Tagged: field recordings

May 7, 2013

Cypher: black metal fusion soundtrack tracking our path to Hell

Spektr, Cypher, Agonia Records, ARCD102 (2013)

It’s been several years since I heard anything by this duo and one reason is that Haemoth & Co haven’t been very prolific: “Cypher” is their first release since “Mescalyne” in 2007. The major advance in Spektr’s music since then is the musicians’ incorporation of elements from several other music genres such as industrial, melodic post-metal, jazz and the usual musique concrete and spoken voice samples with the result that this album resembles a soundtrack to an otherwise silent horror sci-fi film. There is also much manipulation of atmosphere and emotion here.

What horrific futurist film might Spektr be offering on “Cypher”? It agrees more or less with previous work of theirs in which an intrepid adventurer, investigating the deepest recesses of the human mind, crosses into a realm beyond life where not even the dead normally go but some of heightened mental and emotional sensitivities, and some training in gnostic knowledge and ritual, might dare to enter. The volume of the music goes up and down as if the whole thing were animated by an inwardly-generated self-aware consciousness. The critical Rubicon appears to take place somewhere in track 3 (“The Singularity”).

Pivotal tracks are “Teratology”, “The Singularity”, “Antimatter”, the surprisingly blues-sounding (at least in its first few minutes) “Cypher” and “Le Vitriol du Philosophe”, this last being the most brutally industrial, ambient and futuristic, and the least black metal. Indeed, black metal figures much, much less than might be expected: the guitars are still sharp but have a more melodic bent. The long tracks rampage across the musical spectrum and dive into quite unexpected turns and twists; the short tracks are usually quiet ambient interludes between long tracks.

Only about 45 minutes, the album feels like a mammoth effort on the duo’s part to create a hellish odyssey into demonic kingdoms, out of which our explorer ends up crawling out of a wormhole into a future society run by self-aware machines powered by simulacra of human brains. There is not a flesh-n-blood critter in sight. One shudders to think that the one thing more terrifying than what Satan and his acolytes can magick up is the mind, individual and collective, that can imagine Satan and the demonic hierarchy in the first place. As I sit and type this review, am I already looking into the shape of Hell?

Contact: Agonia Records

April 18, 2013

Time is but a Doorway to the Incinerator: music that addresses the pain and meaninglessness of existence

Torture Chain, Time is but a Doorway to the Incinerator, Eternal Summer, cassette (2012)

This US act has only released a few demos with long titles if not long playing times. The music is a raw punk-influenced straightforward black metal with no keyboards and no attempt at creating a particular mood or atmosphere. The introduction could be a creepy found sound recording of cheesy melodic synthesiser tone wash and a woodwind combination of clarinet and oboe tunes. It doesn’t last long: it’s swept straight into oblivion by a roar of hateful black metal guitar scrabble and frenzied drumming with overworked cymbals. Floppy drums pound out frantic beats and the crackly rasp of the vocal is frightful in its severe texture and malevolence.

Although the demo is dense and fast, individual bits are often distinctive: high-pitched lead guitar solos sometimes fly through the storm like electrical charges and riffs and rhythms change throughout. Rhythms can sometimes be jaunty and rhythm guitar riffs may have a very strong folk-martial feel in a style similar to the old French Black Legions band Vlad Tepes. About halfway through, the song recedes into a quiet acoustic guitar passage and is thoughtful and meditative before it gives way to a steady and relaxed section dominated by a repeating melodic guitar riff loop. The song speeds up into a fast and busy runaway train of repeating guitar riffs, steady drumming and haranguing BM vocals thick with aggression, hostility and pain. Rhythms and riff changes will continue for some time, then change either abruptly or subtly in ways that listeners won’t catch until too late and the riffs transform yet again into something else. Towards the end there’s an interrogation between black metal guitar and acoustic guitar and after the strings finish their Q&A session, the track relaxes into a fairly laidback rhythm. The music builds to a very layered conclusion of heavy rhythms and beats, noisy and buzzy guitars all careening towards a singularity, and more pained and quite demented vocals.

