RG Rough has worked his way through a personal history of 1970s recorded music armed with a pair of scissors and several rolls of splicing tape, and come up with 70 (BAM BALAM RECORDS BBLP089), a highly entertaining sampling record…although the method behind it (“ripped to shreds…coerced into fitting”) may sound violent and ferocious, these two sides of continuous instrumental passages are extremely listenable, perhaps due to the steady beat that progresses more-or-less intact throughout and acts like some time-travelling glue to hold the fragments together. Perhaps Rough is aiming for a post-modern take on Stars On 45, those novelty discs of the 1980s. Interestingly, though I may call myself a fan of this particular era in musical history, but I personally couldn’t recognise a single sound or edited snippet from the dense array of selections that have been thrown into Rough’s cauldron of velour and dacron stew. Apparently he did something similar for this same label in 2019, with his 60 album, which I never heard but is probably equally adept at concealing his swipes and lifts from Buffalo Springfield or Lothar and The Hand People. Franco-Anglo Robert G Rough first came our way on his team-up with Makoto Kawabata from 2020, where his collaging skills meshed neatly with the exploits of that Japanese guitarist maverick. I guess at heart this 70 item is rooted in the aesthetics and techniques of dance culture, but it’s an artistic and satisfying statement that would also make a good party record. (04/04/2022)

Speaking of Richard Pinhas, with whom RG Rough has appeared on record, here is the great French innovator himself recording as Heldon on Antelast (BAM BALAM RECORDS BBLP090). Made in Nantes with the help of Florian Tatard and the drummer Arthur Narcy, it’s six tracks of sprawling guitar-based cosmic anarchy, liberally enhanced with layering, studio sorcery, and excessive droning effects, designed to push the body and mind to its utmost limits. Narcy in particular is crucial to the overall plan, with his free-form drum paintings allowing much air and space into the galaxian tapestry, while still managing to propel the megacraft forward into the deepest constellations with his urgent pummels. I’m personally drawn to the two long tracks here (‘Antelast One’ and ‘Antelast Three’) since they provide the Olympian arena-size space needed by Pinhas to expand on his guitar lectures as he continues to ruminate in a philosophical manner as he weaves his dense amplifier-hungry fug. While this might not be in the same spectacular regions as Quentin Compson, his 2020 album where he was aided considerably by the production skills of Stephen O’Malley, it’s still a hefty canoe of darkened excessive spacerock, whose energy never flags once the players work themselves into the crab nebula of tranced-out soloing. “For fans of Krautrock”, says the press note, an assertion which has some truth if you accept this French titan as an “honorary” German kosmische innovator… (04/04/2022)

As it turns out, the electronic side of things does tend to dominate this album, but when the classical elements do shine, it’s a pleasing effect. At their best, Spectral Bazaar do manage a nice atmosphere of sorts, and there are some half-decent tunes to be sifted out of the over-produced and over-laden mix. At their worst, they are capable of producing dire disco music, as on ‘Jupiter, the Bringer Of Jollity’, which is heavy-handed and stodgy. The theme of the record is an enduring one to be sure, and the duo keep referring back to the Gustav Holst suite “The Planets”, noting that it’s now been 100 years since this famed and very popular classical piece was first performed.

Spectral Bazaar are not attempting a “cover version” of Holst, but the same planets are chosen (reflecting the fact that there were only seven of them in the recognised solar system at that time). The promotional notes dwell on this at some length, but what surprises me is that there isn’t a single reference to Tangerine Dream, The Cosmic Couriers, or any other outer-space inspired forays to be found in the Kosmische canon. Perhaps we should be grateful for that, and the similar lack of Radiophonic / Dr Who references. However, I’d have welcomed a word in favour of The Man Who Fell To Earth, a film which any sensible cinema-going person loves, and which made dramatic use of the Planets suite music in ways which only Nicolas Roeg could do.

Reasonable effort; next time I would like to hear more care and attention given to composing stronger melodies, and perhaps easing off a bit on the accelerator pedal in the studio. They perform with zest, but Spectral Bazaar are still uncertain what direction to take with their music, and need a bit more time to establish an identity of their own. First 100 copies are packaged in a tin box; later pressings will be regular CDs. From 15th July 2019.

