Tagged: laptop music

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 21, 2013

Fabriksampler V4: winding its way through different musical territories of Elektronikopia

Various Artists, Fabriksampler V4, Pharmafabrik, PFCD020 (2011)

Featuring acts from several countries in Europe and from South Africa, this is a lively collection of artists engaged in the multifarious arenas of electronic-based music. The expected genres of noise electronics, ambient, industrial, minimalist and dub-influenced styles are all to be found here. On both discs, tracks are arranged to bleed into or meet one another so the overall effect is of a continuous mega-work that winds its way through several musical territories, moods and atmospheres.

Disc 1 kicks off with Japan’s KK Null with his particular approach to creating music that sounds positively inhuman and machine-like in a deranged and repellent way. This turns into a warmer, more balmy and soothing though no less pointillist piece under Neven M Agalma from Slovenia. Other track highlights include Yoshihiro Kikuchi’s bubbly and cheeky effort (Track 4) which once upon a time would have qualified for a Mego or Editions Mego release; Mutant Beatniks’ rather demented murk piece “Whiteout!!!” with faux sinister and dark wobble drones and eerie noises; and Vega Stereo’s mysterious and brooding “Morning”. Of the rest of the ten tracks on offer, they’re not bad but some can be very repetitive or simply revel in being as baaad-aaaasss as they can and pay no attention to volume dynamics, texture or structure.

Disc 2 seems a quieter, more ambient and better behaved collection although that impression could be due to the opener “Transmortorium” by Velge Naturlig: this has a slow and steady droning low end anchoring a skeletal sputtering high-pitched sound. While the overall effect may be discomforting sometimes, this is a warm and quite beautiful and enchanting piece with warm bell-like tones near the end. Other notable pieces include Astma’s very sparse “IgE”, Analog Concept’s quietly chirpy “Aliens Love This Melody”, Cezary Gapik’s “#0466″ (highly atmospheric minimalist machine droning) and Mike Browning’s complex and layered “Phantom Space” that combines an paradoxically warm yet slightly chilly horn loop, a female vocal and a busy background of simmering effects.

Hmm, there seems to be a bonus track on my copy: the album sleeve states there should be nine tracks on the disc and mine has ten listed. This unnamed piece turns out to be the best track on the entire double set: well over 10 minutes long, it’s a veritable soundtrack to a mini sci-fi / horror flick about some slithery alien menace.

On the whole, Pharmafabrik does a better job selecting which ambient-oriented artists and their work should feature than they do with some other acts. The label probably should have mixed up the genres more but it did aim at connecting like with like which is why each disc sounds different. The set is a hefty one to hear all the way through – most tracks have a lot happening on them – so I suggest each disc should be played at different times of the day, depending on your own moods and what’s occurring around you. Disc 2 is definitely the better of the two and the domination of ambient-oriented electronics here gives it greater versatility as a soundtrack to quiet periods of the day or helping to while away burdensome chores.

Contact: Pharmafabrik

November 12, 2012

No one is an Island: a warm and pleasing set of duets

Bérangère Maximin, No one is an Island, Sub Rosa, CD SR 337 (2012)

Quite right too and Bérangère Maximin proves that maxim by inviting four musicians to her Home Sweet Home Studio – which really is her home sweet home – in Paris to record duets with her. All four musicians invited are guitarists but one, Rhys Chatham, plays trumpet instead on one track. The music varies from wistful and warm to playful and bubbly, and they nearly all have a very light touch. The guests tend to dominate their tracks with Maximin providing the backdrop and the barest of structures for them to play about in.

The only track on which Maximin finds herself alone is the shortest piece on the album, “Un jour, mes restes au soleil”, which features echoing scrabbling strings or some semblance of them: it’s a very fragile little scrap that might be missed if you’re not paying close attention. The two tracks on which Christian Fennesz plays are easily recognisable for his distinctive playing and honeyed sounds; they’re also the only tracks on which Maximin sings. Her vocals and their echoing replies dance and swirl around Fennesz’s light and trilling processed guitar glides on “Knitting in the Air”. The other track “Bicephale Ballade” is a little chillier but Fennesz’s gentle acoustic guitar and the glitchy electronics in the background are a reassuring contrast to Maximin’s slightly shocked voice fragments that jump out suddenly and disappear just as quickly into the darkened space.

