination of instruments, and the instrumentation on offer here – Owen Stewart-Robertson’s guitar, Mike Pride’s drumming and Erica Dicker’s violin – makes for a superbly realised, vibrant and unusual sound. Coherent and ingenious in its dissonances and consonances, there’s not a single note played here that isn’t memorable in some way, well-defined and as three-dimensional as a living painting. The music just leaps off the printed page like a team of wild animals from a picture book, even when the printed page in this case is a compact disc. Young’s other music which I have heard may have veered towards the introspective or the soothing (in a very twisted way, like an old bough curlicued around near a Japanese lake at sunset whose water is slowly turning pink under the sky), but the somewhat rock-music-ified elements here of drumming and electric guitar give Pretty Monster an additional force, transforming the imaginative and unpredictable melodies into even more mind-melting possibilities. By no means an ego-trip for Katherine Young alone, the album gives plenty of space to all the players: Dicker’s violin work on ‘Crushed’ is particularly strong, reaching remarkable heights of controlled frenzy. For fans of the brown, creaky, leathery qualities of the bassoon (a sound which in Katherine’s hands becomes pure flaked tobacco carved in huge ancient chunks), I also recommend ‘For Autonauts, For Travelers’, a cut where that woodwind beast truly burbles and growls in plangent tones, enriched with her unique playing style, and enhanced by electronic treatment. All of this music is just solid enough to eat with a fork and spoon. May I propose that listeners investigate and hear as much of Katherine Young’s music as is humanly possible. Lovely cover art by Rob Patterson. From November 2012.

I am always happy to receive these small gobbets of American weirdness from Amalgamated, a project looming from Spring Valley in Illinois. The deal is that the four-piece Klampe, Newell, Bengtsen and Richards perform their unusual brand of crazy rock-improv-ambient music, then allow D. Petri and Gus Kumo to rebuild and reshape the recordings in the mixing room. Short but intense bursts of energetic and erratic avant-rock noise emerge from these experiments, and two of the tracks on the mini-CD Spark II (INTANGIBLE CAT CAT-17) have additional instruments dubbed in to thicken the rhythms, spice things up with unexpected saxophone toots, or just contribute to the general air of mayhem and directed madness. ‘Musst’ works exceptionally well; one suspects it’s an assemblage of many takes and edits contrived into a single eight-minute slab of Faust-like loopery and pre-planned auto-destruction, but what isn’t? Many great rock records have been assembled from many elements to one degree or another; it’s a question of which gifted hands are doing the cutting and pasting. These talented American goops also believe in producing a very rich and generous sound, never stinting on treatments and effects; the end results are as warm and tasty as a handcrafted cheeseburger. From 14 November 2012.

Two intriguing examples of underground electronica-instrumentals by solo acts Charlatan and Clathrus on their self-titled split tape (FULL OF NOTHING fon36). Sides are unmarked on the cassette but I simply threw the item into th’ player and let it spin. Assuming that this is Charlatan whose noise greets me first, then we’re hearing the music of the famous Brad Rose, the man behind Foxy Digitalis and a fellow with not a few solo aliases in his career. Both ‘Grotesque Social Grid’ and ‘New Millennium’ are fascinating mantra-like constructs whose charm works by using much repetition and looping of very simple phrases, yet never once does it become standard-issue techno-loop trance or boneless ambient. There’s intelligence and imagination abounding in this dense & steely machine-like music, which incidentally is also sunny and upbeat enough (almost psychedelic in places) that it will not be mistaken for “bleak industrial”. I was impressed how busy Rose has been under this name alone; about a dozen Charlatan releases since 2009. The Russian Clathrus is in fact Dmitriy Vlasov, whose Billiam Wutler Yea guise (insanely mutated loop-based gunk) appeals to me mightily. Some of that same intense, determined dementia shows up in the grain of ‘Manitoba’, ‘So Long’ and ‘Zond’ on his side of this C49 tape. He’s certainly keen to show off his transformative skills wherever possible, reworking synth sounds and drum-boxes into unrecognisable utterances, but I suppose his real triumph on these three tracks is the illogical construction of his tunes; they follow crazy paths, make unexpected dives, and disappear down rabbit holes in a highly inconvenient manner. To bewilder the listener in entertaining ways appears to be Clathrus’ plan, and like Charlatan he too manages thereby to avoid the pitfalls of the obvious and keeps us alert at all times. One of many tapes received from this Russian label in September 2012.

