Tagged: field recordings

March 6, 2014

Toxic Beach Party

Old Komm
Ventspils EP
UK DISCREPANT CREP08 EP (2013)

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

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

But then things get a bit more abstracted.

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

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

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

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

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

A vinyl edition of 250.

Discrepant

February 22, 2014

Lava Bombs

Geir Jenssen
Stromboli
UK TOUCH TONE48 LP (2013)

I first sought out Geir Jenssen’s work in 2005 after a short tour around the UK, when Biosphere’s output was strongly recommended at 3am, after a concert in someone’s basement in Salford, by a man wearing a t-shirt that stated, simply, “Listen To Grindcore”. Obviously, as you can probably guess, it was the t-shirt that made me take him seriously. He challenged me, sloshing his tin of lager about in the air for added emphasis while staring vengefully through whatever stimulants were keeping him awake, equally simply but also somewhat more emphatically and deadly serious, to “listen to Biosphere”. So, not having come across the name before, when I got back home, I did.

And I’m mostly glad I did. I’m not really that interested in the early techno stuff, but for sheer sonic depth and immersive cold ambience, Geir Jenssen is quite rightly considered the man to go to, and his curriculum vitae will back this up.

With this release, Jenssen leaves behind the massive clubs and outdoor events, the advertising commissions and jet-set lifestyle of the techno producer and enters the world of the field recordist – he leaves behind the Nike Airs and v-neck t-shirts and puts on his stout trainers, cargo pants and fisherman’s waistcoat. These items are particularly favoured by field recordists with their handy pockets for wind shields, battery packs, adaptors, Kendall Mint Cake and other necessaries for extended periods out of doors. Jenssen is now forever lugging around the signature fluffy-baffled shotgun microphone over one shoulder with a matching portable multi-track hard drive recorder over the other. You get the idea. On Stromboli, as well as the opportunity to imagine Jenssen additionally possibly donning a heat-suit, we get to hear the hissings, explosions, and the pattering of falling rock of Stromboli, an active volcano in Italy, and presumably also the sounds made by 700° C lava creeping languidly around his feet.

Stromboli itself is of sufficient importance with Volcanologists to warrant a volcanic phenomenon being named after it. So called Strombolian eruptions are volcanic eruptions which can send incandescent cinder and lava bombs into the air to heights of up to hundreds of metres.

As Biosphere, Jenssen has worked with field recordings before, notably on Outside By The Fjord and Cho Oyu 8201m – Field Recordings From Tibet. And as a mountaineer in his spare time, (he scaled the Himalayan peak Cho Oyu in 2001), I’m sure he was able to get himself into some good spots on the volcano to record. It is interesting that he has chosen another, not unperilous, environment to work in, what with flowing lava and hot flung debris. Although how near he actually had to get to the crater itself to capture these noises is not clear – some sounds seem distant while others I’m sure are worryingly close. The record sleeve states that the recordings were made “…at Stromboli’s crater edge (924m)” but that would certainly be 923m too close for me.

In terms of Jenssen’s previously released field recordings, Outside By The Fjord is a film documenting a field recording excursion in Sørfjorden, near Tromsø, Norway commissioned by Fondazione Musica per Roma in 2008 and Cho Oyu 8201m – Field Recordings From Tibet was a collection of recordings made during his climb which were destined for use in the making of Dropsonde.

So what was the intention? Simple documentation at first seems the most likely being as they are a quite dry although undoubtably courageous documentation of a dangerous natural phenomena. Unlike other practitioners such as David Velez, Simon Whetham, Mecha/Orga, Jez riley French, Angus Carlyle, Peter Cusack or Lasse-Marc Riek, there is no sense of a journey, narrative or transition or sense that the artist has attempted to create something other than what simply meets the ear. Even the nature-obsessed Chris Watson’s work relies heavily on a sense of editing clarity and compositional brevity. Stromboli for all the excitement of the subject matter, suffers, perhaps, for its authors lack of commitment toward the material’s presentation. Or maybe that is the point – in releasing a straight field recording under his own name, Jenssen is deliberately disassociating himself from the lush productions of the Biosphere entity. Alternatively, Stromboli could have been a showcase for Jenssen’s location recording skills. Is he casting about for work in television for natural history or geography documentaries? Perhaps the National Geographic Channel aren’t hiring at the moment.

