Tagged: guitar

March 6, 2014

Quiet Village

Mike Cooper
White Shadows In The South Seas
AUSTRALIA ROOM 40 RM454 CD (2013)

Research wise – I’ll readily admit to falling ass over tip, when it comes to the career of a certain Mike Cooper. I thought that it was pretty damn unlikely that the highly regarded English avant guitarist/composer and Recedent could be one and the same guy who was behind a slew of very fine prog blues elpees back in the late sixties/early-to-mid seventies like the fabulously named Trout Steel (Dawn Records) and Life and Death in Paradise on the Fresh Air imprint. That would entail a really radical change of direction over some time admittedly… but one and the same person it surely is… mea maxima culpa and curse these blindspots!!

With a twenty-year love of all things south seas-related, Mike has gradually honed a particularly singular technique in merging experimental string bending styles/tonalities with the tiki bar ambience/birdcall-populated soundstage of lounge exotica. Souvenirs of a plastic Hawaii peopled by the likes of Arthur Lyman, duplicious first lieutenant to one of the genre’s originators: Martin Denny (read Incredibly Strange Music, Volume One for the whole story…).

White Shadows in the South Seas (c.d.) comes as a rather belated successor to the Rayon Hula 10 inch vinyl set and for about a third of the journey (by outrigger naturally), it’s all plain sailing with “Dr. Derelict” and the stellar lap steel figures of “Night Flower Tapu” easily functioning as moderne travelogue soundtracks. But further on, things get incrementally darker, with snaking tendrils and sundry foliage proving too much for the sun’s rays. Those early suggestions of Jon Hassel’s ‘Fourth World’ series and Pyrolator’s sampler-based “Wunderland” have clearly faded away and instead cuts like “Lung Collapse” and the brassy reverberations of “Tapu Lifted” (irrespective of mother nature-derived loopery) inch closer to the more foreboding area of the industrial tone poem. It’s like being so caught up in the lushness of these idyllic surroundings has made the intrepid voyagers completely oblivious to the leeches syphoning precious fluids from their flesh. Very rarely has anything from the contempo exotica subgenre flagged up this number of ‘Danger in Paradise!’ warnings.

March 2, 2014

Action Vision

You may recall we reviewed the lovely music of Neil Luck in October 2012, the London composer who gave us Last Wane Days, a truly unique operetta baroque-pop chamber piece – a real surprise for many a powdered wig. He also appeared with one cut on the GoldDust compilation for Slightly Off Kilter records. Luck it was who sent us Songs From Badly-Lit Rooms (SQUIB-BOX NO NUMBER), received here 13 March 2013, and another uniquely somehow very English piece of wailery and squealation it doe bee. As you can tell I am already lapsing into a Jacobean-era style of writing and speaking, a transformation I considereth most appte when hearing these sodden wood-panelled pieces of musicke, as I sitte beside the fire and peepe dartingly out of a small latch window. These airres fitte for the eares of our right royalle King were played by Tom Jackson the clarinettist, with the viola player Benedict Taylor ever by his side. Both are improvisers and performers well respected about the towne, and indeed have likewise found success beyond the seas. For many pieces the players doe buzz and humme at a frantic rate, as though pursued by two tigers from Oriental parts, or else find themselves besette with unwanted small insects crawling about in their nether garments. My advice would be to wear an iron codpiece and so preserve themselves from The Enemy. Also of interest are the different timbres and acoustic qualities, which vary from track to track; perhaps the titles indeed reflect the real-world locations for their performances. If so, most sensitive to the space of a chamber they have proven themselves. No man can listen and remain unmoved at such delicious sounds; barking, crying, hooting and issuing many a plaintive mew, both raising dreadfull clamours to the skies. The duo perform roped together like two sailors on board a shipload of tobacco, and communicate by unseen means that inform their every thought and move. In fine, most high recommendation for this moving and delightful recording. Now I must needs return to gutting my fish from Cheapside market, ere I expire from hunger.

From 11 March 2013 we received a glorious eccentric and fiery recording of avant-rock solo antics by GR (i.e. Gregory Raimo from France). What an axeman he’s proving himself on these solid high-volume grooves. I’d like to meet his tailor. His A Reverse Age (MEXICAN SUMMER MEX140) is a glorious blast of psychedelic rockabilly noise, the musical fabric cut to shreds by his nasal poison vocalising which mows down eight beds of precious flowers and causes entire trees to wither and die with just one billow from Raimo’s diabolical breath. With his ‘Hymn to Pan’ and his ‘The Primitive Hoodoo’ he owns himself a willing convert to the anti-religion of The Cramps, while his thudding drumming style and raw recording approach fuel the excitement to boiling pitch. The highlight though is his rich and juicy guitar style, often-times heavily psychedelic and reminiscent of Gary Ramon of Modern Art / Sun Dial (or the glorious obscurity Jesse Harper). Fans of Alan Vega and The Fall from circa 1980-1981 should devour this flaming nugget at tremendous speed, using crocodile jaws to chew the slabs of meat. Excessive and flailing adjectives abound on the press release, describing this wild trip as an “argument between myth and reality”, but such unhinged language and frothing praise is quite justifiable in the face of this rockin’ gemuloid.