The other tracks on the album are quite good but don’t shine as much as the Fennesz ones. “Where the Skin meets the Bone” with Chatham has a ghostly air but comes across as overly fussy and strangulated for a long piece. “Carnaval Cannibale” with Richard Pinhas on guitar is a busy piece of digital beehive buzz. Frédéric D Oberland appears on “How Warm is Our Love”.

Overall this recording is a warm, pleasing set of collaborations. The tracks aren’t that much of a stretch for the guest musicians who could have used Maximin’s own contributions as something to bounce off and zoom into the stratosphere to explore new musical territories; only Maximin comes across as having put some effort into really stretching her talent and experience.

Contact: Sub Rosa

August 7, 2012

Liquid Fear and Pez Rock n Roll

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 19, 2012

Grey Lunar Seas

The Peregrine (EXPERIMEDIA EXPLP020) by Lawrence English came out in 2011 as a vinyl LP, offering two sides of virtually non-stop ambient drone electronics of an overpowering richness. I can see some sense in the press release’s notes about “saturation”; this is the kind of very full sound that can drench a listener, and to step into this environment is to emerge dripping head to foot with strange digital washes and thick syrupy gloop in your gumboots. The second side is slightly more introverted and bleak than the first, but it’s all the kind of whirlpool-quicksandy anti-matter than English not only has made into one of his readily-identifiable signature sounds, but is also music that’s steeped in melancholy and wistful emotions. He based the work on a book called The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, finding musical inspiration not so much in the flights or predatory activities of this hawk-like avian monster, but in the book’s descriptive passages which apparently expend much prose on the environment, the land, and movement within it. This is also expressed by visual analogue on the cover, in Eugene Carchesio’s painting which depicts said bird in front of a row of empty musical staves.

Also on vinyl LP is Mark Fell‘s Periodic Orbit Of Dynamic System Related to a Knot (EDITIONS MEGO 133) which came out in late November 2011. It’s a very percussive-heavy set of electronica which proceeds at a fairly relentless pace with rhythms and cross-rhythms that would be impossible for anything but programmed machines to execute, and despite Fell’s consistently minimalistic approach to production it’s a fairly exhausting listen. I think this is due to two main factors: (1) remorselessness, as the beats start to feel more like the blows of a surgical hammer working its way through the shell of your cranium to attack soft brain tissue within; and (2) complexity, because Fell consistently refuses anything so obvious as four-beats-to-a-bar, preferring to programme his devices to deliver odd syncopations and trip-wire booby-traps that can entangle the feet of the unwary. Anyone attempting to dance to this music will indeed find themselves “related to a knot” in a way they hadn’t quite anticipated. His electronic melody lines (for want of a better term) are vaguely familiar enough to strike a chord with listeners conversant with more user-friendly dancefloor music, but the avant-garde manner in which these elements are set forth is unlikely to be mistaken for Saturday night entertainment. The album was compiled from a range of things lurking in Fell’s digital grab-bag, including out-takes, live work, and unreleased records, and is seamlessly presented here as two side-long suites executed with merciless precision and timing.

Day Lineal scored a hit with former TSP writer Aaron Robertson in 2007 with their Sound Like You Mean It album. What Will You Become? (NO LABEL) arrived here 24 November 2011, and shows they’re not exactly a prolific entity – this is only their fourth release since 2001. What we have is ten charming and rather unpredictable instrumental pieces, which proceed down an imaginary garden path with tripping gentle beats and regular rhythms, even when their melodies are not particularly memorable. Day Lineal’s chief appeal resides in their distinctive sound, which involves a process of recording and re-recording, using dictaphones to add that vaguely distorted impression which studio technicians strive so hard to create with filters and other effects. Most of what we hear is the sound of the musicians playing along to their own lo-fi pre-records, sometimes layering in subliminal field recordings for added ambience, and the album is a warm and appealing set of percussion-heavy music with an intangible nostalgic dimension, like fragments of Gamelan music captured from times past and replayed in a sun-filled nursery.