The percussive nature of the explosions of the volcano put me in mind of 17th Century ships’ cannon. The hissing and fizzing noises could also be mistaken for the sound of rolling waves out at sea. I wonder if there is a maritime connection in Jenssen’s mind? Maybe if you played this album over a film of period ships, (or even Pirates of the Caribbean), would it fool the brain? It also put me in mind of the sounds that emanate from all that Ministry of Defence land in Dorset near where I grew up, where the Army practice manoeuvres with live rounds.

In a way, travel is bound up inextricably with field recording practice – searching out the unusual, alien, exotic, unheard. Jenssen officially joins the ranks of these sonic H V Mortons in search of something else; and I’m keen to hear where his next postcard hails from.

Quite a curious prospect this, then. The sleeve offers up photographs taken at night; on the cover the volcano itself, on the reverse Geir Jenssen manipulating his equipment. Couple this with the malevolent nature of the audio and I’d say this is a good record to put on to augment the sounds of Bonfire Night next November.

February 18, 2014

BOT Commands

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

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

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

February 5, 2014

Reflexion Interior

The item Eins Bis Sechzehn (CRONICA 069-2012) is by the sound artist Ephraim Wegner and the visual artist Julia Weinmann, with their audio and visual snapshots of old ruined hotels. Presumably they wander about these collapsing edifices while no-one is looking and operate their capture devices before a wedge of plaster falls on their heads. They present the finished work as a fairly short CD – just six tracks of field recordings – and a portfolio of full-colour photographs, very well printed and some of them folding out into friezes. Although at first glance / listen we may think we’re facing a rather empty and desolate set of surroundings, in fact there are minimal traces of human endeavour and past lives embedded in the recordings. We can hear something bumping about like the ghost of a portly man settling into a sofa or furniture removers operating a service lift. Also other signs of life, like birds twittering outside or the distant seashore. Evocative and airy, it’s quite a benign undertone here, and clearly not directed by Stanley Kubrick in the ruins of the Overlook Hotel while furrowing his beetling brow. I’m very much reminded of Michael J. Schumacher and his 2003 release Room Pieces – this one seems to be poking around in similar enigmatic blank zones. I haven’t read their lengthy explanation in the notes though, as I suspect it’s trying to overstretch a simple idea with one too many “resonances”.

Another nice printed book + CD package is GROC 1912-2012 (SONORIDAD AMARILLA) and may have emerged from a music festival in Sant Sebastia. Mostly printed in Spanish with English translations. Miguel A Garcia is involved, and so are Artur Vidal, Coco Moya and Alicia Grueso. The book is a puzzling set of fragmented texts, alongside equally baffling but very direct monochrome images, making me feel I’m wandering through a conceptual art exhibit from 1970s England rather than flipping the pages of a book. The CD is even more opaque, short tracks where nothing is really explained but which sound like captured output from the most avant-garde radio station ever to have escaped the attention of the authorities. There’s a gorgeous “distant” quality; you can almost see tiny figures moving about inside a small surreal TV set glowing with yellow light. Things may become clearer if you read the texts while listening. The book is a libretto, structured like scenes from a play (with very strange stage directions), and it’s possible to interpret everything as the soundtrack to a performance of a gently absurd drama, almost as empty as a Beckett drama, but without the despair. The creators are aiming at a certain open-ended framework so that the performance can “project into the viewer’s imagination”, and there are hints at painterly sensibilities at work what with the fleeting Kandinsky reference, and the fact that Groc translates from Catalan as “yellow”. It’s to everyone’s credit here that so much can be expressed in a small, compacted package, and this beguiling little gem will grow on all those who own it and live with it.