This piece in particular calls to mind the clattersome glories of The Vitamin B12, another Brighton project. ↩

November 12, 2013

Robotic Reveries

"Perfectly-proportioned space-pop" — “Perfectly proportioned space-pop…”

Three Legged Race
Persuasive Barrier
AUSTRIA SPECTRUM SPOOLS SP022 LP (2012)

Check the Edition Mego’s ‘Spectrum Spools’ website, scan the covers and this is the one your eyes will be drawn to: a tightly rendered telephone melting out of a white leather egg. Correspondingly, the record it protects vomits vast valleys of multi-coloured, molten strangeness into listening spaces, and long may it do so. Persuasive Barrier is the surreal spawn of Robert Beatty: Kentucky-based multi-media artist, progenitor of a panoply of psychedelic sleeves (including the iconic, airbrushed moonscape to Burning Star Core’s Challenger), small-run cassettes and now this strangely hued volume of lysergic library music under the ‘Three-Legged Race’ moniker. It calls up any number of potent references: visual classics such as La Planète Sauvage, the works of Piotr Kamler, right up to the deliciously dreary Willows by Belbury Poly, but none more accurately than Mort Garson’s Black Mass (under the ‘Lucifer’ pseudonym). Like the scratch-card I’ve never found, it’s an instant winner.

I was fortunate enough to receive the record during a spell of the ‘there’s no more ‘new’ music (just a spectrum of spins on the old)’ doldrums, and to be honest my mind hasn’t changed. However, faith is fully refurbished when, balanced between the imitation and ‘innovation’, one encounters such a successful restoration of a well-worn sound. Alternating between ear-baitingly brief synthetic song-craft and longer, woozier wig-outs, the tracks exhibit resourcefulness using a presumably pared-down set-up and an intrepid navigator’s spirit of adventurous tomfoolery.

The scene is set in the opening tracks: ‘Traces of a Wet Crowd’, a spirited swarm of pinpricks and clipped garbles, lasts long enough to bemuse before melting into ‘Permethrin I’: a yawning groan of cold, metallic space. Alternation between these atmospheres of bleepy whimsy and deep paranoia characterises the overall content. Highlights include the melancholic ‘Persuasive Barrier’; a ponderous procession of descending, doleful pulses, eliciting many a bleak, airbrushed sci-fi paperback landscape, and ‘Magnetic Bride’: another Terry Gilliam sky rattled by ring-modulated gargles, faint laboratory burbles and quicksand-distressed SOS bleeps, as if an old Dr Who soundtrack had somehow gained sentience and outgrown its background role.

Though teasingly tiny, the album is perfectly proportioned space-pop: its 5-year genesis suggesting sincere craftsmanship: the labour of love. Retro-sleeve art included, Beatty himself has confirmed that he sees his work as a considered reaction to a pervasive culture of internet-ready laziness. Persuasive Barrier isn’t an original sound, granted, but neither is it derivative, and certainly has the capacity for succour, not least to Ghost Box fans who feel those releases have lately lost the zeitgeist that once distinguished them. Of all the releases I’ve reviewed for this journal thus far, this is one of the best. It has my fullest possible recommendation and strikes me as the very reason replacement cartridges are made available.

November 8, 2013

Music Has The Right To Vowels

EAU-DC
NR 2
GERMANY EMPIRIC RECORDS EMREC 3 (2013)

It begins as a series of warm, leisurely pulses that ripple across my living room, like Janek Schaefer’s respiratory system beamed live from ‘Basic Channel’ radio. It’s a bare beginning, but evolves by and by, softly excavated by sub-bass scrapes, then accommodating an array of devices cherry-picked from the modern electronic(a) lexicon and stripped to the skeleton. The sound is eclectic but implacable, as if dreamed, depersonalised and filtered through the same slurred, sun-bleached prism that renders the best available dub techno so hypnotising.

EAU-DC is Messrs Thorsten Polomski and Jens Fischer, the latter of whom may or may not trade under the guise of ‘DJ Fox’. Information on the pair is scarcer than this 200-copy record (large posters enclosed in the first 100). It is a streamlined sequel to the artists’ ‘sometimes hasty’ debut, and it displays an approach to track construction that is as laconic as their press: “just mixing up favoured elements, adding more restrained, but sometimes pretty hasty beats and analog sounding fx’s”. And though dropped twice in the same copy, here ‘haste’ is as conspicuous by its audible absence as is unnecessary explanation. Personal satisfaction is the artists’ evident motivating mandate, but with indulgence subordinate to intuition. The results should thus please anyone with an ear for ambiguous, understated atmospheres that don’t necessitate herbal accompaniment.

The seamlessly segued ‘SKLLRDE / PRNCS’ provides a lengthy lead-in, draping layer upon luscious layer of languorous cloud-tone over a ghostly heartbeat. An arrhythmic limp sets the tempo for ‘MCROMRKA’, the first track to make use of more than one vowel in the title. The resulting oxygen expulsion and subsequently dizzying head-rush might explain this ear-catching meter, which is, in due course, ameliorated by a vertiginous, undulating organ line. Side B ups the speed slightly: scattering suggestions of drum’n’bass and even dubstep here and there, though always in the sparest, most tasteful manner I hasten to add. Even the remote, pitch-shifted (but radiant) female vocals in the final track – ‘ESTUTHAT’ – look unlikely to divide listeners the way Burial’s ‘Untrue’ did, instead allowing the record to drift into its longed-for last slumber.