Another one Mego last winter was MP3 Deviations #6+7 by Yasunao Tone (EDITIONS MEGO 125). I found the whole thing repellent and unlistenable, but don’t let that put you off as it’s intended as a serious experiment in electronic music and has a deep commitment to the methodical scrambling of digital audio information which, I suggest, has been one of this label’s consistent aesthetic benchmarks since its very earliest times. ¹ Working with collaborators at the New Aesthetics In Computer Music and the Music Research Centre at York University, Yasunao Tone created these two long pieces in New York in 2011 as part of his quest to develop a new form of audio software through “disruption of the MP3″. As part of his work, he succeeded in corrupting a source sound file to the extent that he could transform mistakes that would normally be regarded as processing errors into a new form of automated sound generation. He also hacked into an application and did various evil things which play hob with playback speeds, pitch, and stereo channels. Net result is that Mr Tone is persuaded he has invented a novel form of digital playback software, harnessing the unpredictable results which come from feeding corrupt data into a mangled application; presumably, although this is not explicitly stated on the release, the unpredictable-ness is somehow made constant and repeatable. He has since used it for live performances in public places, so it must have reached a steady state by now. I’m sure it succeeds on technical grounds, and probably what we hear is as close as we’ll ever get to “hearing” the actual processes by which a piece of software acts on a stream of data. As music, it’s well-nigh impossible for human ears to endure: an absurd and chaotic spew of non-musical wheezes, whines, high-pitched squeals and inhuman digital grunts.

Symeta (RASTER NOTON R-N130) by Byetone fits right into the way today’s post is shaping up, with its ultra-precise electronic beats and dub-like pulsations. Unlike most of what we’d heard today however, Byetone still believes in old-fashioned ideas like musical development, and although incredibly minimal and mechanical, his avant-techno pieces tend to keep to the same beat rather than opting for the massively-syncopated approach of Mark Fell, and pleasing melodic progressions in tone and pitch are not ruled out of scope either. I gather that some listeners find Byetone’s work pleasing enough, but grumble that he strays a digit too far from the Raster Noton aesthetic of pure abstract glitch, and that his music isn’t much more than an update on conventional or tried-and-tested forms of electro-beat music that are already regarded as old hat. However, that’s an area that’s beyond my ken, and today I’m finding these monotonous hypno-throbbers a very pleasing spin. Although it’s mostly the sort of impossibly-perfect superdisco music that we might expect from this label, there are two tracks called ‘Helix’ and ‘Black Peace’ that are much dirtier and distorted, almost “heavy metal” with their repeated loops of grungeiness, and it’s here at least we can see where the Suicide comparisons are coming from. Olaf Bender is Byetone and has been making music since 1999; Symeta derives from his live work of the last two years.

When I spoke to Peter Rehberg (who is named as the executive producer of the present release) in 2000, he indicated that he considered his work with software as a form of “unsponsored research & development” – it was a way of repurposing applications in a way that the proprietors would never even consider, but which led to interesting future possibilities. He also likened hacking to the John Cage prepared piano, which is a bit of a leap of faith when considering these MP3 Deviations. At least the prepared piano still remained a piano after Cage’s intervention, albeit one with the normal resonances of its strings severely disrupted. One senses that if Yasunao Tone worked with a piano, he would have a team of carpenters take it apart so he could completely rebuild it from the ground up, and transform it into a rolltop writing desk with ivory teeth, a steel-string nervous system, and hammers that worked as detonators for a string of high explosive fireworks. ↩

March 11, 2012

Machines of Moisture

Hold the front page

I keep trying to find a way in to decode the abstract and slightly illogical electronic music of Jim O’Rourke on his double LP Old News #5 (EDITIONS MEGO OLD NEWS 5). It’s four separate pieces, one side each, drawn from O’Rourke’s personal archive of his recordings, made in Chicago and Tokyo, but taken together the album amounts to a labyrinth, multiplied to the power of four. It’s very puzzling stuff; each piece proceeds quite slowly with monotonous drones, yet within that slow-moving framework there can be a rush of detail. As soon as I think the piece is going to resolve into something resembling a tune, it dives down a side-turning where digital white noise and glitch are the order of the day. To me it’s a rather disjointed listen, not to say that the music is fragmented or composed of multiple edits, just that I can’t connect the dots or follow the lines of thought of this inscrutable American laptop music pioneer. Even the sleeve image is hard to read; it looks like it’s going to be a crowd of people in the street, but their arms and legs are incomplete, they have no faces, the lines don’t quite join up, and there are odd geometric shapes piercing the picture plane, further disrupting the visual flow. This is the first of many such packages where O’Rourke will retrieve and issue such works from his voluminous hard drive, so maybe when the series is completed it will make more sense to me.