Segments (EM002) is the second release from Emitter Micro, the German label who sent us the 2 (3) Incomplete Triptychs cassette in a clear box. As HiFi / LoNoise, the trumpeter Louis Laurain is joined by the electronics of Pierce Warnecke for 21 minutes of thoroughly abstracted sound – starting as puffy blankets of “reduced improv” minimalism, then exploding into a more full-bodied broth of amplified buzziness. Evidence of strong concentration and focus from both players here. Has a refreshing “raw” quality; untreated surfaces which you could use as building blocks in modular self-assembly furniture, and transform your living quarters.

I’ll confess I’m struggling slightly to derive much meat from the wispy melodic bones of Twilight Peaks (SMERALDINA-RIMA 20), a Robbie Basho release which was reissued by the Belgian Smeraldina-Rima label in 2012. This may be because it was originally an unabashed New Age release, issued in 1985 by a New York organisation called The Relaxation Company on their Vital Body Marketing label, and existed as a cassette with a bland cover of soothing dimensions and packaged as “Rich & lyrical solo guitar”. Basho had his own reasons for treading the New Age music path; one possible motivation could have been that his music didn’t catch on as expected with the “folk music” audience, and by the mid-1980s when it seemed that New Age music was in the ascendancy, he decided to hitch his wagon to that twinkly star. Maybe it’s time for this overlooked genre to undergo some form of reappraisal. The writers Richard Osborn and Glenn Jones, who provide the notes to this release, need no such persuading and they write from the depths of their own experience; Jones, who produced this reissue from original tapes, was a friend of Basho and articulates the beauty and value of this music well, making a good case in a sympathetic manner. After all it’s fair to say that Basho has not sacrificed an iota of his skill or artistry here, and there’s still the focus and precision in the playing that characterises his earlier music. The overall saminess of the sound, and its rather thin over-processed patina, may start to grow wearisome to the ears after a while, but that’s the central paradox of this item; it might be a rare case of high art hidden within a bland and commercialised genre. This reissue adds three tracks not on the original cassette, including two live cuts; these live recordings have escaped the cosseting effects of the original studio production and have a slightly rougher edge; these extra 12 minutes may make all the difference to you if you’re considering adding this to your Basho collection. Tremendous cover art, but it’s a little bit misleading as to the musical content.

February 2, 2014

Kinder in der Wildnis: a cosmic blast from the past that should be reverberating around the world

Günter Schickert, Kinder in der Wildnis, Bureau-B, CD BB151 (2013)

What have we here? It’s a blast from the past courtesy of one Günter Schickert who was active in the 1970s and early years of the 1980s but whose work since then has been obscure. His output apparently was small and this reissue of work first released on cassette in 1983 and later subject to another cassette release in the 1990s consists of material from Schickert’s own archives. The songs are not related to one another and there are two bonus tracks tacked onto the end of the album which were recorded in the 1980s and which show influences from the Deutsche Neue Welle movement , analogous to New Wave in the UK of the same period, that hit the German rock scene.

Schickert’s signature is repetitive looping rhythm guitar riffs which appear on nearly every track on this compilation. The entire album sounds like early Amon Duul II at their most shambolic and eccentric; the music sounds as if it’s about to full apart any moment and only fraying string and old sticky-tape are holding it together. Environmental field recordings, chanting vocals with slight reverb, psychedelic guitar and mesmeric tribal rhythms are some of the elements that make this music very idiosyncratic in a scene known for a lot of wacky and way-out experimentation. The throbbing, thumping rhythm patterns of “Rabe in der Nacht” have such a hypnotic vibe that even Schickert himself might be in thrall to it: it reappears in slightly changed and sped-up form in the title track that comes much later on this collection.

The music is dark dark dark and very trippy in a very heavy way, with lots of strange put-on voices and bird noises (which include Schickert’s own attempts at imitating crows), swirling synthesisers, bedazzling effects and a thick atmosphere that alone could make your head spin. Each track seems weirder and more unsettled than the one before it. Tracks 3 and 4 are highly immersive and repetitive pieces of musical mesmerism while “Suleika” seems a bit more settled and structured. Even then that track shows signs of falling off the straight and narrow path into a wild world of trance psychedelia. Schickert’s vocal delivery here suggests a knowing psychopomps beckoning us to follow him into the underworld of spirits, from which we may never return.