Here’s the scrapey improviser Tim Olive with another release on the 845 Audio label sent to us from Kobe in Japan on 21 March 2013. He was carrying a metal pail full of old rusty bolts at the time. On Various Histories (845 AUDIO 845-2) he teams up with Katsura Mouri, a fabulously talented sound artist who works with turntables which are doctored with “prepared records”, percussive objects and pieces of metal. She’s been a member of BusRatch, DOOG, and herviviennestrap, but also performs solo and in 2009 she toured with other contemporary turntable manipulators eRikm, Martin Tetreault and Ignaz Schick; and has assembled a cunning multiple turntable set-up, like Philip Jeck used. This is the first I ever heard of Mouri, but I love her delicate approach; there’s none of the heavy-handedness, violence or sarcasm one sometimes finds with your basic turntabling types – present company excepted, of course – who seem intent on smashing the device, breaking records, or trying to single-handedly destroy the history of recorded music through the symbolic annihilation of this culturally-loaded (as they would see it) machine. Instead she works most sympathetically here with Tim, who plays pieces of metal amplified with guitar pickups, to create five intense pieces of heavily abstracted grey rumbly sound, rich with plenty of low bass grumbles and growls, most of the music hovering gracefully on the twilight zone where it might erupt into vicious anti-social table noise at the turn of a feathered cable. However, it never actually does that, and instead suffuses all emotions into this slowly-bubbling green soup of seething restraint. One listen to this shimmery-abraso beauty and I’m head over heels with Katsura Mouri’s playing style, now tempted to seek out her 2000 and 2002 BusRatch records for PARA discs.

February 16, 2014

One Harp, One Guitar

The Harp of the New Cambria

Yeah…Rock! Rhodri Davies finally discovers the power of heavy metal! For years this Welsh genius (improviser, composer, innovator) was known for producing extremely quiet and minimal music with his harp, often in the company of other minimal improvisers, although admittedly he was recently drawn to use of the ebow as a process whereby he could extend the resonating strings into a powerful, humming, ultra-long drone. As is well known we love his work here and some of his recent records (e.g. 2010′s Carliol with John Butcher) have been exemplary in terms of their stripped-down astringency, their frightening sense of purpose, their deep-frozen “core of ice” affect such that to listen was like being stabbed in the head with an icicle. Now on Wound Response (ALT.VINYL av038) he’s embracing amplification and distortion, and with these groovy cuts he’s turning himself into a Welsh avant-garde version of Jimmy Page or Leslie West, riffing away in gorgeous circular patterns with a strong sense of simple melodic drive, anchoring down his quicksilver inventions with a solid root note, and generally updating the blues / rock mode in his own shimmering image of palpitating atonal holydom. In fine this is the sort of harp record that Keiji Haino probably wishes he could have made, during that creative purple patch when he figured he was tough enough to play any instrument known to man and create a hideous racket on it, including the hurdy-gurdy which he memorably transformed into a shrieking wheezy monster of steel and wood. Now Haino must surrender his laurel wreath to a new victor.

Davies is getting this fab new sound from use of transducers, contact mics, a volume pedal, an overdrive unit and two amplifiers, the sort of setup that produced those side-long versions of ‘Dazed and Confused’ (although in fact a theremin was also used I believe). The volume pedal in particular is one of my personal favourite devices and isn’t used enough in my view, ever since Derek Bailey trod his well-brogued foot on one of them during his brief but memorable “electric” phase ¹. Mostly of course the quality of the music here is produced not by means of electronic assistance, but through the sheer dazzling brilliance of Rhodri’s attack. Man, you could use these fingers to mow an entire field of wheat – he’s his own combine harvester! Speed and coruscating energy are the order of the day, at times making music that resembles the hammered dulcimer or autoharp of an acid-fried folk musician, perhaps named Barney Pembleton, on the most gloriously impossible folk-rock record that never existed and was in fact purposely suppressed by Elektra, Island and Transatlantic working in an unholy triumvirate of conspiracy to conceal dangerously good music from the crowd. Now through the gift of channelling the spirit of Barney Pembleton, Rhodri Davies has succeeded in unleashing that monster from the vaults. Lovely screenprinted card presentation on this beast, with drawings by the organist / composer Jean-Luc Guionnet, a Phil Begg recording, and title borrowed from the musician’s personal bookshelf of great literature. And it’s pressed in clear vinyl, which ought to be the clincher. From 26 October 2012, and a total goodie.

