Tagged: Norway

November 11, 2012

Pause and think again

Big Numbers

It’s been a while since we heard from the excellent John Wall, a UK composer who has been continually honing his very extreme approach to the art of digital composition. I was rivetted by his earlier work like Alterstill ¹ which displayed his meticulous approach to layering and assembling samples, producing astonishing juxtapositions and creating “virtual bands” from highly unlikely pairings of selected records. He made most plunderphonics artistes, especially the over-rated John Oswald, look excessive and careless by comparison. Since then Wall embarked on a trajectory, a path of attenuation that was determined to pare down his already minimal approach, and the music became increasingly austere: shorter in duration, far fewer notes, much more abstracted, and even tougher for the human ear to endure. As he evolved this very fundamental take on the less-is-more philosophy, I sensed by the time of 2005′s Cphon that Wall was sacrificing some of his own human spontaneity on the altar of digital perfection, much as I enjoyed the music. That particular trend appears to be reversing itself on this new record 139 (ENTR’ACTE 139) for Entr’Acte. This may be partially because another human is involved; it is a collaboration with Mark Durgan, the English noisemeister whose 2005 Hypertension Classics Vol. 2 (4 CDs of blistering, churning hell released under his Putrefier alias) still causes murmurs of painful remembrance among the few whose ears it has scarred. On these six untitled pieces, Durgan has been issued with a modular synth, but any predilection he may have had for creating a blistering screech assault has been quashed by the iron control of Wall. Or has it? Minimal as this music may be, the compacted strength of a thousand noise firebrands still ticks away at its mechanical heart. Wall may be doing everything in his power to bleed away the rich colours from each inhuman tone, but as many seated behind the mixing desk have learned, you can’t keep a maverick down for long. Which brings us to the additional credit Wall has taken on the record, that of “severe editing”. One can imagine what this methodology involves, not only a ruthless and focussed effort of selection in order to reduce hours of music to a single powerful blip of concentrated juiceiness, but also carrying out the activity with a stern countenance and furrowed brow, thereby presenting the very image of severity. I’m all for it. If I had my way John Wall would be appointed as a sort of musical censor in this country, cutting down overlong contemporary electronica albums to a fraction of their current length. In fact, why stop there? If he could encode his method into a computer script in some way, it could come bundled with each new installation of Audacity or Max-MSP, and automatically curtail the music at source. That would teach a few people a thing or two! At slightly over 33 minutes in length, this is a record which offers you ten times as much vitamin-enriched protein as any given slice of venison…realised at Wall’s UtterPsalm studios, and it’s also nice to see he’s able to incorporate his letterpress skills (title embossed in blind) into the design of the package, which meets the generic Entr’acte packaging conventions halfway. From 29 March 2012.

It had a dying fall

From the Californian Accretions label we have the solo piano record by Nazo Zakkak, A Pause By Any Other Name (ACCRETIONS ALP055CD). This gifted composer who currently teaches music at St Katherine College in San Diego has been improvising at the keyboard since an early age, but his Pause record is a structured composition of slow and very beautiful piano music. Zakkak considers himself a modernist and experimental musician, but tends to embrace harmonic structure and melody rather than the indeterminism and alienating techniques of much contemporary classical music of the 1960s. In short nary a trace of John Cage’s dicta can be found embodied in this music, outside of a passing reference to Morton Feldman, whose piano music this superficially resembles in its use of space and very deliberate timing. According to Cecilia Sun’s liner notes, it is to English composers of the 20th century we must look if we want to find real spiritual forebears to Pause, among them Michael Nyman ², Howard Skempton, and Brian Eno. All those concerned in bringing this release into the light are reluctant to dub this music “ambient” without the application of various caveats, and while many listeners will be instantly reminded of Music For Airports when they hear this, it would be foolish to overlook the compositional methodology at work here. Although recorded entirely by the composer on this release, Pause is scored for four pianists, who are required to pay careful attention to the decay of each chord they play in the series, making use of the sustain pedal and listening closely to the dying chords of their fellow musicians. The act of decay itself plays a part as a trigger in the compositional process, in other words. The album arrives in a rather vague and grey piece of cover art, but it’s a not-unpleasant piece of music. From 14 March 2012.

Layer Cake

After all that composed music, how about something more performed and spontaneous to round out our day? We’ve been receiving quite a number of items from the Norwegian Hubro label this year, many of them real niftaroos. Hubro seem to specialise in bringing our attention to numerous talented instrumental bands, all capable of producing fascinating music which is impossible to classify, freely mixing within jazz, rock or improvised idioms. What also comes across is great fluency and skill in playing. No exception is the trio Cakewalk, whose debut album Wired (HUBRO CD2514) was released in May 2012. Øystein Skar, Stephan Meidell and Ivar Loe Bjørnstad play synth, guitar and drums and while they are more firmly situated in the improvised rock camp than some bands on the label, the classification pigeonhole drops away very quickly on hearing just a few bars of music. It’s just great instrumental playing with a lot of energy, fire, and innovation, without self-consciously trying to imitate styles or genres such as krautrock, jazz fusion, or psychedelic jamming music; all three players make inventive use of their instruments and generate strong, unusual sounds. I suppose it is fair to remark that the band really have only two modes – either taut fast rock riffing or swirly introspective offbeat droning – but the elements fuse together in very satisfying and surprising ways, and each piece evolves and grows naturally. What comes across strongly is the assurance and confidence in the playing, which is impressive for a debut album, but then all three players are quite experienced and have come to Cakewalk from earlier bands – among them Sacred Harp, Highasakite, The Sweetest Thrill, Kramacher, Vanilla Riot, Glow and the Hedvig Mollestad Trio. Quite a list of names there – what current explosions of talent might we be neglecting in that Nordic Realm? At one time the lazy journalists used to summarise Norway as the home of “Norwegian noise” – and nothing else! Excellent bands like Cakewalk are proving what nonsense that is.

