Tagged: guitar

May 21, 2013

Ensemble Pearl: debut album of low-key cavernous drone soundscapes

Ensemble Pearl, self-titled, Drag City, DC544CD (2013)

Led by Stephen O’Malley and featuring Michio Kurihara, Atsuo of Boris and William Herzog, Ensemble Pearl is a venture into impressionistic and sometimes ponderous soundscapes of guitar drone. Basic line-up is guitars-bass-drums with additional instrumentation from Eyvind Kang and Timba Harris. The album derives from music the group played for a dance performance choreographed by Gisèle Vienne, who has occasionally surfaced here and there on various TSP album reviews (especially those for SOMA’s other project KTL) as a catalyst eminence grise .

The mood across the six tracks tends to be fairly dark and quite solemn, the first track “Ghost Parade” setting the tone and atmosphere with suggestions of deep space behind the music. “Painting on a Corpse” sets up a tension between the urgent rhythmic repetition and the guitar improvisations which are distinguished by long extended chords and pointillist lines of quivering raindrop notes.

After the light and delicate “Wray”, we return to a cavernous and lumbering world in twilight shades in “Island Epiphany”. Mysterious though not malevolent ambience, clear production and slight echoes give an impression of a huge if empty labyrinth within the soundscapes. Guitar drones can be long, rough and ear-splitting in tone and texture. In “Giant”, the listener is lulled into thinking the musicians are treading water until about the 4th minute when an unseen force pulls everybody into higher realms of existence. Light sparkles of angelic presence watch over you as you pass by. Higher and higher you go until the scenery changes and you find yourself on the edge between an ordered universe and a dark chaos.

There hardly seems anything left for Ensemble Pearl to do at this point. “Sexy Angle” comes across as a not very remarkable summation of what’s come before despite its 17-minute length: it’s a long ponderous struggle through murky tunnels and black chasms. Although that may very well be the point: on reaching the heights of illumination, clarity and perfection, one must return to ordinary life and its uncertainties to understand the work to be done to recreate something of what was briefly experienced.

It has its beautiful and blissful moments which unfortunately are too few while the sombre plodding passages are too many. The album is very subdued for a group of musicians whose names, individually and sometimes together, are associated with power and loudness. There’s a lot of depth to the music, often so much so that it almost swallows up the energy and zest released by the musicians which might account for the relative low-key feel of the entire work. The album might disappoint fans of SOMA and Boris alike but, considered as part of SOMA’s increasingly varied oeuvre as a musician and artist, it must be considered an essential step in his musical adventures which have taken him far, far beyond doom metal.

Contact: Drag City

May 20, 2013

Two Intrepid Dentists

Luciano Maggiore & Francesco Brasini, How to Increase Light in the Ear
ITALY BORING MACHINES BM040 CD (2012)

Two long, intense electro-acoustic interrogations from these two exploratory Italians. Instruments are self-built guitars, Revox tape machine and electronic devices. High-frequencies are the stated and actual order of the day. The approach is tightly focused and ruthlessly restrained for the most part. Ploughing determined furrows extruded filaments of frequency needle and itch. Mic-feedback whines are pushed through hair thin cracks. Constant high frequency level activity and agitation demands listener attention and denies any comfortable zone-out in the listener or the music.

The first track resembles a recording of an introverted dental drill in close proximity to, yet studiously ignoring, the cold metal curves of an anaesthetic gas tank. As it moves through its twenty-odd minutes the clipped and controlled high-frequency activities, presumably generated by the ‘electronic devices’ noted in the credits, are gradually, very gradually, joined by simple lower register frequencies whose tones start to beat against each other. Eventually these harmonic conglomerates start to acquire almost ecclesiastical shadings. The drones beneath the drill shift as this illusory organ adjusts its stops by itself before fading away to stark and simple high frequencies again without reaching any sort of conventional conclusions. This track has admirable scouring ability and should be appreciated by religiously minded dentists everywhere.

