Tagged: electropop

Empty Worlds


Four cassettes from the Swedish Beläten label sent to us by Thomas Martin Ekelund, who may also be the label boss. Beläten produce “post avantgarde pop” and align themselves with things apocalyptic, transgressive, esoteric, and pagan. Even the catalogue numbers are somewhat recherché, using characters from the Hebrew alphabet. Industrial music has clearly cast a long shadow since 1979. I seem to be one of the few music fans who never heard a single record by Throbbing Gristle but I continue to experience the long-tail fallout from that cultural event, as reflected in tape bands like these. Even the fact that they express a preference for cassette tapes is a statement, expressing allegiance with the “glory days” of tape trading and mail art of the early 1980s. And guess what…the label is based in Gothenburg, home of the finest gloom music in all of the Nordic realms. All of these items (which arrived 20 July 2012) existed in tiny editions of 50 copies and have probably all sold out, although downloads are available.

Michael Idehall produces 10 sullen, inward-looking episodes on Sol. Electronic pulses with a sinister bent are repeated with a single-minded dedication to monotony and dreariness, while a cracked and muttering voice utters its broken phrases, to create sensations and emotions very suggestive of an inner desolation and multiple disasters. To accompany these inner journeys, additional synths bark and toot in distinctly inhuman fashion, or provide snarling and sizzly textures to add to the general discomfort. The cumulative effect tends to present Idehall as a haunted figure cursed under a malevolent spell, a supernatural dimension which is not denied by the magick and pagan themes running through tracks such as ‘Snake Messiah’, ‘Serpent Wand’ and ‘Language of the Birds’. Clunky and hesitant in places, his music nonetheless creates powerful ceremonial effects with a Hammer Horror undercurrent.

Edifice Of Nine Sauvastikas is a split tape. Æther and Trepaneringsritualen each create a ten-minute drone piece dedicated to an esoteric reference, paying their respects to Yung-drung Gu-tzeg 1. Æther’s interpretation of the hermetic theme results merely in a plodding and overlong drone of rather wearisome solemnity, but I’ll admit there is a dynamic at work which allows a gradual build-up of slow-burning terror as reflected in the increased distortion and deepening of the tones, plus they manage to emulate the sound of chanting monks quite effectively. Trepaneringsritualen recently had a single out on Fang Bomb, and he’s a pretty cool doomster. In fact he’s also Thomas Martin Ekelund, the man behind this label and also the excellent Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words. While that former incarnation was fixated on the afterlife in a semi-mystical and speculative fashion, Trepaneringsritualen is all about the futility and the doom – mixing it up with quasi-religious and supernatural elements to further add to the black cloud of uncertainty. As such, his work fits in perfectly with this label’s aesthetic. On the cassette he contributes a murky clashing percussive sound with layers of hideous grind and eerie whisperments, instantly evoking a terrible inhuman landscape. What strikes me with this track, and indeed all the music spun so far, is how it’s not afraid to stay in the same place, working obsessively with the same limited range of tones and sounds until they grind them into a handful of dust.

Now here’s an entire tape by Trepaneringsritualen called Roi Perdu. I should be careful what I wish for. What a nifty cover too, a simple skull with a crown on it, yet it’s an image that induces instant suicidal feelings with its stark message of futility. This one was originally issued by iDEAL Recordings in Sweden and constitutes a reissue. The album also has an intriguing theme, slightly more historical in nature as it explores myths and legends of medieval Europe. I thought it might be a dark ambient update on the Fisher King and the Golden Bough themes in The Waste Land, but it seems Trepaneringsritualen have their eyes on the Merovingian legend. Four tracks of increasingly abject futility, with the ultra-slow bleak music proceeding at a leaden pace with its processed ambient drones weighed down by four anchors stapled into its dorsal muscles. The voice elements, as is customary, are likewise treated until what ends up on the tape is the monstrous groanings of a tormented creature. This may not appear very engaging from my description, but Trepaneringsritualen (like most of Ekelund’s music) has a cathartic effect on the listener, and you’ll expunge many an inner demon if you can make it to the other end of this turgid field of grim murk. Of all items in this batch this one has the most cohesive vibe, a composition that is planned and sequenced for maximum effect.

A Somatic Response is a compilation put together by Soma Sema and featuring the music of Blitzkrieg Baby, Television Set, Vita Noctis, Club Amour, Kord, Lust For Youth, Goz Mongo Alliance, Xiu & Soma Sema. This is mostly variants and strains of minimal electro-pop music shading into a genre which I believe is called Cold Wave. Melodies, lyrics and vocals feature more prominently, and in many instances we have a self-important male voice chanting about alienation and coldness against the beat of a drum machine. But I do like ‘Slugs’ by Estroboscorpio with its twisted and poisonous synth lines, Makina Girgir‘s ‘Alpha’ for its sinister air, and the sheer shrieking insufferability of Nimam Spregleda‘s ‘Fire’. In distinction to the above doomy ambient music, this is more upfront, aggressive even…the underlying message of many songs is that we’re on our own in a cruel world and nobody will protect us from the forces of evil.

  1. It’s the name of a mountain also called Mount Kailash, and figures largely in an ancient Tibetan spiritualist tradition. ↩
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Right Heft


Concrete and Clay

I quite like the Gobi Wow (NEVER COME ASHORE NCALP1) LP from FvRTvR, which turns out to be the duo of the American percussionist Fritz Welch with German loonoid Guido Henneböhl working a mysterious home-made electronic monstrosity. Together they conspire to leak out disjunctive additive-free homegrown noise comprising electronic bursts, mangled voices, and hammered metallism. This pair were very good together on the Demon Cycle 1-9 release as I recall, a fairly fatal mesmerising diabolic charmer from which grotesque ancient voices would ofttimes creak. Gobi Wow has the same undercurrents of nastery, but is a lot more bitty…the general debris of the sound feels like broken masonry pieces scattered about the studio floor which cannot be fitted together, not least to reconstruct a Greek ruin. Add to that the general inclination of the two players towards refusing musical convention wherever possible, in favour of twisted, slimy and spiky eruptions. These strategies cohere to result in a difficult surface listen, full of uglification and indigestibility. However, what we can admire is the stern determination of the two farming-fishermen to keep going no matter what, even if the weather be inhospitable for planting oats, and the pond yields no more bream to the bitter worms that are suspended on their two rods. We haven’t come across this degree of coarsened aesthetic anti-pleasure since Adam Bohman played with Damian Bisciglia. Rachel Lowther did the modelling clay cover. And it is a good choice of imagery for the music, which has the rough and lumpy quality of a half-worked statement of rawness, ripped from the carcass of a two-headed artist-creating golem type monster. Arrived 25th April 2012.