The original album’s highlight is the title track which features Schickert’s then four-year-old daughter going head to head with dad on vocals at full tilt. (Ah, it must be fun being a little kid when your dad is an experimental musician who plays by his own rules; you can count on being drafted in as session musician and singer, and if your dad is named Campbell Kneale, you even gain credits as a fully fledged artist and presumably earn the same amount in ice cream currency as adult musicians do in real money.) The little girl goes for her life with reverbed voice against Schickert’s flubby trumpet and while the rest of the music stays steady throughout, there’s an air of slight craziness as a result of the singing.

The bonus tracks have a clean sound and the music seems much tighter and a bit subdued. Schickert’s voice comes over as curiously flat and a bit disembodied. The overall clinical effect may be intended but after the glorious messiness of what has gone before, the extra songs might seem a bit disappointing to some listeners. Now I’m not insinuating that the Deutsche Neue Welle movement was not a good influence on German pop and rock; indeed that particular music trend from the late 1970s seems to have disappeared from most discourse on German contemporary music and rarely gets a mention elsewhere. Probably the closest most people come to referring to DNW is when the names of bands associated with that scene (Malaria!, Deutsche-Amerikanische Freundschaft to take the best-known examples) are dropped into conversation. It’s just that Schickert, in trying to accommodate and adapt some of its influences, comes off second-best while updating his sound and the result ends up the musical equivalent of a caged bird, severely restricted in its movements and unable to fly.

Nonetheless this is a mesmerising recording from the history vaults of Seventies German rock which deserves to be much more widely known.

January 23, 2014

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

Tarab, Strata, Unfathomless, CD U18 (2013)

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

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

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

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

January 1, 2014

La Marque Jaune

I’m about as ill-equipped as I ever am to take pen in hand, even as my typewriter keys get gummed up with my own mental whitewash…soon after we published a post about Staaltape in October 2012, three more Staaltape cassette tapes arrived 17 January 2013, presenting the same enigmatic puzzles – anonymous packages, hand-written information, blank imagery. At first coup d’oeil, it’s hard to know what to even call the items by name, as the titles and artists are far from clear. There are lots of layers to the packages, like layers of semiotic meaning, and it takes patience to even get to the cassettes through pieces of tissue paper, rubber bands, inserts, masking tape and such. And once again the parcel itself is wrapped up in a strange collage made by the label owner Rinus Van Alebeek. I am suitably bewildered already. So let’s take the cassette Zanstones Für Berlin first of all. The cover is hand-painted with poster paint with the letter S, because every copy had one of the title’s letters on the cover, so if they were all laid out in a shop or gallery I suppose it would spell itself out. As fate would have it, it’s already in its second (small) edition of 18 copies. The American audio artist Zan Hoffman had a show called Zanstones held at Staalplaat Berlin in 2011, and he gathered all the sounds on this tape in a single day. The little pictures printed on this piece of Kodak Extralife paper don’t really explain very much about that process, though some of them they show him in the open air in that city pointing his microphones in unusual places, including up towards a municipal traffic light. The late Hugh Davies made sound recordings of different types of pedestrian crossings across the world; I think he was a connoisseur in that area.

This cassette is a fairly puzzling audio experience too. I ought to start off saying it is fascinating to listen to and in places has a primitive beauty that is almost incandescent (especially the eerie, insistent drones on side two). But it’s eccentric and strange too. It’s quite some way from the usual things that city-dwelling field recordists bring us back from the city when they create their well-meaning but ultimately rather boring documentary snapshots. By contrast, Zanstones Fur Berlin is full of highly surprising incident, and amounts to some sort of day-dreaming, ambulatory episode – the recognisable sounds we hear always being undercut or overlaid with very non-familiar things. Hoffman has found a world within a world, or else he doesn’t live in the same place as most normal men. It’s a portable audio installation, a tour around a private art gallery. He somehow remakes the world into his own private space and beholds everything with wonder. The strangest elements on this tape are provided by Hoffman’s muttering, chanting and whispering voice, which cloaks everything in mystery. It might be possible to read these utterances as aural captions for the vitrines in this aural art exhibit. It’s as though we’re having the outside world explained to us by a certifiable madman, speaking urgently in his own private language. Then it dawns on us that he’s not mad at all. The label regards this recording as a surrealist journey, and I’m all for that.

