Tagged: noise

Foreign Greys

Fukushima! (PRESQU’ILE RECORDS PSQ004-2) is a compilation themed on the Japanese nuclear disaster of 2011, caused by an earthquake and leading to multiple reactor meltdowns. Otomo Yoshihide went on a lecture tour to raise awareness, and his appearance at the University of Tokyo in April 2011 was the direct inspiration for this two-disc set. I would imagine that Otomo gave a very direct, honest and impassioned account of the situation, if his music is anything to go by. He doesn’t appear on the compilation, but there is much modern avant performed music to savour. Disc two is dominated by star players from the Berlin reduced improv sphere, notably Burkhard Beins, Annette Krebs and Ingar Zach, plus similar minimalists Mark Wastell, Greg Kelley and Michael Pisaro. Their accumulated tracks put the listener in a suitably sober mood, and are politically contextualised by Krebs’ field recordings of a Berlin street demonstration. The main event is on disc one, a 34-minute John Tilbury piano solo from a composition by Dave Smith. It’s like listening to a very coherent argument made by an intelligent and assured wise man, which is exactly what it is. There’s also some alarming tones from Magda Mayas and a superbly baffling performance from Joe Foster of English with the Korean players Jin Sangtae, Hong Chulki and Choi Joonyong. Overlong, uneven, but this fund-raising comp is in a good cause. (19/07/2012)

Psykisk Tortur are the Norwegian combo, currently down to a duo of founder member Nicolaysen and Ronny Waernes, missing original member Tore Nilsen. When these maniacs began their unholy career in 1984 they became notorious for physically dangerous performances involving industrial machinery and metal percussion, thus aligning themselves with the early Faust, Hanatarash, and Einstürzende Neubaten – and although I’m not sure if the Norwegians ever succeeded in destroying any venue in which they played, they were certainly in receipt of numerous banning orders and they never ate lunch in Bodø again. On Nightrider (GO TO GATE RECORDS GO TO CD 022), their intense noise has mutated into a grotesque form of heavy metal rock, where mad electronic gibberish takes the place of squealing guitar solos, and the drumming is every bit as intense as a thousand Slayer tribute bands. It’s especially memorable when a “song” is attempted, as on ‘Stille Er Morgen’, where the monotonous chant is solemnly intoned against an insane cataclysm of heavily-distorted amplified wildness and remorseless drumbeats. Those who crave more outright “experimental” noise are advised to spin ‘Lettmetall’ to experience the more free-form tendencies of this powerful team, while rest of album is sufficient to satisfy any crazed Napalm Death fans. Very percussive and metallic throughout; the album virtually builds an iron suit around your whole body while you wait. As Robert Pepper astutely noted, “Psykisk Tortur rules!” (06/07/2012)

Matt Earle is an Australian musician and label owner, who has improvised with Guthrie and Guerra in his home country and recorded electronic music as part of Stasis Duo. Muura is his solo outlet, and the object simply titled Tape (ORGANIZED MUSIC FROM THESSALONIKI T19) is a cassette of process drone music that crawls from the speakers like over-baked ectoplasm escaping a desert climate. It’s built up from layered recordings of by-products of the electric guitar, including amplifier hum, feedback, and other “mistakes” generally considered undesirable by normal men. From this swamp of friable material, Muura impressively manages to build a hefty brick wall – a compelling experience of solid, throbbing abstract sound. The B side may have employed the same processes, but is somehow hollowed out and subtracted to create an extremely bleak and negative effect. Ultra-drone. (19/07/2012)

We last noted the Irish noise duo Safe in late 2010 with their Bare Life release. Now here’s their fifth item Crop (DOTDOTDOT MUSIC DOTDOTDOTCD010), where Hegarty and O’Shaugnessy supplement the group with four collaborators who add guitars, synth and toy instruments to the melee on this live recording. And it’s a continuous 40-minute assault, so civilians should approach this toxic area with caution. What may appear at first to be an indistinguishable howl of unpleasant frequencies slugging it out inside a tight arena of hate will reveal itself to be much more complex, and as deep as an aquarium filled with unusual marine life. The usual relentless Merzbow-chug power blast which Safe favour has been slightly subdued to act as a rhythmical backdrop to the instrumental lines of Langan, Condon, O’Brien and Lynch, guitar and synth eruptions which mew most plaintively. When you get this many noiseicians gathered together in a live situation, it can sometimes be a guarantee of unlistenable, sloppy chaos. But the musicians here reverse that trend, cohering strongly and sustaining interest unflaggingly for all 40 minutes. (24/07/2012)