Something, Anything

Lovely songs by Chris Weisman on his Fresh Sip (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR074) double LP. In fact the entire set is indeed like a “fresh sip” of fruit juice packed with goody vitamins. Chris did just about everything on the album, playing all the instruments and dubbing on tasty harmony vocals, and probably acting as his own producer between takes on what I assume were these home-made recordings originally produced in 2009 in his Battleboro home. There are two “suites”, and on Yen You, many of the songs could be said to start life built on a low-key electro-pop skeleton with a simple programmed beat to keep all elements working to order, but then again each song is also a springboard for rich harmonised vocal melodies, drones, guitar solos, and quite restrained supporting melodies played on nice keyboards. So far everything and everyone is doing flip-fops, lightweight acrobatics of poppy grace. There is a refreshing absence of freakery and psychotic weirdness from each of these sweet productions. Weisman has no interest in de-producing his own songs simply to demonstrate his studio know-how or to explode the mind of the listener, although this isn’t to deny his obvious recording skills. He just likes his art to conceal art. Another strong plus factor is quite simply the limpid beauty of the young man’s singing voice; The Association would have been proud to count him as a member any day. The lyrics seem quite poetic and personal too, with oblique and private messages that have a charm and a depth which you certainly won’t fathom with just one or two spins. Looks like this will be a grower. On I Don’t Care Again there are more songs in like vein, perhaps some of them weighted slightly more in favour of the acoustic guitar and the mysterious poetry and manufactured via a slightly more ramshackle production, but no doubt all four sides are cut from the same paisley cloth. The material was originally released on cassette in 2010 on Autumn Records, something I will never see, so this vinyl rescue is quite welcome. The sleeve design is understated to say the least, and may hint at something about the creator’s impish modesty. At a time when American underground music was in danger of losing its way in an ever-increasing spiral of eccentricity and insanity, it’s refreshing to find there are still some musicians who haven’t completely forsaken the craft of pop melody and concision in songwriting. The press notes make comparisons with Todd Rundgren, which are apt. From 31 May 2012.

Jollity Farm

Songwriting skill which soars and gallops on quite another plane can be found with the Happy Jawbone Family Band from Vermont, one of those wayward and very able combos which the USA seems to be breeding and exporting with considerable skill lately (Colin L. Orchestra, Trawler Bycatch, The Bird Names, King Kong Ding Dong). The songs on this hearty and extroverted freak-party album OK Midnight, You Win (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR063) are played with swagger and confidence, like a slightly tipsy form of country and western mixed with elements of raw psychedelia and played by mutant rockabilly guitarists, all of which would be welcome enough, but the real flavour of the album is to be savoured in the voice of the lead singer. He has a thick and clotted tone with vaguely nasal undercurrents, and he seems to be using a broad tongue which he wraps around each lyrical moment like it was a chunky golden nugget he’s about to chew. You never forget a distinctive singing voice. The effect is made yet more delicious with the additions of high-range female vocal harmonies and backing vocals, which have also signed up to the general agreement agreement to partake of the juice and rollick freely in a fun-loving balmy atmosphere. This may be as close as we’ll get in our time to a reincarnation of the great Kevin Ayers. But these crazed Yankees also have a slightly menacing side when they get warmed up, chanting and declaiming with emphatic mania like some militant hillbillies practising their war chants. Not every one of these melodies may be a memorable one, but when this group find the right couplet of dementia to savour, they’ll hammer it into your forehead with a six-inch nail. Beautifully recorded with a solid and punchy presence. I don’t really know who to credit with what in this loopy collective, although names are supplied on the insert, nor can I tell you what any of the songs mean. You don’t learn them with your brain, so much as feel them in the belly. All this issued under the wraps of cover art which proposes a mutant birth double-horse running every which way, and an insert textured with coarse animal hair.

This Heat

From same label we also have Cold / Burn (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR069), which is another kettle of bones and a return to the juddering noise-drone collective music thing we all love so well. It features Anla Courtis, Okkyung Lee, C. Spencer Yeh and Jon Wesseltoft, with Lasse Marhaug behind the controls – a major meeting of minds which I don’t expect will happen again any time soon. The album is two side-long improvisations made using violin, harmonium, cello and electric guitar, and oodles of instinctive inspiration. It’s one of those miracles of performed music where the finished product is full of paradox – a single wodge of monotonous sound, yet alive with teeming detail; staying firmly on one root note yet also allowing a million and one diversions to wriggle freely across wild scales and tonalities. What I also like is the slightly untidy quality of the playing, where no-one is paying attention to the strictures of performed improvisation, a genre which can have its own set of rigid rules. Nor do they hew to the self-imposed puritanism which can sometimes bedevil those who try to emulate the music of Terry Riley or La Monte Young. My hero on two legs is C. Spencer Yeh, the Bronze God from Brooklyn, who is supplying a good deal of the energy on these sides; when his bowing arm is coiled and unsprung he can piston back and forth continuously for as long as it take a dynasty in China to rise and fall. And any time Courtis steps into a studio or simply enters a room full of listeners, you can expect that room to become charged with his magical-realist visions as he spins his unlikely yarns of metaphysical heroism. Norwegian Wesseltoft, who also adds shruti box and organ to the droning churn, produced a memorable cassette called Singing Cobra Ecstasy for our ears in 2009, and here he just keeps up with a steady shimmering drone long beyond the point of normalcy or sanity would expect. Korean cellist Lee is that fragile genius who won us over with her understated work on the Anicca LP for Dancing Wayang. Besides gender balance in a group, it’s arguably important to get a good balance of acoustic and electric instruments, which may be which this session scores such a direct hit on certain nerval synapses and brainial cord-crakes. You gotta swallow the whole thing like a horse pill the size of a hockey puck to get full effect, and submerge both feet in the rich organic dronery which knows no boundaries, showing how the power of massed imaginative energy in a mutually respecting improv context can knock formal composition hollow, when the parameters are just right. Excellent. From 27th February 2012.

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EXTRA-SEXES-SPIRAL-MIRROR

Loop systems and complex overtones


The partnering of Richard Pinhas with Merzbow continues to be fruitful and productive if the Rhizome (CUNEIFORM RECORDS RUNE 328) two-disk pack is anything go by. On the audio disc five long tracks of music from the pair of them recorded in 2010 at the Washington DC Sonic Circuits Festival, plus video footage of the performance on an accompanying DVD disc. The pair do function well together and successfully achieve a solid integration of respective sounds and performance styles which is exceptionally rare, they unfailingly summon up a sense of great volume and soaring power, plus they apparently have the stamina to keep on doing it for long stretches. I often have the feeling that Pinhas tends to dominate this live set and that his long-form, processed and treated guitar sounds are ubiquitous, much like Robert De Niro appearing in every single frame of Taxi Driver. It’s as though once Pinhas plugs in his axe and the pedals start to kick in, he’s an unstoppable force of nature. By contrast Masami Akita is almost performing the role of an eclectic miniaturist, adding details to the grand design where needed, such as the elegant swirl of a theremin-like cascade, or occasional interruptions of his characteristic aggressive wallops of caustic agony. Either that, or he generates a thickened buzz from his Apple Mac and mixing desk setup that may not simply be background wallpaper, but something integral to the structure of each improvisation. Although perhaps “structure” is not quite the bon mot, as this remains some of the most shapeless and meandering music to have reached us in 2012. Although polished, competent, professional, and served up to our ears through the most effective amplification and digital processes currently available to mankind, I wonder if this is fundamentally no different to an endless Jerry Garcia solo from a Grateful Dead concert. Whatever structure in the music we enjoy is provided mostly by Pinhas when he clicks on his echo device to create interesting loop effects and repeated guitar chimes, thus at least providing some form of pattern (however subtle) within the general formless murk and drone. For the most part, I feel myself suspended by my wrists inside a relentless wind-tunnel of sound, with little chance of escape from the airless blasts. Fripp and Eno they ain’t, I’m afraid. Genuinely wished I could enjoy this one more than I do, as I love and respect much of the work of these two towering creators. From March 2012.