The Persian Version

Last heard from Yek Koo with her single Alone Together, now here she is with an entire album recorded for the same label called Love Song For The Dead C (EMERALD COCOON EC009). Yek Koo is Helga Fassonaki from Metal Rouge, working solo with guitar, percussion devices and her voice for this uncanny limited-edition vinyl item, released at the same time as her one-person show at the Human Resources gallery in LA. The order of the day on this highly discursive and ghostified dron-gronathon is a fairly skeletal approach to music-making, selecting bare twigs or bent wire sticks, remnants and rags of material and assembling them with the intuitive flair of a collage artist or maker of bricolage. These tunes unfold in real time, coming to life on the gallery wall rather than enduring a half-life as tracks etched into dead vinyl. There’s a gloriously delirious tone which the press notes describe as “drunkenly stumbling”, to account for the free-swimming odd mismatches of sound-generation here. The very body of each tune appears fragile, so brittle that it might shatter at any second, or so nebulous that you could disperse the entire album by turning on the fan. Yet Yek Koo’s music keeps on going, and the mysterious drug-like logic of her music is as potent as a spell from Circe burning evil incense blocks in her copper bowl.

Everything is suggestive of alienation and distance – distorted, weirdly-echoed effects, beautifully badly-played electric guitar to produce unearthly tones, an out-of-tune waily voice drifting in from a secret chamber – yet in the final analysis, it’s the most honest and intimate music you could hope for. It’s as though Fassonaki has found a completely instinctive way to outwit the subtleties of our own mind games and ego tricks, and bypass normal channels of communication to arrive at a very direct statement delivered from the heart. The label exhibits a certain pride in the “tradition of the great outsider sides of the early 90s”. Although “outsider” is becoming a commonplace term these days, the point is well made, and even the cover art with its simple pastedown wraparound is trying to forge a link with the 1990s “tradition”, if indeed there is one, when great underground music was packaged in master bags with paste-on covers (mainly for economic reasons) and released in near-secrecy. Of course this attentuated, formless wailing sound she makes isn’t going to appeal to everyone, but I personally am completely enchanted with this LP and it’s highly worthy of your attention. Received 22nd May 2012.

Best heard on the classic LP Domestic and Public Pieces. Let me know if you ever find a copy. ↩

February 15, 2014

People in the Ceiling

A delightful item is Tales Of The Expected (MOMENTAL RECORDS MR CD1), an assemblage concocted with joyful glee and meticulous care by the composer Thierry Vaudor. This Canadian-born composer comes to us from a musicological background, and after his studies in jazz composition at Montreal he played his bass in local jazz and rock bands before picking up the virtual editing knife under the guise of Total Normal. All the cuts on this album he classifies under the “acousmatic” term, which is what composers say when they intend the music to be used exclusively for playback over speakers. It’s all done by building layers of sampling and editing, a task over which Vaudor labours with love and dedication, and you might hear anything up to 150 separate instruments on a single track. Some of them are quite brief in duration, but the listener certainly won’t feel short-changed after digesting each intense and chunky spread of music which smears like goose liver pate over hot buttered toast. I want to emphasise that Vaudor is not one of those sampling types who wallows in irony, post-modernism, sarcasm or all the other tricks perpetrated by some dozy samplerdelic types following in the wake of John Oswald, and we are not invited to play “spot the source” nor break into a knowing smirk at each witty juxtaposition. Instead, Vaudor works entirely with his ears; he chooses the “intrinsic qualities” of a “found sound”, not for what he calls its “anecdotal or referential value”. In this way he delivers quietly impossible music: brilliant melodic poppy-jazzy rhythms sprinkled with elements of easy listening, techno-lite beats, souled-up vocals, and multiple layers of extremely odd confections of constructed sound. Lots of good humour in these seamlessly-assembled bright tunes, and intellectually satisfying too. From 1st February 2013.

Late notice for the Untitled (SMERALDINA-RIMA S-R-015) album by Spirit Of The Positive Wind, a lumpy clunkeroo of rugged performo-noise from four Americans which was released in October 2011, received here in April 2012, and is only now surfacing to the rim of the cauldron. On this vinyl item we’ve got members of Mouthus Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson (who also did the cover painting), plus Pete Nolan of Magik Markers and Karl Bauer from Axolotl. I’ve enjoyed the crazy noise music of all of these underground Yanks, although it’s been impossible to keep up with all of their prodigious output, and to this day I still feel unable to assess the value of what they’ve achieved over the last ten years or so. Releases like this one, while extremely enjoyable, aren’t helping me make up my mind. Their combined work has been collaged together into two suites of about 20 minutes apiece, and the process has involved a fair amount of smearing and rendering-down, at times producing extremely bizarre and unfamiliar sounds, and at other times creating a rather wearisome and unnatural bubbling drone effect. I certainly admire whatever rough-hewn techniques were employed to achieve these strange-tasting effects and exotic aural moments, but somewhere the force of the original performances has been drained away. There may be about five or ten good minutes in amongst this meandery mudbath full of purple eels and gulping carps, but there doesn’t seem to be any convenient way to extract these nuggets.