Something stirs… the very keystone of the whole Acid Mothers oeuvre has been reactivated (again). On this occasion though, the run is a little less generous; a limited edition of three hundred, making this one hundred and eight less than the original double l.p. set which, surprisingly, is now of a ten year vintage. This lengthy double c.d. set then, edging just over two of your earth hours, adds flesh to the somewhat hazy beginnings of these other mothers, which started back in the early nineties or thereabouts. This saw Kawabata Makoto, then Musica Transonic’s guitarist of choice, luring various disciples of ‘The Acid Mothers Temple Soul Collective’ (which included dancers, artists, mermaid researchers (?), and professional vagrants), into his new ‘improvising jam band’. The A.M.T. then becoming a going concern, its freak flag mostly observed in a swirling mist of exotic substances. Their early recordings, in the form of limited edition cassettes, which took in pieces by the original cast (Makoto, Keizo, Casino, Hajime) and newly recorded tracks were hawked around by Makoto at Mainliner gigs during an overseas tour in ’97. These tapes later received further adjustments and eventually resurfaced as the A.M.T.’s debut on the PSF imprint. So any thoughts of The Early A.M.T… as a set of demos isn’t really too wide of the mark. It would’ve been fascinating to observe a group that sounded ever so slightly different to the one we’re now so familiar with, but, even at this early stage, the Gong’wind/”Flying” era U.F.O./Trad Gras… template seemed to be the finished article from day one. Though certainly, on a seriously more intense level than Messrs Allen, Brock, Mogg and Persson could’ve ever attained with their respective outfits back in the day.

“From the Melting Paraiso UFO” opens this set and is helmed, interestingly, by the somewhat unfamiliar figure of Johan Wellens. His mush-mouthed profundities becoming strangely out of focus as this multi-pedalled stomp grows around him in size and complexity. A brief moment of search enginuity reveals him to be the label boss of Tokyo-based Tiliqua Records; a second home no less, to the legendary free guitarist Takayanagi Masayuki. Wellens’ narratives can also be found on the chaosmic splurge of “Speed Guru” which has reappeared in various shapes and sizes on later albums, and as a co-scribe on the attractively warped “Rolling Buzz Fuzz Fucker”.

“Zen Feedbacker”/”Candy Aum” (from disc two) puts the listener on the back ear immediately as the respective tracks play simultaneously from the left and right channels (if you so desire). There’s also the wired churn of “Tibetan Esoteric Rage” (surely Raga?) with Makoto’s blaring bagpipes set on stun and the kitchen sink electronic drama of “Aunt Ema Blues”. “Pink Lady Lemonade” makes its first appearance, but is unfortunately, more fluffy bunny than hurtling asteroid. Its lyrical, almost m.o.r. moodscapes really do disrupt the generally accepted norms of motherdom. Apparently “Psycho Line” was dropped from this collection due to being “of inferior musical value…”, can we swap?

Kawabata Makoto: a giggling shaman, Cotton Casino as a space-suited Lorelei and bassist Suhara Keizo and drummer Koizumi Hajime as the indomitable ‘Spock Twins’… who knows what adventures these spaced cadets will encounter in the twenty-first, second, and erm, twenty-third centuries??

Since the theme of the work was inspired by space travel, it must have been a good fit for the science-and-art confluence that is so important to Meta.Morf. In this instance, there are two sources explicitly cited, but I don’t think the creators are intending much more with their sound art than an impressionistic footnote to the sources. The first is a Polish movie called Na srebrnym globie by the director Andrzej Żuławski, somewhat notorious among film buffs who collect “lost” films; though made in the 1970s, it was suppressed for years by the Polish cultural affairs minister, who thought he was watching a veiled comment on totalitarianism. The movie didn’t surface until 1988, finally allowing audiences to savour its allegorical and symbolical resonances. I never saw the film, but the synopsis makes it sounds like a cross between Stalker, Zardoz, and Planet of the Apes, only far more earnest and dour in tone. I know that Marhaug for one loves obscure cinema, and I would credit him with seeing the film which has lent its title to this album.

Żuławski’s life was seriously damaged by this debacle. You could perhaps say the same about some of the NASA astronauts, who were never the same after going to the moon. Which brings us to our second source, a book by the American journalist Andrew Smith. He wrote about the American astronauts who travelled to the moon in his book Moon Dust, very much pitching it from the human story-telling angle; what was Neil Armstrong really like as a person? Serious scholars of NASA history have been disappointed by Smith’s impressionistic and subjective viewpoint; other readers have found it compelling and original.