Sound Creation (DEEP LISTENING DL 44-2012) by Johannes Welsch is music made almost entirely from gongs of various sizes. He’s a player who loves to immerse himself, and the listeners, in a continuous ringing sound throughout most of the record, and some incredibly lush cloud-like reverberances are summoned as he strikes his enormous metal discs with what I can only assume must be a constant, sustained, hammering action that is extremely punishing to the wrists and spinal column. He works with a considerable variety of sizes of gong, and both he and his mentor Dr Elaine Keillor of Carleton U speak with some authority about musical effects such as fundamentals, overtones and harmonics. While all the music is improvised, Welsch orders his work in accordance with simple conceptual structures – the first four pieces here are named for the four ancient elements. The ‘Earth’ suite in particular here delivers quite an astonishing sensation across its ten minutes, and if you wandered into range of hearing halfway through the piece it’s possible you’d mistake it for a fascinating continuum produced by electronic means. Not that there’s any careless distortion or noise to be found in the clean and accurate playing of this maestro of the tam-tam. One gets a similar impression of near-volcanic rumblings from the first part of his ‘Symphony’, a piece which growls and grumbles like a ferocious metal dinosaur before feeding time. Singing bowls appear on the last track, ‘Air’, of this otherwise all-gong album, producing their familiar high tones in splendid acoustic fulsomeness. Stockhausen, who famously added amplification and ring modulator to his tam-tams 1, is namechecked as an inspiration for some of this music, although other improvisers who have gonged, such as Eddie Prévost or Mark Wastell, don’t appear to figure prominently in Welsch’s musical schema. As imagery on cover suggests, where photo of gong has been transformed into a glowing meteor, this feels like a very heavy and elemental album. From 10 April 2012.

A splendidly fractured, raucous and impolite bowl of spew is Spiral Mirror (SMERALDINA-RIMA 16), an LP released by Extra Sexes in October 2011 (although we received a promo in April 2012). In fact its creation even pre-dates that release date, as the label have had it lined up for some time. Whence come these feral vocal barks, these twisted shrieks of feedback guitar, and this utterly mangled structure that seems to privilege an intense psychological episode as the raison d’etre for making music? It seems once there was a long-standing noisegrind band called Boy+Girl, a four-piece put together in 2005 by A G Davis of Florida who released some 18 albums before imploding last year (although they may have now reformed again). At some point in this turmoil, the Extra Sexes side project emerged, much like a mutant baby flung from the flanks of a monstrous slimy beast. Extra Sexes managed to make four cassettes and a CDR in 2009 alone. Visual artist and poet Davis is one who has set his teeth to explore the murkier realms of the human psyche, and has developed his own unconventional methods of music production to achieve this. I never heard Boy+Girl, but even so one has the impression their live shows must have been dangerous arenas for performance art, poetry and noise which delved unflinchingly into psycho-sexual dramas. I’m basing most of this assumption on this photograph, but we’re probably in the ballpark. For Extra Sexes, a drum machine was brought in, and a guitar replaced the familiar synths. The plan started out as a sort of cut-and-paste plunderphonic business, but with the malevolent intention of destroying the history of recorded music in a gigantic conflagration; sampling as an act of mangling and mauling, rather than anything to do with enhancing or expanding our musical appreciation. Into this seething cauldron, Extra Sexes would wilfully toss fragments of their own insane and extreme noise exploits. The results as gleaned from this gloriously indigestible vinyl abomination are considerable, and each track is a slice taken from a huge pie full of worms, snakes, and scorpions. Recommended to all fans of strong, dynamic noise such as Wolf Eyes. Extra Sexes have their own very distinctive contribution to make to the genre, and I like the way the music is always dancing on a knife-edge between coherence and sheer gibbering lunacy.

Chunky underground-ish electropop songs & tunes from French band DAT Politics on their Blitz Gazer (SUB ROSA SR342) album, a fun album full of noisy and bouncy synth music, propelled by a drum machine that’s apparently hopped up on eight bowls of chocolate cereal. I think they’re usually a trio nowadays, but it’s possible this release only features two (Collet and Prilliot) of the core members. The band used to be Tone Rec in the late 1990s when they first formed, but have made a number of records in their present shape, including at least four albums for Chicks On Speed Records; they now find themselves reunited with their old home at Sub Rosa. Short, snappy songs, probably to do with futuristic robot love and twisted forms of virtual reality. A lot of this would make pretty good music for a European bunker disco party housed in some concrete structure, and the only time when the music grates on my bark is when the diabolical auto-tune device is applied to the vocals. Not especially avant, despite the “arty” moves of the terrible cover, which is all over the boutique. Also available as an LP pressed in purple vinyl.

  1. See Mikrophonie I, from 1964. ↩
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The Bag Is Ready

Une Saison en Enfer

Season Two (SOLAR IPSE #01) is the latest team-up of those two Italian improvisers Ninni Morgia and Marcello Magliocchi; last heard them doing their guitar and percussion duo thing on the 2011 Sound Gates LP, which we noted this summer. Both are radical inventors or reinventors of musical instruments, Magliocchi in that he creates his own percussive instruments from found objects but also has many extended techniques concealed up his long white sleeves. His approach to playing the bowed cymbal, for example, creates a dynamo hum of evil proportions on ‘Medusa’, its tidal swells sucking you into a fatal whirlpool for 9 minutes. On ‘Avoiding Traps’, his suffused cymbal fog effect is like a cloud of liquid metal alloys floating in the room, capable of nickel-plating both lungs instantly. The Sicilian guitarist Morgia is one of the busiest guitar-players on the planet, equipped with arms and fingers made of recycled Slinky Toys. He does everything he can on his electric guitar apart from strike a recognisable chord or hold down a note in conventional fingering manner. Instead, distortion and mutation are his watchwords, muffling strings at every opportunity or causing them to hoot and howl like animals, and activating his strumming right hand to more or less pounce on the strings like a cougar from a tree, making unexpected dives and leaps and occasionally even shredding the flesh with his long sharp claws. Which reminds me that, pound for pound, this album is much more aggressive than the rather wispy and mysterious Sound Gates, the latter record resembling at times an electro-acoustic foray into the tunnels of the cerebellum, much as we loved it. Season Two isn’t exactly the improv remake of ‘God Save The Queen’, but half of the tracks are quite short and punchy and characterised by a thunderous undercurrent of bass tones and a considerable amount of shrill noisy attack at the front end. The nine-minute ‘Thor’s Tunnel’ in particular should endear this duo to listeners who derive twisted kicks from the more feral and untutored guitar-drum noise assaults of MoHa! or Mouthus. There are sterner and more meditative tracks, but overall a raucous and passionate album on which there’s no denying the musicianly skills of both these artistes, who pay close attention to interactivity, detail and dynamics in every second of these live recordings, yet are still able to blast out with the force of a dozen red devils when the occasion demands it. Arrived 22 March 2012.