La Géographie Sans Regret (SPECTROPOL RECORDS SpecT 15) is a fairly uncanny record, one of those wild collaborative affairs that make you wonder in amazement at the results. The young Brazilian guitarist George Christian clashes his steely howler-mode strings with the Japanese act Mehata Sentimental Legend, who is the visual artist and experimenter Mehata Hiroshi and one who describes their work as “ritual futurism”. It’s a shocking listen; within seconds you’re presented with far too much musical information to digest, as though watching a cine film with double exposures, or even triple exposures. This impression persists for the first two tracks and, apart from a lull into a slightly quieter passage on track 3, doesn’t get much easier after that point; indeed it’s these very raw and discordant qualities that make the work live and breathe for me, and keep it fresh and vital for each new spin. For just about every second of listening, you truly feel like this is a matter of life or death, that something very serious is at stake. Both musicians recorded their parts at their respective homelands, separated by significant distances, and I wonder if the totality was assembled after the fact from disparate parts, a method that is proven to work well, and if that’s what they did it adds considerably to the deliciously jarring experience of the album. Plus there’s the claustrophobic and eccentric mix, which piles all the sounds together as signs of equal value, and obliges the listener to sort it all out in the head. Both of them sing or add voice parts, but as the lyrics are printed in Portuguese I assume that’s George’s voice that dominates on such juddering haunters as ‘Abismo de Cravos’; he admits he is attempting to “test the limits of his singing voice”, and his notes also disclose the very personal exploratory nature of this work, a reconciliation of his own musical history with his interest in contemporary art. As to Mehata Hiroshi, this person is a cryptical mystic type, uttering compelling phrases such as ‘Stem and root emits life to two sides of the same coin’ and ‘Soul, such as magma deep underground that is wriggling’. Right on! The total effect of this slow-raging hailstorm of shrill and metallic sound swirling together with these plaintive howly vocals is palpable, producing a coppery taste in the mouth and inducing an apocalyptic headache of the soul. Not an easy listen and few will work their way past its forbidding surface, but once you’re deep within this tunnel / maelstrom of music you’ll find it hard to slip loose from its intestinal bonds. Besides the wild voices, you should find the guitar playing of George Christian is truly remarkable (when it occasionally climbs its way to the surface of the cluttered mix, that is) and it’s not far-fetched to predict that one day soon he’ll be held in as high esteem as Haino, Akiyama, or Li Jianhong. From 5th March 2013, and highly recommended.

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 5, 2014

Space, No Oddity

Tetuzi Akiyama / Jeff Gburek
respect
SPECTROPOL RECORDS SpecT 18 CD (2012)

Precision and restraint are the watchwords for this beguiling release, which teams Japanese guitar guru Tetuzi Akiyama with Polish-American improviser Jeff Gburek for a quartet of long, contemplative duets recorded in 2010 and inspired – perhaps counterintuitively, given the chilly cover art of the CD – by the empty deserts of New Mexico.

Both players are veterans of these types of meetings, and this experience is what makes the record so enjoyable. There’s no showing off or attempting to dominate. Instead collaboration and the exchange of ideas predominate.

Gorgeous and hypnotic, the four pieces have an arresting sense of space and stillness, emphasised by the way in which the two players’ contributions weave and mesh together together, resulting gauzy films of abstract sound. The six and a half minutes of “Respect 4” are a fine example, Akiyama’s broken chords hanging luminously in the air like wire wool as Gburek subtly brings in a whining, fuzzy drone of feedback that swoops around and then enfolds them, as if wrapping them in a warm blanket.

Akiyama focuses exclusively on acoustic guitar throughout, playing with a glacial stillness that demonstrates his expertise in improvising groups small and large. Since forging his improvisational chops in the Madhar group in the late 80’s, he ran a monthly improv session with no-input mixing board maestro Toshimaru Nakamura in the 90s, has played in a duo with Hervé Boghossian since 2006, all the while amassing a comprehensive discography of solo, duo and larger group recordings with all manner of players.

His finesse is demonstrated perfectly in “Respect 3”. On this piece – which, perhaps appropriately my CD player seems to think is the first track on the album – we get a full 30 seconds of silence before Akiyama starts, plucking pinched harmonics followed by a glisteningly melodic line that appears on the horizon, like an iceberg in a freezing sea.