Time after Time

Likewise, I honestly wish I was deriving more pleasure from Temporal Marauder‘s Temporal Marauder Makes You Feel (SP 006), an album on the Mego sub-label Spectrum Spools. Unlike Old News, there’s less of a problem finding a way into the sound; the surface is appealing, rich layers of electronic music often propelled by enjoyable pulsebeats, plus sequencer patterns, filters, effects and dribbling beepy noises. Sampled voices occasionally murmur unintelligible statements, and short simple keyboard melodies are buried everywhere in the morass of detail. Once the initial charm of the sound wears off, I find myself wishing each piece would develop into something and move forward, but all eight tracks inevitably just keep on chugging away in neutral. This is largely the work of Jean Logarin with the percussionist Hans Schule, recorded by Max Tanguy. There is a back story to the record which would have us believe it was recorded in the 1970s and is now being presented in its re-edited form as a lost treasure of “kosmische” styled music, but I’m not having any of that. I can’t really place any credence in this wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Moonshine

With an album called The Whiskey Mountain Sessions (FIREPOOL RECORDS FR002) and a band name Hillmen, I was half-expecting this Californian band to deliver a post-modern update on 1920s country or jugband music. Instead the four players Hillman, Ellett, Murray and Rivers produce four lengthy jam sessions of improvisation using guitars, keyboards, bass and drums, resulting in competent fusion jazz, produced with very little studio intervention or overdubbing, in order to preserve the spontaneity of their work. The results come out like a slightly rougher version of an Al Di Meola LP. Nothing very innovative going on here I’m afraid, and I distrust sleeve notes that use superlatives like “magical…profoundly creative…transcendent dimensions…transformational power” so liberally. This is released on the showcase label of the avant-rock band Djam Karet.

Vermiform Appendix

Vega is the the team of Henry Vega and the singer Anat Spiegel. On Wormsongs (ARTEKSOUNDS ART001), Mr Vega spins very delicate digital backdrops of glitchy ambient music to support the fragile and breathy intonations of the songstress, and a mysterious web of artifice appears in the dusty attic corners of your mind. Marco Molling and Georg Hobmeier provide the textual starting points for a couple of tracks, and the percussionist Bart de Vrees appears on ‘Light Code’. At first the ambient tones seemed a shade too familiar and ordinary to me, but after a more determined listen I’m gradually succumbing to the minimalistic charms of these lightly throbbing drones and brushy percussive effects. I’m arriving at the conclusion that Henry Vega is a very abstemious miniaturist, one who distils his musical output with as much care as a chemist of the 17th century. Likewise, Spiegel may be the most mannered vocalist you’ve heard this side of Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen, but she is wound as taut as a watch spring and seems to be forcing each musical droplet out of her pipes as though there were a narrow-necked spigot attached to her throat. If you’re expecting a sort of post-modern operatic soprano, she’s actually much less stiff than that; she’s very adept at holding on to a monotone and working the note into the ground, as she twists her tongue around some very spiky syllables and difficult sibilants with ease. This is the case whether working to a text, or scatting with her unusual wordless moans. Brittle, fragmented, perplexing.

Hotel Splendide

A curious undertaking by Nettle has resulted in the album El Resplandor: The Shining In Dubai (SUB ROSA SR324). The subtext is that DJ Rupture had a momentary brainstorm where he transplanted the events of the Kubrick film The Shining into Dubai; if we play along with this fantasy, then the images of a luxury hotel in the Arab Emirates on the CD front cover soon give way to desolation and poverty with the shabby and deserted interiors we see in Lamya Gargash’s photographs when we open the gatefold. This before-and-after scenario may be read as an index of the deterioration of the caretaker’s mind in the original story, and it also works as a comment on the current global financial disaster; after all the opening line of Geoff Manaugh’s short story, provided to bolster the idea, is “They came to Dubai on the promise of easy money”. Musically, the work offers a melting-pot of styles, including improvisation, electronica, classical chamber music, and folk music of Africa. This reflects the mixed stylistic backgrounds of the six talented players who help DJ Rupture to realise the work, among them the guitarist Andy Moor and the cellist Jennifer Jones. It’s fine instrumental music with plenty of atmosphere and undercurrents of menace suggested by many minor keys and quirky melodies, which befits this quasi-soundtrack to an imaginary film; spirits and ghosts are floating around every stairway, strongly suggested by the dispassionately gorgeous chanting of vocalist Lindsay Cuff. The track ‘Simoom (Wasp Wind)’ stands out as a painful noise piece, where the spiky electric guitar of Moor is given license to whip up a storm, and the track works into a frenzy of spiralling mayhem with percussion, vocals, loops, and electronic processing. The string players are all excellent, producing crisp lines with assurance, bending notes and creating unusual effects on their violins and cellos, and providing a perfect counterpoint to Rupture’s electronic melodies, as on ‘Espina’ for example. This just in: I learn that Geoff Manaugh writes about architecture. So El Resplandor works as soundtrack music, but also has a spatial dimension, acting as a sort of conceptual work describing a promenade around a vast deserted building.