Tales from the Crypt

From 05 March 2012, we have Joke Lanz and his Münster Bern (CUBUS RECORDS CB 368). Me, I’m still reeling from the fabulous two double-LP compilations 1 of his Sudden Infant work which brought home to me the importance and influence of this outrageously unique personality, besides being shocking, hilarious and terrifying all at once. This item is less of a confrontational noise assault-performance thing and shows Lanz’s diabolical skills in working the turntables on a single 26-minute track which he recorded live in the cathedral at a music festival in Bern. It’s mostly a mind-sappingly odd and bewildering frieze of aural collage, with a string of disconnected sound events (music snatches, voices, sound effects and generally unrecognisable goop) following the dark logic of a mind which only its owner truly understands. Church bells give way to dripping-tap electronica bloops, then dissonant avant-guitar plucks, then a sobbing voice, a deeply troubling high-key whine, then a calm TV announcer’s voice; by about mid-point the vocal elements are becoming quite grotesque, with speeded-up repeats and loops rendering their every syllable as pure gibberish. It’s like viewing a series of surreal art objects in glass boxes arranged in a long line, creating an impression on your mind which grows more nightmarish and ridiculous the further into the gallery you walk with tentative step. I say this to emphasise the separatedness of Joke’s sounds; some turntablers like to confuse us with multiple overlays which crash together into a sonic pile-up in short order, but here each item is presented to us in almost stark isolation, with the accretion of sounds only gradually coalescing to form a semi-connected statement. The natural echo of the cathedral only increases that sense of isolation, and some of the noises here feel like silly little clowns or cartoon animals performing their zany turns in the most inappropriate possible setting before a cold or indifferent audience. The disruption to clear thinking is completed by the interventions of Joke’s stabbing finger, aggressively halting, reversing and rubbing the rotating discs with his radical take on the “scratching” technique. And what a powerful finger it is too. I mean, just look at that photo on the back cover. It looks like it’s hinged in three places, something you could pull out of a metal toolbox and use as a car jack. Lanz’s sense of jet-black humour seems to have been a key operator for this work, but the lasting effect of Münster Bern is one of total absurdity, a miniature portrait of the futility and folly of existence.

Jesus Couldn’t Drum

Curio of the day is this package called Don’t Drum for Other Girls (SEED RECORDS SEEDCD33) which arrived 23 March 2012 in an elaborate screenprinted foldout cover. This was sent to us by the Department of Music at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, and may represent a stage in a music/art student project. It’s credited to a band called Sleeps In Oysters, but they just did the basic music and numerous other creators have been involved in the realisation of this elaborate multi-media package. Luckily I have the latest version of VLC media player which is capable of displaying entire contents of disc in a menu, regardless of their file formats. There are about five original tunes by Sleeps In Oysters and some remixes-reworkings of same by Diasonic, John Oyster, DJ Arctic Roll, Liquid Chris H. and Christ. The songs aren’t much more than basic girl-pop with electro beat trappings and semi-punky guitar chords, with a nondescript girl vocalist intoning the lyrics with very little real passion or expression. As pop songs go, better melodies have been written. So far it’s something of a cocktail, but from what I can gather from the press notes which freely invoke everything from post-punk pop to modern-day girl bands, stopping off at Cyndi Lauper and 1980s power pop en route, that is exactly the intention. Oddly enough the reworked versions of the songs are more interesting to my ears; ‘He Drummed Part 2′ strips away almost all the song elements and offers us an attenuated mechanical whine blended with an ambient background tune, while something resembling a mad prepared electric violin is sawn apart with fiendish glee. John Oyster is responsible for that, and also the ‘Son Of Drum Mix’ of the title track which buries the basic tracks in a compressed echo chamber while bringing some insane drum machine tracks to the fore. Curious rather than exciting, but even so it just about manages to demonstrate how conventional pop can be recast as vaguely experimental music. Equally odd is the performance artist The Strangest Pet, who adds a twisted spoken narrative to another version of ‘He Drummed’. Then we come to the moving images segment, which is a pop promo video for the title song made by Carlos Saez of Madrid. It hasn’t improved the song for me much (third hearing in and it’s becoming rather grating) but care has gone into building the colourful pop-art props, and the images of the musicians running around the town dressed as outsize Korg synthesisers have an endearing quality. We also see the artistes inside their cramped cardboard boxes looking almost frantic, trapped, beating against the walls of a cell. The package includes generous number of photos of the video shoot, and the other visual elements are folders of image files – collage artworks created by an English artist LustrousChemistry (i.e. Paul Hearn), who also assembled the hand-made package for the release. A good effort in all, but what is it trying to communicate? The package is an odd mix of banality, cliché and experimentation, and any shared ground between the diverse talents involved is hard to discern. I can’t find the missing pazzazz factor that would make this very mixed package truly lift off for me. There may be some intended ironic subtext about pop music, but it’s nothing like as coherent as (say) X-Ray Spex, Bow Wow Wow, ABC or even Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

  1. My Life’s a Gunshot (Retrospective 1989-2009). ↩
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Liquid Fear and Pez Rock n Roll


A hefty bundle of CDRs and CDs arrived 14 February 2012 from digital sadist Miguel A. García in Bilbao. We last had news from him in May 2010, though I still recall his earlier Armiarmak record with fondness as a stern and brooding monsterpiece. There’s Cooloola Monster for starters, his team-up project with Carlos Valverde. Canciones Del Diablo (MASK OF THE SLAVE MS 027) is a bracing blast of distorto-filthed-up songs heavy with plenty of clanking rhythms and disgusting noise effects, plus additional voice hideousness provided by guest Ohiana Vicente. How often do we hear something that celebrates the joys of plague, Vlad Tepes, the ‘Curse of Akerveltz’, a journey ‘Into the Crypts’, Judas and The Antichrist, all in one single album? In these bizarre parodies of vaguely rockist electropop music with added scuzzerment for nutrition, Cooloola Monster provide a very imaginative and dynamic angle on the above shopping list of supernatural-horror themes, veering between deconstructed song-form and grisly Saturnine atmospheres of sonic murk. Good abrasive junk. A nifty start to the evening.

Mubles is Miguel with Alvaro Matilla; Miguel does all the instruments, which on El Accesso Al Ser (YOUNG GIRLS RECORDS YGR45) consists of spartan electronics generated with his familiar oscillators and a no-input mixing desk. Alvaro does the vocals and wrote the lyrics, but in case you were expecting Rush mixed with Blue Oyster Cult, their mis-conception of the song form on this occasion is about as radical as the brick foundations for a black cathedral of death. García grinds out fatal noise bursts, grim chugs, painful feedback squeals, menacing drones, and nondescript rumblings fit to raise Bedlam in your listening parlour, while Alvaro simply stands there and whines interminably through his nasal-throat orifice, complaining bitterly about who knows what. In short it’s like a slowed-down Spanish poetry-rap chanted and spat out by disguntled bees to the backdrop of a formless, shape-shifting electronic ghastliness. Or it’s like the Spanish version of Mark E. Smith growling away alongside the dark brother of Martin Rev. It’s great! Plus three guest players supply organ, electronics and more voice. Their name means “furniture” in Spanish, or it would do if they weren’t missing one letter E. Cutely, the CDR displays picture of furniture when played on a PC. Odd bestial sex in the back garden cover sketch is by Raul Dominguez. Eccentricity score so far = about two thousand points. Can it get even better?

Much the same instrumentation is played by García in his Xedh form. On Anekkyy (TRAIT MEDIA WORKS TMW029) he does it with Jon Imbemon, equipped with his guitar and effects pedal. This is just a single 50-minute track, hopefully done live in one take at a studio where the engineers chose suicide by hanging with a flex rather than endure another minute of this grim musical cacophono-fest. Ferocious, abrasive and poisonous sheets of noise just pour out of this deadly duo’s fingertips like death rays emanate from the gun of a hostile alien. Matter of fact I suspect Xedh could cause instant concussion to the skull just by pointing one finger at his chosen enemy. As noise explosions go, this Anekkyy is a deliberative and controlled assault on the senses, and I love the way it proceeds at a remorselessly measured pace, mowing down acres of goldenrods with the awesome certainty of the Grim Reaper himself. The duo leave plenty of space for each other, allowing heavy and angular blocks of sound to protrude from the mossbed of hissing fuzz as needed, creating fascinating abstract shapes of black monumentality. Another chompworthy cake, and released on the label associated with the great Eric Lunde. Box score to García = 3 out of 6.