NR 2 is a solid listening experience in its entirety, offering your ears some of the best comfort that music money can by, short of Boards of Canada reissues perhaps. These 8 tracks amount to a hazy road journey that casually deconstructs any number of electronic sub-genres, and if you choose to ignore the label’s ‘33rpm’ notice, you can make a double album of it to no dilution of your enjoyment.

October 20, 2013

The Best Way to Travel

Kotra & Zavoloka & Dunaewsky69
Kallista
UKRAINE KVITNU 27 CD (2012)

Here is an exotic Eastern European electronic-errr, some sort of luridly packaged three-way hymn to Krakow. It is not sponsored by the city fathers, as far as I can tell, but there is some university connection in there. 24 tracks in just over an hour, alternating between the three artists, although there’s not much to distinguish individual contributions – or, being more generous, it is coherent in its electro-eclectism. Anyway, the whole thing is a mish-mash of various cranky electronics, Geiger counter clicks and aggravated synths being maltreated, sounding on the whole a lot like corrupt mp3s of someone pretending to be Aphex Twin layered with more obsessive-compulsive glitching played by laptops plugged into the wrong voltage. Someone’s probably stuffed MSG in the USB port as well. There’s a rather ramshackle air and fluctuating levels, gratifyingly antisocial frequencies sticking out at inopportune angles.

Sometimes our artists do not sound particularly in control of the electronics (which in fact include custom-built oscillators, according to the packaging). Who wants control anyway, though? Montage and jump-cut, cheesy break-beats and thick melodies cut out or fizzle into corrosive goo as soon as they start. Cumbersome and ragged-cornered takes on collage with field recordings collide with detournings of techno-technique. Which, considering I have been known to complain about overly slick production in electronic music, should please me to some degree.

This does a fairly convincing job of conjuring up an imagined sensory electro-magnetic overload somewhere in a sprawling metropolis, mobile phones and the sticky floor of a bus as you pass through an unfamiliar neighbourhood full of signs advertising who knows what, strange juxtapositions, olfactory collisions, aural chewing gum stuck to a tourist map of the mind, all coloured in with some highlighters. Not in the lines, either.

I have never holidayed in Krakow, but thanks to this garishly packaged lump o’ sound I feel I have, now, and I can confidently report that the streets are paved with energy drink, it’s built of leaking glowsticks, and giant bears lurch up at you from stinking alleyways, displaying their lantern-like gullets before swimming away again with a flick of the tail. Hooray! Boney M would be proud.

Joda Clément
The Narrows
BELGIUM UNFATHOMLESS U09 CD (2011)

In which we encounter a low frequency drone with mid-range textural flecks to keep you dancing derived from field recordings of behind sheds, some fences etc. This is a little like lying above a wide, slowly moving, conveyor belt which has been scattered with lumps of rock and rubble (mostly, say, from the size of a small potato to a little larger than a fist), whilst a feather duvet is draped down on you from above, lying over you and the conveyor belt, its end dragging over the rocks as they trundle past you, meanwhile keeping you insulated from much else apart from the rumble of the conveyor mechanism and the soft clack of stone on stone. There’s a bit of twitching of limbs in the last seven minutes, an adjustment in recumbent position, and then everything fades out at 35 minutes before it can outstay its welcome. I must say I spent a refreshing half hour on the carpet with my eyes closed to this. If I was to be critical I could say that the background drone which provides the ground for most of the rubbley noises was a little too obtrusive bass-wise to effect complete relaxation. It is also overall a bit clean and tidy, as far as drones go, for my liking, although there are moves towards abrasion in the surrounding scrapes. Handy hint: this could be mitigated by listening on a portable system with crappy speakers and no bottom end.

Kotra
Dunaewsky69
Zavoloka
Kvitnu
Joda Clément
Unfathomless

October 14, 2013

Moon and a Mask

Stuart Chalmers is a fiendishly witty and capable mangler / masher of cassette tapes, blending his outputs from that aural activity with other sources (field recordings, radio signals, synths) to produce moments of delirious joy on Daydream Empire (LF RECORDS LF029). As with many geniuses in this genre his plan is to give the ear/brain a overload of information to process, spewing it out in slightly haphazard order to allow maximal surprise to the listener, while underpinning each composition with a steady flow of musical or verbal patterns. Each piece just floats like polystyrene on a lake. Chalmers is not in the game to shock or outrage; rather his balmy, hazy and opaque works spread a fine surreal gauze over the surface of the world, and everything appears slightly askew. The titles act as an index to his intentions: ‘Fall of Reality’, ‘Melting of time’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ are poignant and accurate descriptions of his process. Chalmers is associated with improvising collectives in Oxford and Cheltenham, and also records as tusK and skarabee. (27/12/2012)