March 9, 2012

Noish ((Oscar Martin)): Noise&Capitalism.txt>> /dev/dsp

Noish ((Oscar Martin)), Noise&Capitalism.txt>> /dev/dsp, Free Software Series Free SS 15 CDR (2010)

Listening to this recording, I feel nostalgic for the days ten years or so ago when Mego truly was a force for good in the universe: it’s got that light, cheeky, devil-may-care attitude with the sharp crackly edges that made several Mego releases so outstanding. Spanish native Oscar Martin takes a txt file of “Noise and Capitalism” and shoves into the dsp of his computer to generate sounds which he then puts through a wringer in the shape of analogue tape on a cassette recorder, and edits and refines the sounds to something very sculptured, animated and sometimes surprisingly crystalline and clear. There are points where the track barely hangs together and stutters its way through a series of bleeps, blinks and urgent pulses. The impression I get is we’re going through a tunnel, a worm-hole with transparent sides, through a strange soupy universe of mercurial liquid sounds that shape our journey and send our tunnel into strange detours and valleys where we are more lost than ever before. The music expands and contracts, making for a most uncomfortable ride.

Perhaps it could have been shorter and more compact – there are times where I feel Martin lets his laptop have a little too much freedom and the critter runs away from him, and Martin’s got to try and get it back under control and go to where he’d like to be. But if a computer can’t have some scope to play with its sounds, it’s going to be a surly and rebellious child and there are moments where indeed it sulks and pouts and sidles along with long droning siren noises. In the last few minutes I sense a bit more urgency as if there’s a lot more territory to cover and we still haven’t reached the halfway point of our trip. We continue on and all of a sudden the CD ends just when we’re almost home; this gives the impression that there are still more areas that Martin has discovered that remain undiscovered.

Contact: Free Software Series

October 8, 2011

Exercise Restraint

Imperious Wrecks

This double-CD by Vrakets Position (VRAKGODS 001) arrived late April 2011. It’s two guys from Sweden who make one heck of a deuced fine 100% improvised din using just guitars and synths, maybe some effects pedals, a rhythm box…veering somewhere along the slopes of avant-rock, free noise and even freer improvisation, the combined simplistic and unfettered musical thumping howl they make is utterly splendid. Göran Green and Tommy Lindholm are old friends who were in a punk band 1978-1982, and after the break-up of that combo continued making music together on cassettes from 1988 onwards. Now it seems they’re both over 60 years old and still find they have a hunger and passion for playing that is undiminished. So along comes this set offering over 70 minutes of music, all drawn from their recent period of creativity which started in 2007 – freaky psychedelic-ish jamming and soaring feedback din, enigmatic atonal songs, near-romantic ballads, and just plain old freeform fuzz out noise. One trademark that distinguishes their mixed-up emotional splurges is a strong sense of rhythm and repetition, and there’s hardly a song among the seven cuts on CD1 that doesn’t massage your brain into a glorious state of tranced-out bonelessness, simply by dint of mindless repeat thumpage. It’s a soft-hard sound that insinuates itself into your body like so much cotton wadding, which then proceeds to swell up when moistened and cause your carcass to turn inside-out. CD2 is slightly less of an all-out zonkermaroo, offering one single 24 minute floor-wiper called ‘True Sailing Is Dead’ (a line from ‘Horse Latitudes’ by The Doors, as any fule kno). This item is more of a wishy-washy synth based wailer that ebbs and flows like a miniature whirlpool and is (for me) marred slightly by the annoying voices at the start, but even so I can see th’ track might turn out to be a beguiling mystery swamper with its numbing repeato-patterns and general air of opacity, something it shares with its sister CD. One of the real nice surprises of the year this, and recommended too. Allegedly, the boys from Northern Skåne have hundreds of cassettes dating back to 1978, so keep an eye open for more releases from those carrier-bags of buried treasure. By the way their name translates (roughly) as “Position of the Wreck” in English, and after playing the first disc, you’ll understand exactly what it means.