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Horn Beam Fantasmas


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fistula: a complex and temperamental sound beast of many moods

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Sujo and Sun Hammer, Fistula, Inam Records, CD 107 (2012)

“Fistula” is a medical term describing a passage between two organs that normally aren’t connected and, while I think it’s one of those topics that inspire surgeons to tell each other war stories and jokes at post-conference cocktail parties, I can see the title is an apt metaphor for the music, a collaboration between noise / drone guitarist Sujo (Ryan Huber) and ambient soundscape designer Sun Hammer (Jay Bodley). Seven quite beautiful atmospheric tracks of shimmery guitar fuzz and buzz drone, digital noise, musique concrete, industrial, ambient and post-rock are featured here. The various genres weave from one to another to create a network of passageways that result in a complex and temperamental sound beast of many unpredictable moods.

All tracks can be heard as movements (heh-heh) of one over-arching work or separately. Though they all include noise and drone as essential elements and can be harsh and abrasive in tone and volume, several tracks (especially later ones) can be very serene and blissful. From track 5 “Hari” onwards, the music can be introverted and brooding with little attempt made to find a way of resolving the darkness and tension arising from deep within its wells.

The album might not be as long as I’d like – a few pieces here and there feel quite cramped for room and time and deserve to be more expansive and exploratory – but the tracks exert a strong pull on the consciousness and quickly mesmerises and initiates the listener into its self-contained universe of sculptured noise / drone and moody dark ambience. The album has quite a distinct character, being energetic and strongly hard-edged in style in its first half before the aggression gives way to quieter and more introspective mood music.

Contact: Sujo, Sun Hammer

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Entertainment and Partial Entropy


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

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

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

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

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Walking Woods


Composer Daniel Stearns freely owns up to the peculiar mental state of “dissociation”, which manifests itself as unusual occasions or experiences in his life from time to time, strange visitations which have descended upon his psyche since as long as he can remember. He takes heart in the fact that other mystics, scholars, writers and musicians in history appear to have been subjected to similar episodes, among them William James, Emerson, Charles Ives, Sigurd Olson and the Outsider artist Adolf Wolfli. Now on Golden Town (SPECTROPOL SpecT 03), he attempts to find musical expression for the semi-visionary outlook he receives in his detached states, and fourteen tracks of decidedly strange and distinctive music are the result. From the first track onwards, the music evokes mental detachment and an uncanny sense of world-going-wrongness before your very ears. Stearns was encouraged in his project not only by Bruce Hamilton but by the composer Steve Moshier, whom he met through online social media. The CD appears to be linked quite strongly to Stearns’ visual effluvia, a tack which leads us to consider his interest in lo-fi photography (typically using cellphones) to create singular images that appear to be suffused with more meaning and hidden depths than their original subject matter ever contained. Reading the compelling sleeve notes on this release does start to engender a not-unpleasant mind-sapping sensation, as though the layers of reality are starting to flake away and small chinks appear in the fabric that separates us all from the Great Beyond. The music / sound art on the CD is likewise quite unsettling, a queasy mix of semi-identifiable field recordings with wobbly electronic music and some intensive post-production techniques. At its best Golden Town does indeed come close to ushering the listener into the private world of Daniel Stearns, which he describes metaphorically as “an insular place at the far end of a dark wood” which he arrived at after “walking down a mountain I never knew I’d climbed”, with its extreme disorienting methods and highly dreamlike, somnambulistic tone. The label praises the “trance states” and “hypnotic pattern layers” of this unusual record. From 13 June 2012.