This is absorbing music with so many changes in structure and pace, and with lead guitar soloing that can sound quite conventional yet understandable in its context: when the rest of the music is so chaotic, noisy and has a harsh, gravel-like texture, the lead guitar needs a different sound and playing approach to differentiate itself and to introduce a new theme or a counter-balance to the music. As a result, sometimes the lead guitar sounds a lot more pure-toned, joyful and bubbly, and melodic than it should be. The aggression and toughness are obvious in the music; there may be quiet, soulful moments of delicate acoustic guitar tunes but these are few and far between. The title may be long and awkward but it expresses in language intended to shock that life is not pleasant and is full of pain and existential hollowness.

Released in cassette format, the cassette cover features arresting line artwork of what looks like black ink drawn finely on white background and then reproduced on a copier.

Contact: Eternal Summer

April 14, 2013

Entertainment and Partial Entropy

On Numbers (CREATIVE SOURCES RECORDINGS CS 201 CD) we have the team-up of the guitarist Han-Earl Park with Richard Barrett playing live electronics. After some 20 minutes of slotting this one into the old playback vestibule, I bethought me “Yikes…amplified Derek Bailey meets Thomas Lehn!” Park is one of those scary polymath guys who seems to have a tremendous facility for music, both improvising and composing it, and he has played in many groups and at many festivals, appearing around the globe in seemingly ubiquitous fashion. Scariest of all is his intense and speedy guitar technique, which on parts of this album presents a rush of tangled information that would require a bank of dedicated computers to solve it. Thankfully Mr Han-Earl is never too “glib” in his phrasing and throws in multiple fishhooks and other barbs to snag our ears, otherwise we might be tempted to switch off in the face of his effortless glides and spiky dense riffs. It’s also good to find him in this duo set-up where the detail of his playing can be more clearly heard than in Mathilde 253. The Englishman Barrett is also a composer, like Park sometimes situated in an academic and teaching context, and is no stranger to using electronics in the live situation having formed the FURT duo with Paul Obermayer as long ago as 1986. Some day I really must get around to hearing FURT, or some of Barrett’s compositions, because I have the sense I would find a denseness and complexity that I could really sink my teeth into. Barrett’s method in wielding his “boxes” here is certainly pretty enervated. Regardless of whatever intricate and dazzling shapes are thrown at him like crystal spears by his sparring partner, he responds in kind with impossibly twisted gurgles, shrieks and salivated electronic utterances. Throughout album, a lively and sizzling session of fierce interplay is staged between these two boxing kangaroos, with sqwawks and yelps a-plenty as another blow is landed on the respective muzzle or snout. The striking thing is that neither player appears to be breaking into a sweat at any time, and I have the abiding mental image of two unfazed chess players sitting in a deep-freeze unit, weaving complex theorems while remaining almost immobile in large leather armchairs. The music has that degree of rigid control, of brittle precision, even when the structure appears at its maddest and the musical data is flying wildly beyond the point of interpretation. The value of this music as a form of invented language is emphasised by the odd titles, ‘tolur’, ‘tricav’, ‘ankpla’, ‘uettet’…as if counting upwards in Venusian. From 19 June 2012.