UtterPsalm CD2, released in 1995. ↩
In particular his Decay Music (UK OBSCURE NO 6, 1976), which shares some common ground with this record. ↩

September 11, 2012

The Choko King: oddball solo eccentric with a playful and eclectic style

Jono El Grande, The Choko King, Norway, Rune Arkiv, RACD107 (2011)

Not quite my brand of oddball solo music eccentric – I prefer my artistic eccentrics to be morose and cantankerous fellers in the vein of Fastest and Keuhkot – but Jono El Grande is an amusing fellow and the music on “The Choko King”, a compilation of recordings he made from 1995 to 2008, is a great exposition of his style and art. Best approach to listening and comprehending this album is to hear it in one go because it’s the guy’s outlook and style and the album’s mood that are most important: El Grande has a playful, open and easy-going attitude and his music is eclectic and varied, blending in influences from film scores, prog rock, electronic pop and what might be lounge space music from the 1960s in parts. The majority of tracks whiz by quickly and a couple repeat in different versions (“Eva’s Horse Dance”, “Vital Requiem”). The entire recording is happy and exuberant, full of the joy of being and being able to run across a range of music territories, picking whatever pleases our man and combining different elements into one joyful and idiosyncratic whole.

Pride of place is given to the bonus track “Vital Requiem – Complete” which at 14 minutes is the longest song and a veritable circus bizarre of near-deranged tunes on xylophones out of hell and other instruments whose crazy melodies suggest possession by phantoms that escaped from the spirit world equivalent of a mental asylum. A cartoon vocal gibbering in mysterious tongues is the highlight of the song.

The music flies about at various tangents and just when you think you have him figured out, off he goes in another unexpected direction. After a while of constant upbeat happiness, I confess I begin to find the album a bit tiresome and the playfulness not so spontaneous and even rather strained. Back to the likes of Fastest and Keuhkot for this reviewer: birds of a feather flock together, I suppose.

Contact: Jono El Grande, Rune Arkiv / Rune Grammofon

July 27, 2012

Archer Heights

Split for the Coast

The eleventh release on the Spectrum Spools label is Soft Coast by No UFO’s, which is the work of Konrad Jandavs from Vancouver. Once again John Elliott rescues an obscure piece of music from a small-run cassette label origins, and reissues it on luxury vinyl. I like a good deal of what Mr Jandavs is doing here with his synths, beatboxes, sequencers and filters, especially those cuts which maintain a good solid beat to support the layers of droniness. In some ways it’d be nice to hear him try out the long-form La Dusseldorf thing and see what part of the melodic backwoods his Winnebago takes him, but there’s also a lot to be said for his generally economical approach here, curbing any tendencies towards wallowing in self-indulgent filtered ecstasy. No UFO’s also has an uncluttered and fresh approach to the construction of each piece, such that we’re not wading through layers of overdubbed fug; there’s a simplicity and directness which appeals, even if the melodic figures are not especially strong or original. From December 2011, and likely to grow on us with time.

Dead By Dawn

Now here’s a lively and spicy mixed-up morgeroon from Anders Hana, who’s a Norwegian loopoid from Stavanger associated with such fine acts as MoHa!, Noxagt and Ultralyd. Also Blodsprut, Circulasione Totale Orchestra, Clifford Torus, Crimetime Orchestra, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Quintet, Jaga Jazzist, Morthana, and Pokemachine. Matter of fact if there’s any far-out underground music going on in Stavanger it’s fairly likely that Hana will be involved in some way, either organising the venue where it happens or tearing the tickets on the door with a surly grunt directed at all incoming punters. On the single-sided vinyl object Dead Clubbing (DRID MACHINE RECORDS DMR2), he plays all the instruments including guitar, bass and drums, adding demented saxophone noise and groany synth passages, thus performing as his own one-man stoner-rock heavy-metal beat-jazz free-noise experimental-electronics combo. When you’re in the mood for something rich, thick and zesty, Hana is the man who’ll spread hot sauce over your French fries using a trowel for the purpose. Aye, nothing less than high volume and full-intensity performances will satisfy his creative urges on this salvo of grapeshot, and primary colours are the only oil paints he’ll deign to scrape with his nine-inch palette knife. What’s not to like? Well, only the slightly clod-hoppering and clumpy dynamic of the whole LP gives it a slightly awkward feel in places, like a Sherman tank stuck in first gear or a 30-foot giant with impaired motor functions, but that’s all part of the unkempt charm of Mr “no hairbrush for me thanks” Hana. The six dense pieces are generally short, obsessively repetitive and extremely – erm – direct. The label also operates as a fine-art screenprinting joint in Stavanger, and the actual artefact (I only have a promo CD) has visuals printed directly onto the vinyl and onto the PVC sleeve. 300 copies only of this drool-worthy red pancake.

Free Fall

Deeply impressed by Airfields (MAZAGRAN mz005), a new composition by Cypriot genius Yannis Kyriakides which we’ve had in the pouch since December. We noted his double-CD set Antichamber in TSP19 and I think it was around then we started to find a way into this dense work with its blending of acoustic chamber music with electronic sounds and strange effects, whereas previously it had seemed a bit daunting and unapproachable. This Airfields piece, a 12-part composition played by musikFabrik, an ensemble of classical players, with live electronics by the composer, really hits home – a very interesting take on spectral music, all players producing uncanny tones and unfamiliar sounds from their carefully-woven shrouds of woodwinds, strings, piano and percussion. In his notes, Kyriakides tells the story of how the piece came to be, and it’s a tale that involves a composition for the Siren Orchestra (who derive ideas from the futurist Luigi Russolo and the scientific theorist Heimholtz), and another composition for the Seattle Chamber Players. Since 2008, Kyriakides has been developing his own form of unusual graphic scores, working with photographs taken by satellites which he manages to recast into sonic information. As that technique improved, he found ways to render parts of these graphic scores by hand, translating the contours of these aerial views into scores which musicians could read. I like the idea that the musicians playing this unconventional sheet music are “put into a metaphorical orbit”, and it’s no doubt this methodology which accounts for the unusual, dizzying sensations of Airfields – sometimes we feel we are indeed falling through the sky in a semi-controlled way, taking a reverse parachute dive into another dimension. It’s entirely subjective, but I think this compelling and strangely melancholic music would make a perfect accompaniment while viewing Le Drapeau Noir, a 1937 painting by René Magritte. Further ghostly timbres arise in this, the third version of the evolving concept, through his placement of the brass section on the balcony of the performing space, to assist with the natural echo of the other musicians on the stage (a radical rearrangement of orchestral convention of which I’m sure Stockhausen would’ve approved). A live recording made in Amsterdam, the disc is issued with a booklet of full colour photographs.