Liberez Shun Front

Here’s a gem I’ve left festering at the bottom of the box for too long, the LP The Letter (ALTER ALT05) by Liberez released in May 2011. This English avant-rock combo were formed by the recording engineer John Hannon and the drummer Pete Wilkins, both former members of Woe. The group was soon rounded out by the addition of guitarist and keyboard player Tom James Scott, who’s had a couple of releases on Bo’Weavil. Their secret weapon is the vocalist Nina Bosnic, whose highly unorthodox role in the band is to pour her ominous spoken-word texts in the microphone, producing recordings which are themselves looped, repeated, and heavily processed in the studio workflow. Indeed it seems that it was one of her texts, a private diary-like recounting of an incident from her home country, that sparked the catalyst causing Liberez to cease tinkering with lo-fi home recordings and start to gain an identity of its own. Once you hear Bosnic’s looped sprechtsing (especially on the title track, split into three separate parts) you’ll quickly discern the overlap into avant-garde sound poetry and Steve Reich tape loops; and the whole band are studio-wise experimenting noiseniks almost on a par with This Heat or The Pop Group. In fact the whole Liberez mission statement involves intelligent notions about deconstructing traditional apprehensions about band dynamics, and moving widely and freely into areas of wild experimentation and music production, freely admitting influences from avant-garde composition in a meaningful way (instead of simply namechecking every European composer who’s ever had a release on the Philips silver series or spliced a tape within spitting distance of Pierre Schaeffer). All I know is, I loved their claustrophobic and catastrophic bass-heavy sound within ten seconds of hearing it, and the LP lives up to its title, performing like a dispatch of urgent news from a strife-torn corner of the contemporary world. Highly recommended listening!

Les Fleurs Du Malcontents

Now for some richly disquieting “art music” on the great German label Absinth Records from Tomas Phillips, joining up with guzheng player Craig Hilton on Le Goût De Néant (ABSINTH RECORDS 019). A guzheng is a grotesque Chinese zither-like instrument kitted out with a peculiar number of strings, at least three times more than a normal guitar, and in fact the exact number of strings can change at any given moment, accounting for its controversial status in the stringed instrument world. As for Phillips, he is armed with the ubiquitous laptop and must be held responsible for transforming portions of this music into the many-layered, dreamy, slightly threatening and ambiguous sleepwalker drones we’re dealing with today. So far, everything about this feels wrong. The duo take their inspiration from the 19th-century French Bohemian layabout Baudelaire, a man so brimful of laudanum and opiates that in the end he could only put his trousers on in the morning with the aid of a mechanical derrick, and while three of the cuts here are called ‘Sans Mouvement’ (parts I-III), a highly apt description of the poet’s physical condition for 90% of the time, the centrepiece is the title track which translates as the “taste of nothing”, a sensation which one can only assume was the ultimate goal of Charlie B and all who followed in his decadent footsteps. While the preceding tracks are quite musically droneworthy and resemble supersize cellos brought in on slow-motion speedboats across an ocean of glue, this ‘Goût De Néant’ track is much more disjunctive and event-laden by comparison, passing through unpleasant sickness-states of low rumbling, nerve-shredding jangling effects, heavy mixed chords like twenty cathedral organs, and odd passages of mysterious silence. Great attention to detail here in bringing this 24-minute delirium of unwelcome physiological conditions to fruition. What an unreal record; it’s even more disturbing to hear the guzheng, which we usually consider to be quite a lively instrument plucked at happy events like weddings and drinking parties, being pressed into service as an instrument of ashen-faced doom and jaded world-weariness. I hope that Phillips and Hilton, now known around Europe as “Laughing Boy” and “Smiley Gus” respectively, get together again soon so they can realise a sonic tribute to the poems of Edgar Allen Poe. Now that, I would buy!

September 3, 2011

The Vehement Shore of a Bright Life

We last noted Zavoloka in 2005 with a release of hers on the Ukrainian Nexsound label. Here she is again with Vedana (KVITNU 16), an impressive collection of well-polished electroacoustic music which has taken about two years of hard graft on her part to execute, involving research, live performance, studio work in Cracow, and a collaboration with the visual artist Laetitia Morais. Kvitnu are planning a series of abstract musical works dedicated to the four ancient elements, and this release takes on the “water” theme. Nary a field recording of a spring, river, stream or waterfall here, and instead this imaginative creatrice has drawn inspiration from the Ukrainian legends of the Kharaktemyky, magician-cossacks who held sway over forces of nature to the extent that, merely by the act of drinking spring water, they could perform remarkable feats of channelled energy. The Vedana album clearly expresses these ideas of purity and inner cleanitude, and true to its word the music “flows, melts, drips and crashes”. Indeed the very lack of pre-mapped contours to these nine pieces is very refreshing, and they merge and unfold in a highly natural and non-linear way. Packed in a hexagonal card wallet printed with apt microscopic water-crystal shapes and snowflakes. Released in April 2011, received here 11/05/2011.