However, I struggled to find a trace of either source in the tepid, abstract sludge that is On The Silver Globe. No symbolism, no politics, no allegory, no science fiction, no ruined lives, no NASA, no human stories about astronauts; for the most part it’s hard to even connect it to outer space, which after all is supposed to be its primary theme. It’s such a near-blank canvas you could almost read anything into it. I realise “cosmic music” is a cliché these days, but at least Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind and Gong managed to evoke a vision of the galaxies, or suggestions of space travel, in their powerful music, however prosaic that vision may have been. On The Silver Globe lacks sufficient content, and just seems detached and passive to me. This isn’t to deny the exemplary studio craft that has gone into its making; the instrumentation included a rich mix of guitars, analogue synths, oscillators, and various approaches to digital processing and reworking, and the production skills have resulted in a unique blend of understated sound. Even without the space themes, I would have liked to have experienced a bit more in the way of events and resolution, but found neither in these formless drifting shapes. I could not hear “the inevitable conclusion in which all cosmic matter is sucked into a black hole” of which the press notes speak. For a more successful NASA-themed piece of music, may I direct you to Promenade D’Été D’Ulis NASA by the Argentinian composer Edgardo Canton, a work of great purpose, beauty, and import.

As its title suggests, this album is both a double CD set – so there’s twice as music for the price of one! – and the second release for the improvising ensemble led by British multi-instrumentalist Martin Archer, a very welcome frequent flyer to these parts, and Chris Bywater, less familiar to me but no less adept at playing several instruments. All tracks on the two discs are based on live improvised performances made in late 2013 with some additions made later in the year and in 2014. The result is an album that straddles a balance between wandering improvisation and more structured and shaped work with a definite focus and theme.

Everything on this album comes across as very smooth, clean and flowing; perhaps it’s all a little too smooth and tight, given that the performances were originally live and over 150+ minutes of music the odd clunky moment or two might be expected. The general impression is of a work rejoicing in its brief existence, testing its boundaries and expanding wherever it can to many places and levels of an uplifting if not always beneficent nature. There may be moments where going Full Steam Ahead isn’t always possible because large nebulas are throwing up dense gases in our path and avoiding them risks throwing us into the pull of a large black hole; but there appears to be nothing of an actively hostile and malevolent bent in this particular universe where OUA inhabit and cruise about.

Disc 1 offers quite a range of jazzy space soundscapes from the warm soothing radiance of “Paratacamite” to tracks happy to wander down detours that take us back in time (the 1970s-sounding “Modus”) or merely to walk a tight-rope between funk and Morricone horror film soundtracks (“Noctilucent”) among others. “Space Smells of Strawberries” for the most part is as light and joyful as its title suggests. Most tracks here are very accessible if a little bit repetitive even to those not usually fond of improvised music because of its tendency to wander up hill and down dale; the one exception is the meandering 20-minute marathon “Across the Atmospheric Eddies” which as it hints goes about vacuuming up little fragments of sound and shining a spotlight on each and every one of them.

The tracks on Disc 2 are fewer and longer but are no less distinctive for that. “The Braking of Bonds & The Rearrangement of Atoms” is my favourite piece of the entire set: it’s a work of beauty and wonder, of fine and subtle craft, of mystery and mischief, and it’s something curious besides. In its later moments the track morphs into an awkward ugly-duckling creature, leaving behind scraps of its previous incarnation. From here on we move into a more remote and otherworldly realm with few reminders of the world we left behind. “RMMV Asturias” is as close to creepy and spooky as it’s possible for the album to come with phantom choirs that seem more clumsy and gauche than ghostly or chilling.

While there are occasions where I think the music falters and doesn’t quite achieve everything it sets out to do – I don’t think Archer has the necessary misanthropic outlook on life needed to create really sinister and genuinely frightening music but if he did, then the world would be a poorer and sadder place without the likes of Combat Astronomy, Masayo Asahara and OUA! – and maybe there’s been a little too much editing to deliver a smooth and professional-sounding opus, “O2” is still a marvel to behold. When all said and done, the journey is more important than its destination.

