Tagged: percussion

The Towering Inferno

PAN32-cover-0x640
From Eli Keszler we have the wonderful Catching Net (PAN 32), shaping up to be an exceptionally powerful set…I received the release as two unmarked CDRs in a plain white sleeve so shoved one into nearby slot in hopes of result…this is how I began by playing the second disc first and received the almighty shock of hearing ‘Catching Net’, where Keszler combines one of his installations with chamber music, viz. a string quartet and piano. We have encountered his installation work previously for example on the impressive Oxtirn LP which was reissued by ESP-Disk in 2010. For some reason I misapprehended these installations as being a little more complex than they actually are, when it seems the main component is piano wires, strung about the performance space in such wise as to cause strong and extremely resonant vibrations. Paul Panhuysen would be proud. It seems the composer was aiming for a certain timeless quality in opting to use piano strings, “sounds that won’t get dated in any way”. I also learn that while he’s had training in music, his visual art / sculptural skills are all hard-won on his own terms…in other words he’s an auto-didact in that area…which may account for his bold gestures and risk-taking. This ‘Catching Net’ piece alone ought to justify instant purchase of the release by Xenakis fans…using all-acoustic methods, a monument in sound is erected, its creaks and groans reaching up to the stars with solid staircases of iron…his compositional method does involve some form of notation, but a stopwatch is used to determine the tempo, rather than conventional marks on a stave…this may be because machinery and motors are used to scrape, judder and hammer the strings…imagine a large-scale version of Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano, only stripped bare and removed from its wooden coffin, and the hammering action taking place in a form of grisly, deathly slow-motion performed by inhuman robot arms.

The triumph of ‘Catching Net’ has been to combine the mechanisms of the installation with the violins, viola, cello and piano, melding classical chamber music with abstract metallic sound art to produce astonishing, astringent effects that your body cannot ignore, in a face-to-face exemplar of raw and physical art-music. To hear the installation by itself, we click on to next track ‘Cold Pin’ which offers further monstrous scrapperings of doomulated grind for 13 minutes. It is here specifically that the motorised components come into play on a version of the installation that was attached to a large curved wall in a huge dome in Boston called the Cyclorama 1. Once again the axis of art-music-architecture is too clear to ignore and the Xenakis comparison is not far from the mark. Also on disc two we have ‘Collecting Basin’ which was executed by stringing up a large water tower and using two empty basins 2 as “amplifiers” or echo units. Astute avant-music fans may recall to mind Eric Lanzillotta’s Water Tower record 3, but also the echo experiments of Yoshi Wada when he used an empty swimming pool to act as a natural echo amphitheatre for his resonant chanting voice 4. It’s probably fair to see Keszler in the tradition of the old school of American conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s, who really thought big…transforming entire landscapes, taking over buildings, creating huge blocky steel sculptures in enormous New York lofts, pushing them out into public spaces…5 this ‘Collecting Basin’ induces dizzying vertigo as we listen to its terrifying grunts and sighs, like some gigantic breathing ogre in its cave, the very sound invoking the awesome scale of the acoustic space.

Disc One gathers three performances called ‘Cold Pin’ 1-3, and are records of Eli’s “band” performing heavily percussive and metallic noise. The three performances were recorded in significantly different acoustic spaces, which is most noticeable on the third very echoey track. In the band are Ashley Paul on alto sax and bass harp, Geoff Mullen on guitar, Greg Kelley on trumpet and Reuben Son on bassoon, with Keszler rattling his tireless arms across an array that includes drums, percussion instruments, crotales, and another guitar. Two of these cuts have already been released by the PAN label. ‘Cold Pin 1′ is intense and heavy – the improvising elements barely allowed to get a word in edgewise among the throbbing steel blasts and near-continuous resonating effects. On ‘Cold Pin 2′ the other players are more audible and the performance succeeds as a very radical form of group improvisation, where every second is packed with dense, detailed musical information. This music seems to be unfolding and generating itself, rather than played by people in real time; the collaborators are like radio receivers for these streams of information from unknown dimensions. On ‘Cold Pin 3′, it’s a little unclear whether the same five-piece is featured; the notes refer to a “mixed sextet and piano quintet”, and on early spins I’m not yet able to perceive any pianos playing here at all. But no matter, as this 25-minute piece is another essential piece of keening, melancholic, churning music, where some very unhappy brass or reed instruments make their plaint in slow and languid tones across a bedrock of spiky and restless percussive skitterments. Highly recommend this Catching Net double CD…its wild dynamics, resonating frequencies and primeval forces will alarm and amaze you…Keszler is emerging as a significant talent and one with a completely unique and personal approach to acoustic sound-generation, combining it with composition, improvisation, noise and live ensemble playing in very exciting ways.

  1. See this image to give you some idea of the scale involved. ↩
  2. Very coincidentally, the water tower was in Shreveport, thought by many to be the original home of The Residents. ↩
  3. Anomalous Records, SOUND 1, 2000; although Lanzillotta was probably aiming more for a naturalistic “found” installation vibe ↩
  4. Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile, India Navigation IN 3025, 1982 ↩
  5. Such as…erm…Tony Smith, Christo, Serra, Carl Andre… ↩
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015

Right Heft


Concrete and Clay

I quite like the Gobi Wow (NEVER COME ASHORE NCALP1) LP from FvRTvR, which turns out to be the duo of the American percussionist Fritz Welch with German loonoid Guido Henneböhl working a mysterious home-made electronic monstrosity. Together they conspire to leak out disjunctive additive-free homegrown noise comprising electronic bursts, mangled voices, and hammered metallism. This pair were very good together on the Demon Cycle 1-9 release as I recall, a fairly fatal mesmerising diabolic charmer from which grotesque ancient voices would ofttimes creak. Gobi Wow has the same undercurrents of nastery, but is a lot more bitty…the general debris of the sound feels like broken masonry pieces scattered about the studio floor which cannot be fitted together, not least to reconstruct a Greek ruin. Add to that the general inclination of the two players towards refusing musical convention wherever possible, in favour of twisted, slimy and spiky eruptions. These strategies cohere to result in a difficult surface listen, full of uglification and indigestibility. However, what we can admire is the stern determination of the two farming-fishermen to keep going no matter what, even if the weather be inhospitable for planting oats, and the pond yields no more bream to the bitter worms that are suspended on their two rods. We haven’t come across this degree of coarsened aesthetic anti-pleasure since Adam Bohman played with Damian Bisciglia. Rachel Lowther did the modelling clay cover. And it is a good choice of imagery for the music, which has the rough and lumpy quality of a half-worked statement of rawness, ripped from the carcass of a two-headed artist-creating golem type monster. Arrived 25th April 2012.