I am surprised I never heard of this talented and prolific creator before, considering he’s been around since the 1980s, has his own ZH27 tape label, and has released a large amount of material under his own name and within several groups – including Ambient Complot, Aquabatic Bubble Gum, Bodycocktail, Crow White, Here Be Monsters, JaJa HoLe, Kozan, Masters Of The Ungentlemanly Art, Second Violin, and many more. He claims to be on a 27-year mission “to explore new audio realms”, leaving behind the effluvia of recorded artefacts to mark his journey’s progress. As such he is a cassette hero and fits perfectly into the loose affiliation of Staaltape geniuses, and also owns the sort of unclassifiable mindset that neatly escapes categorisation, always leaping over eighteen hurdles and staying ten kilometres ahead of all the competition. Very high recommendation for this uncanny recording. Now I would like to hear a lot more from Hoffman and ZH27.

Now we have an item clipped in a shiny black box. On the front is a murky image which I take to be an x-ray of a spinal column. The interior is disguised as an old Sacha Distel tape on a budget label. This AudioZine #1: Glenn Branca item is the work of Rinus Van Alebeek, who composed the A side ‘City Of Music’ using location recordings from New York City – there are numerous edits and strange treatments, including some echo and backwards tapes perhaps, and the music of Glenn Branca may appear here also. Spoken word elements there be, isolated remarks from an American companion (playing Virgil to Van Alebeek’s Dante), leaking into the chaotic and vivid sounds of the gigantic metal monster that is NYC. What a living breathing creature he transforms it into. I sometimes wonder why other “artistic” field recordists tend to produce such dead documents of the environment: sedate, minimal, almost inhuman in their clinical beauty. Then you hear an ugly but vital document like this one, almost scary in the way it depicts and totally embraces the raw and bleeding inhospitality of modern urban life. This is not a question of looking among “the garbage and the flowers”, but allowing yourself to be run over by an entire fleet of garbage trucks and very possibly eaten alive by the giant rats of Manhattan. From these edits and treatments, there emerges a glorious roar of abstract noise which makes you glad to be alive. On the B side we have further recordings from Paris, New York and Washington D.C.; for parts of these aural journeys, Van Alebeek is assisted by Harold Schellinx and Emmanuel Rebus. Schellinx is an important creator (musician, writer and artist) from the Dutch underground who played in post-punk bands in the 1970s, and has been creating sonic diaries for about 13 years with his portable Walkman recorder and tiny mic clipped to his jacket lapel. This side is largely more straightforward and non-composed, it includes a long (bootleg-quality) recording of Glenn Branca’s guitar music being played at a venue and we also eavesdrop on a conversation between an American (probably Branca himself) and our European friends; some of this has been used as raw material for the A side. Branca’s contribution is such that he even has his own name loosely inserted in the release on a small piece of orange paper. Would he appreciate being visually compared to Sacha Distel? N.B.: I wrote the above without knowing the actual story, which is here.

The last item is titled Groetjes Uit Brussel and features contributions from four Belgian sound artists – Flavien Gillié, Jean Jacques Duerinckx, Margarida Guia and the strangely-named Patate. The artistic brief handed down to them was to “depict one moment or fragment of the town they live in”. They came up with these lovely miniaturist statements which glisten like a jewel for precious seconds, then vanish in a drifty manner. I don’t know a great deal about these Belgians although Duerinckx appears to be a jazz saxophonist and Margarida Guia is a performance artist / comedienne who has appeared in films and has composed radiophonic works. Of the three tapes, this one might not be as outright strange or shocking as the two items noted above, but it is extremely beguiling; the individual contributions are listed, but not divided up or signposted in the programme, and the accumulated listening experience reveals a misty and slightly warped view of the city of Brussels. Moving from shopping mall to church, we are in a highly fluid zone where even the most fleeting and banal sound has the potential to be a sign of some import. Signs are taken for wonders. We don’t know where we are or where we might be going next, and the effect is like floating through an evanescent dream-world on winged shoes, passing overheard and drifting through walls like a wispy ghost.