We got a small bundle of items from the Lisca Records label in Lucca on 25 June 2012, which I intend to digest one at a time. First from the envelope is Uncodified with the Document (LISCA 011) album, which is mostly the work of Corrado Altieri, although the venerable Simon Balestrazzi popped into the studio to add electronic parts to a couple of tracks, and also did the mastering using his magickal digital toasting device. Unlike Balestrazzi who seeks to beguile with occult drones, Corrado Altieri is a no-nonsense bare knuckle fighter, and can be quite adept at piling it on with remorseless intensity when creating nasty slabs of throbbing noise-poundage. ‘Severance’ is one particularly compelling assault of post-industrial grindery which is akin to trip through the ancient tunnels of Lucca at high speed during a dark night, while also being pummelled about the face with a leather sap. ‘Aesthetic Imperfection’ is slightly less brutal, but still exhibits the same qualities of airless, layered, noise; the ultra-dense sound occupies every available space in the spectrum and never dares to relax its tinnitus-inducing whirrs and buzzes. And for those who still enjoy inculcating a sense of dread and unease in their lives through music, the opening cut ‘Discobar Panic Disorder’ is your go-to point for the requisite ingestion of paranoia. Just ten seconds in and an instant migraine headache will be thine. I think it achieves this through its upsetting mixed organ chords, but there is also an overhanging cloud of gloomery on this cut produced by more insidious and inscrutable methods. Maybe all it takes is to go into the studio when you’re in a bad mood, and your ill temper will simply pass directly into the recording process. Of the other cuts, five of them are extremely short, making cryptical and punchy statements in a matter of seconds; perhaps they were rescued from offcuts or outtakes of longer sessions. One of them may be simply an amplifier warming up, another a mere doodle from a synth machine. I wish other noise-makers could be as concise and selective in their releases. Document is perhaps not a staggeringly innovative release in this genre, but there is much strong content to enjoy in this stern frowner of sullen, rhythmic, pulsations.

Excellent recordings of animal wildlife and the forest environs on Sempervirent (GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 111), made by the field recordist Rodolphe Alexis. He did it in various nature reserves and protected areas of the Costa Rica forests in Central America. His setup was such that he simply wanted to document whatever passed before his mics, but it so happens a large amount of wildlife was captured onto disk as well, and so a list of species has been provided in the package, along with rich colour photographs of same in the booklet. Monkeys, parrots, frogs and bats abound; all of this information was probably added after the recordings were made, but it adds a satisfying sense of completion to the work. Alexis remains justifiably proud of his decision to leave the recordings raw and unprocessed, and what we hear is as close to nature as technology can bring us. If I had to locate this within the broad spectrum of field recordings, I’d venture to place it at the “scientific investigation” end rather than in the zone of “art music”, but it remains a vivid and fascinating listen. From 18 June 2012.

Slow minimalist composition from Monty Adkins on Four Shibusa (AUDIOBULB RECORDS AB040), which was released in April 2012. Each lengthy title uses the plaintive long tones of the twin clarinets played by Heather Roche and Jonathan Sage, and combines this sound with wispy electronic drone music, holding everything for a long time. Along with duration, delicacy and subtlety are the main watchwords, but Adkins is carefully creating some very poignant contrasts in his music – it’s just that they happen very slowly and tend to creep up on the listener. The term “shibusa” is Japanese and is concerned with finding beauty in everyday objects, recognising perfection in simplicity. As part of his aesthetic development along this contemplative road, Adkins worked for one year with the visual artist Pip Dickens, whose paintings of small and beautiful objects can be seen on the panels of this digipak. I like parts of this record and perhaps my preference is for the unadorned clarinets, which have a stark loneliness I find appealing. The electronic half of the act is a shade too “tasteful” for me, but I admit the combination of sounds works well.