A shortish 7-track sampler from the Slovakian LOM label arrived 19 December 2012, showcasing the sound art of MRKVA and BOLKA (respectively, Jonáš Gruska and Matúš Kobolka). The label proposes itself as a meeting point for the assistance and encouragement of experimental art of all stripe, including field recordings, music, literature, books, images and poetry, and they tend to favour all of these cultural jewels when expressed in digital or web-based formats. The sounds hereon are ingenious compacted statements using intense digital glitchoid effects in abundance, the results quite often folded into pleated shapes that resemble swarms of insects – a trope which clearly preoccupies both their brains, if the fractured press release speaks true. They would like to help us to “channel our inner insect”. While each short slab of whoopery bounces with teeming life and transports you bodily across a field of grass, none of the sounds ever distress you with unpleasant noise nor threaten you with despondent gloomy drone. A charming and understated piece of imaginative electronica.

Nad Spiro is Rosa Arruti. This Spanish creatrice works mostly with heavily processed electric guitars, and builds intricately detailed patterns and textures from tiny samples, occasionally adding distorted voices on her CD Atomic Spy (GEOMETRIK RECORDS gr gsg 01). In an extremely precise manner, she weaves psychologically unsettling dramas which execute themselves with the deathly accuracy of a 1940s suspense movie – indeed the high-contrast photography of a film noir would seem an apt keynote for this whole album, with its mysterious jet-black shadows. This particular mesmerising outing has a vaguely “urban” theme, all eight tracks linking to suggest the narrative of a journalist or private eye who is tormented by unknown terrors in the city, including ghostly voices emanating from the old-fashioned valve radio set. The nocturnal mood and story are enhanced by the very strong cover image, a photo-collage by the artist Josep Renau which resembles a Weegee news photograph going horribly wrong.

The Chasms Of My Heart (CRUCIAL BLAST RECORDS CBR98) by Theologian is a strong dose of pounding industrialism, an overpowering abundance of powerful drone characterised by smothering intensity and relentless drive. Theologian plans to pursue his seething emotions with the determination of a pile-driver, rather than the stealth of a nimble hunter, and he’ll keep on screaming and howling in anguish until the very chambers of his own heart are rubbed raw. His record cover (and many of his other releases too) betray an interest in the frail flesh of the human body, the assorted juxtapositions here implying some sort of painful surgery for the torso, or the use of x-rays to reveal the hidden movements of the inner man, as if any felt emotion were a form of cancer that we must purge ourselves of. Track titles likewise allude to themes of despair and bodily decay; in some ways you could read the album as a gloss on a Hamlet soliloquy. While I personally strive to eschew artistic works which appear to wallow in self-pity and sentimentality, I am drawn to the compelling sonic surface of this heavy album, which veers between suffocating ultra-drones and hideously overloaded noise; technically it’s an admirable achievement of overdubbing and layering. Theologian is Leech, who also calls himself Navicon Torture Technologies, or Theologian Prime, and this is his third album for the Crucial Blast label.

July 29, 2013

Disenchanting

Deison
Quiet Rooms
USA AAGOO RECORDS AGO051 CD (2012)
I’m being seduced by sound. This is pseudo-Electronic Voice Phenomena, predictably Brian Eno-influenced, translucent, flimsy, field recordings made using the by now familiar technique of amplifying mics so hard they pick up the conversation in a room farther down the hallway, made in an empty, bored moment while on holiday, taken home and augmented in a fairly predictable and inoffensive way with synths and tapes to produce a somnambulant species of music of the mildly distracting type that already overpopulates the marketplace. An example of the kind of inadvertent championing of expensive technology over creative talent that seems so prevalent today.

This, from the aagoo website: Bas Mantel who did the amazing design had this to say “These compositions sound frightening, but at the same time enchanting.” In case you were wondering, the “amazing design” comprises a fairly bland and generic Victorian black and white photograph of a child’s blank, expressionless face, one finger pressed to the her temple overlaid on an uninspiring barely there view through a window background. Pleasant though a lot of the material is, frightening and enchanting are not words I would use. Sorry Bas, I couldn’t disagree with you more.

Rather than being a “frightening” listen, mostly these four tracks strike me as merely a handful of isolated synth pads triggered at length that could I could imagine being used by ambient electronicists on the R&S label back in the early 90’s as beds for the breathing spaces between their techno workouts. Isolated as they are here, the sounds are neither particularly “enchanting” in that they are too unremarkable in their construction and repetitive in their facilitation. I feel I’m being seduced in the same way that television advertising tries to seduce me. Overall, I find myself asking myself the question “but is this enough?” a lot, although if I’m totally honest I’m actually quite enjoying the seduction despite myself.

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)