If the aim of Van Alebeek and these artists is to create unusual maps of the world, they are succeeding. The tapes themselves are the maps, finding aids to allow us to locate our own zones of importance, and in the final analysis enabling us to perform our own personal dérives of the city. These tapes do more than just present interesting glimpses of overlooked corners of the world, they perform certain artistic operations on the mind and help us to rewire our brains.

Staaltape

December 23, 2013

Insect Jazz

David Rothenberg
Bug Music
USA TERRA NOVA MUSIC TN 1309 / GERMANY GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 122 CD (2013)

Now this is a new one for me. I’ve heard a few insect field-recordings: Chris Watson and Sublime Frequencies being two suppliers that spring to mind; and I’ve reviewed a modest number of improv recordings, but ‘insect jazz’? I don’t think even Derek Bailey went there. The last recording entitled ‘Bug Music’ was – to my knowledge – Don Byron’s suite of Raymond Scott cartoon soundtrack (to-be) covers. Though he sported a clarinet like David Rothenberg does here, the sound was a world apart: post-colonial jazz caricatures of orientalised cultures with titles such as ‘War Dance for Wooden Indians’. There is of course Graeme Revell’s 1986 LP The Insect Musicians, which provides a starting point for the present offering, being a meticulously organised taxonomy of different insect sounds and their potential integration via technology.

And so it is – following on from entries dedicated to bird and whale song – that Rothenberg now turns entomologist, ushers in swarms of winged and multi-limbed musicians including cicadas, crickets, katydids, leafhoppers and water bugs, from which he manages to coax a pleasant panoply of rhythms and resonations; insect idioms including stridulation, scratches, clicks, chirps and thwooms – some on site, some looped or stretched in the studio; proving once and for all that fact can be flightier than fiction. For more seasoned seekers of the unusual, there is also a turn from a beetle that vibrates its penis violently underwater. The insects, in turn, prompt a sensitive musical response from Rothenberg and co., yielding a delicate palette for the production of precious musical miniatures, which amount to a reflection on relations ‘twixt man and nature, and signalling well the sonic subtleties one’s perceptual filter might ordinarily omit.

Additional performers include Robert Jurgendal on guitar (whose work with Fripp and Eno shows through), singer Timothy Hill and Umru Rothenberg on ipad. So as not to overshadow the main attraction, homo sapien headcounts are kept low throughout, whether live in situ or otherwise, and no effort is spared in underdoing things, as in ‘What Makes Them Dance?’ where ‘a wash’ of sampled katydid hum emerges unhurriedly from the slow spaces between gentle wind, piano and percussion, or ‘Treetop’ wherein Rothenberg’s clarinet ascends to the eponymous summit ¹ only when permitted by breaks in the subsonic rumble. Only in the final track, ‘The Year of Insect Thinking’ does Rothenberg cut loose, blended with upbeat electronic percussion that falls on the tasteful side of Bill Laswell’s ethnographic dabbling. As he postulates in his liner notes, ‘human music (likely) evolved out of the millions of years of listening to the sounds of bugs’, which notion has prompted his decision to consciously ‘learn’ from this in his own approach to composition/performance. The patient approach to performance within signals a degree of success in this enterprise.

Indeed, however intricate the expressions of the exoskeletal extras, Rothenberg’s accompaniment is always sparing and sympathetic: the work of a curious and well-attuned ear and a desire to accentuate the unique. Listeners should find the pieces agreeable, though I would qualify this remark by stating that it perhaps requires careful listening in shorter sessions, so as to do it justice. It was released in tandem with a book of a similar name (Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise, St Martins Press), and is available in an edition of 1000 copies, thus in no foreseeable danger of extinction.