April 4, 2012

Campomorto

Ronny Wærnes is the Norwegian sound-art semi-industrial noise-guy who just won’t quit…got a couple of CDRs from him in December 2011. Tendentious D (GO TO GATE RECORDS GO TO CD 019) is a collection of eight eerie pulsating electronic drones, wobblers, squealers and whoopers, each more inexplicable than the last. He put these eight together for the RPM Challenge last year, a no-prize event which is intended to motivate musicians by offering them a small audience, a web stream and a guaranteed listen from someone with a pair of ears, which in this over-crowded world of music-making where there seem to be more records than people to listen, is not a bad prospect. The only catch is you have to complete your work in just one month to qualify for the RPM event. While there’s not much content on Tendentious D that’s so novel it’s going to amaze your leathery hide and make it turn inside-out, Ronny creates some quietly compelling non-musical chunterings and ambient-tinted bleatings, and it’s impressive he did it all just by processing sounds through a contact microphone, effects pedals and a mixing desk.

For Between Nothingness and Entertainment (GO TO GATE RECORDS GO TO CD 021), Ronny teamed up with the guitarist Kjetil Hanssen from Oslo who also has a radio show, his own record label, and plays with a large number of bands and “projects”. This is a good old-fashioned blast of no-nonsense noise music, realised in the studio with guitar and electronics and powerful amplifiers that must have sat there for hours taking all the abuse poured into them like long-suffering partners in a hopeless relationship. It’s got all the airless qualities that make noise music seem, to civilians and infidels, like so much air pollution belched into the clean air like factory chimneys. Though its creators speak of a “massive wave of energy”, it’s not really that energised, and I kind of like the fact that these tracks aren’t especially relentless or propelled by the usual power-house pump-action wheel motions that characterise a lot of evil power noise muck. Instead, Wærnes and Hanssen just pour out generous globules of tasty textured drone-noise action as efficiently as if they were pulling deep-sea fish out of a hole cut in the ice. Wisely, they never look up from their work or pay attention to any distractions, and just keep reeling in the fish.

Here’s another vinyl LP from Boring Machines in Italy. Heroin In Tahiti‘s Death Surf (BM036LP) was realised by the duo of Mattioli and De Figuereido using guitars, synths and drum machines, between them creating a very appealing and agitated, churning surface which somehow blends surf music, garage bands, and exploitation movie soundtrack music with the alienating forces of “cold wave” music. Plenty of distortion pedals, reverb and echo, aimless twanging, and endless drum machine rhythms ploughing across imaginary fields of urban desolation. These musical layers melt together as surely as if the Italians were blasting five wax figurines with a blowtorch. The synth effects aren’t used as tasteful watercolour washes, but more like the impasto layers of a painter like Frank Auerbach, and the rest of the music has to sink or swim in these thick tides of grisly electronic gloop. At worst, the excessive reverb here can tend to disguise the fact that some of these instrumentals aren’t much more than sluggish 12-bar blues or rockabilly jams, but at their best Heroin In Tahiti can do more than hint at the vivid semi-apocalyptic landscapes they are clutching at. I’m intrigued to learn that both players live in a neglected area of east Rome, where the fabric of the city is falling down around them and a local scene called “Borgata Boredom” appears to have formed itself, no doubt a vehicle or framework for unemployed youngsters to find a mode of creative expression for their angst, or just sit around in cafes and whine about the situation. I can’t quite find the Morricone resonances in this music which they allude to in the press release, but the cinematic aspirations of this pair are more than met simply by living in that seedy part of Rome which has been captured by the unflinching cameras of Pasolini, De Sica and Visconti.

April 1, 2012

Three Vinyl Volumens

The Mind Robber

Hobo Sonn might be Ian Murphy. We last heard from him in 2008 with The Thundering Nature of Reality, a terrific limited press LP of mysterious humming which I wrongly took to be made up of guitar and amplifier hum, but Mr Murphy wrote in to correct me on this. “My music is made up of improvised recordings that are then carefully edited together,” he reported in December 2009 by email. “This process takes a lot of time and it is where some degree of composition is involved. Timing/duration is a big factor in my work. Therefore I take a lot of time listening to the music to find exactly where I want the piece to change/progress or end.” I’m glad to have this information as it helps me get my bearings with Wary The Mind (AMEN ABSEN 003), his most recent release which we have had in our paws since September 2011. It’s probably another example of his editing craft, and is meticulously structured and sequenced to achieve quite powerful and mind-warping events, even when the original source material is largely quiet, subdued, and unidentifiable. The first side, for example, contains lengthy stretches of intimate whirrings which to me suggest tiny cogs in tiny machines, malfunctioning or grinding together through a lack of regular oiling. These sonic particles are treated with a sparing degree of studio echo, or digital delay. This side closes with brief passages of piano music which are simply gorgeous in their dreamlike wispiness – they may simply be samples from a classical music record, repeated or looped as needed, their regular sequence disrupted in some way – but what emerges are precious moments from the most beautiful “exotica” album Martin Denny never made. These piano fugues overspill onto the opening of Side B, later to be replaced by continuous analogue drones which morph into Eastern music, or a reasonable facsimile of same. Along the way in this baffling journey, there are fragments of field recordings – a car passing from one speaker to the other, for example – again, very sparingly used. The LP ends with a faint tinkling resembling oriental temple bells and what I imagine to be mumbling in a foreign language, and thereby almost wanders into areas previously annexed by Climax Golden Twins on their gloriously oblique and unexplained sound collages. Hobo Sonn likewise refuses to explain anything here, all sound sources and methods are kept hidden, and the “what-is-it” factor remains highly prevalent. This is a welcome relief from the numerous releases we are sent where the creators feel compelled to tell you in endless detail what they ate for breakfast before they made the LP. In like manner, the cover art is an ingenious collage which drip-feeds us tiny fragments of visual information inside a geometric grid structure. This artwork could almost have been the graphic score for the music within. Recommended. Comes with a free 3″ CDR insert also.

