Tagged: quiet

March 29, 2013

Cendre: beautiful music trapped in land of Melancholia

Fennesz + Sakamoto, Cendre, Touch, CD TONE-32 (2007)

Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on much by various artists who I used to listen to but then drifted away from. It’s been quite some time since I heard anything by Christian Fennesz. So I thought I should check out this collaborative instrumental work from 2007 with Japanese composer / musician Ryuichi Sakamoto with whose music I was also once familiar way back in the early 1980s when he was a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

“Cendre” is a series of ambient soundscape pieces done mainly on piano, guitar and laptop (used to process guitar and piano sounds and melodies). All track titles are short one-word names that suggest states of incomplete stasis or the remains of something that once existed but is no more. Much of the music is desultory piano melody meandering, often sad and meditative in mood as it favours certain keys, with guitar and laptop electronics active in the backdrop. The atmospheres can be quite dark but they are never menacing or threatening. No other instrumentation is used and there are vast spaces revealed in the music by the plaintive keyboard tunes. There is the sense that listeners have to fill in the empty spaces with their own imaginations and memories that those darkened spaces might evoke.

Although the album is divided into 11 tracks, the music is better heard as a continuous soundtrack of changing melodies and sounds that passes through a melancholy blues style, something approaching lounge lizard muzak and occasionally falling into abstract experimental territory. The best tracks are those where the piano and guitar electronics are blended so well that everything sounds like one instrument with an amazing array of tones and effects that all sound like pure piano and Fenneszian guitar effects (“Kuni”, for instance).

The music is certainly very beautiful and its sculpting can be gorgeous and heavenly but at the same time it stays within a very restricted zone of Melancholia: in this world, joy, lightness and happy defiance, in the face of a world that insists on solemn observance of the transience of life, are qualities alien to its denizens. I know we all have to die one day and for many that’s a terrible prospect to be shunned; for others such knowledge kills off all motivation to live fully in the moment; and for still others the awareness suggests we must observe detachment and resist a hunger to satisfy all our appetites but at the risk of denying our emotions, feelings and animal passion; but “Cendre” takes its remit of regarding the world and change with a detached eye rather too seriously to the extent of draining any life out of the music. The result is an album that increasingly becomes stupefying and soporific as it hammers its message over and over with each subsequent track.

Hmm … I probably wasn’t missing all that much after all after floating away from Fennesz and Sakamoto all those years ago.

Contact: Touch Music, Christian Fennesz, Ryuichi Sakamoto

December 21, 2012

Omnimoment: five soundscape pieces that delight the senses

Hitoshi Kojo, Omnimoment: Site-specific Sound Works 2006 – 2009, Omnimemento, CD OM05 (2012)

A beautifully packaged set of five soundscape pieces, “Omnimoment …” is a compilation of sound works originally made as installations or live installations dependent on the objects found in or around the locations where they were recorded, mixed with the natural environmental sounds of those locations. This is a document made with a great deal of love and care. Each track is accompanied by an explanation of how it was made, the sound sources used to produce the sounds we hear in it and the location where it was made. The locations include Barcelona, a castle in Germany, a lake site in Estonia and a couple of venues in New York.

“Shiranui” sets the pace with a slow, calm drone created from a metal cylinder found in a barn at the lake site. Kojo surmises that the object might once have been a turbine but it, like the other objects used on the recording, is being used for something other than what it was originally designed for and that’s part of the theme of this album: to use objects in a way other than the object’s narrowly defined, specialised role for which it was created and in doing so, open up human minds and hearts to an alternative parallel world. “Sea Migration” is just a little faster but has a murky air with a hint of sea-salt smell and a breezy ambience that could be mistaken for soft digitalised noise with a bit of drone.

“Sunshine Erosion” is a beautiful piece created on a surprising mixture of junk metal, kitchen supplies, plastic tube, a tuning fork and objects picked up at the beach; its sound is not too far off in mood from Fennesz during his “Endless Summer” period and if it were a bit softer and muted around the edges it might even slip into Touch label territory. The ambience is warm, relaxed and serene but there is enough sharp edge to the work to move it away from sentimentality.

The last two tracks “Star Grazing / Seeding Planets”, using a mix of kitchen supplies, glass and metal objects, and traffic noise ambience, are static fragile pieces of droning wonder; the latter track is a bit stronger and more whining. The mood is very benevolent and tranquil, and one has a vision of the universe and its maker as essentially benign and looking favourably on the germination of life across the galaxies: a very pleasant counter-balance to the visions of the universe as indifferent or downright hostile to humans that this reviewer often encounters in several genres of music.