Another gorgeous work of dreaming-awake music from Joe Frawley is Carnival (JOE FRAWLEY MUSIC JFM-CD10). Using his familiar constructs of piano music, found sounds, tape loops, voices and other carefully-selected remnants, Frawley weaves his ambiguous dream-narratives in sound. Evocative titles such as ‘A sleepwalker’s vocabulary’ and ‘Premonition’ confirm his surrealist bent; each track is packed with sumptuous layers and inexpressibly beautiful moments of sound that pass and vanish in seconds, fading in and out like phantoms lit up in orange autumn light. The spoken-word fragments are planted and repeated like scraps torn from a poetry book and found strewn across moonlit pavements in strange cities. As ever, the listener has the delightful impression of being conducted on a dream-quest and invited to interpret multiple symbols, clues and fleeting hints. Collaborators on this release include Rachel Rambach, the lyre player Connie Alblas, and the guitarist Greg Conte, but in essence it is a Frawley solo piece. He has published a complete list of his samples and sources used for this miniature on his website. Received in May, but this feels like the sort of record you should be playing in the months of September and October, complementing the fey and wistful season with its mysterious charm. Come to that, it would be perfect for me if Frawley were to produce an interpretation of the stories of Ray Bradbury.

A stellar lineup of composers produced Quartet for the End of Space (POGUS PRODUCTIONS 21059-2): Pauline Oliveros, Jonas Braasch, Doug Van Nort, and Francisco López. On these eight lengthy pieces they assist playing each other’s compositions in the mode of performance which is quite close to “electroacoustic improvisation”, or EAI as some will have it. This strange work is largely charcterised by very alien, unnatural sounds; great duration; slow exploration of imaginary spaces; and certain affinities with the weather, of which Braasch’s ‘Snow Drifts’ is the most obvious example. His ‘Web Doppelganger’ on the other hand is asking profound questions about the very nature of improvised and aleatory music, and doing so in a very creative way. Recorded and performed in 2010, and put together with a great sense of deliberation and care; instrumentation is not detailed, but there is a deal of electronic music, signal processing and computer assisted sounds blending with traditional instruments such as the saxophone. All the musicians play with authority and gravitas on this profound and stirring collection.

Human Greed is mostly the vision of founder Michael Begg, whose Black Hill album we heard in November 2008. For Fortress Longing (OMNEMPATHY OMIC2), he’s joined by members of Fovea Hex, 48 Cameras, and Colin Potter, and the visual artists Deryk Thomas and Nicole Boitos, the former contributing heavily to the overall aesthetic of the project. The record is the result of Begg’s personal questing, involving much travel and self-imposed silence and exile, and an investigation into the properties of various droning musical devices, including singing bowls, the glass harmonica and stringed instruments. Mystical burnished drones result, at times so evanescent they seem to hang in the air like solar phenomena. Hermetic symbolism is implied in the cover images, texts, track titles, and that same sense of ancient mystery lurks within every moment of this slow and icy ambient music, as fragile and delicate as the tracery of frost on a window. Arrived here late May 2011.

A sizzling bruiser of raw electronic improvisation is Ktotam (ZEROMOON ZERO012) from the Argentinian sound artist Andrea Pensado, a kind of mixed-media composer who comes from Buenos Aires but has also lived in Cracow for ten years. These seven blistering cuts were produced with an unearthly combination of laptop noise and her own voice, using the voice to perform multiple tasks: barking out texts and fragments of speech, triggering gated samples in the set-up, and even controlling the mix in some way. I assume she’s equipped with a digital version of a snorkel or aqualung to perform these superhuman tasks. The results are just astonishing; dark magical incantations and spells for the digital realm. If I could send out one of these grunters in email form, I feel sure I could vanquish my enemies or win the girl of my dreams. Mastered by Jeff Carey and released on his Zeromoon label, this is a totally essential dollop of musical gravel re-expressed as virtual bits and bytes. I just adore the craggy formlessness of this energised mouth-music, at times so granular and crunchy you could eat it for breakfast with half a pint of milk. Pensado truly is a “bicho raro”!