The lovely Dan Peck is the New York radical artist who has found the missing connection between jazz music and doom metal. He expresses this discovery using the tuba, playing in a trio called The Gate who we first heard on the 2009 LP Acid Soil with its great zombie skeleton cover. Now here they are again on Destruction of Darkness (CARRIER RECORDS CARRIER 015), Peck with his brass beast, the bassist Tom Blancarte and drummer Brian Osborne. Three lengthy tracks of depressing, intense and slow-moving sludge are created, almost unbelievably, through acoustic methods. I say “unbelievably” because in form and surface, this music is uncannily close to heavy sludge rock made with guitars and amplifiers. Stephen O’Malley had better look to his laurels! This micro-genre has been dubbed “doom jazz” by the experts, a fitting nomenclature, and The Gate do it far more convincingly than The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, even though the latter have the musical style embedded in their name. 1 If you like deeply resonant bass and sub-bass tones that can slough the skin off a Burmese python at fifteen paces, with enough presence to flatten a mountain range into Play-Doh, then this is the record for you. Peck’s method, which incidentally is composed rather than improvised and partly indebted to the work of Hungarian composer György Kurtág, is horrifyingly effective when set to a relentless march beat as on ‘Aeons Of Decay’, but also doubly fatal on ‘Frozen Gods’ where for the first half of its 23-minute stretch, the tuba just sits there and growls menacingly in jet-black rumbling tones, its bad-tempered sighs sometimes joined by the equally disgruntled upright bass sawing out snarls and grunts from the lower depths. It’s not just the glorious sound of this record that’s so compelling, but the way it contains all the nuances of improvisatory rapport and compositional structure that makes it so satisfying a listen. I suppose ‘Buried Blasphemy’ is the liveliest cut here and is the one to spin to your extreme metal-freak friends with their strange haircuts and pieces of metal embedded in their noses and lips. 2 If they arrive at the party clutching their boring records by Cult Of Luna, Neurosis and Mastodon in their heavily-ringed fists, then give ‘em a dose of this monster and watch ‘em drop dead. From 23 April 2012 and highly recommended.

When not working solo as TL0741, Pat Gillis is one half of Northern Machine with the bass player Bill Warford. The duo poured most of their energy into studio-based records for a while, until they found they could wreak their droning noise on stage and made a leap into releasing live recordings, staring with 2004′s Staalhertz. In Front Of The Crowd (HC3 MUSIC HC3NMCD9) is also live music, a compilation of ten examples of their craft made in the period 2005-2009, realised using keyboards, percussion, tape loops and various electronic effects; all the individual voices of these instruments, most especially the “singing metals” of Warford, do tend to lose some of their definition in the overall droney murk, sometimes resulting in rather nightmarish effects as the frequencies swirl together like nine types of liquid glue. I get the impression the pair are very good at working their way intuitively through the twin swamps of aggressive noise and effects-drenched drone, but the intention in the live work was to introduce some repeatable elements and a tad more structure to the enterprise. Unfortunately these good intentions appear to have succumbed to the compelling effects of loud amplification, and while the record has its moments of good solid assaultive chunkery and mysterious sojourns in a dreamy dark-ambient state, the music becomes quite samey and dull towards the end of the album. Despite the often compelling surfaces, I just don’t hear enough risk-taking or moments of real danger in the playing. One title at least, ‘Circuit Parasite’, seems indicative of their approach; one often has the impression of electronic equipment simply feeding off itself. From 13 June 2012.

  1. Sadly they are an example of a band who cannot possibly live up to their own name. ↩
  2. I of course have many such acquaintances in my coterie, to a man all named Zach and covered with so many tattoos that their arms resemble walking museums of scrimshaw work. ↩
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Condensing Clouds

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

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

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

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


Pity me…I’ve been ill with a nasty strain of flu twice this month, and it’s putting a crimp in many of my plans. If you were expecting a radio show this week, sorry to disappoint you, but it’s this rotten illness what did for me last Friday, when I should have been on the air but was instead stretched out like a numb cadaver on my rack of pain and coughery. Now for some CD releases.

Jan Klug and Kasper van Hoek recorded Music Played On A Monday (HEILSKABAAL RECORDS HK021) at the Mohr Institute. Just fourteen minutes of music from these worthy Netherlandish fellows on this mini CD. The event or occasion was “Max Meetup”, a kind of musical swap meet where I suppose musicians, laptoppers and tech buffs all compared notes about their use of the Max / MSP software. One of these days I really must find out what this transformative software actually does to sound, and try to understand why so many musicians are attracted to it. On this recording Klug plays woodwinds, Theremin, and the famous Crackle Box invented by Michel Waisvisz, while the prolific Van Hoek has his home-made stringed instruments. It’s fair to say the experience of a Monday which they present is much the same as that of many people – lethargic, uncertain, and laced with a certain dread. Some interesting sound effects pour out of the churning aural melange, but the music is rather unstructured and refuses to amount to much more than just interesting combinations of tones and textures. This is another Monday morning effect, well known to anyone who works in an office, where your thoughts just cannot connect and you flit miserably from one incomplete task to another. From 11 June 2012.