Something, Anything

Lovely songs by Chris Weisman on his Fresh Sip (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR074) double LP. In fact the entire set is indeed like a “fresh sip” of fruit juice packed with goody vitamins. Chris did just about everything on the album, playing all the instruments and dubbing on tasty harmony vocals, and probably acting as his own producer between takes on what I assume were these home-made recordings originally produced in 2009 in his Battleboro home. There are two “suites”, and on Yen You, many of the songs could be said to start life built on a low-key electro-pop skeleton with a simple programmed beat to keep all elements working to order, but then again each song is also a springboard for rich harmonised vocal melodies, drones, guitar solos, and quite restrained supporting melodies played on nice keyboards. So far everything and everyone is doing flip-fops, lightweight acrobatics of poppy grace. There is a refreshing absence of freakery and psychotic weirdness from each of these sweet productions. Weisman has no interest in de-producing his own songs simply to demonstrate his studio know-how or to explode the mind of the listener, although this isn’t to deny his obvious recording skills. He just likes his art to conceal art. Another strong plus factor is quite simply the limpid beauty of the young man’s singing voice; The Association would have been proud to count him as a member any day. The lyrics seem quite poetic and personal too, with oblique and private messages that have a charm and a depth which you certainly won’t fathom with just one or two spins. Looks like this will be a grower. On I Don’t Care Again there are more songs in like vein, perhaps some of them weighted slightly more in favour of the acoustic guitar and the mysterious poetry and manufactured via a slightly more ramshackle production, but no doubt all four sides are cut from the same paisley cloth. The material was originally released on cassette in 2010 on Autumn Records, something I will never see, so this vinyl rescue is quite welcome. The sleeve design is understated to say the least, and may hint at something about the creator’s impish modesty. At a time when American underground music was in danger of losing its way in an ever-increasing spiral of eccentricity and insanity, it’s refreshing to find there are still some musicians who haven’t completely forsaken the craft of pop melody and concision in songwriting. The press notes make comparisons with Todd Rundgren, which are apt. From 31 May 2012.

Jollity Farm

Songwriting skill which soars and gallops on quite another plane can be found with the Happy Jawbone Family Band from Vermont, one of those wayward and very able combos which the USA seems to be breeding and exporting with considerable skill lately (Colin L. Orchestra, Trawler Bycatch, The Bird Names, King Kong Ding Dong). The songs on this hearty and extroverted freak-party album OK Midnight, You Win (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR063) are played with swagger and confidence, like a slightly tipsy form of country and western mixed with elements of raw psychedelia and played by mutant rockabilly guitarists, all of which would be welcome enough, but the real flavour of the album is to be savoured in the voice of the lead singer. He has a thick and clotted tone with vaguely nasal undercurrents, and he seems to be using a broad tongue which he wraps around each lyrical moment like it was a chunky golden nugget he’s about to chew. You never forget a distinctive singing voice. The effect is made yet more delicious with the additions of high-range female vocal harmonies and backing vocals, which have also signed up to the general agreement agreement to partake of the juice and rollick freely in a fun-loving balmy atmosphere. This may be as close as we’ll get in our time to a reincarnation of the great Kevin Ayers. But these crazed Yankees also have a slightly menacing side when they get warmed up, chanting and declaiming with emphatic mania like some militant hillbillies practising their war chants. Not every one of these melodies may be a memorable one, but when this group find the right couplet of dementia to savour, they’ll hammer it into your forehead with a six-inch nail. Beautifully recorded with a solid and punchy presence. I don’t really know who to credit with what in this loopy collective, although names are supplied on the insert, nor can I tell you what any of the songs mean. You don’t learn them with your brain, so much as feel them in the belly. All this issued under the wraps of cover art which proposes a mutant birth double-horse running every which way, and an insert textured with coarse animal hair.

This Heat

From same label we also have Cold / Burn (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR069), which is another kettle of bones and a return to the juddering noise-drone collective music thing we all love so well. It features Anla Courtis, Okkyung Lee, C. Spencer Yeh and Jon Wesseltoft, with Lasse Marhaug behind the controls – a major meeting of minds which I don’t expect will happen again any time soon. The album is two side-long improvisations made using violin, harmonium, cello and electric guitar, and oodles of instinctive inspiration. It’s one of those miracles of performed music where the finished product is full of paradox – a single wodge of monotonous sound, yet alive with teeming detail; staying firmly on one root note yet also allowing a million and one diversions to wriggle freely across wild scales and tonalities. What I also like is the slightly untidy quality of the playing, where no-one is paying attention to the strictures of performed improvisation, a genre which can have its own set of rigid rules. Nor do they hew to the self-imposed puritanism which can sometimes bedevil those who try to emulate the music of Terry Riley or La Monte Young. My hero on two legs is C. Spencer Yeh, the Bronze God from Brooklyn, who is supplying a good deal of the energy on these sides; when his bowing arm is coiled and unsprung he can piston back and forth continuously for as long as it take a dynasty in China to rise and fall. And any time Courtis steps into a studio or simply enters a room full of listeners, you can expect that room to become charged with his magical-realist visions as he spins his unlikely yarns of metaphysical heroism. Norwegian Wesseltoft, who also adds shruti box and organ to the droning churn, produced a memorable cassette called Singing Cobra Ecstasy for our ears in 2009, and here he just keeps up with a steady shimmering drone long beyond the point of normalcy or sanity would expect. Korean cellist Lee is that fragile genius who won us over with her understated work on the Anicca LP for Dancing Wayang. Besides gender balance in a group, it’s arguably important to get a good balance of acoustic and electric instruments, which may be which this session scores such a direct hit on certain nerval synapses and brainial cord-crakes. You gotta swallow the whole thing like a horse pill the size of a hockey puck to get full effect, and submerge both feet in the rich organic dronery which knows no boundaries, showing how the power of massed imaginative energy in a mutually respecting improv context can knock formal composition hollow, when the parameters are just right. Excellent. From 27th February 2012.

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Negative Reversals


A curiously depressing and moribund piece of abstract noise from Jason Crumer. Let There Be Crumer (SECOND LAYER RECORDS SLR016) is the first I heard from this Oakland, California creator, a man who seems to court death with a rather oblique and multi-layered sophistication, as if wooing the Grim Reaper in calf-skinned gloves and tricorne hat. The music he makes is structured as a tripartite suite, which works admirably when auditioned from head to toe, leading the listener through multiple tunnels of decidedly mixed emotions, not all of them unpleasant, but somehow hard to fathom. Even the beautiful ambient music has a heaviness and bittersweet plangency to it, that somehow prevents our full enjoyment of the moments of respite that exist in Crumer’s otherwise rather bleak universe. It’s a bit like seeing the pallid sun rise at dawn through an array of grey rainclouds, while we are floating on a sea of polluted liquid in a coracle. Then there’s the triple-gatefold sleeve, almost worthy of being exhibited as a concept art statement in its own right. The internal triptych depicts stages of a violent cockfight in Asia, showing what’s at stake; agitated and desperate men, unsmilingly clutching banknotes in the cockpit as they place bets, and a dismal shot of the final outcome. I thought this final image showed dead birds littering the floor, but now I’m not sure – could they be enormous rats? A pessimistic view, which suggests human existence is both a colossal gamble and a squalid struggle to the death. Plus there’s a grisly designer cake photographed on the back cover which induces the same queasy feelings as the death’s head drawn on the disc, and as a visual analogue the cake is not too far away from that skull – if we read the coloured buttons as a row of bared teeth. The inner sleeve is also printed with surreal anecdotes set in a tiny font, just to send your brain spinning into the last stages of delirium. And if that is Mr Crumer on the cover, note how the image is treated to present a lurid visage of washed-out despair, heavily rimmed eyes to suggest lack of sleep or drug use, with an expression that still seeks understanding…the exact inverse of a James Taylor cover shot from 1971…and showing us what has become of the singer-songwriter dream that captivated a million hippies in those innocent days. The album also exhibits a strong and affecting contrast between the compelling and almost tuneful stretches of drone abstraction and the more brutal walls of extremely harsh grinding noise, but I gather that many of Crumer’s releases fit this profile and push the crazy-dynamic aesthetic as far as it can go. In short you won’t know where to put yourself, nor where to set the volume knob on your amplifier. Recommended to fans of John Duncan, particularly if you like his releases such as 1994′s Send.