Track two, even longer at nearly half an hour, is another slowly unfolding drama incorporating many seeming wrong turns and cul-de-sacs, appreciation of the whole piece reveals an inexorable progress towards some sort of dénouement, however. Weedy high tones set the stage, beating and fluttering unstably against each other, pitch manipulation I assume is courtesy of the Revox tape machine. High mosquito-pitched tones are utilised, and then an almost melodious drone is gradually introduced, lending the piece a less restless and dissatisfied tone than that of the preceding work. The middle of this second track sees the introduction of some remarkably piercing tones which sound filed to a point and thin and flat enough to slide beneath your mental window casements. Tremeloed, reedy sounds continue to wisp and circulate around each other in palpable atmosphere of focus and tension, you can almost hear our intrepid dentists’ intent gazes. Little by little over its long course the track fleshes out into a (kind of) triumphant and (sort of) expansive mode, providing a more confident base for more pro-active frequency prods and what sounds like a rumbling piano (possibly self-made guitar derived), all of which adds variety to the previously restrained sound palette, the piano/guitar sounds being especially effective. Our dynamic duo even deploy some big (in this context) gestures notching up the pace and adding a sense of purpose or direction. The end of this piece is relatively bombastic. A crescendo, even. Dynamics? Worry not, as it tails off once again into inscrutable high frequencies, still whirring glassily.

May 12, 2013

Horn Beam Fantasmas

Loopy and intense noisy jazz rock blurt from Cactus Truck, a trio which showcases the saxophone malarkey of John Dikeman as much as the tangled guitar lines of Jasper Stadhouders, while drummer Onno Govaert urges these two rabid loons to propel themselves over the cliff edge. Their album Brand New For China! (PUBLIC EYESORE NO. 119) has a ten-minute opening salvo which will let the listener know instantly if they’ve the stomach to stick around for more of the same. These “spiky” fellows have caused much agitation in and around Amsterdam where they are based (this was recorded in a Netherlands studio), but many improvisers and veteran jazzmen on the international circuits also tip their hats to Cactus Truck. They make sure to put on gardening gloves first, though. I’d like to report a melange of Albert Ayler lines on top of Beefheartian blues rhythms, but their ultra-aggressive music favours surface sound and technique over structure. Not that you’ll notice as you succumb to the joyous free energy on offer here. (09/07/2012)

From the Belgian duo NDE we have Kampfbereit (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR146CD), their second release which in typography and cover art at least is “disguised” as a Black Metal album, but turns out to be a wild experiment in suffocating, extreme noise – situated in the “Death Industrial” sub-sub-genre, as the press notes would have it. As they hurl around their buckets of distortion, hammering percussion, and excessively filtered screaming vocals, NDE also prove they can do dynamic changes pretty well, and the album is designed almost purely as an extreme listening experience, where we are given few clues or map points and the listener’s imagination must work hard to process the scrambled information. A few quieter tracks paint “bleak and empty” vistas of desolate misery, but most of the content is simply intolerably repellent and over-layered loud noise. A painful and torturous journey to the depths of a Pandemonium-styled Hades. (28/07/2012)

Is it too early to say Northern Spy Records are taking up the slack from ESP-Disk? The latter label used to make a point in the 1960s of signing up eccentric performers from rock’s margins, some of them recruited direct from the street, and gradually made history thereby (even if they sold few records at the time). I’m getting a similar vibe from Diamond Terrifier, although my impression is based largely on the photo inside the gatefold of Kill The Self That Wants To Kill Your Self (NORTHERN SPY RECORDS NSCD026), and I may be misreading it completely. This odd record is a one-man show by Sam Hillmer, who exhibits untrammelled raw passion when playing his saxophone, recorded in strange ways and at strange times, with minimal (or zero) accompaniment. That woodwind instrument has rarely sounded so other-worldly. It’s not just microphone placement, either; Hillmer is reaching down into a very deep personal place to extract these hollow bellows and loosing them into the ether like mind-drenching fog clouds. Diamond Terrifier, who cutely expresses his name as <>T, is a truly original primitive. This is his debut record; will the world allow a second release? P.S. – the fauvist version of the American flag on back cover is a nice touch, clues us in to the “alternative” universe of Mr. Hillmer. (19/07/2012)

Blindshore is James Adkisson, a Texas guitarist who used to play in Seven Percent Solution. Hollow (SELF-RELEASED) is a solo album on which he plays everything, and freely owns up to his influences – some of them rather conventional, such as Adrian Belew or Brian May, along with his first loves Fripp and Sonic Youth. The results are agreeable and competent modern rock music, but given his proclivities for progressive rock and melody (no bad things, I hasten to add), Blindshore is unlikely to be mistaken for a carbon-copy of solemn post-rockers such as Isis or Red Sparowes. Adkisson’s vocals are a tad thin, but he uses the singing voice as another instrument in his very thickened mixes, where no space is left unfilled and there is barely space for the listener to move. (18/07/2012)