Throughout this fine, meditative record, every note, chord or harmonic Akiyama plays is perfectly placed – not only in relation to the other notes he plays, but also to the space and silence surrounding him. Perhaps this is why the album’s release notes talk about its ‘post-Feldman’ quality…

Gburek, in comparison, brings everything but the kitchen sink, mobilising slide, acoustic and prepared guitar and a raft of unidentified electronics to play with. He’s a well-regarded musician and composer in his own right, who has worked with Keith Rowe, Tom Carter from Charalambides, Eddie Prevost and many other experimentalists.

He dips into his bag of tricks sparingly, though, offsetting his partner’s contributions to great effect. The insistent, Morse-code like tones at the start of “Respect 4” ,for example, anchor Akiyama’s frail guitar melodies perfectly. Midway through “Respect 2”, he plays a high, keening melody, possibly on prepared guitar, making a sound somewhere between a Theremin and pedal steel guitar that curls around the space in a peculiarly feline way. Elsewhere, low rumbles, creaks and chimes bring ghostly touches of colour and texture.

In fact, the more I listen to this album, the more I’m convinced that Gburek brings a fantastically unconventional structure to these pieces. His interventions often blindside the listener, reconfiguring a track in unexpected ways. One-and-half minutes into the pristine quietude of “Respect 2”, a burst of white noise erupts, shattering the calm, followed by a clamour of recorded voices, in French and Polish. It’s as if someone has walked into the recording studio and switched on the radio. It’s weird, but it works.

Then, in “Respect 4”, following a particularly limpid section of guitar and electronics, Gburek unexpectedly summons up a sinister, bruised wave of sound which obliterates everything else. It then dissipates as quickly as it appeared, leaving Akiyama to pluck enigmatic droplets of guitar that shine in the now-empty space.
It might be easy, given all of this stillness and restraint, to fall back on some hackneyed guff about the intrinsically calm and meditative nature of Japanese art. To be sure, this album does have a scent of the Onkyokei about it (although Akiyama is quite capable of playing loud and visceral too, as anyone who heard his playing on 2012’s Satanic Abandoned Rock & Roll Society record, Bloody Imagination will testify.

But more importantly this is a collaboration, not a solo record, one which takes its cue from the wide open, empty sky of the southwest USA, not the Off Site venue in Tokyo. Its distinctive character comes from the inspiration of this landscape, moulded and formed by both Akiyama’s Japanese and Gburek’s Polish-American sensibilities.

In fact this record actually recalls some of Manfred Eicher’s poised productions for ECM. Perhaps this is a more adventurous, abstract and dissonant ECM record than that label is accustomed to, true. And maybe the icy European landscape on the CD case recalls ECM’s distinctive aesthetic more than I should allow it to. But still, there’s a shared sense of the possibilities of space and the calm intimacy of the recording that unites the Munich-based label and this mesmeric album.

Bandcamp page

January 27, 2014

The Bloody Hammer

Satanic Abandoned Rock & Roll Society – pretty powerful name for a band eh readers! It’s up there with the Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, although that Fuji bunch can’t quite live up to that name, bluster as they may with their powerful slow drones and collective long hair. Us black-hearted types have more confidence in a name like Satanic Abandoned Rock & Roll Society, although to their discredit they don’t reproduce it in full on the front cover, instead opting for an obscure acronym which indicates the typographical designer for this release is preening his own sense of cleverness instead of (to my mind) representing the music properly. Mater of fact this whole album needs to be redesigned from the ground up, starting with strong shades of primary red and black instead of these sickly grey and maroon hues. And we need at least one pentagram or other magical symbol on the cover instead of these vague rotating hexagons. Come to think of it, these visual ideas of mine are pretty trite and have already been done to death by a million no-hoper Heavy Metal bands. No wonder I never get any LP design work! My idea of a record cover for The Cramps would be a skull wearing a top hat and framed by two dice…

However spin the disc of Bloody Imagination (MIKROTON RECORDINGS mikroton cd 12) and we’re certainly not disappointed by the dense and thuddy drone-o feedback noise produced by four mighty “shoguns” of Japanese music, namely Tetuzi Akiyama, Naoaki Miyamoto, Utah Kawasaki and Atsuhiro Ito. Any listening infantryman worth their salt knows the name of Akiyama, the guitarist who dresses like a 1970s New York street dude and plays in numerous rock and improv inflected styles, and might as well carry his electric guitar in a machine gun case. Utah’s name first reached my ears when Otomo Yoshihide was getting all excited about this new “Onkyo” style in the 1990s and reported that Kawasaki played a broken synth. How better to align oneself with those two Swiss noise pioneers Voice Crack than to use malfunctioning equipment. Atsuhiro Ito is a member of Intonarumori Orchestra and Optrum. If you ever Google for a picture of this fellow you’ll notice that he’s never in public without his hat (like the guitar player Taku Sugimoto, another credited with developing the slow and near-silent performing style that was later dubbed “onkyo”), and also that he appears to be gifted in playing the fluorescent lighting tube (actually it’s his “optron” – see below). Now I want to revisit his contributions to the Improvised Music From Japan box set from 2001. Lastly we have the second guitarist Naoaki Miyamoto whose name is new to me but whose career also dates from this millennial “tabula rasa” point of 2000-2001 when the music was taken for a long walk in the snowdrifts around Mount Aino, and lost its memory.