Neptune‘s msg rcvd (NORTHERN SPY NSCD021) is another glorious oddity. Last heard from these American weirdnuts with their fine album Silent Partner which was the one to introduce me to their unusual world of percussion-and-electronics music, although the band has been promulgating their unique style of music around the Boston area for almost 20 years now. Time to get over the shock of those home-made instruments, which are one of their signature keynotes; let’s just accept that Jason Sandford is a sculptor, musician and just plain wayward visionary type of fellow, here providing the guitar, vocals, feedback organ, oscillator and amplified gas can to the trio’s exploits, accompanied by drummer Kevin Emil Micke and second guitarist / keyboardist Mark William Pearson. Besides the thrilling fractured-rock and electrifying pulsations of ‘Luminous Skull’, we have the more bewildering mental outing called ‘Dark Report’, a minimalist recit of unsettling poetry with only the barest percussive backdrop and shocking noisy shrieky interruptions to punctuate its odd rhythms. This track alone will separate the true believers from the drop-ins who have come in search of more oddball Krautrock-influenced music; ‘Dark Report’ is a genuine existential spooker, and grim enough to have been recorded by the original 1978 Alternative TV. Another major cut of note is ‘Negative Reversal’, a splendid bone-rattler of ramshackle metal, cracked drumming, and unpredictable oscillatory bursts, all used to deliver another cryptic lyric filled with images of skin, anatomical details, and underground-movie styled theatrics, almost a murder mystery story spat out in broken images. The closing number ‘dstl sgnl’ isn’t very uplifting either, with its forlorn spartan drumming and desultory guitar strums, again hewing close to the spirit of near-formless randomness that is the underlying trend of this record. In all, a lugubrious tone may abound on msg rcvd, but the abiding strength of Neptune is their cohesion as performers; they form a tight unit, each leaving space for the others to spread their blackened wings, and have trained themselves to be on guard against the many clichés of improvised and rock music. Particularly so in the drumming department, where they never settle for four beats to the bar – instead, these are rhythms that could wrong-foot any given herd of running giraffes or mountain goats. Neptune also understand how to use noise sparingly and expressively, thus assisting in the depiction of the uncertain emotional states hinted at in their opaque lyrics. Very strong and unusual work which deserves your listening time. This one from 29 February 2012.

The trio Grampus are from Los Angeles, and already on their debut album Ilk Ilk (PFMENTUM CD068) they make theur improvised utterances with rare assurance. The cornerstone of their sound is the modifications wrought upon brass instruments by the ever-reliable digital processor, Max/MSP. Both trumpeter Louis Lopez and trombonist Daniel Eaton go to considerable lengths to disguise, mutate and reorganise the fundamental pitches of their instruments, resulting in colourful alien tones where about 85% of the sound is totally unfamiliar to human ears, the only recognisable element being the traces of human breathing encoded in the music. The percussionist Michael Lockwood negotiates his path around these crazy, ever-expanding shapes, and his brittle attack is a stark contrast to the soft, bulbous blobs of the brass duo. Grampus certainly succeed in creating an unusual sound, and their track titles have a spiky humour. I look forward to hearing a bit more collaborative effort on their next outing, because not all these tracks cohere fully for me, sometimes descending into flabbiness too quickly. From 17 May 2012.

Mag Resistance is the duo of percussionist Mark E. Miller (Toy Killers) with the fab Matthew Wascovich, vocalist and songwriter from Scarcity Of Tanks, our favourite Cleveland band. On the cassette Voice Studies 06 (MY DANCE THE SKULL), they both provide voice elements while Miller does evil things with his mixing desk, and two splendid ten-minute rants are the result. ‘Future Of Futures’ and ‘No More Shadows’ are like political diatribes snatched from a television set broadcasting in 2026, the distorted barking tone yapping out slogans, harsh, clipped statements, and paranoid repetitions to the background of a clunkoid robotic box, sparking on all six. You gotta love the bold simplicity of this approach, like an even more stripped down version of rap music, with no tunes and no strict rhythm. In fact “megaphone and grumbling static noise” just about sums it up. But it’s the scary authority of the speaking voice, which I assume is that of Wascovich, which really makes the hidden subordinate inside of you sit up and take notice. If you listen for long enough you might just find yourself obeying any order, no matter how ludicrous. A strong and abrasive listen with a wiry core. This reminded me a lot of Uns. In fact I think these fellows need to team up with Z’EV as soon as humanly possible; the resulting project could be enough to topple the existing world order. Another from the batch of tapes received from this label 11 May 2012.

EDIT: Toy Killers added at 19:45

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004

Making of Rainbows

Nine Inch Snails

Slugfield may be a pretty repulsive name, and an album title like Slime Zone (PNL RECORDS PNL008) isn’t guaranteed to attract many potential fans from the ranks of Radio Norge listeners, but any musical endeavour which involves three Norwegian underground supremos (Marhaug, Ratkje and Nilssen-Love) deserves your warmest embrace, no matter how big the slug may be, nor how wet and slimy its trail. These 2010 recordings were enacted during a jazz festival in Oslo, but the mucus which this trio of gastropods produce is more in the nature of improvised electronic noise. Lasse Marhaug does it with his turntable and electronics set-up, while the very gifted and much-in-demand Maja S.K. Ratkje uses her voice and more electronics. When this pair are zooming together in the “zone” and carving out hefty slabs of richly buzzing atmospherics, Paal Nilssen-Love is able to exercise considerable self-restraint and pull away from his percussive kit, but once he picks up his steel mallets and starts a-hammering then he’s every bit as untamed as two separate Andrew Cyrilles. Ratkje is of course capable of singing like an angel when required, but in this particular milieu she brings wordless abstract screeches and gulps to the conversation, half-swallowing and half-vomiting her near-inhuman streams of vocalese data as if possessed by the Norwegian equivalent of “Old Nick”. An exciting and varied record; the textural dynamics reach all the extremes, and it’s not simply a free-for-all bluster-bout of self-indulgent high volume. The positive qualities of this release can be garnered from the longer tracks such as ‘Bring ‘Em On’ and ‘Happy After Party Dance’, where the players sustain high energy and much complexity for lengthy tussles of unbroken blastage, without any audible signs of flagging. Note sturdy “mini-album” gatefold cover with pastedown artwork for this CD release. From May 2012.