March 17, 2013

A Floating State

A great shame that the German sound artist Rolf Julius died in January 2011, a fact which I have overlooked while waxing very lyrical about the series of his works being issued by the Western Vinyl label in Texas. We noted Music For The Ears and Music For A Distance, both of which compiled examples of this sound-artist’s installation and field recording works from what I assume must be a hefty catalogue. On Raining (WESTERN VINYL / SMALL MUSIC No. 3) , there is the title piece which is nearly one hour long, itself part of a larger installation work from 2007 called Dot. This rain piece is extremely dense and immersive, a real force of dampened nature which you can easily get lost inside…seems highly appropriate for the current weather in the UK, not that I have anything against the rain in March which cold and penetrating as it might be, somehow feels quite different and invigorating to the miserable rain of November. Julius’ Raining is also invigorating. And meditative. In amongst the continual downfall of heavy precipitation in a meadow or lea, there is the steady creaking and cracking of what I take to be branches of old oaks, soughing and sighing until they resemble the timbers of an old sea-hulk. Also the occasional murmurs of a cow-like beast making its moan through a grey veil of misty fog. Most bizarre of all, tiny notes of music like a celeste or very small piccolo somewhere in overall natural mixture…how can this be…are these notes just artefacts, by-products of the sonic assemblage, or produced by wind chimes in the landscape? If you’re a regular listener to field recordings of the weather, you may think you’ve heard all you need to hear in that genre, but I can assure you Julius’ work has a compelling attraction and a tremendous attention to detail. There is real weight and import to this sound, which may have something to do with the framing, assembly and presentation of the work. That he is able to achieve such precision of thought when working with such intangible elements is not unremarkable.

It seems that when played back on large-scale speakers this gallery art ‘Rain’ thing “engulfs the listener in a dense world…soaked pastures full of life”, according to press notes here. Being engulfed in a dense world sounds good to me, so intention at house of the Projector is to replay said soaken events on big hifi in due course. Hopefully neighbours will find me three days later soaked to my skin, if not drowned to death like character in famous Ray Bradbury story ¹. But in one instance of an installation Julius instead used a much smaller speaker, flattening and compressing the sounds into “soft and cyclical patterns” such that listener had the illusion of watching the earth being soaked from a viewpoint high in the sky. This reinforces something about the very physical nature of Julius’ work; it’s not some vapid intellectual proposition, but a strong artistic statement about real, tangible things.

Also on the CD is ‘Weitflächig’, a composition from 2004. At first it might be mistook for more rain, but I think it’s possibly an assembly of short-wave radios. Lots of micro-events…tiny sounds…you could run a microscope over the surface of this one and might be amazed…teeming protozoa pushing about on the slide, stretching their limbs…it’s to do with a methodology this German sound artist had, which he called Music For A Wide Plain. According to his plan it should be possible to breed lots of small sounds in a sonic greenhouse, until they grow and become a wide plain full of life. Or an entire world, like the Project Genesis thing in Star Trek movies. A pattern beginning to appear here…Rolf Julius certainly not an “anti-life” artist…heaven knows we have enough of them and their critical, destructive ways producing art that can only end in more pessimism.

Last piece ‘Music For A Glimpse Inward’, in four and one-half minutes presenting something which is more like music than the long-form experiential type pieces above…there are dynamics and subtle changes, even musical tones…like the other works here the main point of the thing was all in the playback in the installation…very carefully positioned speakers in an very large empty room…music played at just right degree, correct volume (Julius was a stickler for details in just about everything, including weight of paper in which his work packaged), to pass on a certain perception of space to the listener. And a feeling of stillness. This stillness and serenity is another keynote to understanding the work of Rolf Julius, and is articulated clearly in the notes here by George Thomas. Rolf Julius believed that there were spaces of tranquillity all around the world, if only we had the available senses to find them…inner peace could be shared by means of art and music…this is a very encouraging message, given that modern life seems to be doing everything it can to destroy peace, quiet, privacy, and the joys of the interior life…but it’s also fair to say that these “spaces into which one can retreat” are also a private thing, a state of mind and being which the individual must work hard to attain. To assist in developing your own private Nirvana of peace, start with this release. Arrived 10 May 2012 and released 12 June 2012.