Herz Aus Glass

Melt Famas is the duo of Fred Bigot and Nikolas Mallet, and their lovely 10-incher Serial Weather (MUZI-02) is an early release on the new Swiss-German label Musikzimmer – prior to this the organisers been more involved in exhibition spaces and soundart interventions of some sort. This black beauty comprises three loud and joyous tracks of guitar and drum music, but the electric guitar of Bigot has been amplified and distorted to the point where it starts to melt into electronica – he’s achieving wild and woolly effects which most half-baked laptoppers would only manage to arrive at through 18 presets and a sportsbag filled with FX pedals. That said, there’s probably some form of synth or keyboard on this record too, but I love the way everything locks together into this rich and sumptuous sun-drenched racket, allowing for distortion but never settling down into an amorphous blob of similar-sounding frequencies. In short, great dynamics! There’s a cover version of ‘Heart Of Glass’ where the singer appears both alarmed and bored by the love affair which is breaking up around his ears, but by the end of the song the situation has become little short of cataclysmic, with walls falling down around us in chaotic fashion. ‘Plastic Swing’ is a five-minute gem of semi-industrial instrumental march music with a plangent melody which D.A.F. would have been proud of, while the flipside is fully occupied with 11 minutes of ‘Ice Age Fire Cage’, its melodic and trebly guitars to the fore in another highly rich and addictive mix, concocting excessive acid-trip music that is a fine homage to all things psychedelic. Bigot impressed us heavily with the Holy Mountain compilation of his avant-techno 12-inchers, a CD which appeared in 2009 – but the music was already ten years old by that point. Now with this guitar-heavy record, I’m beginning to see the rockabilly connection with Bigot more clearly. With tremendous instrumental prowess on display and no restraint on the volume control, this record is an unalloyed delight.

Sei Still, Wisse ICH BIN

I’ve played two of the four sides of Twenty-One Pieces (EARLY MORNING RECORDS EMR 018), a double LP by Taming Power which came out in 2009 but was sent to us in August 2011 by its creator Askild Haugland. So far I’ve heard many beautiful instrumentals made with electric guitars, Casio keyboards and other instruments, interspersed with abstract sound-art experiments produced with such devices as singing bowls, handsaws, field recordings, the human voice, and tape recorders. The guitar pieces are melodic and sweet, stirring unnameable feelings of nostalgia for this listener. The abstract works are very varied, sometimes creating impressions of the elements, the wind or the weather, or simply exploring an intriguing effect of “acoustic noise”. Tape recorders and cassette recorders play a big part in the work. It’s strange, minimal, affecting. Haugland seems to have some quite unique working methods – he refers to “pieces recorded in stop-motion” in his enclosed letter – and not one of these instrumentals ever falls into the usual stumbling blocks or clichés of drone–ambient music. His guitar work in particular reminds me strongly of the American outsider, Wilburn Burchett; there’s the same studied deliberation in the playing, the inner core of beauty to the music, disrupted by unexpectedly loud or wrong-sounding notes, which are seamlessly incorporated in the whole work. It’s all about the playing, the exploration, the process; and while the finished pieces may appear mysterious and odd sometimes, Haugland is doing nothing to obfuscate or mystify his methods, which are clear and open, declared with honesty. This Norwegian player, himself something of an outsider I expect, has been patiently carving away at his craft since 1987, and when he began his use of the tape recorder as an instrument in 1996 and 1997, he found himself in a purple patch of creative output. Early Morning Records is his own record label for his music, and to date he’s released 18 LPs and 40 cassettes. Collectors who take an interest in the work of single-minded mavericks releasing their own home-made LPs (step forward Jandek) should investigate, but I can recommend this beautiful, singular and seriously-crafted music to just about anyone. Haugland has a spiritual depth and simplicity in his music that reminds me of Florian Fricke, and believe me that’s not a compliment I would pay lightly.

March 25, 2012

Primordial Wasps

Pillow Talk

Very nice to have discovered the vocal work of Bonnie Barnett, appearing on In Between Dreams (PFMENTUM PFMCD063) as the leader of Bonnie Barnett Group. She’s an improviser and composer who lives in Los Angeles, and creates an extemporised form of vocal music which is pleasant and surprising. Not as fiercely extreme as the UK’s voice-wildman Phil Minton, nor even comparable to the trippy skitterings of Norma Winstone, she occupies her own space with these smoky wordless half-sung utterings. Quite often her genius scat-babble is as intimate and incomprehensible as the murmurings of a sleep-talker, an impression which the title may be alluding to. While Barnett is capable of doing the gymnastic workout of ultra-fast syllable delivery, by which I mean consonants delivered from a jazzy machine-gun in the mode of an avant-garde Jon Hendricks, she mostly proceeds at an unhurried pace, interlocking her vocals with the unpredictable moves of the rhythm section, that is the bassist Hal Onserud and drummer Garth Powell. The excellent Richard Wood contributes suitably oneiric and autumnal woodwind blasts with his mystery horns, and reminds us how these instruments can, in the jazz context, resemble the speech of human voices. Most of the material is abstract improvised breath-a-thons, but two tracks use actual texts; the eight-minute ‘Matisse’ which comes from the writing of Gertrude Stein, and the ten-minute ‘Nothingness’ which is based on Jean-Paul Sartre. Both of these are rapped out with stark clarity in a voice which rings with authority, every letter clearly outlined on her crystal tongue, as though Ms Barnett were a human typewriter and your ears are the big roll of paper which became On The Road. It’s like attending literature and linguistics classes at an impossibly hip college where all the professors are jazz beatniks, and you get your diploma awarded in cut-up form by Brion Gysin.