Drum’N'Cello

Peter Gregson performed all the cello parts for Cello Multitracks (NONCLASSICAL NONCLSS014), an album showcasing the work of UK contemporary composer Gabriel Prokofiev. It’s a strong collection which whole-heartedly embraces modern music in two ways: (a) the use of sophisticated multi-tracking studio methods, and (b) a strong influence from dance and remix culture. The former is shown on the first four tracks, a suite for nine cellos whereon Gregson overdubs himself and produces astonishing effects. You may have expected a morass of tasteful minimal droning, but this player has remarkable attack in his bowing and plucking techniques, leaves enormous gaps in the music, and creates a diabolically clever net of exciting dynamic music. The piece ‘Jerk Driver’ alone seems to have the potential to close the gaps between dub music, post-punk and classical composition, while ‘Float Dance’ has enough dissonances to satisfy any hard-core Serialist yet still retains the snap and crackle of dance music, as if a solid rhythm pulse were encoded in its DNA. We could say the same of ‘Tuff Strum’, where the cellist seems determined to recreate an acoustic chamber form of drum’n'bass. Gregson’s skills transfer well into the live environment too; he played his live parts against a bank of eight loudspeakers playing pre-recorded material when the music was premiered in 2011. The electronic dance influence extends to the remaining nine cuts, which are remixes of the music created by various luminaries of DJ culture, with at least one of them (DJ Spooky) hailing from the more “arty” end of that spectrum. These remixes are apparently representative of musical styles that are a closed shop to me, including dubstep, hip-hop and techno, but the use of reverb, loops and drum machines is rarely used to swamp the foregrounded cello sound, which consistently emerges as sharp as shards of broken glass painted black. A thrilling and innovative record. Some classical composers have made complete ninnies of themselves through dabbling in popular music or contemporary forms, but it’s completely different with these two fellows, who are already steeped in the milieu; “Peter makes his own electronic music and has a lot of studio experience,” reports the composer, explaining why they had such an immediate rapport and achieved such productive results. Recommended. From 16 May 2012.

The Water Synth

Enchanting and delicate percussive effects on Ombrophilia (APOSIOPÈSE NO NUMBER), by the Japanese composer Tomoko Sauvage who despite her “wild” surname is about as gentle as a Buddhist baby lamb on these recordings. The process she used involves porcelain bowls, presumably being struck by wooden spoons and making use of metal wire strands in some way. The bowls are filled with water and recorded using hydrophones. There are no melodies or tunes as such, but complex arrays of percussive notes performing like a broken mechanical street-piano. Some of Tomoko’s titles, such as ‘Raindrop Exercise’ and ‘Amniotic Life’, indicate her respect and love for nature, and the entire system is sympathetically described as a “natural synthesizer”. LP format only and limited to 500 copies (mine is a CDR promo). Arrived 04 May 2012.

Petals Fell on Petaluma

No less natural in its approach to electro-acoustic music is the mini-CD Aposiopesis (LF RECORDS LF026), 20 minutes of superb “airy” drone from Petals, the performing name of Kevin Sanders. Very coincidentally, the title here matches the name of the French record label which released the above LP 1. From what I can gather, the Petals music here is a live taped recording of a set-up involving violin strings, metal bars and elastic bands, creating a feedback system with the actual resonances of the four walls where it was recorded. A delicious combination of room sound, musical drone, and ambient feedback, all colliding with the recording process in subtle ways. Sanders also runs a record label called Hairdryer Excommunication, where he is dedicated to “Pluralising Minimalism”. If that involves enriching impoverished minimal music with added passion, heart and beauty such as we hear on this little gem, then I’m all for it. His website contains images and videos which may illuminate the matter further. From 30 May 2013.

  1. The term is something to do with unfinished sentences. Luckily, it’s not as severe as aphasia. ↩
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004

Black and Orange destruction

That path is for your steps alone

The Italian percussionist Andrea Belfi has recorded Wege (RM446) for the Room 40 label. He feeds his drum kit through a looping system that involves amplification and feedback, and a modular synth; he’s able to control the degree of feedback with his mallets and sticks on the snare, or even by stretching the skins of his drums. In this way, he is said to emulate the composition ‘Pendulum Music’ by Steve Reich, which used similar methodology, but it also seems appropriate to mention Max Neuhaus in this context, who was an early pioneer of using feedback with his drumkit in the early 1960s. Belfi’s results here are far from dry or academic though, and he manages to transcend the means of production, creating rich crackling textures that fizz with subdued energy. He even creates some passages of sweet music with melodies, rhythms and patterns. From 5th March 2012.

Music for DeVeren Bookwalter

Norwegian saxophonist Kjetil Moster may have started life tooting wild sqwawks for a hardcore rock band, but after hearing records of John Coltrane he was drawn towards jazz, opting to study that musical form at the conservatory in Trondheim. He’s since found a way back into rock music as a key member of Datarock, but still finds time to contribute improvised sax music with other groups when the occasion requires. His Blowjob (+3DB RECORDS +3DB014) album is a set of solo tenor improvisations. It’s great as a showcase for his techniques, including overblowing, heavy non-musical breathing, and long sustained tones – all of which he has clearly mastered and puts them to use in service of his music, sometimes melancholy, sometimes emerging as disjointed thoughts. The tracks ‘Sayonara’ and ‘No Wonder We Love’ exhibit his romantic side, except they are like stripped-down, ultra-minimal versions of the sorts of tunes which Coltrane would have rendered as richly-embroidered fabrics. The title track and ‘Seaweed’ are much more abstract, a delicate cross between a breathing exercise and the blueprint for an improvised melody. From 5th March 2012.

A triptych for the end of the world

Debacle 070 from Seattle’s Debacle Records is a compellingly violent split between three noise projects, only one of which is familiar to us. It begins with Bacteria Cult, which may be the work of Chris Dodge who performs in many bands and projects besides running the Slap A Ham Records label. He is joined by three other players (Fetus, Howard and Nervo) and their 20-minute piece ‘It has been 3,000 years since the machine has stopped working’ is a full-bodied experiment in rumbling feedback, electronic tones, speeded-up voices and liberal use of a delay effect, all in the service of painting a pessimistic vision of things to come. Strong opener; gotta admire Bacteria Cult’s rigid control of their sonic elements which are carefully laid out to exploit the dynamic possibilities to the full. Yet it’s poised on the edge of chaos throughout. Good morning tension.

Juhyo is the team of Brian Kopish and Bill Henson from Minneapolis. Their ‘We Are Not Winning’ also uses a voice component or two, and one of them could be a media commentator or a military personage lamenting the fact that [America] is not winning a war. To bolster the sense of futility and inescapable misery, the Juhyo lads emit bizarre electronic sloughing effects that are not unlike the sounds a dying whale might make if she consisted of metal parts and circuits instead of bones and blubber. This shapeless and parpy musical rondello sits on top of an insistent lower-depths bass rumblage and is punctuated with sinister, bristling purrs from a spiky musical-box torture machine. The added voices increase in hysteria and madness as a counterpoint to the calm and assured grimness of this black noise, which ploughs on remorselessly. War is Hell, eh!