The groovy thing about this 52-minute mo-fo (continuous playing, no edits) is that the musicians characterise their work primarily in terms of the frequencies they generate – e.g., Tetuzi dominates the high frequencies, Atsuhiro occupies the lower depths. Then there’s the instrumentation itself, the “optron” played by Ito ¹ and Tetuzi’s resonator (all-steel body) guitar played with a samurai sword, to get that doubled-up effect of metal on metal. This is not “minimal” music as regards the volume or the presence, which is full-on and extremely “solid”, producing a goodly chunk of impenetrable smoke in the listening parlour. But it is also extremely disciplined, the four musicians locking into a tight unit and keeping the intensity on an even keel, without wavering for a second. What great sailors they would make, pilots of an old-fashioned tea-clipper. There are no excessive gestures or unnecessary sounds, and the musical bundle is as watertight as a full-body protective suit made of epoxy resin. As far as Rock & Roll Societies go, this is one “smart set” where you’ll be glad you signed the membership papers and paid your monthly dues. As far as “satanic” goes, this record may not exhibit the same brand of theatrical horror that we get from Sunn O))) or Black Metal records, but it is still extremely – erm – affecting, both for the bodily and mental cavities. If we regard a satanic rite as something which requires intense concentration and never admits the possibility of a mistake in the procedure ², then this record is a masterclass in the “dark arts”. Would ya believe this uncanny production, composed and produced by Tetuzi Akiyama, been boiling in the vaults since 2004? What hath befallen the world in the eight year interval leading up to its release?

One pundit on YouTube has dubbed it “Merzlight” ↩
This line of thought isn’t too far-fetched if you’re of the school of thought that ascribes the “Black Mass” to the perverted invention of late 19th-century decadents, who simply created an intellectual inversion of the Catholic liturgy. ↩

January 21, 2014

Frozen Lakes

Every so often we get musicians who decide they must get back to first principles and start asking fundamental questions about what their chosen instruments actually “do”; this can involve a radical deconstruction of said instrument, or even of the style in which it is played. Some of this line of thought may have fed into the construction of kopfüberwelle (ABSINTH RECORDS 024), where the players Chris Abrahams and Sabine Vogel ask each other some pretty pointed questions about the flute and the organ. They tend to ask these questions in musical form, and the enactments of these conceptual ideas are what we hear on the record, a fairly minimal and often beautiful set of pieces recorded in 2010 at a church in Zepernick. The study they make involves a comparison of the similarities and differences between the two, so we are treated to a fairly commonplace list of observations about air flowing through pipes and the respective limitations of the instruments. I suppose this could be fairly interesting, except I think it’s fair to say that old-fashioned classical composers have been aware of such characteristics for hundreds of years, and have reflected this understanding in their notated dynamics, the choice of instruments when scoring for the orchestra, etc. Where would we be without avant-garde musicians rediscovering the obvious for us? This gripe aside, the music here is enjoyable enough. Their most original discovery in this experiment is that the flute player is free to move up and down the performance hall, while the organist is not. This leads to some unusual acoustic sonorities as Sabine Vogel’s flute tone bounces off the wall of the church, or otherwise changes according to where he’s positioned himself. These process-based rules sometimes tend to dominate the work, becoming the primary reason for the performance, but the duo still arrive at some gorgeous sonorities, and do achieve the hoped-for blendings where you cannot tell one instrument from the other. Amidst all the poised and mannered droning, the track ‘Floating Head Over’ stands out for its slightly uncanny moaning voice, which I assume is Chris Abrahams generating a few head tones through his nose or mouth. If he’s doing so while also playing the flute, it’s a notable feat. (11/12/2012).