Mad Hatter’s Songs

Layers Of The Onion sent us their 3-track album Hal-An-Tow (OHM RECORDS 2.4 OHM / APARTMENT RECORDS APAREC030 / DRONING-ON RECORDS DRONCD15) in December 2011. This is the duo of Norwegian Fredrik Ness Sevendal with the English player Martin Scott Powell, joined on one track by Aaron Moore from Volcano The Bear. I haven’t heard much from Sevendal since the droney electronic record Song Of Degrees he made with Bill Wood in 2003, although he’s also a member of Kobi, the Norwegian group with a fluid line-up which combines acoustic instruments with field recordings. In project name and title, this release cleverly references an album by The Incredible String Band and the traditional folk song ‘Hal-An-Tow’, performed for example by Shirley Collins and the Albion Dance Band as well as The Watersons. I don’t begrudge them that, but those two references are about all you’ll get in terms of actual folk music from this duo, unless the fauvist tinting of the cover photograph qualifies as an “acid folk” album cover. ‘When Acorns Reach The Sky’ is an acoustic guitar riff which Robin Williamson might have used for two bars of a song, but Powell and Sevendal see fit to extend it into an interminable nine-minute circular guitar drone. The tuneless abstraction of ‘The Muspel Light’ is preferable, and has no connection with folk music at all – it’s a limpid and lengthy drone perhaps produced with bowed guitars, synths, electronics and theremin, and has a natural rise-and-fall rhythm which is not displeasing. My guess is that the Norwegian half of the act was the dominant force behind this one. In between these pieces, we have ‘In The Land of Sona-Nyl’, a curious instrumental composed of instrumental layers which don’t quite fit together, a tune that isn’t quite situated in any single key, and a drum track that can’t decide whether to shuffle along with a cool jazz tempo or a slow rock beat. It follows a meandering direction in an uncertain way, which indeed characterises most of the work on this album. Layers Of The Onion create an agreeable and unusual sound and, to their credit, do so through largely acoustic methods, but beyond playing these languid and spacey jams they don’t really do enough with it for my liking.

Haptic Birthday

Haptic are the trio of Chicago musicians Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills and Adam Sonderberg, also associated with Dropp Ensemble and Olivia Block, among others. While this is the first time I heard them playing together, Hess is familiar to me as one half of Ural Umbo (rich occultist drone music), and Sonderberg played percussion on a fine release by Civil War. Scilens (ENTR’ACTE E127) also exists in a quite different edition as a cassette released in 2011 by the Flingco Sound System, but here it is on CD and clearly marked “First Edition”. As to the music, I am baffled by its inscrutability. Heavy bass emanations, forlorn and random piano notes, shuffling brush-work percussion, and dusty alienated drones from nameless electronic generators. Where ‘The Ister’ is rather a disjunctive exploration into these unknown territories, ‘Setae’ and ‘Winter Wasp’ are more integrated drone pieces, with a very solid and tangible presence to the thick humming sound. Yet so far everything seems stark, cold and almost inhuman, music of great doubtfulness delivered by shadowy men with stern faces and beetling brows. ‘Pentimenti’ leads us even further into the maze of cold storage units and malfunctioning walkie-talkies, and it’s like taking a walk through an icy wasteland which alternates with a deep-freeze meat locker. Simultaneously, there’s too much space and not enough, creating a delicious combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia in one handy thirteen-minute dose. Lastly there’s ‘Secret Track’, a 20-minute chiller which you won’t find on the cassette version, and it’s an exercise in sub-zero tension, its menacingly near-silent murmurs and gently purring layers preparing the listener to expect the worst at any moment. Quite remarkable industrial-minimalist music, and commendable for the fact that I sense it’s mostly created in real time by performing musicians, without over-much reliance on processes, effects, or machinery.

February 14, 2012

Wach Auf and Smell the Coffee!

Wach Auf! (ØRA FONOGRAM OF019) was sent to us in October 2011. Here the great Norwegian musician, composer and one half of the noise band Fe-Mail Maja S.K. Ratkje reveals she has yet another astonishing talent, her remarkable singing prowess. Backed by the Norwegian combo POING, she sings her way through 15 songs which all have a revolutionary or socialist theme. At first I thought this was a modernist “classical” record of some ilk, a forgiveable error perhaps as it contains not a few renditions of songs from the Kurt Weill / Bertolt Brecht catalogue, but there’s also plenty of other unlikely material fit to stir your Marxist zeal and have you itching to join the barricades. Rudolf Nilsen was apparently a radical activist in 1920s Norway; two of his poems are here, ‘Street Boy’ and ‘Revolution Calling’. Hans Eisler, the Viennese contemporary of Brecht, is also represented, notably by his ‘Solidarity Song’ which he co-authored with Brecht. There’s a downtrodden miner’s song (credited to Trad.) that wouldn’t have been out of place in Woody Guthrie’s mouth, and even Minor Threat, the 1980s American radical hardcore guitar band, enjoy a brief acoustic rendering. Mostly though, it’s the pre-war turmoil of Berlin that sets the scene for the album, and I expect it’s these radical interpretations of the Brecht-Weill material that I’ll keep coming back to this for. So much for the choice of repertoire which is mostly impeccable for hewing to the left-wing theme, though I can’t quite fathom out what ‘True Colours’, the soppy 1980s Cyndi Lauper hit, is doing here. Even the cover design gets in on the act, with diagonals, red blocks, monochrome photos emulating the somewhat earlier graphic design forms of Berlin Dada and (even earlier) Russian Konstruktivism. Wouldn’t Chris Cutler have loved this record? Not sure, but he rightly supported Dagmar Krause’s similar-ish LPs of Brecht-Eisler-Weill songs, the incomparable Supply and Demand and Tank Battles, both from 1986.