Attacca are an improvising trio based in Berlin active since 2010, who declare O’ The Emotions! (SCHRAUM 15). Two German players, the trombonist Mattias Müller and the bassist Axel Haller, are joined by Canadian Dave Bennett, a refugee electro-acoustic student who has made his home in Europe’s financial capital and contributes guitar to the trio’s sound. Attacca seem to be all about the very rich sound they make together, rather than owing much of a debt to jazz or even improvised music, and don’t wish to draw attention to their respective techniques. Instead, we hear a compelling and integrated combination of tones and textures, with repetitions and patterns arrived at by very natural means. The ebbs and flows of this watery gelatin suck us in like so much quicksand. The “emotions” of the title are thus very hard to name or identify, and clearly they can only be processed by the players through their exploratory work. (12/07/2012)

More splendidly sickened and corrupted computer noise from dsic, the New Zealand expat who lives in Bristol and whose LF Records netlabel rarely disappoints. Public Benefits, Private Vices (LF020) is one of his more aggressive concoctions, seething with hateful noise for most of its duration, and feeling entitled to pummel the listener’s head with cruel buffets. When this punch-up with a street drunk subsides, we are left with curious passages of disaffected half-noise, which pulsate and sizzle like an angry insect poised to strike again. The only variations to the above scheme are found with the final track, a soothing potion of pure tones deployed in random fashion; and the curious voice loops which last for 36 seconds on track two. Whole album could erupt into violence at any moment, creating a tense and invigorating spin. When I grow tired of “polite” and well-manicured laptop music, I always turn to dsic, a man who’s never afraid to show his Samsung just who wears the pants in his house! (24/07/2012)

Just heard from Alfredo Costa Monteiro yesterday, and here he is again as part of an ad-hoc trio called 300 Basses, with Jonas Kocher and Luca Venitucci. Sei Ritornelli (POTLATCH P212) was recorded in late 2011 when the three of them were on a residency in Switzerland. Although I personally would welcome the formation of an orchestra of 300 musicians playing only the upright double bass (and hopefully doing so at the Hot Gates), the music of 300 Basses is in fact predicated on the accordion. Continuing to pursue his radical, deconstructionist approach to conventional instruments, Monteiro attempts to refashion the very workings of the accordion according to his own diabolical schemes, rethinking the respective purposes of the bellows, keys and buttons. If applied to to the fields of biology or zoology, I suspect his “what-if” approach would lead to his being banned under various international anti-vivisection agreements. The resultant horrors are laid bare on this extreme record, where to my ears the accordions simply seem to be begging for mercy under this cruel and unusual treatment. Still, that’s clearly the intention. Kocher used to make me a little impatient with his earlier slow-moving minimalist releases like Materials and Solo, but there’s a little more fire to be heard in this collaborative work. (09/07/2012)

April 4, 2013

Condensing Clouds

From Göteborg in Sweden ¹ we have a package of tapes produced by the label Native Parts Records which arrived 1st June 2012. The DIY collage covers looked promising and the website follows a similar aesthetic, configured so that the scrolling takes place on the horizontal plane instead of the vertical. Skugar is Johannes Brander and his solo tape is Magic / Khands (NPR02) which is quite pleasing although I found the first track wittering on for too long with its dreamy synth runs and rather pointless droning. What don’t I like? Hmmm…maybe the root note is a bit too ordinary and the overall tone is a shade too nice, as if the music were trying too hard to please an audience. However the B side (if indeed that is correct since the sides are unmarked) is darker and more engaging. Fairly sinister edge and lots of unknown quantities. I find myself being gently pulled into a bewildering maze of slightly distorted rumbling and keening noises, a faded jungle of imaginary plants and wildlife. Skogar seems to work best when he allows himself to meander in this echoey electronic murk, a gaseous entity which is almost beyond being abstract, so lacking in definition it be. Yet there is a core of some living matter within the cloud. Pulsate! Pulsate! Skugar also exhibits some interest in psychedelic or proggy tunes, as suggested by his cover of a Bardo Pond piece, an American band whom we would associate with that early 1990s upsurge interest in “space-rock” and latterday psychey droning with guitars. Skogar works well for me when his inner skeleton is acting sullen and weird, and he should force himself down that path of incommunicative obscurity more often, perhaps by putting his head in a cloth sack ². Also we like his interest in malfunctioning or broken equipment which was used to make the record. Strange cover art shows men in sun hats like 1930s Mexicans or Paraguyans, being dwarved by enormous plants, maybe some form of gigantic sugar beet or other local crop. There is also a luxury art edition of the release which comes with a unique painting on wood. It’s an old-ish release from 2010 but is still available.