Each piece has visual documentation which can be viewed on the links that Kojo has given in the booklet that accompanies the album. Some people may query why Kojo didn’t just release the set in DVD format rather than as CD and one can argue the pros and cons of releasing these tracks on DVD against the pros and cons of releasing the same in CD format. There is value in seeing the music being made as it goes but this can detract from the actual product itself; there’s also value in hearing the music and not seeing it being made but then it becomes a very different creature when removed from its environmental context and the instruments that made it. If something sounds as if it had been generated on a PC and then we discover it was created manually on instruments that weren’t intended as instruments but as ordinary cooking objects let’s say, then wouldn’t we judge the musical product differently? We might say that due to the extra effort and the creativity the musician demonstrated, the music becomes more valuable as an entity in itself.

A very soothing and quite lovely listening experience on the whole, and very well packaged and organised in a way that explains the artist’s intentions and why he used everyday non-musical objects as musical instruments, this album offers much that will delight the listener’s senses.

Contact: Omnimemento, Hitoshi Kojo

October 7, 2012

We The People

Métal Urbain

Here’s TSP favourite Franck Vigroux with a new solo record, his first for about two years since the exciting and pessimistic Camera Police, which took a stern unblinking look at modern surveillance methods. We (Nous Autres) (D’AUTRES CORDES RECORDS DAC 2021) is not informed by so specific a theme, but the titles such as ‘Death in Paris’, ‘Ininferna’, ‘Fire’, ‘Crash’ and ‘La Mort’ should alert you to the inflammatory nature of the music here. Many tracks demonstrate Vigroux’s strong capability in terms of manipulating and sculpting electronic noise on a grand scale. There’s a very physical, manual quality to the way he assembles sound, smearing vats of lard with one hand while controlling an enormous derrick with the other, swinging steel-like girders of digital burr and buzz into place. When he’s not hammering another rivet into the cast-iron coffin of 21st-century schizoid man, Vigroux exhales from his poisoned lungs bleak and foggy atmospheres such as ‘Bruisme’ or ‘Ashes II’, which are positively Ballard-esque in their remorseless misery. There’s also the splintered and nightmarish consciousness of ‘Death in Paris’, which in less than two minutes posits a horrifying future where your modernistic all-automated apartment (all its utilities computer-assisted, natch) is rebelling against you at every turn, and gloomy resigned robots wait outside with the express task of hammering your face into the wall with mighty metal mitts. Speaking of Ballard, there is the 14-minute ‘Crash’ which in title at least pays homage to the respected English dystopian, and concludes the album by leading us on a lengthy tour around many aspects of the modern urban hell we are doomed to create for ourselves, and combines most of the techniques used so far into one monstrous track – vicious electronic growls, fragmented inhuman voices, white noise, and depressingly vacant ambient fogs. Even if this cut ends the album on a relatively serene and calming tone of minimal drone, you’ll still be crushed into a compressed block of meat by the claustrophobic weight of Vigroux’s brilliant music. Listen out too for the “abrasive distorted electronic beats” as noted in the press pack, and the contributions of vocalist Annabelle Playe. Vigroux uses a lot of electro-acoustic methodology in all his music, but I sense he works in a very intuitive and painterly style, rather than assembling content laboriously like a formal composer. The results always pay off, and his dark imagination flourishes. Received 18 March 2012.

Proteus Gowanus

The Gowanus Session (PORTER RECORDS PRCD-4068) is a fabulous suite of free-jazz-improvised music created by bassist William Parker, pianist Thollem McDonas, and Nels Cline with his electric guitar. Californian improviser Cline may be familiar to you from records he’s made with Thurston, Zeena Parkins, Chris Corsano, Alan Licht, Henry Kaiser and many other untamed Americans. The Gowanus Session does contain two or three high-energy type cuts, which propel themselves forward admirably without the aid of a drummer, but the trio exercise considerable restraint as they explore puzzling metaphysical mysteries on the quieter, slower tracks. The album is mainly about the combination of unusual and far-out sounds, textures and tones, and it’s loaded with tasty, dense musical fillings. Parker for one serves up a fabulous range of techniques, such that his bass performs as a growling droner or pattering percussive instrument as the situation demands. McDonas supplies rich and baroque chord shapes, melodies and patterns, while Cline is generally let off the leash to go completely bonkers – aggressive feedback blasts, intense high-octane soloing, and amplified curved shapes that fall out of his solid-body guitar like dollops of Baskin-Robbins’ finest. Recorded and mixed by Peter Karl in his studio, and it’s got cover art by Cork Marcheschi, a former member of Fifty Foot Hose. How much more hip could it be? Received 20 March 2012.