Here’s one he made with Richard Kamerman, released on the latter’s NYC label. Homophest 20110921 (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYRL04) I take to be a document of some live event or other. After the previous three scorchers, this 31-minute dose of electronic sandpapering can seem comparatively restrained, but ye must persevere to be rewarded with extremely sullen and bad-tempered murmuring, as unvarying pitches of solid tuneless drones invade your personal space like a scowling man with a heavy, Frankenstinian brow. To make the experience even more insufferable, the duo keep stopping and starting what they’re doing, allowing the noisier aspects to drop out suddenly and leaving you face to face with an inexplicable, mysterious rattling. It’s the aural equivalent of watching your favourite appliances (TV set, fridge, washing machine) start to conk out and die, as you despairingly search for the number of a repairman and then realise nobody does call-out repairs any more. A fine set of contemporary minimo-noise art.

More collaborations on Exiled In Bilbao (DIM RECORDS DIM023 / GOLDSOUNDZ GS#111 / TIBPROD TIBCD127 / SERIESNEGRAS SN008), performed by Larraskito Audio Dissection Unit, an eight-piece of Spaniards who manipulate live electronics, objects, guitars and radio (on one track); García joins ‘em for three of the seven cuts, which are probably edited highlights from lengthy jams. Competent enough work, but this is the only one of the six CDs to misfire for me. Put simply there’s just too much going on with this laptop-based orchestra, and the photos of the men hunched over their mixing desks and banks of pedals doesn’t promise much in the way of healthy interaction between humans. Admittedly, the guitar players do much to liven up the solemn tone with their obnoxious axes belching stinky fire into the room. But mostly, proceedings just drift from one formless overcrowded and “textured” drone into another.

Lastly we have a Miguel A. García three-incher, called Red River / Rio Tinto (GHOST & SON GHOST5). This snakey little gemuloid is blessed with a Nick Hoffman colour drawing of cobras on the cover, and its hot pink printing has been flaking off into the case and littering my floor for the last few months. For me it’s a welcome return to noisy spirited chaos and lava-fuelled mayhem, a Habanero chili rammed in my mouth. Its uproarious mood cancels out the polite stiffness of the preceding arty CD. It’s ironic that García credits himself with “constructing” this errant jumble of insanity, when it’s about as broken as an old china plate in 16 pieces. All the gang of buddies are here for this toxic picnic. Alba Burgos and Ohiana Vicente give us their shrill screaming voices, Raul Dominguez hammers percussion like a baby with biscuit tins, and Carlos Valverde mangles guitars sadistically. Nine tracks, most of ‘em in the two-three minute area lengthwise, and it’s like how three year-old lunatics would imagine punk rock, if allowed to get their hands on flamethrowers and sticks of dynamite for instruments. Urgent, passionate thrash-racket laced with electronic vomit, power noise, and idiotic non-riff guitar riffs. Irresistible!

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012

Don’t even go to the Fat Stars


Another item from the Attenuation Circuit envelope of January 2012 is by the Finnish musician Esa Ruoho. As Lackluster, he’s been working in the area of avant-garde Techno music for a long time, but Riversmouth (ACM 1009) is not modern disco hoppery – it’s twenty minutes of ambiguous and exploratory drone work produced by digital means. We’re invited to savour its minimalist leanings, but Ruoho’s work here seems to me just a shade too cluttered to qualify as pure digital glitch, that near-inhuman genre of electronic music which constantly celebrates its characteristic steely glint and diamond claw. Ruoho prefers soft edges and undefined contours to the geometric Raster-Noton grid. He cannot resist introducing harmonies, textures, washes, and additional tones on top of the basic calm undercurrents he generates, almost adding elements at random until a certain pleasing unpredictability is achieved. The path is far from clear and the original aims are being steadily forgotten. The short piece feels like a journey across the surface of a huge lake that’s been half-filled with blue jelly.

Machinefabriek is the ever-popular Rutger Zuydervelt. If anyone knows about crossing lakes filled with gelatin, he’s your man. He could probably do it while wearing a pair of stilts. On Veldwerk (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR156CD) we get a very nice sampling of some recent-ish field recording work and slow droney music from this Netherlandish sound artist, representing a variety of approaches; some are aural portraits of places and events, others have been self-consciously edited together into a narrative structure to represent a diary of a trip overseas. There’s also audio from an art gallery installation, and a film soundtrack. At all times the aim of Machinefabriek is to steadily contemplate the world from a centre of incredible stillness, neither casting judgement on his surroundings nor excluding anything that might be of potential import. Nothing escapes his all-seeing eye or his all-hearing ears. I would imagine it’s taken him many years to achieve this Zen-like state and if there were marks of distinction for being a “perfect master” in the high arts of field recording and phonography (or even just taking the time to simply listen), Zuydervelt ought to have achieved a black belt or the honorary title of the Akond of Sennheiser. Of particular interest: the “rough editing” techniques used to create a great sense of urgency and naturalism on ‘Slovensko’, where the artist is deliberately emulating techniques he learned from Yan Jun; and the 21-minute ‘Apollo’, a soundtrack work that’s a collaboration with Makino Takashi. The films of this Japanese cineaste reveal a preoccupation with galaxies and outer space, always a popular theme for avant-garde dronery of all stripes. Machinefabriek was torn between his natural inclination for uneventful minimalism and Takashi’s requirements for more layers and action. The results aren’t exactly the same as standing next to a Saturn V lift-off, but this subtle and mystical piece can easily hold its own with the incredible music of Matsuo Ohno. A lot of this was released on small editions of CDRs and singles, probably quite hard to find now, so this could be a useful comp. From 16 January 2012.

Japanese pop singer Tujiko Noriko makes a return to the Mego label with GYU (EDITIONS MEGO 239), and I had to rack my memory banks to recall that she released Make Me Hard for this label ten years ago. She’s been busy enough in the interim with records for Nature Bliss and Room40, including a collaboration on that label with Lawrence English. Here on this album of electro-pop beat songs, she’s assisted by the technical and writing skills of Tatsuya Yamada, masquerading as Tyme. The sleeve drawings by Toshiko Kimura promise wonderful vistas of birds and human escaping the confines of city life to rise reborn into organic bliss, but the music is 100% synthetic; not a sound slips by but has been processed into little shards of slippery pink candy. I’m not saying the production has been overcooked, but a lot of the soul has been drained from Noriko’s singing, and even the meticulously constructed stacks of Beach Boys harmonies don’t liven things up a whole lot. The preponderance of synths, drum machines and sequencers used for the backing music gives the whole album a sealed-off, unreal sensation. Six years to cpomplete it took, but this is because of the creative processes involved in the collaborative writing, rather than the making of the album; disposable pop this ain’t, even at its most elevator-friendly moments. It has a kind of artificial sheen of exquisiteness, even when the unwavering 4/4 time signatures and monotonous melodies become wearying. The titles are poetic though, if the translation provided is anything to go by: it’s a world of Tropic Penguins, Golden Hearts, Vacation of God, Slow Motion and an Unforgettable Lightworld.