Ratke and the boys have been doing this since 2000, when they first covered Brecht and Weill and started playing a commie-inspired night of songs once a year in a decrepit little pub in Oslo. The Norwegian pinkos turned up in droves, and the nights expanded to include speeches, poetry readings, and folk song; hopefully it didn’t turn into a debating society. It took the band 12 years to get around to getting this collection into wax, but it’s a corker of an album. Yes, Ratkje truly shines as a songstress, but it’s a collaborative set all the way; Rolf-Erik Nystrøm on woodwinds, Frode Haltli on accordion and trombone, Håkon Thelin on the bass; all the guys sing too. I’ve been listening to Weill’s music since 1978 (the way in for me was ‘Alabama Song’ by The Doors) and seem to recall reading that what the composer wanted was not traditional classical singers who were note-perfect, but actors who could sing; he wanted passion and blood in the song, and interpretation to enrich the meaning of the fiery lyrics. On that account, Ratkje and POING fill up the scorecard in nothing flat, winning the gold medal after just 2-3 tracks in. Especially effective is their lurid, excessive treatment of ‘Der Seeräuberjenny’, also known as ‘The Pirate Song’ (whose terrifying Black Freighter also loomed large in a subplot to Alan Moore’s Watchmen). In their hands, this song of pitiless, brooding vengeance is transformed into a violent, serial-killer snuff movie. The inhuman relish with which Ratkje intones (in German) ‘Kill Em All’ is a true shudderfest; she appears momentarily possessed with insane wrath.

The three instrumentalists meanwhile start off by delivering a highly entertaining form of super-fast cabaret music, played at intense speeds and with note-perfect vigour; soon it becomes clear what musical cosmopolitans they all are, and the album is infused with punk rock, folk music, klezmer, pop music, improvisation and free jazz. Not since bands like Ground-Zero have I heard this assured ability to turn a speeding song around in mid-career and tear down another musical side-road at 100 mph in pursuit of the “truth” of the song. You can keep your mannered John Zorn combos and his laboured attempts to meld hardcore guitar with Ornette Coleman. Nystrøm’s brief forays into atonal improvisation in the middle of a 1930s song are really something to savour; Evan Parker surfacing in the middle of a Marlene Dietrich clip.

I saw Ratkje with Fe-Mail supporting Wolf Eyes some years ago at the ICA in London. Amazingly, she’s about to tour the UK in March this year, with Ikue Mori; just four dates, one of which will be in London. She won’t be performing this material, but I would guess it’s going to be a memorable gig.

February 11, 2012

Bittern Predictions

The 1982 Trio – they simply call themselves 1982 – are three Norwegian players who play all-acoustic music with violin, harmonium and drum kit on Pintura (HUBRO CD 2510). With this simple set-up they achieve some remarkable sonorities and combinations of tones that are extremely satisfying, the extended notes of each violin stroke fusing with the languid sighs of the harmonium, allowing each taut percussion note from the drumkit to ring out like a small lead pellet from an airgun. In the hands of more impatient musicians, these instruments could lend themselves to performing modern jazz music of some sort, but 1982 are largely concerned with creating introspective, slow-moving and melancholic instrumentals, none of which have titles and are suitable for observing natural landscapes or under-furnished interiors. One of my personal favourite King Crimson pieces from the 1970s is a semi-improvised tune called ‘Trio’ which featured the interplay of David Cross’ violin and John Wetton’s bass with the mellotron playing of Robert Fripp. If you heard that, and you like it too, then Pintura is sure to please you. The clear, no-frills recording quality on this album is the work of Davide Bertolini working at the Grieghallen Studio in Bergen.

Full-bodied free jazz saxophone honk-a-ma-thon from Wolf Scarers, who are the duo of Keith Jafrate and Simon Prince. On Throat (THE NOISE UPSTAIRS NUS004) they both wield tenors like two Scots kings fighting with claymores, although Jafrate has an alto sax sellotaped to his midriff and Prince has a couple of flutes secreted in his enormous boots. Both these English hooters are long-established as musicians, but they never played together until relatively recently when they shared a bill at a Huddersfield music festival. I’m surprised to learn that, as they seem very comfortable with one another, their brass members locking together as perfectly as the antlers of two rutting stags, each one knowing instinctively when to offer support and proppage to his partner’s wilder flights of pufferment and zany toots. They don’t rely heavily on attention-getting over-blowing effects, and both have a facility with playing clear melodic passages and well-controlled quieter segments that contrast nicely with the more raucous and growly interludes. Listeners are especially advised to note the 27-minute marathon ‘Flagstone’, a highly sustained and accomplished piece of improvisation that flows and seesaws in flawless acrobatic fashion. As you can see the cover art promises plenty blood, broken glass and maybe even bare teeth, and while Wolf Scarers are not quite as all-out violent as that, this is a hot little baked potato. The label, The Noise Upstairs, is also an improv collective and venue which operates in Manchester and Sheffield.

Intense and ugly electronic noise abounds when we enter the undersea world of Horacio Pollard, a Berlin-living musician who spends some time in the UK and runs his Neigh Percent micro-label. Baracuda (NEIGH%MUSIC), like the vicious sharp-toothed saltwater fish which is its namesake, rips into you from the start with acid tones, obnoxious feedback, and harsh shrieking vocalising. Each track is a short episode which ends as suddenly as a nightmare trip to the sonic dentist of pain. Yet we may peel away these crusty layers of noisy cottage pie to expose the sweet filling within Pollard’s music. He controls his powerful forces as surely as an occult magus, yet also knows when to allow his alchemical serpents to slip off the leash and slither wildly into the air with their feathered scales. The further we go into this short album, the more dynamic and textured the music doth become, such as the very enjoyable (to me) two-minute ‘Shephards Prop’ which in this context is almost like pop music. In fact there might actually be a conventional pop-music record lurking somewhere at the bottom of this particular foetid trifle. However if you prefer long duration and relentless attack, then click on to the 10-minute ‘Itching-Togo’ where your predilections will be fully satisfied. Nine tracks are advertised on this CDR, although my version of VLC Media Player will only recognise eight of them, and #6 won’t play at all.