Nice blending of synthetic and acoustic tones on The Contaminist (INTANGIBLE CAT CAT 16), assembled by Homogenized Terrestrials (i.e. Phil Klampe). He does it by mixing recordings of synthesizers, percussion, field recordings and the human voice, until everything becomes a thickly wafered agglomeration under his processing tools. Much to his credit, he avoids numerous pitfalls of much ambient music, even when aligning himself with Brian Eno, Fennesz, or Robin Storey (as the press notes have it); he studiously rejects any clichéd or over-familiar sound. The other thing I enjoy is the eccentric structure of each piece; they don’t tend to follow linear compositional rules to do with beginnings, endings, and conventional rise-and-fall dynamics. Instead, Klampe succeeds in delivering genuinely open-ended compositions which float along like free-travelling bubble shapes in the ether, without succumbing to the usual problem faced by contemporary electronic music, that of pointless meandering with no end in view. In this context, his title ‘Gravity Reversed’ seems exceptionally apt. Not a track here outstays their welcome (most last around three or four minutes) and by completion of piece you experience a notable satisfaction and do at least feel like some useful information has been imparted. As can be seen from cover art, he likens himself to a bee collecting pollen. Or maybe the flowers themselves are like the music, and we as listeners must gather what we can, using our proboscis like an ear trumpet and bringing the golden tones back to the listening hive. Sorry about these over-stretched metaphors…From 13 February 2013.

My Dear Killer is the latest in a line of idiosyncratic and unusual musicians on the Italian Boring Machines label, with a solo album The Electric Dragon Of Venus (BM047LP). Like label mate Rella The Woodcutter, this singer-songwriter wields a jet black acoustic guitar which he strums in plangent fashion, his stark and clipped chords ringing out across a metaphysical void. On top of this spare framework, he adds his cryptic lyrics filled with many poignant symbols of alienation, disconnectedness, and melancholy. To make the listening experience even more craggy to your ears, there’s the decidedly odd singing voice; My Dear Killer is so apparently choked up with nameless emotions that he can barely complete a phrase, and the lines judder out of his tremulous throat in a deliciously broken fashion. Even though the lyrics are English, this intense affectation makes the words quite hard to understand. In short, this ghostly update on the acoustic Syd Barrett performs as though the recording studio were a prison cell, a confessional where he can disclose his most intimate thoughts in his inimitable halting fashion. I’m touched to learn that his previous LP – released many years ago in 2006 – was called Clinical Shyness, perhaps a diagnosis of the artist’s borderline personality disorder. To further crystallise the strangeness of this album, there are bouts of electric guitar (often scuzzed up with distortion and feedback) thrown in as occasional non-accompaniments to some of the songs, by which I mean these guitar lines bear no relation whatsoever to the metre, tone or mood of the song, and feel more like unwelcome mental apparitions, storm clouds on the mental horizon of the troubled singer. Then there are snippets of sound effects and field recordings which bookend most of the tracks; the sound of innocent children playing in the street has rarely seemed so forlorn and tragic. My Dear Killer’s sound is very much an acquired taste, but there’s no denying the sincerity of this album, nor the depth of his hurt. From February 2013.

January 12, 2014

Drei Vier, Grenadier

From Carlin How in North Yorkshire we have split CDR Vier Mit Vier (ELM LODGE RECORDS 012a), with four tracks each by Forkeyes and Marcus HP Davis 1. They both decided to give the release a title that fits the “German 70s experimental music” vibe which they happen to have alighted on. Many aspire to imitate the holy grail of kosmische and krautrock these days, which has resulted in a lot of name-checking and bad music in recent years, but in this case we have an exception. The stuff by Forkeyes is actually quite appealing – retro-styled rock music with guitars, bass, drums and keyboards with that rough-hewn rehearsal studio sound, enhanced by very little in the way of processing. Forkeyes plays with some guts and passion and does indeed turn in a creditable emulation of the Neu! template, inflected with a certain amount of no-nonsense Englishness, although without much of the trippiness or psychotic dementia we might have otherwise hoped for. I particularly like his tracks ‘Whaletrash’ and ‘Noy’ for their adherence to these vaguely 1970s stylings, while ‘Wild Wooley War’ attempts to incorporate more modern sequenced elements and disco beats (as I call them), overcrowding the sound somewhat. Even so, full marks for energetic bouncing-about and making music that sounds like fun. Forkeyes is Mike Bryson, who used to be a member of Bogshed – Hebden’s finest, a personal favourite of mine from the mid-1980s and a band who stayed far truer to the spirit of The Magic Band than the much-vaunted Stump. Plus they had a great sense of humour. Bryson’s also a cartoonist (published in Private Eye) and may have supplied the quirky cover art, including the drawing of two ugly giants lifting up the side of a house (or is it a gigantic music centre?)

If Forkeyes is a cocktail of Neu!’s rhythms and the thuggery of Guru Guru mixed with the melodic guitar work of prog giants like Steve Howe, then I don’t know how to characterise Marcus HP Davis 1, a musical jackdaw who has a considerable number of trinkets stowed in his nest. On ‘Slacker bidder overlord’ he’s put all the rock music elements through a mincing machine and stirs them liberally into a swirling casserole, whose rhythms and general lack of centre owes much to Acid House of the 1980s ¹. ‘Rheintum Earbuzz’ time-warps Delia Derbyshire melodies through a slightly bleak wasteland of synth drones and processed guitar stabs. ‘Life in the wrong lane’ is even more of a mish-mash, attempting to reference Kraftwerk’s Autobahn with its flute samples while applying them to rhythm tracks that don’t quite match up; in his brave genre-crossing effort, the composer forgot to include things like ideas, coherence, or a melody. Of the pair, Marcus appears to be more the studio-bound musician, with his layers and mixings, compared to the lively Forkeyes who has an exciting real-time sound in all his recordings, even when he’s playing everything himself by overdubbing. Perhaps not essential, but this is an unusual slice of English underground music, parts of which have attracted notice on Radio 1 and in the pages of The Wire. From 02/11/2012.