Brander’s an able painter as shown by the symbolist cover art ³ he produced for Verfver‘s tape which is Animi / Animus (NPR24). A solo tape by Johan Gustafsson who is also associated with Tsukimono, Blessings, and Scraps of Tape. We like him well as Tsukimono, under which name he produced the memorable title ‘Moan Jar’ for a compilation. This tape doesn’t quite produce the desired chilling / pessimistic / bleak visions however. Distortion and lo-fi recording are the guiding lights behind this scrapbook of musical episodes, pages and cuttings torn from the eyes and mind of a restless soul. Verfver does manage some pleasing moments in this eclectic array of ambient, drones, tunes, piano fugues, and rhythmic avant-rock tunes, but there is too often a deficiency of conviction or weight behind his musical utterances. I’m sure there is a way to turn these wispy tones into the sort of plangent and heartfelt melancholic wails to which he aspires. He has certainly managed as much in his Tsukimono guise.

Lastly we have Crystal Crypt‘s II (NPR21). Crystal Crypt is another alias for Johannes Brander, and again the package is adorned with clippings from National Geographic magazine to form the collage cover art. The titles here certainly indicate a more “cosmic” Pink Floyd type outlook on man’s existence, with ‘Beyond’, ‘Worlds Apart’ and ‘Future Past’ pointing to his aspirations to journey into the metaphysical zones. Realised I think mostly with an electric guitar, feedback and an echo unit, though there is also percussion and other things going on. Works best when it wallows in maddening repetition and remorseless exploration of raw guitar tones. The music he makes here can also appear lonely and isolated, so perhaps at one level these tunes and their ponderous titles are metaphors for an inability to communicate ⁴. Although still formless, woolly and self-indulgent in places, this cloudy and clanging music does have the same sort of “Roman wilderness of pain” vibe as the Skogar tape, a mental state which Brander would do well to cultivate and explore even more fearlessly on future experiments with his psychological axe. A 2011 recording which the creator wishes to associate with ‘Heart of Darkness’, the Conrad novel which was one of the texts which fed into Apocalypse Now, still the movie of choice for all dark-hearted outcasts and pariahs of society. I often think a lot of these musicians wish they could remake the soundtrack for this film, and this tape may represent another entry in that ongoing catalogue.

Also the home of Fang Bomb Records, our favourite label of angsty and grating Swedish noise. ↩
I make this suggestion simply as a cheap and practical way to achieve sensory deprivation. More sophisticated methods are available. ↩
It depicts a cathedral blighted by a witch in the guise of a black spider with multiple arms. ↩
At times the music put me in mind of another Göteborg depressive, Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, who likewise despairs of making himself understood by the rest of humanity. In that instance the creator suffers from borderline personality disorder. ↩

March 29, 2013

Cendre: beautiful music trapped in land of Melancholia

Fennesz + Sakamoto, Cendre, Touch, CD TONE-32 (2007)

Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on much by various artists who I used to listen to but then drifted away from. It’s been quite some time since I heard anything by Christian Fennesz. So I thought I should check out this collaborative instrumental work from 2007 with Japanese composer / musician Ryuichi Sakamoto with whose music I was also once familiar way back in the early 1980s when he was a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

“Cendre” is a series of ambient soundscape pieces done mainly on piano, guitar and laptop (used to process guitar and piano sounds and melodies). All track titles are short one-word names that suggest states of incomplete stasis or the remains of something that once existed but is no more. Much of the music is desultory piano melody meandering, often sad and meditative in mood as it favours certain keys, with guitar and laptop electronics active in the backdrop. The atmospheres can be quite dark but they are never menacing or threatening. No other instrumentation is used and there are vast spaces revealed in the music by the plaintive keyboard tunes. There is the sense that listeners have to fill in the empty spaces with their own imaginations and memories that those darkened spaces might evoke.