Now for some Italian avant-garde Techno on a Ukrainian label. The duo of Plaster are Gianclaudio Hashem Moniri and Giuseppe Carlini from Rome who profess a liking for the same things that would have endeared them to Kevin Martin in 1997 and might even have earned them a spot on his Macro Dub Infection compilations, to wit dark ambient tones and dubby beats. Platforms (KVITNU 20) certainly delivers plenty of atmosphere and the rich, bass-heavy throbs on tracks such as ‘Component’ and ‘Structure’ will simultaneously induce narcolepsy and invite you to move up to an imaginary dancefloor where you can sway your etherised body and stamp your paws like a tranquillised polar bear. When it comes to actual melodies, each track is brutally simple, and refuses linear development or variation in favour of monotony and stasis. I’m not quite as keen on the beat-less trancey numbers which feel a bit sketchy and samey, but there’s only a couple of these; the album closes out with longer remix-style dub cuts like ‘Rearline’ with its crunchy white-noise pulsations, the slow and murderous mood of ‘Double Connection’, and the minimal electro-screech of ‘Trasversal’. Arrives in an elaborate black and gold foldout cover designed by the lovely Zavoloka, and there’s a three-minute movie by their friend David Terranova (stop motion and slow motion manipulations of a ballet dancer, footage tinted in blue and black) included as a bonus on the CD.

December 11, 2011

Concerning This Square

The Tree in the Quadtych

From Sheffield here’s Cameron Deas, another guitar-playing acoustic Englishman worthy to hold his head alongside C. Joynes, with his Quadtych (PRESENT TIME EXERCISES PTECD1) CD which he kindly sent us some months ago released on his own label Present Time Exercises. This is a single work in four parts which unfolds over 70 minutes (look for the vinyl versions!) in which Deas gives himself a very broad canvas to apply his impressionistic, painterly guitar effects. While your man Basho Junghans continues to work his guitar like an orchestra, for Deas it’s more a matter of gradually creating sheets of sound, through a mixture of techniques – scraping, strumming, sliding, and an insistent rubbing method that generates vast clouds of resonating metallicness. On Part One he’s more concerned with creating this gaseous billow of steel-string noise than he is with delivering melodies or picking tunes, and thusly he ushers us into the gateway of his private world. Part Two is somewhat more “open”, and we find minimal forlorn half-tunes seep into an otherwise deserted vacuum of gently echoing stillness. By time of Part Three (and we still have not departed from the single root chord which anchors this album in place) he’s somehow creating a jangling violin-bow effect which he sustains for far longer than is humanly possible, an orchestral drone which supports his folk-tune inflected melodies. Aside from fact that this music must require four hands and eighteen extra digits to play it, I’m astonished by the innovation here, and Deas must have put many years into crafting his unique style, finding this highly individual voice for the guitar. Jake Blanchard did the striking and sympathetic cover art, suggesting not only that twigs and branches grow from the neck and head of a guitar (the music is alive), but also that guitars are already growing in the very trees that are used to make them, and it’s just a question of releasing them from the prison of the bark (music as a natural phenomenon). I’m interested enough now to search for his prior releases on the UK Blackest Rainbow label.

Weather Pressure

Norwegian instrumental band Splashgirl have their third album Pressure (HUBRO CD2509) sent to us in September, where the core trio play a jazz-like setup with piano, bass and drums, augmented by their own synths and electronics, plus guest players who supply guitar, brass, vocals, and even some live tapework. I like their skeletal sound, but I find the lugubrious pace of these plodders a bit heavy-going after a while. The whole band appear to be in a perpetual state of mild depression about something, but it’s never really revealed what is troubling their sensitive souls. It’s a frustrating listen because none of the pieces resolve in a satisfactory manner; they come and go like passing clouds in the sky. In Splashgirl’s personal weather system, no doubt this vagueness bodes a grey weekend of drizzle and mist.

Affected Youth

Ville Leinonen is a famed Finnish singer and songwriter who’s new to me, but Auringosäde / Pommisuoja (FONAL RECORDS FR-82) is his 13th album and he’s been making records since 1997. The album is intended to present “two dramatically different sides” of his complex personality, so the first four tracks are whimsical, acoustic and fey and the remaining four cuts are dark, brooding electronic noise. An idiosyncratic and well-produced record, but I’m steadfastly unimpressed by the whole thing. Ville’s voice is weak and affected, and he feels to me like a refugee from a mainstream pop-synth band like A-ha, Pet Shop Boys or The Communards. Song melodies have been deconstructed to the point where they just don’t matter any more, reducing any verse-chorus structure to disconnected rubble. The acoustic tracks are mannered, disjunctive, and in places quite cloying and twee. The Pommisuoja tracks don’t do much for me either; imagine someone practising John Lennon karaoke vocals over loud and ponderous electric guitar feedback. “Post-apocalyptic blues”, indeed!

Sax Pax for the Duration

Stéphane Rives is the French sax player who I associate with the production of a severe and hard-to-digest sound. On one of the rare occasions when I played a DJ set for a wedding, I spun one of his solo CDs and was soon asked by the distraught organiser to turn it off and go back to playing that nice chill-out music from Oval instead. Rives used to do the quiet-minimal breath-exploration technique along with a number of other European players like Axel Dörner and Robin Hayward, but I think that particular gimmick is old hat now. On Axiom For The Duration (POTLATCH P211) he teams up with the percussionist Seijiro Murayama, and the pair of them have come up with a total bruiser of solid minimalism. Just put this on as loud as the market will bear, and you’ll find yourself being gradually crowded out of your own living room by its sheer physical presence. Murayama could be the driving force behind this merciless method, since he’s been exploring for about ten years the idea that he can control the acoustic space of any given performing area through his sound alone. Depriving himself of food and sleep, he pays attention to every eyelid flicker and throat-clearing action of the audience at every gig he plays, and devises methods to weave these micro-events into his playing, thus “revitalizing the environment”. What he did in this Paris room in May 2010 is certainly a feat to remember, and it’s much to Naxos Bobine’s credit that he recorded it so faithfully. Rives honks in on the action too, by sustaining incredibly long tones (infinitely long) played in the upper registers that defy all rational thought. With one mighty gulp, he can take in as much air as is consumed by the motorbikes of Hong Kong in a single day; he unleashes these currents from his capacious lungs with the rigid control of a pressure valve such as you might find in an industrial-sized refrigeration unit, while his talons maintain a rigid clutch around the neck of his soprano sax. For a full 56 minutes, these two torture-meisters don’t rest for a single second as they issue their monstrous wall of humming and piercing with the slow deliberation of art gallery assistants executing a Sol Lewitt pencil drawing on the walls. And while we’re on the subject, dig the nifty geometry artwork for this release by Octobre. Just great!