Leave it to Gagarin Records to introduce me to exciting and fun music I never heard before. Adi Gelbart, here performing simply as Gelbart, has been creating solo records for about 15 years for such labels as Defekt, Fact Records and Economic Thought. On Vermin (GR 2029), the A side is occupied by seven short and poppy instrumentals that show Adi’s effortless skill in weaving old-school synths and drum machines around his little finger, while charming snakes and juggling Indian clubs with his free hands. These delicious cuts, heavy on the keyboard melodies and notable for the snappy pace at which they dash around the block, were all performed solo with the exception of additional clarinet work by Benautik on the lovely ‘Meloda’, and display Adi Gelbart’s well-honed studio skills. It’s like the best and brightest LP of library music you never heard, albeit the label would also like us to hear parallels with progressive rock, noise, and a genre called “spiral space-punk”. As for the library music aspect, this is confirmed by the fact that Gelbart is also a film soundtrack composer, and the B-side of Vermin is the 18 minute soundtrack for the film of this name (which he also made; an excerpt can be seen online at Vimeo). Where the seven pop-tunes on Side A are all of a piece, make their colourful statement and dash off the stage again, the Vermin pieces are much more bitty and dramatic, filled with wild changes as befits the wayward editing of the experimental film. By turns threatening, exciting and mysterious, this is astonishingly wonderful music. It strives to align itself with science-fiction music soundtracks, and does comport itself with a certain “1960s” vibe for reasons that are hard to pin down – maybe just the recording quality alone accounts for it, or the choice of certain instruments and amplifiers…the combination of Vox organ and Telecaster guitars (I’m guessing) is quite inspired! It’s also stylistically very wild, somehow encompassing discordant post-Stockhausen electronic abstractions and textures, with moody subterranean organ drones and bursts of poppy jazz-inflected beat music, reminiscent of some subversive music smuggled out of pre-Republic Czechoslovakia. Of course it is all very “knowing” and post-modern, but Gelbart executes it with such flair, wit, passion and outright musical skill that you can’t help but fall in love with it. From November 2013.

Lustre may be familiar to quite a few TSP readers with his dark ambient / black metal instrumental soundscape work – he has released a number of EPs, split recordings and albums – but Elderwind is a fairly unknown Russian entry into the world of BM.

Lustre leads the way with the two parts to “Follow Us to the Stars” – these are completely synth-dominated instrumental pieces of long droning sounds based around sparse minimalist rhythm loops and best heard together as one track – which in a way they are. Right from the start the music settles into two opposing camps of repeating swooping drones and pointillist tones, over which effects such as a pounding background beat or atmospheric wash might add some texture or depth. The second part is as repetitive as the first but in a darker vein.

The whole thing sounds mournful though possibly this wasn’t the intention. I find no sense of wonder or anticipation of the glories of the cosmos and the chance to be at one with the universe and to know something of its purpose (and by implication, the purpose of humanity and our individual purpose). Both parts are flat in sound and feeling, and with repetition being the only way these tracks escalate tension and feeling, the music becomes a tedious affair. The droning lacks subtlety and is very heavy-handed in comparison with the rest of the delicate music.

Elderwind grabs just over half the split release’s playing time with four separate tracks. The difference between Elderwind’s side and Lustre’s tracks is immediate: the Elderwind tracks are highly atmospheric and seem more attuned to the concept of the split recording, with a sense of awe at humanity’s contact with the infinite. The tracks naturally roll from one into another which enables the momentum and the ambience (and the soothing feelings they generate) to pass smoothly into succeeding tracks without the disruption of abrupt changing repetition loops. The final track “Polaris” suggests some kind of unity or communion is reached with the combination of spiritual organ-like tones, background wave sounds and strange whistle effects that seem to encourage listeners to reach out and contact denizens of the farthest galaxies.

It’s clear to me which side is the winner by a long distance: Elderwind hands out a punishing lesson to Lustre on how to create atmospheric space mood music that respects the concept and implications involved in voyaging to the stars. Both acts proceed from a depressive / atmospheric black metal background which comes with a baggage of existential contemplation of the human condition. Listeners might assume (mistakenly perhaps) that with such a background, these bands investigating space travel would bring along a curiosity about how such travel could reflect something to us about our purpose and place in the universe.