Although the album is divided into 11 tracks, the music is better heard as a continuous soundtrack of changing melodies and sounds that passes through a melancholy blues style, something approaching lounge lizard muzak and occasionally falling into abstract experimental territory. The best tracks are those where the piano and guitar electronics are blended so well that everything sounds like one instrument with an amazing array of tones and effects that all sound like pure piano and Fenneszian guitar effects (“Kuni”, for instance).

The music is certainly very beautiful and its sculpting can be gorgeous and heavenly but at the same time it stays within a very restricted zone of Melancholia: in this world, joy, lightness and happy defiance, in the face of a world that insists on solemn observance of the transience of life, are qualities alien to its denizens. I know we all have to die one day and for many that’s a terrible prospect to be shunned; for others such knowledge kills off all motivation to live fully in the moment; and for still others the awareness suggests we must observe detachment and resist a hunger to satisfy all our appetites but at the risk of denying our emotions, feelings and animal passion; but “Cendre” takes its remit of regarding the world and change with a detached eye rather too seriously to the extent of draining any life out of the music. The result is an album that increasingly becomes stupefying and soporific as it hammers its message over and over with each subsequent track.

Hmm … I probably wasn’t missing all that much after all after floating away from Fennesz and Sakamoto all those years ago.

Contact: Touch Music, Christian Fennesz, Ryuichi Sakamoto

March 16, 2013

“I Am A Surfer / Musician”

Laid Back (EM RECORDS EM1093CD) by Corky Carroll & Friends is the last item in the lovely box sent to us in May 2012 by the Japanese EM Records label, whose choice of unusual, obscure and fascinating reissues is only surpassed by the high quality and attention to detail with which they are produced…in 2008 we took in a scad of excellent Surf Music reissues from this label, all of them superb-i-mundo, having grown into firm favourites for this ho-dad over the years…it was the first we’d heard of The Farm, Peter Finch, Tully, Tamam Shud and the Tim Gaze Band, and these oddities were a rich mix of home-recorded surf music and soundtracks to rarely-seen surf movies, with sleeve notes giving many glimpses into this rarefied hothouse culture…with the reissue of Corky Carroll’s Laid Back, another piece of this odd sand-encrusted jigsaw is now in our fingers. For starters, this 1971 album was produced by Dennis Dragon, the main man behind The Farm, and like Carroll himself a genuine pro surfer first and foremost who had turned to musical endeavours…all the performers on the record were bona fide surfers too, and the record was put together as a sort of road-trip with mobile studio, dropping in on these coast-dwelling sports types at their homes and recording them al fresco, au naturel…a garage surf record…a field recording, in places, if you count the gentle birdsong in background…if surf music by surfers was a form of indigenous folk music, then Dennis Dragon was acting as an unofficial Peter Kennedy or Alan Lomax type…

Of course the record itself is not like The Farm at all, nor is it surf music in the mode of Dick Dale’s razor-edged axe solos or lush Beach Boys harmonies, as Corky himself points out in his plain-spoken sleeve notes (the complete absence of any hi-falutin self-serving nonsense on this whole record is a breath of fresh air). It’s mostly acoustic guitar music played by enthused amateurs, an album which you wouldn’t mind filing one or two inches away from your Fahey and Kottke LPs. Raymond Patterson is a Hawaiian guitarist, and his exquisite ‘Maui Chimes’ would make a grown man cry. Al Oakie is a blues player who also sings without a trace of caustic anger or bitterness and blows his harmonica in melodic ways. David Lyons has a strong and elaborate style of finger-picking that will intrigue followers of Basho. Liane Hirschl warbles in solemn tones like a fourth-division version of Joan Baez; she may not have the protest elements or been loved by the media, but she scores more field goals with her plain manner. Hana is a four-piece band whose splendid ‘Hanalei’ even has the sound of the surf crashing waves recorded in the background as they perform a perhaps surprisingly ultra-mellow piece of cocktail lounge music on two guitars, bass and piano, one you could comfortably use to sip your evening pineapple juice laced with hot lava. Their ‘Ain’t Nothin’ (In the World)’ is also a chord-heavy sweet smoothster, an incarnation of milk-white non-soulful soul boys The Alessi Brothers a few years before ‘Oh Lori’ was a hit.