‘The Long Rain’, originally published in 1950, and compiled in The Illustrated Man. ↩

March 12, 2013

Aethyrvorous (self-titled demo): an intense and deeply committed immersion in the black art

Aethyrvorous, self-titled, self-released cassette tape (2009)

While looking at something else on Youtube.com, I glanced to the right-hand side of the screen (where the list of other viewing options is located) and saw that a demo by a band rejoicing in the wonderful name of Aethyrvorous (it just looks so good, I don’t even stoop to think what aethyrs are that the musicians are so enthusiastic about eating them) had been uploaded in three parts so as you do, I decided to check the band out. (Aethyrs are a kind of spirit referred to in some gnostic forms and systems of knowledge.) This self-titled three-song demo turns out to be an unholy behemoth of heavy blackened death metal with lightning-fast lead guitar licks that illuminate the silhouette of the monstrous mammoth that is the band’s style. Sad to see then, that this demo is the only recorded proof of the band’s existence as the guys split some time after the recording was made and aren’t planning a reunion for old times’ sake. A full-length album, even if just a ragbag compilation of singles, rehearsals, out-takes and live performances, would have been icing on a huge cake.

Ain’t nothing like a bit of throat singing, guttural chanting and groaning, and some droning Tibetan-style monastic music to set off proceedings. After some deep meditative music on the emptiness and unreality of life and the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth, the band launches straight into a tortuous journey of thundering, stuttering drum rhythms inter-twined with scrabbly guitar and tormented roaring vocals. In some ways this music is reminiscent of Deathspell Omega in atmosphere and its tortured quality. Voices gabble and rage at each other while riffs launch desperately into the air but can barely complete their trajectories before being pulled back to earth. Solo lead guitar howls with a thin tone as if losing the fight for life. Unfortunately this track ends all too quickly. Track II picks up the pace and fury with a short introduction of blaring horns and cow-bells that lead into a frantic song of overworked choppy guitar licks, hurried drumming and what sounds like musings of deep-voiced demons unconcerned with keeping up with the sometimes cacophonous music.

Track III is a mighty death swamp beast that changes beat and rhythm at lightning speed throughout while lead guitar spasmodically sputters and squeals in the midst of a grimy seaweed-crowned lagoon monster aesthetic. Rhythm guitars trail thick sludgy magma. Towards the end the lead guitar forgets itself and dives into a deranged whoop of trembling flutter and high-flying howl. The rhythm changes yet again and falls into something thick, slurpy and serpentine as drum rolls and crashing cymbals duel with each other and guitars growl continuously. As usual, the vocals have little to do with the music and for all I know might be declaiming something important in the thousand-year history of Satanic philosophy; that could explain why our ears must be constantly slugged with the black bile the demon vocalist vomits and spews.

By all that’s unholy, at the risk of damaging my sanity from exposure to this particular example of profane black art, I wish this demo had been TEN TIMES as long – oh all right, let’s say at least THREE TIMES as long – as it is: the 23-minute running time simply doesn’t do justice to the variety of music featured in these tracks, especially in Track III. The music is positively reptilian and as cold-bloodedly malevolent as it can achieve without freezing over into something resembling the ninth and lowest part of Hell where Satan is encased in ice. The sampled recordings of Tibetan religious music set the scene for all three tracks and put the guys into the appropriate frame of mind to deliver genuinely sinister and creepy music that resembles a hulking, guttural, grime-encrusted giant from the miasmic deeps.

The most impressive aspect of Aethyrvorous’s short demo is its intensity and deep immersion in the esoteric and this is reflected in the artwork of the cassette tape cover: overly detailed filigree work portraying mysterious mythical monsters bearing aloft a structure of strange yet familiar glyphs and sigils combined with a riot of decorative symbols and hieroglyphic designs. The only other band whose absorption into the occult seems as intense and complex as Aethyrvorous’s total submersion is fellow Australian act Elysian Blaze. (Now isn’t that intriguing to know, that two Australian acts in different cities appear to have reached such a deep level of commitment to the black arts and no-one else has?)

Most readers will be able to find the demo by visiting Youtube.com and typing the band’s name into the search field. Quite a few people have uploaded all three tracks there and have also posted pictures of the artwork. Neither the band nor its individual members – well heck, I’m not even sure if there had been just the one person or a few people in the band – appears to have a Facebook / Twitter / MySpace or bandcamp page.