Actually, it refers to the name of the insect, the three-humped treehopper. ↩

December 22, 2013

Black and Blue Blues

Simon Balestrazzi sent us a copy of Hashima’s record from Italy – Simon may not actually appear on this 47-minute stretch of doom-laden rattling noise, but he is credited with the mastering and I venture to say that it’s a project laced with a palpable dose of the characteristic Balestrazzi traits, including that sense of blackened occultism and semi-magickal ceremony in the enactment of the mysterious sounds. Collapsing New Buildings (SANTOS PRODUCTIONS SNTSR08) echoes its way into infinity; it resounds with such ominous natural echo that it might as well have been performed in a long, old-fashioned corridor some several hundred metres in length and lined with civil-service styled wooden panelling decorating the drably-painted walls. One is reminded of the anecdote often told about the recording of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Boxer’ and how the dramatic percussion effect on that record was achieved by setting up an enormous bass drum at the end of a studio corridor for Hal Blaine to bash ¹. Hashima’s intentions are far from benign, and this darkened record reeks with fugged-out screams and tortured feedback effects – much like prising open an enormous door in this ‘new building’, and the entire record is characterised by ferocious percussion work reminiscent of the demolition crew hammering down walls with sledgehammers, or ripping apart metal siding inside an elevator shaft. The other part of the puzzle is that Hashima Island is a real-life location (off the coast of Japan) and a notorious site of dereliction and ruined buildings – what was once a prosperous coal mining town in the first half of the 20th century is now a major symbol of serious neglect. Two other artists who have been intrigued by this world-famous “ghost town” are CM Von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad, whose response was to make a video “installation” out of the place. I have seen this video, and believe me, it’s a haunting and harrowing experience. Perhaps Hashima is another alias for Balestrazzi? Perhaps the work was actually recorded in one of the decaying buildings on that bleak atoll? Speculation aside, I would imagine the cover art for this release is a genuine Hashima photo, and you couldn’t wish for a more palpable image of extreme urban decay. The record itself more than lives up to that visual promise! Arrived 3rd January 2013, but may have been released in October 2012.

Blue Poles (SLIGHTLY OFF KILTER sok046) is a collection of aural experiments by Paul Khimasia Morgan, recorded in various locations during 2011 and 2012. They don’t seem to have any theme or connection and are related only by appearing together on this album. They comprise field recordings, pieces where he’s working with musical instruments in various combinations, or more abstract experiments in sound art using feedback and white noise through a mixing desk. Morgan restricts himself by only allowing an interpretative dimension to appear inside his titles, some of which are like isolated fragments from poetry or the opening lines of mysterious short stories. For the rest, all description is stony-faced: he delivers only a completely factual shopping list of the objects and bric-a-brac used to create each track, noting the location and place where he did it. On this outing at least, Morgan shows himself as a devotee of the “small objects and small sounds” school of sound art, creating curious creaky episodes of rather dry rattling and rustling like a slightly more fulsome version of the later Jeph Jerman. The work may occasionally produce some odd musical notes or drones from a guitar or zither, or some low-key electro-acoustic effects where a microphone or mixing desk may interact with the activities. Largely though, Blue Poles takes a non-musical and documentary approach; the musician’s own work is treated as though it were an event taking place in the countryside, and recorded as though he were making a field recording of it. This lends a diffuse quality to each piece; it’s not clear where it begins or ends, if indeed it can be said to occupy such certain ground. Rather than finished compositions, it might be more apt to regard these as fleeting snapshots of unusual phenomena in progress. (24/01/2013)