The set is completed by Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, the core team of Stan reed and wm. Rage and Crystal Perez, joined by M S Waldron and producer Scott Colburn, the same team who have sickened and terrified listeners with their monstrous, skeleton-filled recordings in recent years. On ‘Pure / Filth’ they may appear to have reined in their tendency for all-out thermonuclear war in sound – at least for the opening half of the piece, which is an increasingly menacing and expanding set of ringing frequencies slugging it out for space on the battleground with some slow-motion explosive bursts of ugly noise. But by the mid-point of this hateful symphony, the gloves are off and the entire widescreen arena is ablaze with hideous bombshells and fireballs, spelling death for any living creature within range. We listen horrified – can it get any more intense? It can. Only a few hardy souls will make it to the end of this harshest of harsh noise walls, where the very sound itself is capable of choking our lungs with putrid black smoke.

If the three creators share any common ground here, it would be their unfailingly bleak outlook on human existence, and a need to express their varying degrees of dismay through long-form escapades of inescapable despairing noise. Even when tempered with exciting dynamics, as all the music is, there is still no escape from the gloom, which at times threatens to choke us. The other shared sentiment is a certain relish in savouring the charred filth of the blackness into which they continually plunge. The package draws implicit connections between disease and warfare, both spreading unstoppably. It’s also possible to “read” the three tracks as a narrative sequence in triptych form, starting with a society where the machinery of its infrastructure has broken down and left them in a less than desirable state; proceeding to a point where war has broken out, and it’s an unwinnable war; and ending with a complete disaster of utter annihilation, probably involving large amounts of heavy explosives. The plot of all the Terminator movies, in short. From March 2012, a very credible example of modern noise horror, with excellent illustrations by Seattle artist Demian Johnston.

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Monopoles and Nightingales Walk these Hills

Nothing’s Gonna Touch Ya

Nice modern instrumental music from Trapist on The Golden Years (STAUBGOLD DIGITAL 19). This is the Vienna-based trio of Martin Siewert, Martin Brandlmayr and Joe Williamson, on the face of it comprising a guitar and piano jazz trio of the sort that Blue Note Records would not have kicked out of the studio in the mid 1950s. But in sooth what we hear would have caused the sacred eyebrows of Kenny Burrell and Joe Pass to knit together in consternation, for nowhere do we hear performed music with the taut energetic punch of post-bop modal playing. Instead the entire threesome move as though they’ve been dipped liberally in a tin of Tate & Lyle’s finest, which is probably why percussionist Brandlmayr is nicknamed “the man with the golden arm” 1. The sound is also very contemporary: the guitar has sometimes been treated with live electronics, there is evidence of skilled production technique on the record from its engineers Christoph Amann and Siewert, and the eminently eclectic musicians are informed by a huge range of musical styles, including touches of light glitchy noise that occasionally roars its way into the fold like models of small wolves entering the parlour full of sheep, and there are uncertain tone clusters produced by bowed strings and bowed percussion which float like evil Darmstadtian clouds over the planned pastoral picnic. With ‘The Gun That’s Hanging on the Kitchen Wall’, Siewert allows delicious and even tasteful chords to strum their way across the canvas of slow-moving ominous narrative, and through its deliberately leaden pace and title I cannot help but think of this as a missing track from the 2005 Earth LP Hex 2. ‘The Spoke and The Horse’ likewise seems to pick up the vaguely-suggested “wild west” theme, although if this trio were producing a seminar on that subject, I would expect fleeting images from a John Ford movie to flicker across the presentation in a washed-out, subliminal manner. ‘Pisa’ is the one live track in the otherwise studio-bound album, and it concludes with ‘Walk These Hills Lightly’, where the trio push their already-subtle approach into an even more diffuse zone of unobtruseiveness. Here the bass strings and the guitar strings could be said to be sketching out the construction lines for the skeleton of a tune, perhaps with the expectation that the listener complete the tune, or simply enjoy its uncompleted state. These Austrian mellow-mites have been producing this extremely stripped-down form of semi-melodic quasi-structured improvisation for many years now; Siewert and Brandlmayr we remember from their 2003 release for Erstwhile, but they’ve been going for longer than that.

Seen III, Took 4

Subtlety is also a keyword to bring into the classroom as we approach Scènes (EMPREINTES DIGITALES IMED 11111) by Pete Stollery, an electro-acoustic composer who studied under the great Jonty Harrison and is now a Professor at the University of Aberdeen, where he is a strong advocate for new music in Scotland via the agency of InvisiblEARts. Since Radiophonic Music is never out of fashion, readers may initially be drawn to the six minute track ‘Serendipities and Synchronicities’, which was composed for a stage play about Delia Derbyshire. In it, Stollery attempts to express his personal affinities with Delia’s work, by refracting it through his own very similar compositional methods. There are also two pieces excerpted from his ongoing Gordon Soundscape project, which is a plan to compile an aural map of Aberdeenshire, through collaging field recordings and processing of same; his chief aim as gazetteer in this instance is to identify and record endangered sounds, such as certain activities found within the dying distillery industry. He also aims to map Paris in like manner, on ‘Scènes, Rendez-Vous’ which has its origins in his childhood memory of a 1967 Claud Lelouch documentary, and uses information from the film as rules to govern his sound-gathering and compositional actions. ‘Fields of Silence’ is also based on field recordings, themed around the intriguing idea that a field of grain falls silent “after it has been harvested”. This very much reminds me of a Ray Bradbury story 3. Or that Roald Dahl story where an inventor is able to hear the cries of plants being cut by secaturs 4. Stollery somehow manages to discover sound events and textures within the mown stubble itself, as well as collaging in “before and after” sound events from combine harvesters. In all Stollery seems to be a thoughtful and gentle composer, one who wouldn’t want to impose anything on the landscape, but rather cares to ask interesting questions about our relationship to our sonic environment. In some cases I find his explanatory notes more interesting than the sounds he produces. This is particularly so with ‘Back to Square One’, where he writes with something approaching passion about the excitement he feels when listening to the “musicality” of sports commentators on the radio and telly, yet very little of that passion or excitement has found its way into the muffled, pedestrian music.

Drums Along the Mohawk

The Hamburg based drummer and percussionist Sven Kacirek has been working steadily producing commissions and compositions since 2001, occasionally finding time to realise his own solo albums in the lucid gaps. Scarlet Pitch Dreams (PINGIPUNG 32) is one of them, released in April 2012. Many of his commissions have, unsurprisingly, been employed for contemporary dance and theatre projects, although on the strength of this album I think he should also look into film soundtracks as another career strand; many of these tracks resemble cues from a suspense drama or a police-procedural TV show shot in grainy blue and silver hues, but there are also lighter and more melodic moments, some of them even slightly humorous in tone. Stylistically, it’s mostly the sound of very clipped piano notes or vibraphone runs picking out the tunes, layered on top of swishy jazz-like beats and cluttered rhythms.