March 5, 2013

Breed in Me the Darkness: demon hybrid child needs to spread its wings and rejoice in full satanic blackened noise glory

Sutekh Hexen and Andrew Liles, Breed in Me the Darkness, Aurora Borealis Records, cassette (2012)

(NB Album scheduled for CD and vinyl release in mid-March 2013)

Prominent players in the black metal / noise/ drone scene, the Californian band Sutekh Hexen (Scott Miller and Kevin Gan Yuen) teams up with sound artist Andrew Liles to produce this album of two Sutekh Hexen tracks plus their respective remixes. Having someone like Liles, a long-time Nurse With Wound collaborator, chew up Sutekh Hexen tracks might seem a bit superfluous as Sutekh Hexen would appear to have the intense blown-out blackened noise soundscape genre all sewn up with nothing left for anyone to work with into something even more forbidding and extreme but Liles has managed to control and sculpt the tracks to his own out-there specifications. The threesome even cram the originals and the remixes into the modest physical format of a 45-minute cassette tape.

Unusually the first side opens with the remix of “We Once Walked Upon These Coals” with the original following after. Stern piano melodies, brimming with sinister portent, take us into a black passage of ambient horror-expectancy: a deeper melody, steely and rumbling, generally contrasts with a shrill, icy-toned trilling tune. Ghostly wobble and susurrating sound fill the background void. The track slides into a fluttering machine ambience as if a giant mosquito drone the size of a passenger jet were hovering just above. Meanwhile a crowd of voices starts gabbling faraway. Machine-like rhythm guitar riffs start churning out and are joined by an evil lead guitar solo trilling up and down the music scale in joyful, deranged mirth. For a brief time, Liles turns Sutekh Hexen into a Satanic heavy metal band. Fear not, SH aren’t going cartoony-evil, the guitar solo halts and that hellish monster-insect flutter-churn resumes its baleful rhythm.

It’s hard to tell where the remix ends and the original track begins due to the cassette format used but I take the break between tracks as that brief moment of quiet before a series of explosions begins that expands into pealing church bells and a choir of phantom voices that bleed into the metallic bell tones and the swirling mess in the background. Various found sounds – screaming women, twittering birds, the metal mosquito drone, a malevolent chanting priest conducting a Satanic ritual among others – fill the song.

Side B sees SH burst out with manic cloudbursts of blackened guitar noise buzz, ripping through the black atmosphere with a sharp hissy edge reminiscent of a high-pressure water hose spewing its product; this might be a highly distorted vocal. The song quickly exhausts itself and drifts into a ghostly pall that roams widely over a bleak and dark landscape. Liles’ take on “Selling Light to Lesser Gods” reconstructs it in reverse: the remix rises quickly out of the void into which the original disappeared with church organ droning as its companion. A choir of demon choristers howl wordless hymns of damnation from their perches and stalls in the blackest parts of Hell. Piercing vocal hiss sounds stab through the track, pronouncing vile curses upon listeners foolish enough to have followed the recording this far. A maddened organ accompaniment is interrupted by shattering glass and the track passes into another realm of blackened ambient hell where the phantom choristers find their voice again. A layer of fuzzy black metal guitar noise loops repeatedly into a sudden outburst of digital sandstorm chaos, beneath which grit coalesces into a demon voice trying to say something. The whole thing stutters into a rapid train rhythm cut short by shattering glass.

The two tracks and their remixes are good though they might have been better on a CD format: the kind of blackened experimental soundscape noise that SH traffics in needs contrasts of sharp sound, blurry noise and other distortions in sound texture and production to bring out the best in all sound textures used. There’s a point in the music where the entire sound universe passes to a deeper, more sinister plane of existence and a CD format would have brought that transformation into clearer focus. As it is, the album isn’t bad but I think the beast that the trio has created is cramped in a sound cage and must have a different format to spread its wings and fly in full monstrous majesty. The ambient and sound-sculpture aspects of SH almost disappear in the cassette format and the music is in danger of sounding one-dimensional much of the time.