I don’t mean to question or criticise Lustre’s sincerity or motivation but his pieces are clunky and amateurish against those of Elderwind. In all probability these fall far short of his ambitions. This split recording could have been something great, a classic of its kind in spacey black metal psychedelia. As it stands, it’s uneven and awkward.

At this point I should mention that Elderwind, according to his entry on Encyclopedia Metallum, formed in 2009 and spent a few years exploring and perfecting his sound before releasing his first recording in 2012. The careful and studious preparation is evident in the quality of the work presented on this split release.

Contact: Kunsthauch
Van Records

Got a large bundle of curios from the Spectropol Records label in Bellingham (Washington State)…first picked out from the envelope was Elle Avait Raison Hathor (SPECT 11) by Vincent Berger Rond. He is an electro-acoustic composer based in Quebec, and presumably appears on the back cover in his winter garb standing besides an ice sculpture of a female head and shoulders. The winter wear is our first clue that this is difficult and inhospitable music for seasoned hardy outdoors-types only, on which more shortly. Meanwhile any attempt to stare fixedly at the image of the woman in order to decipher her features will simply result in even less definition, as it gradually recedes from your intelligence evasively. The whole album, you see, is a conceptual composition addressing “notions of womanhood” and doing so by filtering its music through an understanding of mythological treatments…Japanese, Greek, Inuit and Egyptian texts are found within the booklet, dropping hints that are somewhat less than lucid, yet strangely illuminating. Circe is the well-known enchantress from The Odyssey, but in a few lines you learn more about her meaning and symbolic resonance than you could have wished for. We’ve got a female vocalist Laura Kilty on the first track, where she intones her own settings for the poetry of Rond, but after that the remainder of the album is instrumental. It features strings and piano as you might expect from classical chamber music, but also synthesisers in a couple of places, electric organ, and the multi-dubbed electric guitars of Fred Szymanski. But none of this knowledge prepares you for the sheer weirdness of the distorted soundscape – the whole record just sounds completely bizarre. Vincent Berger Rond’s technique involves a lot of cutting up, editing, reshaping, modification and recomposing, such that Szymanski’s improvised guitar lines, for example, are completely recast into incredible, impossible shapes. The notes also refer to the composer’s “spasmacousmatic” method, which is a highly evocative term suggestive of a deeply radical and idiosyncratic approach to this contemporary form of composition. Not easy to listen to, but he plays fair; the work has clearly been assembled with great care and commitment to the form, and each piece, though at first bewildering, clearly adheres to an internal logic. The womanhood theme is not really explained in detail, which is a relief to any readers who are doubtful about long-winded explanations of an artist’s intentions, but Rond provides terse informational notes about this and would probably be very pleased if we did some research into the area for ourselves. From 13 June 2012.

We noted eRikm‘s Austral in November 2012 – at any rate, the audio dimension of it, which was released by Room40 as part of the Transfall album. Now here it is again as a DVD (DAC2031) from D’Autres Cordes Records, reminding us that the composition is a mixed-media work, combining electronic music with video. The visual side to the work was also created by the composer, and shows him weaving electronically-generated abstract shapes across the screen in shades of gray, green, and red, which multiply and germinate in jerky animated fashion. These images used photographs of cities as their starting point, taken from his journeys to South America. The music is played by the Laborintus Ensemble and remains a sharp snappy piece of atonal chamber music, sounding even better in this DVD presentation. But the visuals are rather banal, very process-heavy, not much more adventurous than a first year art student exercise. From 15 June 2012.

Fractures (DEBACLE DBL076) is a perfectly pleasant record of electronica / beats music by Rainbow Lorikeet. I like the “dubby” construction of the music that emphasises the heavy beats and the spaces in between, reminding me in places of Techno Animal – which I’ll admit is one of the few points of reference I have for this musical genre. Lorikeet’s electric sounds are not very distinctive or inventive though, and I find my attention wavering very quickly after only a few moments of this over-familiar crunch-and-squelch morass.