December 4, 2011

In Dust To Delight

Renewable Sources

Energy (BIOMETRAX BIOM01) is the promise of Biomass, a Californian project put together by Walter Ovtha Woodz, and the title of a CD he released in September 2011. Tangible releases like this are probably just the tip of the biomedical iceberg; Biomass is more of an immersive experiment of sorts, involving meditation and intense concentration in something not unlike an isolation tank, use of headphones for enhanced focus and internalisation, and thereby arriving at the hoped-for “emotionally-dynamic energy field”. Sometimes Biomass does this in a live situation, with the help of the synth player Keyth McGrew, and you have only to imagine the primal forces thus released to bathe many healthy-looking bronzed Californian torsos with healing waves. Pretty good metallic, futuristic, richly-ambient electronic sound on this CD, sometimes propelled by the relentless chugging of sequenced digital rhythms; I’d like to imagine it as a stripped-down version of what you might have heard on any given techno dancefloor in 1995, only more mind-numbingly minimal and repetitive, and also contextualised within an artistic, scientific, and quasi-therapeutic exercise program for the inner raver. It’s not the first time a musician has pledged to mesmerise us into a state of higher being with their rhythmic pulsations, but Biomass has a very clean sound and an intelligent determination to stick to his grid-like plan of bold simplicity. ‘Serpent Sphinx’ and ‘Serpentetraspeed’ are probably the cuts most likely to get your inner vibrations warmed up to fever pitch, but the 22-minute ‘Minechamber’ wins for me through dint of sheer duration, and its highly immersive, claustrophobic characteristics – it’s a voyage inside a scientific chamber of the unknown.

633 Squadron

The Norwegian drone CD Droneskvadronen All-Stars Vol 1 (DRONESKVADRONEN DS07) was assembled by Droný Skvadroný, presumably a pseudonym deriving from the title of this 2011 project which translates into English as “Drone Squadron”. It’s an evocative name, suggestive of Blenheim bombers over the skies of Europe in 1942. No warlike content on this somnolent record however, which is a single 73-minute track comprising a mix of all the contributors who sent in their piece of drone music to Droný for reworking purposes, quite a lot of them from Norway and some associated with the TIBProd. label. A very slow-moving deep-freeze sort of work, where the drones vary from near-musical whines with a sustained root note, to more emptied-out and atmospheric whistling noises. Where Biomass above probably intends his work to agitate and rouse the lethargic slug-a-bed from his armchair, this CD has the near-opposite effect, slowing down your metabolic rate to that of an Arctic snail sleeping in a bucket of library paste. Not bad; determinedly minimal, uneventful, and perfectly sequenced. Droný Skvadroný doesn’t so much edit soundfiles together as melt them into an ambiguous multi-coloured hybrid of candle-wax, melted butter and pemmican. Much like the contents of an Arctic explorer’s survival kit, in fact. Was released 1 August 2011.

I never loved a dear gazelle

We’ve been quite taken with cindytalk‘s brand of slow and fogged-out synthery since hearing Up Here In The Clouds and The Crackle of My Soul, both released for Editions Mego. On Hold Everything Dear (EDITIONS MEGO 122), the solo effort of Gordon Sharp has been supplemented with contributions from Matt Kinnison, the record was recorded in Japan, London and Essex, it took them five years to complete it, and it’s got some connection to the work of John Berger, the polemical left-wing writer and broadcaster. None of this might actually be relevant to the music we hear, but it bears Sharp’s signature traits: layered, slow-moving blocks of processed sounds, informed by a sense of authority and sternness of furrowed brow that verges on the severe. More romantic moments do intrude in the form of short and distant piano music fugues, and little excerpts of field recordings such as the voices of children which open the record. Yet for some reason, these glimpses of hope serve only to add to the abiding sorrow of this record, which seems to be taking universal pessimism about the state of the world into a metaphysical dimension; titles like ‘Waking the Snow’, ‘Hanging in the Air’ and ‘Floating Clouds’ are laced with the sort of cryptic symbolism you’d associate with an ascetic philosopher who has virtually withdrawn himself from all human intercourse and retreated into a world of private signs and meanings. Far more than producing vacant droning, cindytalk manages to invest his work with complex undercurrents and overtones. Where the Droneskvadronen All-Stars are content to issue largely non-associative sounds which allow listeners to project their own delusions and fantasies, cindytalk constructs his music to deliver all the intellectual content of an essay from a Marxist journal from the 1970s. Recommended to all fans of Zoviet France, Mirror, Rapoon, that sort of thing…also exists as a double LP set.

Yours is no disgrace

Quite different again to the above is the American Greh Holger who records as Hive Mind, but also has other aliases and has been a member of numerous electronic noise projects for the last ten years or so, besides running his own label Chondritic Sound in Ann Arbor. His Elemental Disgrace (SPECTRUM SPOOLS SP007) is just 30 minutes long, but is an exquisitely intense exploration of the sort of noise which I whimsically characterise as “subterranean burrowing music”. Another example of this micro-genre comes from the English duo R.Y.N., whose LP Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy is an unbeatable landmark of “S.B.M.”, although Zanzibar Snails are also eligible for inclusion with their Journey Into Amazing Caves CD. Both sides of Elemental Disgrace exhibit this non-stop relentlessly churning rubble of organic, earthy noise, and to listen to it is worse than being buried alive. Every cavity of your body appears to be filling up with soil and stone. What’s most sinister about Hive Mind is that his music here never breaks into a sweat or explodes into a tumult of angry, blistering noise; it just continues to abrade and wear away the soul through sheer dogged persistence, changing you into a spectre with the clammy caresses of a deathly grey hand. In this light, Hive Mind takes the form of a cosmic grave-digger working steadily through the night at his toil, with a very long interment list supplied to him by the sexton. I have a promo CD as usual, and it seems the yellow vinyl pressing of this LP (released 18th October 2011) is already sold out.