Boy Fruit‘s Demonology (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL079) promises plenty with a Satanic title and cover images of eyeless lost souls, but the music turns out to be routine mashups of beats, hiphop, techno and funk, occasionally messed up with spoken-word fragments from FM radio announcers; nowhere near as crazy as it would like to think it is, its looping daftness grows wearisome quite quickly. Not enough effort was spent by Jay Harmon of Cincinnati to transcend his sources, and what he creates is virtually indistinguishable from what he cuts up. From same label, Firstdog‘s Corecore (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL077) is slightly more successful, with its illogical streams of video-game music going completely nuts. Jack Rodriguez, making his full-length debut, takes “wonkiness” as his guiding aesthetic and attempts to tame his inherent melodic waywardness by setting it to minimal dubby beats. When he released this, he had a much better name (First Dog To Visit The Center Of The Earth) but has now curtailed it to Firstdog for some reason. These both from 6 June 2012.

A great piece of electronic analogue noise from Jason Soliday, here billed as J. Soliday on his first proper CD release, Nonagon Knives (CIP CIPCD027). CIP label boss Blake Edwards would put his own head on a guillotine to make sure that Chicago music gets the recognition it deserves, and in print form he’s waxing lyrical about this album until he froths at the mouth. No wonder, though, since Nonagon Knives is a real slicer. Soliday has a lot of the violence and force in his work that makes noise music attractive to so many sickos and masochists (indeed a lot of the audience often begin and end with the violence), but he also has a strong understanding of how to manipulate the stereo field in his favour. At times he pulls off tiny miracles of mixing and panning, situating his barbs, bombs, and boulders at marked points in the imaginary listening space with remarkable assurance. We also find much to admire in his very varied textures, which run the gamut from barbed wire necklets to scalding jets of acid in the mush, not forgetting the layers of painful igneous rocks which sear our running feet. To cap it all off, there’s Soliday’s impeccable timing and dynamics, executed through a powerful mix of lightning reflexes, ultra-sharp editing skills, and sheer instinct; he makes these shocking events collide and germinate with terrifying precision. This music was all generated with modular synth systems, instruments which (I would guess) are much harder to control than their digital counterparts, so this may be another index of Soliday’s great skill. I think the label is correct to compare him with modern electro-acoustic composers; in purpose and method, he has more affinities with the extreme end of the INA-GRM label than he does with Merzbow. Stern, rigid music with a core of pure titanium; an exciting and invigorating listen which I recommend. Only the sleeve image is kinda drab, though I suppose it strikes a suitable keynote of darkness and ambiguity with its digital abstractions. From 25 June 2012.

Equally thrilling is A Congregation Of Vapours (FARPOINT RECORDINGS FARPOINT 038), from the Dublin sound artist Fergus Kelly. This talented fellow gets his effects from combining feedback, home-made electronics, digital processing, field recordings and lumps of metal, plus he makes judicious use of the no-input mixing board as promulgated by Toshimaru Nakamura. The first thing we note about Kelly is that he’s some way from being a pure minimalist, and the best parts of this album just roar out at you with the barely-controlled rage of ancient giants playing quoits or whatever it was they did in ancient times in mythological Éire. We also note that Kelly will never leave a black space on the canvas when he can cover every surface in sight with a luscious abstract drone of some description. The third point in his favour is the very naturalistic / organic vibe to his music, which is intended to be as bracing as rain or seawater in the face, and it refreshes the mind as surely as a good icy March wind against yer cheeks. It’s not just the layered field recordings of the wind and the rain, at times the music itself is as forceful as the very weather that inspires it. Paul Hegarty contributes notes to this release, and while at first I thought we might have another potential noise artist poised for release on Hegarty’s DotDotDot Music label, in fact the abiding keynote here is one of restraint. True, the album gets off to a feisty start with the exhilarating ‘Freefall’, but thereafter it tends to settle down into slower and more meditative music, revealing Kelly’s attention to detail, the way he can discover an inner pulsebeat in the most seemingly inert and unlikely places, and bring it to life. Some of the titles allude to tools we can use to navigate our way around space, both interior and exterior spaces – maps, patterns, sonar, horizon points and so forth, while titles like ‘Pressure Drop’ and ‘Heat Signature’ also feel significant somehow in this regard; a well-attuned human being might be able to use their sense of ‘pressure drop’ to determine how many people are packed inside an auditorium. Perhaps we’re all blind men stumbling about the world, with need of music to steer us like ancient navigators used the stars to steer their vessels. Perhaps also Kelly has an interest in revealing invisible things, like an aural infra-red camera. Kelly is a successful collaborator and composer with numerous activities to his name, including radio broadcasts, public performances, festivals curated by him, and a teamup with the UK improvisers Mark Wastell and Max Eastley. The man even runs his own CDR label. Considering that this method of working is quite commonplace now (I mean especially the mixing of field recordings with everything) it is all the more testament to Kelly’s skills that he produces music of such distinction. One might be tempted at some point to compare him to another Irish electro-acoustic grandee, that is the famous Roger Doyle, but Doyle had a bit more interest in narrative I think. From 11 June 2012.