Anita‘s Hippocamping (WILDRFID RECORDS WLDRFD006) is more successful as an example of inventive and personalised electronica. We’re not given much reliable information on her technique, but I have the impression she’s something of a mosaicist, piecing together musical fugues out of very small fragments of sounds, tones, and whatever shapes she can find lying around the floor of the workshop to pick up and add to the collage. Resultant album is a highly textured listen – you can feel your ears being dragged over a thousand different rugs, textiles, vinyl floors, coconut matting, and assorted soft (and hard) furnishings. While she doesn’t abandon form completely, Anita has very little interest in composing a tune, and would prefer to leave you spinning in an unfamiliar micro-landscape for three or four minutes at a time, while she makes a cup of coffee (small black espresso, natch) and admires the results of her labours with a wicked smirk. What’s also impressive is the very firm and muscular core to these steel-belted monstrinos; Anita is never content to settle for a comforting decaffeinated drone when she can tie you up with eighteen yards of fencing wire. Track 11 is titled ‘L’Ultimo Yogurt’, which is precisely the sort of dessert I’d expect to be served if I was invited to a dinner party by this mysterious woman. This exists as a limited LP with a screenprinted cover and insert provided by visual artist Sofy Maladie.

The First Live Performance (HYPNAGOGIA GIA06) of avant-noise industrial supremos The New Blockaders took place in June 1983 in Morden Tower in Newcastle. Here it is again on CD, with a wealth of splendid artworks printed in full colour, as usual displaying old photographs from the 1920s or 1930s in a highly ironic way. Inside the front flap is an image which I take to be a facsimile of the original poster for the event, juxtaposing men in tuxedos and ties with some old-fashioned machinery that might be a lathe, a sewing machine or some brass plumbing. At this early-ish stage of their development, R. Rupenus and P.D. Rupenus concentrated on creating an unpleasant churning din, much like rocks rattling inside the blades of an old-fashioned lawn mower which you had to push across the ground. I call it the “broken rubble” sound, as opposed to the later “roaring dynamite blast” phase of TNB. Apart from the complete lack of musical dynamic of any sort, the abiding effect here is one of disjunctive, purposeless, neutered energy, a compacted metaphor for the dysfunctional organisational state of any modern agency – be it government, business, academia, or most especially the arts. This is not the first reissue of this music, so prepare (once again) for claustrophobic, nihilistic Hell.

Another CDR from Taruja Records in Auckland. On Rocket Tales (TRUJ 011), Tom Cadillac provides his own eccentric and unbalanced take on the minimal electronica genre, with his wonky analogue synths and slightly dubby drum machine rhythms. His producer George Andrews contributed some help with the drum programming, and there are occasional guest musicians such as the violinist Vicki Johnson, but this is a Cadillac solo studio production. With its rough edges and rather charmingly “odd” keyboard sounds, this is unlikely to be mistaken for a slick piece of imitation Kosmische or a clinical drop-forged Mille Plateaux production from the icy studios of Cologne, and each short instrumental track hobbles along the squelchy pathway in a fairly compelling way – at times like a slightly punkier version of Ptôse, with more warmth and wheeziness in the sounds. He works best when he keeps the “riffs” simple – two or three notes at most. Attempts at “soloing” or stabbing out a slightly more sophisticated melody with his fingers find the player getting unstuck. The only other drawback is the limited sonic range of the album, and the fact that all tunes seem to be in the same key, but these factors may assist with any mesmerising benefits you may hope to derive as a listener. Arrived here in July 2011.

From Ryan Huber’s microlabel in Indiana, we have Hallowed Circuit with Dead Planet Transmission (INAM RECORDS 669). Five examples of variations on sustained noisy-drones, which largely stay in one place and create interesting textures through subtle interventions. ‘HC1’ and ‘HC2’ are subdued humming whirligigs of whine and radio static, but ‘Pillow Dust’, ‘Remains’ and ‘Sister Signal’ are all strong examples of controlled noise eruptions. They soon become overcharged and overloaded with feedback, loops, crusty layers and general detritus piled on with a generous hand, creating that sense of suffocating excess which is one of the “signature” marks of the music on this label. I haven’t checked, but this may even be Huber himself recording under yet another alias. The title track ends the disc and aims for an “epic” sweep of dramatic mixed-chord science fiction deathscape arena music, sending astronauts spinning into a vast black hole or dooming them to face a horde of alien enemies on a hostile planet. Got this in June 2011 but as mine is numbered 29 of 30 copies, it may well be sold out already.