January 15, 2011

A rock without the sea

Here’s the great Bernhard Gál with Same Difference (GROMOGA GRO 11001), a work which comprises 12 suites all based on a highly imaginative and inventive use of traditional Chinese instruments. Numerous traditional Chinese musicians were involved in these projects, with their flutes, percussion, voices and stringed instruments, and they are subsumed into these ambitious compositions by Gál which involve electro-acoustic treatments, Western instruments, loudspeaker set-ups, multi-channel sound projections, and other 20th-century presentational approaches which Stockhausen would recognise, updated and refitted for an austere, modernistic “virtual” audio chamber. Some of these are commissions for assorted inter-cultural and gallery projects, sometimes quite intimately connected with their settings and environments; and at all times this abstemious and thoughtful composer never loses sight of the traditional characteristics of the instruments, and the cultures, he is working with. The results – delicate, spindly, washed-out – may appear at first sight to be lacking in drama, but as usual your listening patience will pay off as you succumb to the interior tensions of these taut, compacted minimalist statements.

Bracing field recordings from Mark Peter Wright on Inanimate Life (3LEAVES 3L004), taken from the North East Coast of England. His preoccupations include observing the wind and the weather, and these striking coastal winds (possessing many meterological characteristics he may deem peculiar to this part of the United Kingdom) react with very specific objects and features he finds in the landscape; these are “catalogued”, both verbally and aurally, as a gorse bush, a barbed wire fence, a flagpole, a hand rail and so forth. These interactions between wind, metal and plant life can produce fascinatingly alien non-musical clonks and clanks that, in their quiet and intimate way, are almost like “acoustic” industrial music. Six photographs of his documentations are included in the sleeve, and there is a mini-cd (pressed up in a strange credit-card format) that includes audio commentary by the artist. He presents the ten pieces without track numbers intentionally, in hopes that the listener will “construct their own listening map”. Received here 8th September 2010.

Super Axel Dörner (ABSINTH RECORDS 018) is a curious improvisational collaboration between Axel Dörner the Berlin-based trumpeter and Diego Chamy, who I suppose to be a unique form of performance artist; on his website he takes the stance that he’s not going to publish an instant CV of his life just to keep the media happy, thus turning himself into another artistic form of Cup-A-Soup: “If you want to know more about me, I kindly invite you to spend some time taking a look at the works that are published on this site.”. Bravo! I love him already. There he is on the cover of this item in fact, looking out at the viewer with a mixture of vulnerability, amazement, and mild scorn. On this record, he is reading out texts, sometimes playing a large orchestral bass drum, and mostly doing dance and body movements; the first piece took place in Axel’s house, but for the second excursion they did it in public at Electronic Church in Berlin. Dance and improv is a winning combination I think, but outside of Derek Bailey who did it with Min Tanaka, I can’t immediately think of that many examples of it. (Although Japanese electronicist Ikuro Takahashi sometimes did it too.) Chamy realises that “movements can’t be seen on a recording”, but believes that his movements “added a visual stratum to the repetitions that were already present in our music”. What’s even more intriguing is his use of non-movement, where he strikes poses like a living statue and holds them for a long time. Chamy is also acutely aware of the effects he’s having on the audience, and indeed on his worthy constituent Dörner here, and is constantly asking himself questions about whether or not he’s doing the right thing. The important part is he’s doing something, and not allowing himself to be paralysed by pointless analysis of his ideas. All of these Absinth Records I regard as strong artistic statements, even if I don’t always like the music on them; this release is no exception (and I should add that I also like it very much). Arrived 30 July 2010. Limited edition.

Jakob Riis is a Danish laptop player involved in many projects and band combos, including one intriguing named Riis And The Smooth Ones (presumably inspired by the LP by Art Ensemble of Chicago). On No Denmark (OLOF BRIGHT OBCD 31), we hear him in collaborative duets with four musicians – two improvising saxophonists, and two guitarists. One of these is the French-Lebanese player Christine Sehnaoui, whose austere work on the Ichnites CD we very much enjoyed last year. On her track ‘No Soil’, she seems to be building a mental labyrinth with her intricate puffs. There’s also the scratchy axe pickings of Anders Lindsjö on ‘No Sky’, and some gorgeous rock-inflected excess from Per Svennsson’s amplified guitar on ‘No Sun’, for which Riis is content simply to provide a throbbing, resonant bass drone as a backdrop. Riis tends to work overtime on these collaborations, providing all manner of dynamic events when interacting with his partners, yet for the title track where he plays a solo laptop turn, he becomes introverted and contemplative, his minimal white-noise digital washes resembling an ocean breeze. I will resist the temptation to refer to this release as Riis’s Pieces, but like my favourite sweetmeat it’s got a nice tender and sweet filling nonetheless.