Contact: Aurora Borealis Records

February 22, 2013

Fragments from the Aethyr: black ambient experimental soundscapes teamed with near-hysterical solo violin wanderings

Funerary Call, Fragments from the Aethyr, Crucial Blast Records, CD CBR100 (2012)

A celebration is in order for Crucial Blast Records with this album from Vancouver-based act Funerary Call, this being the label’s 100th release. Suitably the figure on the cover of this 6th album for the black ambient act is celebrating a well-earned rest, about to drink heartily of his mead; Cernunnos is the horned one’s name and it’s appropriate that he appear on this album as he was one ancient pre-Christian influence (he was originally a nature god of Celts living in western Europe) on the concept of the Devil in early Christian mythology. While Cernunnos relaxes, Funerary Call man Harlow Macfarlane conjures up a world of mediaeval hellfire from the manipulated sounds of guitar, violin and other instruments, electronics and field recordings. The music rumbles and stutters close to hysteria and insanity, and the atmosphere is cold and often dark.

There are just three tracks totalling 39 minutes and they probably describe a ritual of some sort. “Libations” and “Fragments” both feature deranged violin virtuoso performances from Lashen Orendorff while other musicians defer to his screechy delivery and provide consistent support for his maddened mewlings. The ambience on “Libations” is cold and alienating while Orendorff scrabbles furiously on his instrument; if it could speak, it would probably turn out traumatised from the abused strings.

The middle track “Fragments” is the core around which everything pivots. Macfarlane gets busy laying out electronics effects to create a mystery space void in which dark invisible entities float and lob about, rumbling deeply, groaning and farting, just so you know they’re not to be trifled with. In comes Orendorff’s violin bravely, questing in this indifferent space, appealing for answers to its questions of existence, sometimes being rebuffed, other times finding answers that yield yet more questions and conundrums. The track and its predecessor acquire their distinctive characters from the interplay between solo violin and its accompaniment. We follow Orendorff’s violin-playing respectfully and with some fear: the terrain to be traversed is uninviting and sometimes downright hostile, and we can never afford to relax in case unseen forces come and steal our souls forever. Even the violin acquires a dark and sinister edge as though the longer one spends in this subterranean hell, the more corrupted one’s soul becomes. As the track progresses, guitar echo effects start to take over in the background as the violin merges with other acoustic instruments.

Final piece “Transference from the Void” includes some very sonorous throat-singing from Ross Birdwise whose very name suggests someone who communes with nature and the spirit world as readily as the rest of us tweet or hit Facebook or Skype. Spirit beings squeal or moan in the background. This is a much more vocal piece than the previous two but strangely less creepy: the voices sound off against one another but it seems nothing of great consequence is happening here.

At times this is a suspenseful album of delicacy and beauty with a lot of thought put into the construction and delivery of sound fragments and snippets around the violin melodies and guitar effects. The tracks have a definite mood of cold rarefied black ambience. Even so, by the time we reach the end of the album, I feel we have travelled a lot in circles and covered the same parts over and over. The album is chiefly memorable for Orendorff’s violin soloing and the guitar bits which can be quite affecting.

Contact: Crucial Blast Records

January 6, 2013

Miniature Candies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 3, 2013

Texts For Nothing

Got another couple of outlandish cassettes from Bryan Lewis Saunders which arrived 12 April 2012. I will declare an interest because although we never met, we collaborated on a book called Protective Geometry. This very extreme performance-art / writer / poet / painter from America knocked us for a loop-a with his drug-themed LP called Near Death Experience, and, making a rare appearance in the UK, he performed last month at Bristol Arnolfini and in Milton Keynes at the Secret Anarchy Garden 2012. These tapes however are to do with his ongoing project to express the workings of his hidden brain centres by recording his own sleep-talking while asleep, then transcribing the results, verbatim, onto the page. Accordingly these Streams Of Unconscious are being published in serial form as he finds suitable sound-art collaborators to contribute to the project. First three volumes in this series were noted here.