I am guessing when I say this. ↩

January 9, 2014

Black Pepper

Sindre Bjerga’s Black Paper Wings (LF RECORDS LF030) is a nice snappy piece of live electro-acoustic performance performed at an art gallery in Leipzig. It’s done with cassette tapes, apparently. Much very acceptable throbbing and fizzing noise is generated, punctuated with loose ghosts of speaking voices wafting around the aerospace, while Bjerga manipulates and moulds everything presumably in real time, never allowing his blue suit to become stained with the lazy torpidity of process droning. Sindre is very much a live performance fellow leaping about the arena like some latterday Harlequin, rather than a lump of dough who sits in the studio gathering dust and congealing into mouldy pancake batter. His personal website abounds with lists of gigs he’s going to do or positive reports from gigs he has done, plus nice remarks about musicians he has met and collaborated with, and free bags of sweeties sent to subscribers (I could be lying about one of these). He also finds time to run the Gold Soundz label which has been home to memorable releases of underground noise and drone. Gotta admit he’s a magician with his tape manipulation here, kind of like a rockin’ version of Aki Onda. It’s nice when the LF label takes a break from primitive computer noise and issues a more soothing and “artistic” piece of work like this one. From 27 Dec 2012.

Still got some catching up to do with the Quiet World label and there is a big bundle of 2013 releases still awaiting our attention. This one by Fazio is from May 2012 and might be sold out at source (50 copies only). The New York musician Mike Fazio has apparently sent various albums of his to Quiet World label boss Ian Holloway, and Holloway liked them so much he decided to release some Fazio music himself. All at once the remote go forth my soul and my seeking, the unknowable becomes known (QUIET WORLD TWENTY EIGHT) is six pieces of quite gentle ambient guitar instrumentals, where any possible harsh edges have been softened through the use of effects pedals, and the notes just blend into a continual textural soup. At first listen the surface sound was a bit too “tasteful” for my ears, but I found it’s worth persevering; Fazio’s playing is actually quite unusual, and he has a fine gift for inventing highly unusual melodies, exploring them in ways that would never have occurred to the average dice-throwing man. Intuitively, he builds structures in his mind and follows them loosely, like ghostly blueprints for music; he’s not just another aimless guitar noodler. I find evidence here of great concentration and intentness, proof that Fazio really gets “into” his music. “Hours of immersive fun”, is Holloway’s personal guarantee. The lengthy title (ditto track titles) also suggests a poetic and literary bent, which is to be encouraged, and hints at Fazio’s metaphysical and spiritual ambitions; he may be aiming to become the Herman Hesse of guitar music, a mantle previously held by Daniel Fichelscher.

Another spooksome droner from Simon Balestrazzi, the Italian supernatural spirit-lover who hopefully dwells in an ornate Gothic mansion near Casamari Abbey, and wears a dark serge suit while cultivating his window boxes full of deadly nightshade and hellebore. La Montaña Sagrada (SANTOS PRODUCTIONS SNTSR11) of course translates as “holy mountain”, likely confirming Balestrazzi, whose name translates as “bellow of a whale”, as another of the cult of fans who worship at the temple of film-maker Jodorowsky while contemplating their own personal rites of unspeakable and forbidden acts. Even the first track is called ‘Opening Ritual’, and there are mysterious references to perfume, blood, the Rainbow Room and leopard’s milk. He created these five tracks of lengthy instrumental layerings using a familiar array of percussion and keyboards (not unlike the set-up used by Danish droner Elektronavn), but this release stands apart from 99 other murky wailers due to the exceptionally vivid sound captured on the finished item. Every instrument is clearly separated, and even the smallest pluck of a metallic stringed instrument is audible in this well-planned platform. When he reports that it was recorded at NeuroHabitat, one wonders if he’s making a reference to a Maurizio Bianchi 1982 record of that title; MB, as he often styled himself, is generally regarded as the First Name of Italian industrial noise, and I’d be disappointed if Simon B doesn’t have a sizeable collection of MB albums lurking in his musty cupboards. This one’s for fans of metallic, eerie and slow noise with an occult flavour, always intriguing and not necessarily simply billowing out threatening atmospheres for the sake of it.