The Sonic Laocoön

Convolution (TARTARUGA RECORDS TTRCD011) by Max Bondi impressed me in places with its simplicity and stern countenance. We haven’t heard from this fellow since a 2007 team-up with Ala Muerte which came out on Public Guilt, and I can’t seem to find out much else about him at this time. Some of the tracks on Convolution are just very basic electronic drones, with hardly any variations to ease their sullen disposition, and could be characterised by Max’s disciplined refusal to let them develop into anything resembling “ambient” or other pleasurable sensations. Bondi keeps his little pets on a tight leash, and feeds them only on scraps of tofu and raw turnip. For me these murmuring beasts are at their best when situated in the lower register, growling and humming in subsonic manner as if poised for the kill, or else beaming death-rays of hate across the nation. Two tracks which do this very well are ‘Kami’ and ‘Catoptrics’, although ‘Ori’ also has a strong dose of this anti-social poison laced within its broth. However, the last four tracks from ‘Faltung’ onwards follow a different path, and I think these are examples of the sequencer running a pattern through an electronic instrument. These tumbling acrobats are a bit too “bouncy” for me at the moment, but I think at other times in one’s day they would present an interesting monkey-puzzle for the mind to ascend; aye, a plate of sonic macaroni served with epoxy resin instead of grated cheese. Unravel the noodles as ye may. The sleeve art may have something to do with tessellations; it reminds me of an old board game I used to have, where the challenge was to use basic shapes like squares and triangles and form exact pictures of animals, and the only clue they gave us was a silhouette. I expect to puzzle over Bondi’s music in much the same way.

  1. This joke comes from an old episode of Beyond Our Ken. ↩
  2. Or Printing in The Infernal Method, SOUTHERN LORD SUNN48. ↩
  3. “The Scythe”, 1943. ↩
  4. “The Sound Machine”, 1949. ↩
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The Bag Is Ready

Une Saison en Enfer

Season Two (SOLAR IPSE #01) is the latest team-up of those two Italian improvisers Ninni Morgia and Marcello Magliocchi; last heard them doing their guitar and percussion duo thing on the 2011 Sound Gates LP, which we noted this summer. Both are radical inventors or reinventors of musical instruments, Magliocchi in that he creates his own percussive instruments from found objects but also has many extended techniques concealed up his long white sleeves. His approach to playing the bowed cymbal, for example, creates a dynamo hum of evil proportions on ‘Medusa’, its tidal swells sucking you into a fatal whirlpool for 9 minutes. On ‘Avoiding Traps’, his suffused cymbal fog effect is like a cloud of liquid metal alloys floating in the room, capable of nickel-plating both lungs instantly. The Sicilian guitarist Morgia is one of the busiest guitar-players on the planet, equipped with arms and fingers made of recycled Slinky Toys. He does everything he can on his electric guitar apart from strike a recognisable chord or hold down a note in conventional fingering manner. Instead, distortion and mutation are his watchwords, muffling strings at every opportunity or causing them to hoot and howl like animals, and activating his strumming right hand to more or less pounce on the strings like a cougar from a tree, making unexpected dives and leaps and occasionally even shredding the flesh with his long sharp claws. Which reminds me that, pound for pound, this album is much more aggressive than the rather wispy and mysterious Sound Gates, the latter record resembling at times an electro-acoustic foray into the tunnels of the cerebellum, much as we loved it. Season Two isn’t exactly the improv remake of ‘God Save The Queen’, but half of the tracks are quite short and punchy and characterised by a thunderous undercurrent of bass tones and a considerable amount of shrill noisy attack at the front end. The nine-minute ‘Thor’s Tunnel’ in particular should endear this duo to listeners who derive twisted kicks from the more feral and untutored guitar-drum noise assaults of MoHa! or Mouthus. There are sterner and more meditative tracks, but overall a raucous and passionate album on which there’s no denying the musicianly skills of both these artistes, who pay close attention to interactivity, detail and dynamics in every second of these live recordings, yet are still able to blast out with the force of a dozen red devils when the occasion demands it. Arrived 22 March 2012.

Tales from the Crypt

From 05 March 2012, we have Joke Lanz and his Münster Bern (CUBUS RECORDS CB 368). Me, I’m still reeling from the fabulous two double-LP compilations 1 of his Sudden Infant work which brought home to me the importance and influence of this outrageously unique personality, besides being shocking, hilarious and terrifying all at once. This item is less of a confrontational noise assault-performance thing and shows Lanz’s diabolical skills in working the turntables on a single 26-minute track which he recorded live in the cathedral at a music festival in Bern. It’s mostly a mind-sappingly odd and bewildering frieze of aural collage, with a string of disconnected sound events (music snatches, voices, sound effects and generally unrecognisable goop) following the dark logic of a mind which only its owner truly understands. Church bells give way to dripping-tap electronica bloops, then dissonant avant-guitar plucks, then a sobbing voice, a deeply troubling high-key whine, then a calm TV announcer’s voice; by about mid-point the vocal elements are becoming quite grotesque, with speeded-up repeats and loops rendering their every syllable as pure gibberish. It’s like viewing a series of surreal art objects in glass boxes arranged in a long line, creating an impression on your mind which grows more nightmarish and ridiculous the further into the gallery you walk with tentative step. I say this to emphasise the separatedness of Joke’s sounds; some turntablers like to confuse us with multiple overlays which crash together into a sonic pile-up in short order, but here each item is presented to us in almost stark isolation, with the accretion of sounds only gradually coalescing to form a semi-connected statement. The natural echo of the cathedral only increases that sense of isolation, and some of the noises here feel like silly little clowns or cartoon animals performing their zany turns in the most inappropriate possible setting before a cold or indifferent audience. The disruption to clear thinking is completed by the interventions of Joke’s stabbing finger, aggressively halting, reversing and rubbing the rotating discs with his radical take on the “scratching” technique. And what a powerful finger it is too. I mean, just look at that photo on the back cover. It looks like it’s hinged in three places, something you could pull out of a metal toolbox and use as a car jack. Lanz’s sense of jet-black humour seems to have been a key operator for this work, but the lasting effect of Münster Bern is one of total absurdity, a miniature portrait of the futility and folly of existence.