Death, Thou Shalt Die

Just noted Steve Roden yesterday and here he be again, this time in a team-up with Steve Peters. Not A Leaf Remains As It Was (12K RECORDINGS 12K1069) is largely a vocal record of extreme delicacy and subtlety, with near-hesitant vocal wisps unfurling their washed-out tones to the accompaniment of gentle ambient music and small percussive sounds. The content for the lyrics was derived, in an extremely circuitous fashion, from a book of Japanese Jisei, a form of poem supposedly written by Japanese monks at the very point of death (though according to some scholars, warriors and poets did it too). Neither creator can read or speak a word of Japanese, but they weren’t about to let a little thing like that stop them making a covenant with this highly charged spiritual content. Sorting out the poems using a classification system that would have delighted both John Cage and Brian Eno (a methodology that involved using index cards), they proceeded to perform the fragmented texts in a remarkably selective fashion, at times settling for the utterance of a mere syllable simply because they liked the taste of it in their intoning mouths. Even English translations of the Japanese words were fair game in this phonetic approach. It’s thus something of a lottery whether any of the original jisei texts get through at all. In this manner, they hoped to avoid all the obvious pitfalls that await any Westerner who attempts to flirt with Oriental cultures, so there is not a trace of Zen Buddhism anywhere in the finished product. Seattle studio whiz Doug Haire has to be given a lot of credit for making the final assemblage and mix from these evanescent sounds, a task which to many would seem on a par with knitting fog. To its credit, this album completely eschews the use of electronic instruments, and any sounds which we may at first mistake for commonplace “ambient” drones are largely produced by the combined voices of Roden and Peters, as they quaver and whisper like avant-garde choirboys in Westminster Abbey. It’s also notable how, despite being so far removed from the original source material by dint of the elaborate near-conceptual cut-up methods used, the record still resonates with a deep spiritual feeling. It also preserves the very starkness of the jisei, a form which ought to “vividly express the sentiments of an individual standing face-to-face with death.” ¹ Received 18 March 2012.

From http://japanesereligions.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/japanese-death-poem-jisei.html, retrieved 07/10/2012. ↩

October 6, 2012

In Six Parts: cool and impenetrable exterior gives way to warmth and appetite for exploration

Tim Feeney and Vic Rawlings, In Six Parts, Sedimental, SEDCD050 (2007)

A continuous improvisation of electronically-enhanced cello and open circuits by Vic Rawlings chopped into six parts, aided by Tim Feeney on percussion and mixers, this recording demands a fair amount of tolerance on the listener’s part for unusual and often very tense, high-pitched sounds, po-faced noises and buzzes, and a cold, abstract atmosphere. I sense an appetite for exploration and a curiosity and wonder at all the strange scrapings, rubbings, rumbles and piercing drones that pass by. As we proceed steadily into the recording, more robust and sometimes quite impudent noises come up to us like inquisitive humpback whales circling a small boat, poking their snouts into the hull and allowing the tourists on board to pat them on their sides. Deep throaty industrial-steel rumbles and creaking groans travel side by side with prolonged siren loops.

The album ebbs and flows from loud, busy sounds to far-off and remote tones that barely register over the horizon and the atmosphere changes with the music. Contrasts of sound and changes in mood as thin pulses pass into full-bodied rumbles and bumps, accompanied by crackles, are key to appreciating some of the middle “pieces”.

The final track is a real surprise as sudden regular rhythm metal scrapes are introduced and start to govern the direction of the piece while a quiet drone putters away and odd little crackles appear here and there. The ambience changes to a benign and peaceful calm. A real warmth begins to glow as the puttering grows louder. Finally the track becomes very active as the machine drone takes on a stuttering life of its own and cold space tones join the metal rhythms and swirls. From time to time the metal churns like a malfunctioning washing machine. Somehow you sense that this part of the album sums up everything that’s come before with sounds we met earlier coming back for an encore and final farewell.

If the CD sleeve hadn’t mentioned that a cello had been used here, we’d be hard put to guess what instruments were being used and we would have assumed that the two musicians were using electronics, found or junk materials and maybe some prepared instruments – but not a cello! – as their source materials. A steady tension is maintained throughout the first five parts before finding its release and resolution in the sixth part. The atmosphere at times seems quite reverential if cool and detached. The album appears stern and impenetrable at first but like many people reveals a glowing warmth beneath the cool exterior.