On Volume 5 (SUT-13.5), the A side ‘White Surrealist Nihilissmus’ is disrupted by the hyper-busy electronic scratching of Yoshihiro Kikuchi, who scrambles his insane electronic data through a clapped-out computer which he subjects to further abuse with his sharp fingernails and bony digits. These vicious and attenuated sounds are so thin and mean they almost etch themselves into your forehead. Kikuchi plays percussion too, beating his cymbals in the sort of urgently obsessive manner that betokens the soul of a thwarted volunteer fireman who only ever wanted to raise the alarm. Throughout, the voice of Saunders murmurs and whispers his menacing texts implacably. Sheer nightmare, only relieved slightly when the electronic din subsides into a slightly more manageable burring and whirring.

Flip over for Christopher Fleeger‘s additions to ‘Dolphin’s Revenge’. Fleeger works exclusively with field recordings here, but his choice of locales and sound sources is far from conventional – in his list, we have American burger joints, an Australian beach, a European haunted house, and something called the “wave organ” in San Francisco ¹. And some river dolphins, aptly enough. Most field recording phonographer types like to celebrate the glories of nature and tend to bring us uplifting and optimistic views of the rich environments in the world. Not Fleeger, who on this occasion creates grim sonic vistas of an unparalleled bleakness, where all the world’s resources have been used up, there’s zero movement or signs of life, and a horrible stillness abiding in the atmosphere. A more fitting accompaniment to Saunders’ texts is hard to imagine. He’s whispering in a cracked voice as though he were the last man alive on earth. Without a doubt this is a truly apocalyptic 21st-century update on Krapp’s Last Tape.

On Volume 4 (SUT-13.4), we first hear ‘The Severed Head’ with a musical backdrop by Love, Execution Style. This Tennessee musician has been wreaking his mutant form of far-out experimental music for 18 years like a cultural terrorist, only taking an interest in pop as a musical form he can hold hostage in his diabolical compound, and even managing to expand his work into film and TV soundtracks. Everything about LES, including the name, suggests a faintly pathological approach to life, and one senses the creator can’t rest until all his enemies are dead. On this cut he plays a combination of musical instruments and domestic objects, including the clothes dryer and the pork chop. It’s not that the sound he makes is particularly unusual here, but the most striking aspect is the extreme disjunctiveness of the performance – events just tumble out in deliberately haphazard and eccentric manner, and nothing makes any coherent sense. Again, this is apt for Saunders if I may say so – it’s music that comes close to matching the fevered half-connections of his short-circuited cerebellum activity.

The other side is tenanted by two improvising names from the UK – saxophonist Adrian Northover, and the godlike genius Adam Bohman. The suite of sound here is called ‘Squirrel Party at Sally Fields’, and given that both of the Englishmen are supplying additional text and voice elements to the piece it can at first seem as though Saunders is almost being side-lined by his own special guests. But instead these jumbled layers of vocals create a strong sonic conflict, a very distinctive taste. Bohman intones, as ever, in his very splendid sonorous creaky voice declaring little-known and overlooked facts about South London matters. Then American Saunders suddenly slithers into the arena like a sibilant snake, overbreathing his surreal texts into the microphone. Northover’s elasticated sax tones can be heard in the small intervals adding small touches of sweet squeaky improv tootling to the strange and dream-like quagmire of noise. I guarantee you won’t have heard anything quite like it.

Both cassettes are once again very nicely presented and all the texts are printed in full in dinky little booklets designed by Alice Lane. Good luck following the words. You’ll need whatever navigational help you can get when you’re adrift in these stagnant backwaters of the brain!

It turns out to be an acoustic sculpture sited on the bay. ↩

December 8, 2012

Monopoles and Nightingales Walk these Hills

Nothing’s Gonna Touch Ya

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

Seen III, Took 4

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

Drums Along the Mohawk

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

The Sonic Laocoön

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

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