Jesus Couldn’t Drum

Curio of the day is this package called Don’t Drum for Other Girls (SEED RECORDS SEEDCD33) which arrived 23 March 2012 in an elaborate screenprinted foldout cover. This was sent to us by the Department of Music at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, and may represent a stage in a music/art student project. It’s credited to a band called Sleeps In Oysters, but they just did the basic music and numerous other creators have been involved in the realisation of this elaborate multi-media package. Luckily I have the latest version of VLC media player which is capable of displaying entire contents of disc in a menu, regardless of their file formats. There are about five original tunes by Sleeps In Oysters and some remixes-reworkings of same by Diasonic, John Oyster, DJ Arctic Roll, Liquid Chris H. and Christ. The songs aren’t much more than basic girl-pop with electro beat trappings and semi-punky guitar chords, with a nondescript girl vocalist intoning the lyrics with very little real passion or expression. As pop songs go, better melodies have been written. So far it’s something of a cocktail, but from what I can gather from the press notes which freely invoke everything from post-punk pop to modern-day girl bands, stopping off at Cyndi Lauper and 1980s power pop en route, that is exactly the intention. Oddly enough the reworked versions of the songs are more interesting to my ears; ‘He Drummed Part 2′ strips away almost all the song elements and offers us an attenuated mechanical whine blended with an ambient background tune, while something resembling a mad prepared electric violin is sawn apart with fiendish glee. John Oyster is responsible for that, and also the ‘Son Of Drum Mix’ of the title track which buries the basic tracks in a compressed echo chamber while bringing some insane drum machine tracks to the fore. Curious rather than exciting, but even so it just about manages to demonstrate how conventional pop can be recast as vaguely experimental music. Equally odd is the performance artist The Strangest Pet, who adds a twisted spoken narrative to another version of ‘He Drummed’. Then we come to the moving images segment, which is a pop promo video for the title song made by Carlos Saez of Madrid. It hasn’t improved the song for me much (third hearing in and it’s becoming rather grating) but care has gone into building the colourful pop-art props, and the images of the musicians running around the town dressed as outsize Korg synthesisers have an endearing quality. We also see the artistes inside their cramped cardboard boxes looking almost frantic, trapped, beating against the walls of a cell. The package includes generous number of photos of the video shoot, and the other visual elements are folders of image files – collage artworks created by an English artist LustrousChemistry (i.e. Paul Hearn), who also assembled the hand-made package for the release. A good effort in all, but what is it trying to communicate? The package is an odd mix of banality, cliché and experimentation, and any shared ground between the diverse talents involved is hard to discern. I can’t find the missing pazzazz factor that would make this very mixed package truly lift off for me. There may be some intended ironic subtext about pop music, but it’s nothing like as coherent as (say) X-Ray Spex, Bow Wow Wow, ABC or even Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

  1. My Life’s a Gunshot (Retrospective 1989-2009). ↩
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Mirror Man


Australian improvising percussionist Will Guthrie boggles the mind with his extended techniques on Sticks, Stones & Breaking Bones (ANTBOY MUSIC AM11 / LESPOURRICORDS LPR0008 / GAFFER RECORDS GR032) which arrived here 8 March 2012. It contains three recordings which demonstrate his fluency with a particular and highly personal method of drumming which he has been working hard to develop over many years. Now in case you think you’re in for a dissonant listen along the lines of Les Percussions De Strasbourg (the Silver Series LPs that few in their right mind want to collect), I must stress that Guthrie’s work on this record is not completely disjunctive or broken, nor filled with the delicate tinkling of wind chimes or other aesthetic posturings. To put it bluntly, Guthrie rocks like a devil. The first track ‘Sticks’ is one which we can recommend to any honest fan of rock music, as it’s a blastin’ piece of muscular improvisation characterised by a steady pulse and inventive cross-rhythms, played with clarity and precision, resulting in room-filling thwomps that start by agitating the teacups and end up cracking the plaster on your ceiling. John “Drumbo” French fans should dismount instantly and fill their canteens at this oasis. On the strength of these 8 1/2 minutes alone, we have to nominate Guthrie as the best drummer Frank Zappa never recruited; he could have made nine types of mincemeat out of ‘Inca Roads’.

We’ve got a breathing space on second track ‘Stones’ which starts out with long metallic tones perhaps made by brushed cymbals, but it livens up at midpoint to kick into an even more elaborate worked example of Guthrie’s ingenious method. He explains it for the listener in friendly, jargon-free prose with the enclosed handout, and it’s a device that involves the repetition of short and very limited rhythmic phrases, but interpreted in multiple fashions – the phrase can start in the middle, be played backwards, or have its order or direction changed in pretty much any way that suits the player. He calls this method “mirror image rhythms”. It seems to involve memorising a tremendous amount of musical information without the aid of notation, and requires Herculean intellectual and physical efforts. Guthrie freely admits this approach is meticulous to the point of being obsessive, and often feels he’s in danger of losing himself in a “house of mirror music”, never to escape.

The payoff for all this is to be heard on the colossal final track ‘Breaking Bones’, where for 16 minutes Guthrie grinds his way through one of the most simplistic phrases in a drummer’s repertoire, and his aim in performance is to turn himself into a drumming machine, effecting almost mindless mechanical playing. You may think you’ve heard one of the ultimate expressions of this non-human aesthetic on the record made by Tony Conrad and Faust, but brother – you’re in for a surprise. Guthrie’s intention here is to push his body to the limits, stretch his muscles to the point where his own arms and legs start making involuntary spasmodic decisions on their own; it’s all part of the aim of the work, which he has performed live a number of times, and for which he has to get into physical shape (through hard exercise) before he even attempts it. It’s almost a matter of life or death for him, although he may not be putting himself in as much physical danger as fellow Australian Lucas Abela has done, with his madcap antics.

I’m still intrigued by what “mirror image rhythms” means as a technique, but one part of it I do understand is that perfection in executing it is virtually impossible, either because there’s too much information to remember or it’s too physically demanding, or both. As Guthrie admits, he cannot do the same thing note for note even after practising it for so long, but surely the point is that he tries. The act of attempting this physically challenging music is the artistic process that is relevant, whether or not absolute success is attained. Even Stockhausen admitted he was often scoring music that was too complex for any violinist to play, but when they achieved even 70% success, he was more than delighted with the results. In grappling with his mirrors and putting his tendons and ligaments through a stressful Hell that even exceeds the toughest yoga exercise, Guthrie says, “it keeps resulting in engaging music for me”. That’s putting it mildly, Will!

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Shapes of Things


Nice team-up between mystical percussionist and performance artist Z’EV with the Portuguese musician and composer David Maranha on Obsidiana (SONORIS SNS-11). I only really know Maranha from his ensemble pieces such as Circunscrita, but he proves his mettle in the performance pit here and shows he’s got the single-minded brow-furrowing strength to go eight rounds with the powerful and tireless arms of Z’EV. Maranha just oozes heavy black drone-filth and fuzz from his Hammond organ, and as photo shows he leans his whole body into performing that task. Z’EV is credited with playing the “stainless steel discs”, but this doesn’t feel like an especially “metal” album; the resounding skin of his bass drum doesn’t just pummmel us aggressively, it’s little short of a call to nuclear war. From a Lisbon festival June 2010, with a video grab from one of Z’EV’s art movies. Arrived 21 February 2012.

Dislocation is the fab Japanese quartet renowned for mixing crazy free jazz improvisation with demented rock elements, such as wah-wah guitar and loopy speedcore drumming, and there’s electronic shriekment also thrown into that tub of snakes. You can hear them doing it live on Mud Layer Cake (EH?59), with recordings made in 2010 in Nagoya. If you find most table-noise from Japan unapproachable, you might just manage to digest this material, as it’s notched about two or three steps back from “maximum strength”; but the players are still manic and unstoppable when they get into their hyper-fast, ultra-driven thang, and there’s very little structure or dynamics to get in the way of their interplanetary meltdown groove. The recordings may be a shade rough around the edges, but any caveats are more than amply compensated for the ferocious energy levels throughout, especially on the 20-minute second track, which defies belief. From 6 January 2012.