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The Fabulous Shirley Bassey

Seesaw of Dreams


Great package from Darren Wyngarde aka Filthy Turd…no-nonsense English noisemaker of prolific proportions…active and social he be, engaging with noise in a physical and sweaty manner, aided by fellow oddballs, not footling around with computers or antiseptic conceptual notions…arrived here in May 2012…two cassette tapes, wrapped up in a magazine spread (and I use the word advisedly), with some underfloor felt / debris / muck thrown in, hopefully lifted from under one of his fetid carpets…neither tape is titled that I can see, although one of them might be called URDWYG THE GOLDERR – CASSETTE PSYCHIC VOLUME 1 …this one is made from a recycled musicassette, wherein El Filtho has recorded his dire diablry over top of pre-recorded elements but not allowed any remnants of original to survive…such cassettes are probably impossible to give away even in charity shops now, who have turned their backs on VHS tapes long ago…the deal with this release is that the item is not for sale or manufactured in conventional sense, and to hear it you must send a tape in your possession to the warlock himself, whereupon he will refashion and refit it with his grim horrors, hand-making all covers, each one unique…at same time guaranteeing to wreck your equipment…a potent spell then…seems he has already enlisted over 50 subscribers to the scheme, each man willingly signing up for a walk to the gallows tree…so far a pretty convincing raid from under the floorboards, subterranean spirits and demons surfacing to take what is rightfully theirs among the sweepings, the leavings, the dust, the neglected cobwebs of England’s collective murky psyche…obvious clue to remark on here is the sex-magic undercurrent, as bejudged by the magazine pages ye see, but also perhaps to some extent by the choice of musicassettes that have been assaulted by the hands of Senor Turdoo…Shirley Bassey, Charlotte Church, Nana Moskouri are among the celebrity victims of this demented stalker in sound…some might read that enterprise as a nasty form of “aural rape”, but I think it’s more like a demonic possession, an inhabiting of female bodies…not to say that is any more wholesome…also a concerted effort to erase and wipe out all forms of bourgeois good taste by any means possible, dubbing over tapes of Mum and Dad music and effacing printed information from record company by means of blue magic marker…two enemies disposed of in this way…the second tape is also hard to identify like any good criminal renegade walking abroad should be, but the word UR is ensculped in middle of the case…would be possible to read title as 90-O-UR-O-A if wrecked on strong drink at time of scoping…it contains subtle but unsettling looping and murmuring effects, quickly degenerating into a pile of echoed and uncertain wail-noise that can freeze the hearts of strong men, many of them blanching or fainting at the prospect…continuous noise with scads of ghastloid vocal elements, which may morph at any time into a devilish prayer or chant, and certainly no good is boded if screams on tape are evidence of anything…now let us turn to the Cassette Psychic item for ear-trial….of course I was not a subscriber to the plan so Darren the Monstro sent me the Shirley Bassey palimpsest on his own account…wrapped in silver foil…note title inside scrawled in blue biro and torn from notebook of a muttering loon…it is disturbing to hear…again surprisingly at first a departure from the intense and caustic noise wall which previous outings from the Northern climes may have prepared us for…instead a low-key and muffled sound disguises some potent and radical tape experiments with voice, echo device, electronic oozings…still a foul and unpleasant experience, reaching into this bucket of earwigs, worms, and other garden effluvia…what will my hand touch next?…edited and hashed up for maximum disorienting factor, one illogical splice after another, baffling documents and sleep-talk wrenched from the mind of a four A.M. insomniac…at times almost comic, but instantly warping into grotesque and amateurish anti-art, with distorted microphone effects and vari-speeded effects, trivial fragments of sound that even the most hard-bitten cassette band of 1982 would have distanced puny selves from…is this making sense? It is unmaking sense…these scrawls and doodles on magnetic tape could be secret messages intended for your ears only, if you can realign your inner radio antennae onto the wavelength. By writing “Stuff For You” to me and drawing red witch on verso, Darrenacious has succeeded once again in casting the runes on me, sealing my doom.