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Three Vinyl Volumens

The Mind Robber

Hobo Sonn might be Ian Murphy. We last heard from him in 2008 with The Thundering Nature of Reality, a terrific limited press LP of mysterious humming which I wrongly took to be made up of guitar and amplifier hum, but Mr Murphy wrote in to correct me on this. “My music is made up of improvised recordings that are then carefully edited together,” he reported in December 2009 by email. “This process takes a lot of time and it is where some degree of composition is involved. Timing/duration is a big factor in my work. Therefore I take a lot of time listening to the music to find exactly where I want the piece to change/progress or end.” I’m glad to have this information as it helps me get my bearings with Wary The Mind (AMEN ABSEN 003), his most recent release which we have had in our paws since September 2011. It’s probably another example of his editing craft, and is meticulously structured and sequenced to achieve quite powerful and mind-warping events, even when the original source material is largely quiet, subdued, and unidentifiable. The first side, for example, contains lengthy stretches of intimate whirrings which to me suggest tiny cogs in tiny machines, malfunctioning or grinding together through a lack of regular oiling. These sonic particles are treated with a sparing degree of studio echo, or digital delay. This side closes with brief passages of piano music which are simply gorgeous in their dreamlike wispiness – they may simply be samples from a classical music record, repeated or looped as needed, their regular sequence disrupted in some way – but what emerges are precious moments from the most beautiful “exotica” album Martin Denny never made. These piano fugues overspill onto the opening of Side B, later to be replaced by continuous analogue drones which morph into Eastern music, or a reasonable facsimile of same. Along the way in this baffling journey, there are fragments of field recordings – a car passing from one speaker to the other, for example – again, very sparingly used. The LP ends with a faint tinkling resembling oriental temple bells and what I imagine to be mumbling in a foreign language, and thereby almost wanders into areas previously annexed by Climax Golden Twins on their gloriously oblique and unexplained sound collages. Hobo Sonn likewise refuses to explain anything here, all sound sources and methods are kept hidden, and the “what-is-it” factor remains highly prevalent. This is a welcome relief from the numerous releases we are sent where the creators feel compelled to tell you in endless detail what they ate for breakfast before they made the LP. In like manner, the cover art is an ingenious collage which drip-feeds us tiny fragments of visual information inside a geometric grid structure. This artwork could almost have been the graphic score for the music within. Recommended. Comes with a free 3″ CDR insert also.

Herz Aus Glass

Melt Famas is the duo of Fred Bigot and Nikolas Mallet, and their lovely 10-incher Serial Weather (MUZI-02) is an early release on the new Swiss-German label Musikzimmer – prior to this the organisers been more involved in exhibition spaces and soundart interventions of some sort. This black beauty comprises three loud and joyous tracks of guitar and drum music, but the electric guitar of Bigot has been amplified and distorted to the point where it starts to melt into electronica – he’s achieving wild and woolly effects which most half-baked laptoppers would only manage to arrive at through 18 presets and a sportsbag filled with FX pedals. That said, there’s probably some form of synth or keyboard on this record too, but I love the way everything locks together into this rich and sumptuous sun-drenched racket, allowing for distortion but never settling down into an amorphous blob of similar-sounding frequencies. In short, great dynamics! There’s a cover version of ‘Heart Of Glass’ where the singer appears both alarmed and bored by the love affair which is breaking up around his ears, but by the end of the song the situation has become little short of cataclysmic, with walls falling down around us in chaotic fashion. ‘Plastic Swing’ is a five-minute gem of semi-industrial instrumental march music with a plangent melody which D.A.F. would have been proud of, while the flipside is fully occupied with 11 minutes of ‘Ice Age Fire Cage’, its melodic and trebly guitars to the fore in another highly rich and addictive mix, concocting excessive acid-trip music that is a fine homage to all things psychedelic. Bigot impressed us heavily with the Holy Mountain compilation of his avant-techno 12-inchers, a CD which appeared in 2009 – but the music was already ten years old by that point. Now with this guitar-heavy record, I’m beginning to see the rockabilly connection with Bigot more clearly. With tremendous instrumental prowess on display and no restraint on the volume control, this record is an unalloyed delight.

Sei Still, Wisse ICH BIN

I’ve played two of the four sides of Twenty-One Pieces (EARLY MORNING RECORDS EMR 018), a double LP by Taming Power which came out in 2009 but was sent to us in August 2011 by its creator Askild Haugland. So far I’ve heard many beautiful instrumentals made with electric guitars, Casio keyboards and other instruments, interspersed with abstract sound-art experiments produced with such devices as singing bowls, handsaws, field recordings, the human voice, and tape recorders. The guitar pieces are melodic and sweet, stirring unnameable feelings of nostalgia for this listener. The abstract works are very varied, sometimes creating impressions of the elements, the wind or the weather, or simply exploring an intriguing effect of “acoustic noise”. Tape recorders and cassette recorders play a big part in the work. It’s strange, minimal, affecting. Haugland seems to have some quite unique working methods – he refers to “pieces recorded in stop-motion” in his enclosed letter – and not one of these instrumentals ever falls into the usual stumbling blocks or clichés of drone–ambient music. His guitar work in particular reminds me strongly of the American outsider, Wilburn Burchett; there’s the same studied deliberation in the playing, the inner core of beauty to the music, disrupted by unexpectedly loud or wrong-sounding notes, which are seamlessly incorporated in the whole work. It’s all about the playing, the exploration, the process; and while the finished pieces may appear mysterious and odd sometimes, Haugland is doing nothing to obfuscate or mystify his methods, which are clear and open, declared with honesty. This Norwegian player, himself something of an outsider I expect, has been patiently carving away at his craft since 1987, and when he began his use of the tape recorder as an instrument in 1996 and 1997, he found himself in a purple patch of creative output. Early Morning Records is his own record label for his music, and to date he’s released 18 LPs and 40 cassettes. Collectors who take an interest in the work of single-minded mavericks releasing their own home-made LPs (step forward Jandek) should investigate, but I can recommend this beautiful, singular and seriously-crafted music to just about anyone. Haugland has a spiritual depth and simplicity in his music that reminds me of Florian Fricke, and believe me that’s not a compliment I would pay lightly.

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Automatic / Detours

Beuys Keep Swinging

A very fine avant electro-pop oddity from Poland’s Audio Tong label. Go-Go Beuys Band (AUDIO TONG ATCD17.2011) rescues 1985 studio recordings put together by the composers Krzysztof Knittel and Marek Choloniewski, working with their guitars, synths and beatboxes at the Electroacoustic Music Studio in Krakow. That’s odd enough already for me – 1980s pop music being produced at an experimental studio by modernist composers. They were joined by the saxophonist Marek Nedzinski and the singer Olga Szwajgier, plus Janusz Dziubak (a 1980s free improviser who made the LP Tytul Plyty in 1984) contributing the texts for a couple of tracks. By this collaborative effort, they arrived at their own twisted brand of synth-pop music with weird vocals, solid drum machine rhythms and stark melodies picked out on Roland and Yamaha synths, coming close to the same sort of sweetly-rendered dementia as Ptôse, The Residents, or Cabaret Voltaire (although other writers also make comparisons with Throbbing Gristle, Faust and Kraftwerk).