Eek, here’s this very interesting Iain Sinclair record which has been buried in a bag since 21 February 2012. Stone Tape Shuffle (TEST CENTRE) is a limited vinyl album (400 copies) of which I was sent a promo CDR. It’s spoken word, as you’d expect from this unique English writer who has championed the marginal poetry of Stewart Home and the art of psycho-geography in his writings, and spun mind-boggling portraits of London life in his books. But it’s a spoken-word record with a twist; the compiler, Will Shute, wrote to tell me the content is taken from an assortment of Sinclair’s books, and that “the recordings were made in the places corresponding to the fiction, and have been edited together with material from Iain’s archives and with field recordings.” Now while this is not as radical as Mark E. Smith’s The Post-Nearly Man (and what is?), there are glorious moments of overlapping voices from mixed recordings, and some subtle narrative consonances provided by the field recordings of traffic and river from that most noble of cities. For me Side Two is the more compelling of the two suites, with more distorted sounds arising from what I take to be cassette recordings, and there’s also more of a cut-up feel, and more foreign elements from random sounds leaking in. Impenetrable, vivid, disturbing. It’s here that the compilers live up to their aspirations of emulating the strategies of certain William Burroughs recordings and items from the Giorno Poetry Systems records. Sinclair’s writings are quite dense, layered and opaque, an acquired taste for the most part. I know that Private Eye magazine for one regard him and all his works with disdain, and this LP may not be the best place to start if a complete novice; for that, I would recommend Lights Out For The Territory. Nonetheless this is a compelling and very unusual art LP from an English original. We look forward to the promised Chris Petit release from this label.

More murderous electronic music from Ben Vida on esstends-esstends-esstends (PAN LP 23). Extreme electronic music will be the death of me, or I’ll be content, sir, to eat my own head. On this item, Vida is attempting to destroy the illusion of the stereo image and make a record where you have no idea where the source material is emanating from. Further disorientation can be enjoyed by simply moving your head around as you sit wedged between the immovable blocks of electric sound munching out of your speakers like giant poisoned slugs, and full volume playback is indicated. Actually it’s not like slugs at all. Nothing so organic. Instead, we have to visualise vast geometrical shapes, in three dimensions, made of hard material that yields beneath nothing short of a diamond torch cutter, and formed in outrageous configurations that are not known to exist in the Euclidean canon. Through his art, Vida plays hob with “expanded spatialization”, “sound localization”, and our perception of same, like a very refined form of optical art of the sort that reduces your eyelids to quivering bowls of mayonnaise. Fortunately it’s not completely a non-stop ordeal once you get used to the high degree of abstraction in this music, and the purity and simplicity of Vida’s unblemished tones is truly something to savour as they ring forth with shocking clarity; a shot of Lagavulin for the ears. Rashad Becker once again proves he’s the robo-surgeon of the audio mastering world. Ben Vida used to be with Town And Country and had a solo act called Bird Show. More recently he’s been doing “cross control voltage integrated improvisation and real time group automatic composition” with Keith Fullerton Whitman, an activity which sounds like it oughtta to get the pair of them banned in Boston.

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Sculptures, Tapes and Bats

The Jacques Lasry Effect

Some quite nice percussion effects from Marcello Magliocchi on Music For Sounding Sculptures In Twenty-Three Movements (ULTRAMARINE RECORDS UM011). He’s playing metal sound sculptures created by Andrea Dami. There aren’t any pictures supplied with this cassette release, but I found a good photostream on Flickr. The sculptures are boxes or cylinders of steel, the latter perhaps converted from oil drums; one of them is a little tree of cymbals using what looks like a large metal sieve for a plinth. One of them is even more elaborate, incorporating what looks like a large metal lute into its design, while another allows a mobile of smaller percussive objects to be dangled above it. As can be seen, Marcello uses sticks, mallets and bows to draw forth the range of sounds on these “instant compositions”. There are some rich and solemn sounds here, but the performances are rather static and lacklustre for me; it feels like an aural tour around the sculptor’s workshop, rather than a musical improvisatory set. What Eddie Prevost couldn’t have done with these sculptures, eh?

Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus

Silvia Kastel with her Love Tape (ULTRAMARINE RECORDS UM010) is from the same Italian cadre and has connections to the guitarist Ninni Morgia. This is quite a short tape with just seven tracks, and it’s a little gem of snappy experimental tapework. The main component is her own manipulated voice, mostly run backwards, cut to pieces, and played at odd speeds, and she sings, moans and murmurs in a strangulated fashion the better to convey her fractured visions. But there are other odd sounds in here too. Such music we hear is minimal, fragile and half-completed phrases simply looped into a basic pattern, be it a skeletal synth melody or awkward drumbeats. I get the feeling she has assembled this work with tremendous economy and intuition, allowing the complexity and interest to bubble forth naturally from the juxtapositions of a few simple elements. I would like to think of Love Tape as a form of inverted pop music as done by a fine artist, always a reliable sub-genre of experimental music. Kastel’s titles could almost be out-takes from an old 1980 session by Bow Wow Wow. At that point the analogy collapses though, because Love Tape is a disaffected and troubled vision of modern love, an arena fraught with doubts and uncertainties, where once-whole people are reduced to incoherent and mumbly ghosts of their former selves. Fine item! Sorry to have left it languishing in the bag since September 2011.

Bat and Person Dyning

Have you ever heard of a bat detector? The UK’s Bat Conservation Trust knows all about them, luckily, and it turns out there are a wide variety of these electronic devices which can allow us to hear the ultrasonic sounds made by these little black-coated gentlemen with their lovely leathery wings. The devices work in many ways to make audible that which is normally inaudible, including time expansion (slowing down the original bat sound) and frequency division (dividing the frequency rate of the sound); but all of them use the principle of heterodyning, that is mixing the original bat frequency with another frequency, and (through some clever method of sums and differences) presenting a sound that is within the range of the human ear. Every home should have a bat detector, even if you don’t have bats in your garden nor anticipate encountering any in the park. Eisuke Yanagisawa (film-maker, researcher and field recordist) has used one to make the record Ultrasonic Scapes (GRUENREKORDER Gr081). He started off with bats right enough, but soon applied it to cicadas, and thence to all sorts of electrical devices found in the street – including automatic gates, street lights, TV sets…in fine, just about anything that emits ultrasonic frequencies. Some of these sounds he blurts back at us are really intense and surprising, like particularly harsh forms of digital noise music, and even when not so intense they have a very compelling presence. Given its rather serendipitous nature and general lack of structure, you could never mistake this for electronic music, but on a purely aural level I can sense it would appeal to anyone who enjoyed what Stockhausen did with the ring modulator in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s also a rather process-based approach of course, and sometimes it seems more like a demo CD for a bat detector. While I personally would have liked to hear more utterances from the bats and the insects, the street noises are quite impressive too. A good listen – fascinating material which reveals an unheard world that is all around us, yet largely unknown.

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