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Sutekh Hexen

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: Aurora Borealis Records

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"Utarm...finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos..."

Apocryphal Stories: grim tales of descent into avant-black metal / industrial / noise world

"Utarm...finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos..."
“Utarm…finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos…”

Utarm, Apocryphal Stories, Handmade Birds Records, CD (2012)

Good thing Utarm called his album “Apocryphal Stories” as I’d hate to think the five songs here were for real. Judging from the continuous demented wailing and screaming, and the twisted theatrical Satanic stylings of the music, you’d think the Utarm man has spent all his life in Arkham Asylum, that mental institution hell-hole beloved of Lovecraftian short stories and Batman graphic novels; and some would say perhaps he has indeed spent all his life in a bizarre mental institution – for isn’t our entire planet one insane asylum where the most severely disturbed and psychotic inmates are those in charge of all our major political, economic and religious institutions, claiming to know what’s best for us? “Apocryphal Stories” certainly plays as if, having awoken one day and realised his nightmare was not only for real but was also never-ending, the Utarm man decided to record an album detailing his horror and anguish at being permanently trapped with 7 billion crazies on Planet Apokolips right here on Earth.

Opening track “AltEtende Skaper” might capture the moment when the Utarm fella wakes up and finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos: it begins with a slowly expanding universe of warped music-box melodies, spooky ghost lullabies and the guy’s own cries of inner torment. There’s a definite air of disorientation as if he’s waking up from a drugged state and he can barely talk and stand. Voices come out of his brain but he knows not what they are, what they’re saying, where they’re coming from or even if they’re his and not artificial implants. Full realisation hits him about the 6th minute in a huge blow-out of distorted metal guitar fuzz, pounding industrial percussion and howling vocal despair. The whole thing is gut-wrenching, heart-breaking and soul-destroying though there’s a campy edge to the destruction.

The torment doesn’t lessen with “Of Rape, Solitude and Bliss; the Triangle of Flesh”, a creepy suspenseful blackened drama of solo operatic singing, more disorientation with a shaky tempo, and a strange stage-like ambience as though a medieval play about the Black Death was playing out before us. We watch the central character tortured by sights and visions in his mind while beings of ether swirl around his head, baiting him constantly. Again, quite late in the song, there’s new existential pain as a wobbly guitar melody, distorted static buzz and something that sounds like a demon cow mooing and sitting on top of the singer drown out his screams.

And so the album plays out like a twisted Ingmar Bergman film of soul-searching amid desolate soundscapes of bristling, buzzing guitar noise, gently swirling and trilling guitar melodies, tortured screeching and always that strange atmosphere of blissful and serene yet deranged black trance. Layers of sound and noise are at once warm and soothing, and filled with agony and derangement. No matter how bombastic or demented the album gets, there’s always a very strong sense of direction; the songs could easily have gone all over the place and become totally overpowering but it’s to Utarm’s credit that the music is intense and focused throughout the album. The result is that compared to similar blackened metal/industrial/noise acts like Gnaw Their Tongues, Utarm comes across as epic, bombastic and even majestic without becoming overwhelming. There is a core of trance-like bliss in the music that’s reminiscent of drone doomsters Nadja.

Well … the avant-black metal/industrial/noise torture continues all the way to and through outro track “Above Death” with more whooping screams and howls, a strange echoing hover-drone as if our man had been dumped in an underground wind tunnel lined with metal sheets and high-pressure industrial white hiss is pissing through it. Severely damaged freak-out power electronics are being churned out of a sausage-mincing machine; the manufacturers would collapse and die in horror at the way their choppers and mincing grilles were being used here. (Especially if they were the ones strapped to the conveyor belts.)

This collection of grimmer-than-grimm fables and fairy-stories is freaky and intense … the music is scary and noisy, anguished and tortured, yet at times strangely peaceful, trance-like and blissed-out at its centre … a deranged genius is at work here.

Contact: Handmade Bird Records

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