This CD consists of two separate suites, Automatic Pilot and Go-Go Beuys Band, both of them excellent and bizarrely entertaining warped pop music, although Automatic Pilot scores slightly higher for me with its adherence to brevity, its crisp three-minute pop tunes and winning off-kilter melodies. Then again the second set has more prog-like variety in its instrumentals, there are more and lengthier saxophone solos, and the vocals are slightly more declamatory and sonorous, as if reciting an Eastern European morality tale or political diatribe rather than spewing the usual pop-song fare. The singing voices throughout are one of the oddest elements; where the keyboards are relatively familiar, the unusual vocal intonations of Knittel, Choloniewski and their friends take us directly into Eastern European art-rock territory. Don’t be misled by the apparently conventional song titles like ‘China Wedding’, ‘Heavy-Love’ or ‘Rock-Body’; this is 1980s pop music rethought as a surreal pastiche of elements, including both high-art modernism and moments of supreme kitsch. How many other bands would have the sheer audacity to conflate the work of severe conceptualist Joseph Beuys with disposable pop music in their name?

The operation seems to have a semi-temporary studio affair for the most part, although we are informed the two main protagonists did perform some concerts in Poland, Austria and Germany in 1986; and they may or may not have been responsible for other lost, unknown, untraceable and non-existent band projects called Island Of Love and Non-Existed Monastery Group in 1987. On this matter, the elliptical sleeve notes remain obscure, and maybe even the enclosed photographs are part of a conspiracy of misinformation. Nonetheless, the music here is excellent – melodic, oddball, parodic, slightly dark, and beautifully realised. Just imagine what would have happened if this team had been chosen to produce a single for Tears For Fears, Wham or Madonna. The results might not have been world-wide smash hit records, but they would have been distinctive and intellectually satisfying, pop history would have taken a different turn, and we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today. Available in an outsize card cover about the size of a seven-inch single, or can be downloaded in a digital manner for 7 Euros.

Divertimentos

Speaking of avant-garde composers producing pop music, when I heard the 2007 CD issue of Out Of The Blue by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, I waxed lyrical about what might have happened if this lovely US composer had gotten the chance to produce Joni Mitchell or Steely Dan in the 1970s. When you hear the immaculate songs on that CD, you’ll understand what I was blathering about. Now here comes Detours (UNSEEN WORLDS UW07) from the same label, released January this year. No songs this time, it’s all solo piano music by this Mills College maestro, and apparently the first time he’s released an album of new piano works since 2003. However, it is likewise immaculate music which you should all welcome into your homes. There’s the 12-minute suite ’13 Detours’, short compositions that feel like an update on Mussorgsky’s ‘Promenade’ as Tyranny ups the ante and leads us into philosophical diversions of thought, using a form of mental gymnastics learned from the San Francisco composer and film-maker Phil Perkins. It’s music for taking a walk outside your own mind. This turns out to be an underpinning theme for the album, proposing strategies for forms of mental liberation. Even the front cover depicts a “helping hand”.

On the long piece ‘George Fox Searches’, Tyranny uses the sleeve notes to tell the remarkable history of the 17th-century Quaker George Fox, who fled religious intolerance in England to settle in America where his enlightened visions about tolerance, peace and compassion found a more receptive audience. A self-declared agnostic, Tyranny has nonetheless attended Quaker meetings in his time and drawn inspiration from the silence of their prayer meetings, and the spontaneous utterances which might occasionally reveal deep truths; these experiences he effectively recreates in real time on this gorgeous 20-minute piano work, and with characteristic understated genius he also manages to layer in subtle references to the life of Fox, creating music that matches well with Fox’s psychological condition as he undertook his spiritual journey with uncertain steps. Warmth, sympathy, honesty; all good things I associate with this musician.

‘She Wore Red Shoes’ was composed in 2004 as a dance piece for Stefa Zawerucha. In that symbolic work, she enacts a dilemma about life choices no less crucial than those faced by George Fox; the dilemma is represented by a large mandala drawn on the dance floor, sliced into portions that represent past and present influences on her existence. Tyranny’s sprightly music here, a sort of syncopated foxtrot, suggests the protagonist faces her dilemma with calm unwavering dignity, and at the end she “abandons her former life” without regret.

The five-minute ‘Intuition’ piece, though the shortest on the album, is much harder to sum up. In six minutes the uncertain and ambiguous piano and tape music seems to drift freely across an abstract realm of thought where almost anything is possible. This seems appropriate for a work where the composer is trying to digest and sum up various conflicting “cosmological views” of existence, in the end shrugging his shoulders and admitting “I haven’t got a clue”. But he goes on to state he intends to “re-imagine the nature and role of music”, an ambitious undertaking which is performed in a quiet and modest fashion, and like the ’13 Detours’ piece it passes on something useful about the process of thinking intuitively. A very satisfying and approachable record of modern music, rich with ideas and humanity and refreshingly free from any form of arrogance, pretentiousness or impenetrable mysticism. Also available as a limited edition LP.

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The fur really flies


A Ukrainian release for the Portuguese duo of Sturqen, who beef up their dark electronic tones with brutally simple techno beats. Praga (KVITNU 21) may be heavy on the filters sometimes, but I like it when Rodrigues and Arantes keep their work stripped-down and shorn of any processing ornament, and try their hardest to inject passion or excitement purely by the method of dynamics and drop-outs in the mixage. Some of the short tracks, like ‘Xacal’, bypass the beat grid-system altogether and just plump for puzzling episodes of arbitrary sounds stitched together. Their music makes with a muscular and surly vibe, clearly not out to win many friends or engage directly in the expected social milieux of techno music. Nice embossed package in shades of black.

Another creator who might be considered to edge towards the “antisocial” in his music is the American Daniel Menche, who at times is the equal of Z’EV in his single-minded pursuit of remorseless process-based noise. Guts (EDITIONS MEGO EMEGO 138) was created entirely from the insides of pianos, and perhaps we should have included it with our other recent item of “dead piano porn”, not that we’re trying to start an unwholesome trend in that area. Menche goes one step further and informs us that the piano guts were “abused and thrashed”, adding an element of torture to this particular fetish, and as such it fits right in with his numerous records of martial avant-percussion music, which I can’t help but hear as bloodthirsty and pagan hymns to our animalistic urges. Where ‘Guts 2 x 4′ is an intense and almost painful listen of impossible sound, perhaps concocted from multiple layers and reprocessings, ‘Guts One’ is a dismal survey of a ruined landscape of acoustical death, where Menche the overlord is presiding over the spoils of war and the implied death of music itself as he shakes vibrating tones and mournful hums from these smashed string and wood frames. That particular track soon takes a more violent turn, planting sure feet into the sort of territory Merzbow would respect, except that Menche is doing it with mostly organic materials rather than blocks of steel. The other tracks, each around 19 minutes in length, likewise alternate between violent strikings and fiercely resonating harmonics, and the music hews between a cruel form of beauty and an abiding air of pessimistic grimness. The pianos, mutilated as they are, still seem to breath, wailing and complaining at their harsh treatment. Overall, the album arrives at the sort of startling effects that electronic musicians would give their left oscillators for, yet it gets there by electro-acoustical means. This is testament to Menche’s musical imagination, but also the fact that he’s every bit as “non-giving-up” as The Terminator T-2 robot. Exists as a double LP for those who need a vinyl edition of this assault.

A split between Sujo and Korperschwache (INAM RECORDS 087) makes perfect sense…both are strong exemplars of sonic excess in the avant-rock arena, with the latter K-Men borrowing an ounce or two of Black Metal to add to their specific compound. Sujo pours out three lambasters of loud guitar music with solemn beats, using the multiple layers and distortion that are almost the “house style” of this label. His ‘Siem Burns’ has a heroic Death Valley-styled beauty that outdoes Nadja without even trying, but ‘Paraffin’ may just win the prize with its implied streak of venom and destructiveness. Austin duo Korperschwache are conspicuously out of character with ‘The Golden Hammer’, a gorgeous meld of puzzling ambient tapes and acoustic guitar gentleness that more resembles Wooden Wand than it does Burzum, but they’re back on blackened form with ‘Divine Teeth’, a nasty snarl of metal excess where the guitar just bleats in despair in time with the dismal, stark drumming on this downer epic-song. ‘The Healing Power of Xanax’ is a treat for effects lovers; the dominant sound is just pure filtered power chords with tons of fuzz, reverb and sustain. Yet the track feels like the band are treading water for 8 minutes. I prefer this to their recent half-hearted effort on Crucial Blast (Evil Walks), but it still feels like a collection of cast-offs.