Piatcions are an Italian psychedelic rock group who made an LP called Senseless Sense in 2011; we received an advance copy of their 12-incher, Heaven’s Sins (FC009V12), from the London label Fuzz Club Records. Three tracks in fifteen minutes, including a remix of ‘Reel Loop’ by Atom Eye. I won’t pretend that any of this music is particularly “experimental”, but I like it. It brings home the bacon in terms of solid, trancey avant-rock with all the desirable qualities – a solid beat, fuzzed guitars, trippy keyboard drones. Not as self-consciously proggy or kosmische as the retro items we often get from Sulatron Records, this is good treacly dark-drug music that’ll keep a few Spacemen 3 diehards happier for a bit longer. Allegedly, they’re great in a live situation too. (22/01/2013)

The three-inch offering by Vile Plumage is another odd ‘un sent in by Filthy Turd. The Plan Be Vile, Conceived In Shame (NO LABEL CDR) is described as a “metaphysical journey…through Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent”, and consists of lo-fi field recordings made around that undistinguished locale. The recordings have been layered with an uncertain acoustic guitar plucking the idle music of the damned like a diabolical busker in the streets of Hades. Plus menacing whispers and grunts which are occasionally dropped into the continuum. The gentle noise grows into more alarming proportions, with echoed chants, strange howling effects, and gasping women victims; all the while that relentless acoustic guitar keeps on trotting out its implacable rhythm, as though its player was grinning at us with the sinful smile of the fallen. Vile Plumage is the team of Filthy Turd and Andy Jarvis, but in true magus fashion (shape-shifting like a witch’s familiar) even their very name can change at will and they are sometimes called Vile Goldenn Plumage or Goldenn Viles. The actual surface of this recording may not strike you as especially inventive at first, but persevere ye must, since a desolate and spooked vibe runs through it; it’s as though the pair shrunk themselves into small hobgoblins to capture the sounds from the “parks, tunnels and ginnels” of the area, and at length are able to transform into the hideous horned and hairy creature on the cover. Filthy Turd continues to shine his light into odd places, and you may not like what he reveals. From August 2012.

Other reports say this effect was achieved with studio reverb. ↩

November 16, 2013

Sounds of the City

Daniel Blinkhorn
Terra Subfónica
GERMANY GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 117 CD (2013)

With Terra Subfónica, composer and sound artist Daniel Blinkhorn has created a futuristic collection of sub-sounds designed to focus on what we hear in our subconscious. The result is a striking collection of recordings that are combined with Blinkhorn’s instrumental material to create a piece of work that is at once familiar and bizarre. Or, as Blinkhorn himself says, the CD presents a suite of ‘19 dramaturgical, radiophonic miniatures that map a sonic sub terrain’. Phew.

The CD is divided into several series and triptychs covering such terrain as seascapes, tones and timescapes, machines and cityscapes. Other pieces focus on such abstract themes as sonic spaces and even children playing. Some of these tracks, including ‘(sub)urban mantra’, focus on the instrumental; others, such as the seascape triptych, highlight the sounds of nature; and some are just plain weird, like the robotic, machine-inspired, ‘corpus sanus – computare’. On other tracks, the sounds are brought together in a way that combines field recordings, electronic music and experimental sound techniques, manipulated into a radiophonic cacophony.

Blinkhorn also wanted to explore the medium of radio; something that comes across quite clearly on several of the tracks, in particular, ‘place/space threnody’. He’s pushing the boundaries of sound on ‘toy bagatelle i’, which utilises a stereophonic/monophonic/stereophonic structure to accompany the sounds of children playing. The overall feel is certainly one of an artist and relishing the opportunity to experiment in order to present something totally unique.

The result of all this experimentation means that, at first listen, the recordings seem diverse and random, as the ear struggles to reconcile the instrumental work with fragments of the familiar and the alien sounds Blinkhorn has merged. On repeat listens, however, a pattern starts to emerge and the brain starts to get tuned in to these sub-sounds.

It must be noted that while the end result of Terra Subfónica is certainly interesting, it seems more a piece of work to be admired than one to be enjoyed repeatedly. More than mere background, the work demands attention but is quite a challenging listen; especially to those not familiar with this type of sound manipulation.

Overall, Terra Subfónica is an ambitious and highly original work of soundart that has the potential to open listeners’ minds and ears to a whole new world going on beneath what they usually hear.