Carroll himself only appears on the album quite briefly as it turns out, once as part of a combo on ‘Waikiki Shuffle’ and on two short solo bursts, but his sturdy acoustic guitar style is a resonating delight. ‘Sparkles’ last but a minute, was used for a movie called Five Summer Stories, and is sixty seconds of nostalgic warmth; ‘A Walk On Hot Sand’ is another unaffected and moving melody. Carroll would go on to make about 20 albums in the next forty years, but this is his first and represents his all-acoustic phase. Maybe he was playing Jerry Garcia in reverse. It also represents virtually nothing to do with surfing culture per se as far as I can tell; virtually none of the track titles refer to shooting the curl or hanging ten, and instead seem to celebrate the joys of a solitary and simple beach-side lifestyle with lots of sunshine and fresh air. A fulfilling life one suspects, and one that is also of course incredibly relaxed, hence the title. In all a very pleasing if non-essential item, and what I will keep it for is its lack of pretensions and refreshing aural honesty. Interesting fact: Corky Carroll was approached by The Beach Boys in the 1960s and invited to appear in a pop promo movie for them, also to accompany them on a tour just so they could say they had an actual surfer in the famously non-surfing (except for Dennis, a little) surf band. Carroll declined the offer because he was so “into” his professional career as a surfer at the time. Now there’s integrity for you!

February 28, 2013

Go Back to the Sirius: voyage into multi-dimensional psychedelic realms

3841355101-1 — “A traffic jam of space-ships quickly develops…”

VagusNerve, Go Back to the Sirius, Utech Records, URCD073 (2012)

Are they serious? No way would you want to return to the “serious” world of reality after travelling to Sirius with these space travellers. VagusNerve is a Chinese-based duo of guitarist Li Jianhong and laptopper Vavabond and this is their second release for Utech Records. Initially this seems like just another very long and trippy psychedelic voyage into the deep inner space in our heads until the musicians turn on the full radioactive force of blaring guitar feedback and electronic drones, dolphin whistles, low-end buzz and ghostly phantom voices. In the background, coelenterate UFOs float, land on planets, arise and hover in the atmosphere, their fragile tendril-like tentacles wafting behind them. Barking seal voices reverberate in the black clouds and extended guitar drones reach out in all directions from an unseen singularity. A traffic jam of space-ships quickly develops: perpetual motion engines hum furiously, anti-matter drives are on the verge of exploding/imploding, thrumming vibrations and rapidly spinning energy vortices howl and wobble on the edge of chaos and diffusion through all the galaxies.

That was “The Memory of Light” alone and second track “The Exiled Life” is a bit more subdued but no less disorienting in its swerving highs and lows. Vocals are much less blurry and more forward in the track but still very watery and distorted as though Li was speaking to us from a multi-dimensional plane and our particular inadequate space-time continuum was cramming all the different dimensions into its own crude tunnel. This can still be a noisy piece but it appears less exuberant and more restrained in character.

However it’s the third and final track “Go Back to the Sirius” which is as hard-edged, penetrating and searingly hot as it is deliriously expansive and cosmic in scope and ambition. Laser death rays of attack guitar pass through all defences and scan all the cells in living organisms while faint background droning probes and collects fragments of DNA for future experimentation. Eerie and sinister alien communications pop in and out, sinuous effects flutter into view before disappearing quickly into the ether, and faint phantasms bark and whine while Li’s increasingly stuttering guitar drones command all our attention with their insistent howls and yelps. Eventually this work passes to another plane of existence and calms down considerably yet retains a hysterical edge.

This is a wondrous work if heard loudly late at night when the mind is relaxed and submerging into semi-conscious mode; at other times, the music can sometimes seem monotonous and single-minded, even cantankerous in its insistence on commanding your full attention. I have a sense that “Go Back to the Sirius” might win cult status for this act in years to come, not so much for the music but for its ambition and vision, not to mention the duo pushing their instruments and imagination to the utmost.