Inner Self Globophobic Clown Tester (Part One) (WILDRFID WLDRF005) is a jolly compilation LP showcasing various acts and projects on the obscure Swiss label Wildrfid. On it, we find some bafflingly odd pieces of music and collaged sound-art from Exteenager, Anita, Donald Suck, Cancelled, Uiutna, Bulb, and GB, some of whom may simply be aliases of each other (or they may all turn out to be the same person). But I’m not complaining when I hear such fun-loving examples of absurd synth pop and colourful instrumental keyboard ditties, clearly put together by people enjoying themselves and also doing so within the confines of the two-three minute pop song form. At first spin, I guess Uiutna and Anita offer the most straightforwardly “musical” outings (in a decidedly Residents-styled offbeat manner, that is), Cancelled is the most “serious” musician in the set, and Donald Suck is the joker in the pack with his deliberately silly vari-speeded concoctions that wallow in infantile glee and gurgly voices. But the whole comp is entertaining; not sure how this was overlooked for the radio show when it arrived 2-3 months ago, but we’ll be rectifying that in due course. 11 wind-up mechanical confection toys for your ears; the LP edition has a silkscreen cover.

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Cannibale / Agitato


Tutto Va Bene (NIENTE RECORDS VOLUME 9) is the third item we’ve received from the Italian avant-electronic duo st.ride, and it’s another strong set of tunes constructed using drum machine, voice, and the “mopho” which is probably their personal shorthand for the synths and other electronic devices which inhabit their homes in the same way that an unwanted debt-collector hovers around the doorstep of his defaulting creditor. I’m not here to make direct comparisons with previous releases, but this new one feels more stripped-down and uncluttered, probably due to the decision to leave the guitars at home on this particular trip to the Genova studio; without that amplified burr, and thanks to sequencers, monophonic keyboards and primitive settings, the music hits home like a surgical-precision bash in the nose-bone. Maurizio Gusmerini spits, barks and snarls his simplistic lyrics like slogans and chants, a nifty update on the way most UK punk rockers used to sing in 1977; along with Edo Grandi’s drum machine, it’s these rhythmic vocal eructations that are providing most of the structure for each song. This approach creates a bare-bones framework, leaving the synth elements free to squelch out their unnatural fizzes and burbles in extremely simple ways, filling in the spaces and gaps with one-note one-sound monotonal gulps. On occasion, the synths are allowed to go completely crazy, as on ‘Turbamento’ where they unleash eleven types of merry free noise heck from their split-circuit-tongues, making this particular ditty a perfect expression of pent-up anger and frustration in 4 and a half minutes, where the vocalist is simmering with rage and words are inadequate to capture the extent of his emotion. You can hear the stern frown of disapproval written on his face. On ‘Mi Piaci’ he may sound a bit more resigned to the cruel fates of the world, but it’s because he’s been turned into a robot, acquiescing to the incessant demands of the consumer-driven society with a helpless vocodered sigh. In fine, this album is a winning combination of semi-musical contrived chaos, direct and elemental electronic sounds, enervating coffee-fuelled beats, a seriously disaffected singer handing you unpalatable facts (in Italian), and no bullshit anywhere in sight. You may come for the Kraftwerk / Depeche Mode comparisons, but you’ll stay for the distinctive st.ride modernistic take on alienated urban electropop. From the overall pessimistic tone, we have to assume that the title which translates as ‘All’s Well’, is deeply ironic; and the fact it’s restated on the cover in multiple languages only emphasises how bad the situation is world-wide. Embrace this pessimism freely, that’s my advice; in a world full of corrupt media and slimy politicians, at this crucial time we need to get our information from clear-thinking truthsayers, as found on this record.

Profoundly radical and inventive approach to playing contemporary classical violin music from Aisha Orazbayeva on her superb Outside (NONCLASSICAL RECORDINGS NONCLSS013) CD. Technically proficient to a near superhuman degree, she can clearly play complex and challenging modern music with a breathtaking ease, but that’s just for starters – it’s a given. It’s the intense attack of her sound that will demand your attention – she plays like a freakin’ demon on the six Caprices of Salvatore Sciarrino, the startling “calling card” that opens this record and occupies you for seventeen minutes (I personally was riveted to the spot with my jaw hanging open). Her whole body is alive, contorted and possessed as she unleashes these uncanny sounds from her instrument’s guts, not skimping on the astringent scrapey effects and high-register complexities that create shrieking harmonics enough to scrape the fillings from out of your back molars. So far, so electrifying. But all that isn’t enough for her, since she adds a further sonic element by recording these pieces in numerous external locations 1 – bus stop, car park, railway arch, warehouse – eschewing the comfort and predictability of the recording studio acoustics in favour of “wild” echoes and timbral shadings, with results that are later sewn together at the editing suite for maximal ear-slam. You can imagine the devastating effects of these combined strategies, but you don’t have to imagine anything, since Orazbayeva has made this all happen herself. I personally have often grumbled to myself about the generally rather conservative approach to the recording of mainstream classical music; I won’t say that Orazbayeva agrees with me 100%, but she has certainly forged her own personal solution to the situation. Sciarrino, himself something of a musical outsider who considers that he owes no allegiance to any particular school of modernism, seems a most apt composer for her to interpret. The remainder of the CD is also full of interest and surprise; there’s the Ravel Sonata recorded at the Royal Academy recital hall with a piano accompaniment, putting us on slightly more familiar sonic turf (and it’s a beautiful rendering). At the end of the disc are two very odd items – a two-minute Russian lullaby ‘Pchela I Babchka’ by Salvador / Tsepin, and a piece she composed with Helmut Lachenmann called ‘Toccatina / Russian song’, which ought to satisfy your cravings for hearing a truly “deconstructed” approach to plucking muted violin strings in the production of quiet and mysterious music. Before that, we have fourteen gorgeous minutes of ’5 Bagatelles from OUR violin and computer concerto’, which she wrote in 2010 with Peter Zinovieff. Astonishing far-out musical tones are created and generated with great assurance in a seamless mixture of acoustic playing and cyber-music. Quite different in tone to the “demonic possession” style of the Caprices, here Orazbayeva displays her skill for steady, continuous sound and glorious atonalities, combining it with Zinovieff’s dark cybernetic utterances and producing a music so strange that you can taste it like slowly-unfurling fungi in your brain. This suite has both intense intimate beauty but also unfamiliar and alarming darknesses, as on the closing segments ‘Peg’ and ‘Stre’, whose inventive noisy textures you could use to resurface half of the UK’s motorways. The package may look restrained and decorous, but don’t be fooled – it’s an album of pure classical dynamite from this astonishing Kazakh genius. Recommended, but be sure to approach with lead-lined tongs and protective goggles!

  1. A similar strategy was used by the violin-cello improvising duo of Kuwayama-Kijima, who since the early 2000s often performed and recorded their music in abandoned urban spaces. ↩
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