Contact: Utech 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

December 31, 2012

Loop systems and complex overtones

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

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

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

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

See Mikrophonie I, from 1964. ↩

December 30, 2012

Stealth in the Forest

Sam Pettigrew is a pro-active musician, performer, organiser and instigator in Sydney. Earlier this month we noted an item on his new micro label It’ll Be Awesome, and now we have a copy of his solo release Domestic Smear (AVANT WHATEVER 008). Extremely minimal deep-vibro music produced using his main instrument, the double bass, propped up and distributed by means of additional vibration units, pieces of metal and plastic, and an iPod. Three tracks of intense non-musical humming across 40 minutes are the result. Pettigrew might be mistaken for one of the Toshimaru Nakamura (with whom he has performed) school of imitators, but he is not quite as purely process-driven, allowing assorted minimal interventions to vary the tones, textures and pitches of his deeply-resonating burrs and buzzes. These events may happen and unfold quite slowly, but I suppose it’s all in the name of aiding concentration. Pettigrew is also using this release as an opportunity to ask searching questions about “stereotypical roles”, including gender issues, in the relationships between performer and audience. From 3 April 2012.

Just yesterday we were listening to a dark ambient record by Lull and Beta Cloud themed on the subject of insomnia. Today we have a vaguely related item on the same label from Sleep Research Facility, who is Kevin Doherty of Glasgow, and since about 2001 has been producing ambient drone records which are indeed intended to send the listener into the arms of Morpheus. He achieves this through assembling multiple layers of quiet and unobtrusive sound, deliberately avoiding anything that might resemble a pulsebeat or a sound that could disturb the Reckless Sleeper. Stealth (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR159CD) however has a rather sinister subtext, as it’s themed around the creator’s investigations of an American stealth bomber, using field recordings fetched from an aircraft hangar at a US Air Force base in the UK. These source recordings were provided for the project by Si_COMM, who is Barry Nichols of ECM323, and was interviewed in issue #6 of TSP. So far these themes take us back to a time in the mid-1990s when Disinformation, Scanner, John Duncan, S.E.T.I. and others were researching the potential of the military-industrial complex as a sound-production source, and allowing a certain Cold War paranoia to creep into their dark ambient drones. This Stealth record may broadly fit into such a profile, and although we can occasionally hear the crackle of radio static and secret messages buried deep in its stratified layers, the aesthetic keynote is mostly one of mysterious and inexplicable beauty. Where Disinformation liked to present us with aural data in the raw form, Sleep Research Facility’s technique is one of burnishing and reworking in the studio, mixing, editing, sampling and resampling, and extending certain elements by severe time-stretching. For those of you who would like to hear the original source material, Si-COMM’s unadulterated tapes are provided as a second disc in this release. Given the current climate of apprehension about domestic surveillance drones, this release is certainly timely. From 23 April 2012.

La Vie Dans Les Bois (HERBAL INTERNATIONAL CONCRETE DISC 1201) is a document of a musical performance recorded in the open air near a castle in France. The players were Pascal Bathus and Emmanuel Petit with their electric guitars, Lionel Marchetti credited with “electricity”, and Yôko Higashi who performed a butoh dance during their music performance. Higashi has appeared on many records with Lionel Marchetti, but I didn’t know she was also an exponent of this post-war avant-garde Japanese dance artform which involves very slow movements and is, according to many of its practitioners, very elusive when it comes to definitions and meanings. Readers who enjoy improvised music may recall that Derek Bailey released a 1996 album Music and Dance, where he performed his guitar improvisations alongside Min Tanaka, a very prominent butoh dancer. Very coincidentally, Tanaka is the developer of a form of butoh he calls “Body Weather”, of which Sam Pettigrew above is also a subscriber. This isn’t to imply any relations between this CD and Pettigrew’s music, but La Vie Dans Les Bois is a compellingly mysterious piece of delicate interplay where for 50% of the time the guitars are barely recognisable as such, and all the performers only make an utterance when the occasion demands it. The recording also blends nicely with the distant sound of birdsong in the air. As with the Derek Bailey record, you may not be able to “hear” the sound of the dancer participating on the record, but Higashi’s work is still perceptible somehow, as it were appearing in the interstices of the music, shaping its contours. The creators clearly felt moved enough to include a landscape painting by Dominique Lechec as part of the package, and a few lines from a poem. From 24 April 2012.