Contact: Sedimental, Tim Feeney

July 28, 2012

Snowed In

Frame Me Again

Paul Khimasia Morgan is owner of the UK’s Slightly Off Kilter label, and also occasionally makes music and sound-art himself. Empty Frame (ENGRAVED GLASS EG.PCD008) is one where he aurally professes his alignment with Mark Wastell, Rhodri Davies, Burkhard Beins, and others of the “reduced” playing school by making three tracks of extremely quiet and mysterious process-based music, floating in a midway point between improvisation and that unclassifiable activity that involves the manipulation of small objects, and tiny microphones to capture the sounds from those manipulations. On the first track there may be some motorised components involved, but the second cut ‘The prospect of dim sum’ is more of a serene, slightly processed, electronic drone whose origins are untraceable by the ear. The label is largely a showcase for the work of its owner, Jez Riley French, who declares his love for “infinite detail” and sounds that are “often overlooked and hidden”, but he has also released work by Richard Kamerman, Anne Guthrie, John Grzinich, and many others. From 17 January 2012.

One Speak for Both

Speaking of Mr Kamerman, here’s another release on his Copy For Your Records label. Un Lieu Pour Être Deux (CFYR) is credited to Antoine Beuger, who appears to be a Dutch flautist and composer associated with the Wandelweiser Group, an international team of hard-core ascetics who profess a very extreme doctrine of silent music. We’re passingly familiar with the work of one member, the trombonist Radu Malfatti who in turn has had some influence on Mattin, so that gives us some reference point; Malfatti’s testing music is sometimes the equivalent of a death sentence, executed with incredible slowness. The composition (if such it be) by Beuger is realised here by the guitarist Barry Chabala and Ben Owen (of Winds Measure Recordings), who plays synthesizers and contributes field recordings. The 47-minute work seems to have been executed in a single day in New York, and the field recordings are all urban in nature; the distant sound of traffic forms the basis for much of the piece. I think there may be some sort of “imaginary map” or psycho-geographic connotations to decode as well, but the minimal information and cover in this instance is giving nothing away. As a musical performance, it’s quite some way from any familiar sort of improvised music, and the players are both slow, deliberate, and almost cautious in their utterances, drip-feeding small chunks of synth tones and guitar notes that are studiedly inscrutable. I think we have to process this as a conceptual composition, where even the field recordings don’t mean what they appear to mean, and most aesthetic pleasures are being strictly denied to us, or at best being rationed out very carefully. To put it another way, this seems to be a rare use of field recordings as a compositional element, rather than something to be heard in its own right, which is an encouraging development. Strangely compelling to listen to, this perplexing work holds us in a state of considerable tension and concentration for its duration. 150 copies only and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, an apt choice as he represents the Italian wing of this school of emptied-out music. From 16 January 2012.

An Aerie Skit

Two more of the items from the & Records label of Montreal which arrived here 20 January 2012. The record Ave W (&10) is credited to Tiari Kese, who apparently plays all the instruments – keyboards, French horn, electronics and samples, but it’s more likely to be all the work of Michel F Côté, who’s a Canadian electro-acoustic composer. A biography of alleged Bulgarian Tiari Kese can be found online, but with its Stockhausen, Beatles and Debord connections it’s all too good to be true and is probably just another internet hoax. The record does have one glorious track title, ‘Dreams of Spartacus’s Spacecraft’, but I mostly found it a rather turgid listen, directionless and shapeless digital layers of drone that amount to less and less the more they’re piled up. The instrument-playing has been processed and denormalised to an extreme degree, sucking the humanity out of everything until we’re left with echoed and orphaned horn tones floating aimlessly on a sea of samples, light distortion and glitch.

The City Wears a Furry Hat

Even less enjoyable is Solitary Pleasures (&RECORDS &15) by Fortner Anderson. It comprises several short 90-second vocal recits by the poet Anderson while accompanied by electro-acoustic noise played by a non-jazz trio of Alexandre St-Onge, Sam Shalabi, and Michel F. Côté again, this time playing the drums. The release accompanies a book of poems published at the same time. We’ve encountered Fortner Anderson before in TSP15 where we noted the baffling Six Silk Purses, recordings of his spoken word exploits provided to sound artists to add their musical interpretations; in fact the same musicians were on that release too. Fortner’s short couplets are expressed here in diary form, each segment beginning with a calendar date announced in solemn tones, before proceeding with his free-form observations such as “I had forgotten the calculus of transcendence…”, alternating with mini-stories about life in the city and the characters he meets. It all feels oddly old-fashioned, like one of the forgotten Beats. Fortner attempts some jazzy syncopation in his delivery, even as the music drags itself along like a three-legged dog on a hot afternoon. Kenneth Patchen it ain’t.

July 1, 2012

Quiet parts of in-between

Got a fine hour-long performance here by the mighty English duo of Keith Rowe and John Tilbury, two men who can in all fairness be designated as architects supreme of the genre of what we have come to understand as “free improvisation”. Followers of their music will of course know how they have evolved, transformed and refined their playing across the course of many years. AMM were capable of being incredibly noisy in the 1960s. Rowe and Tilbury, either singly or together, have been getting quieter and quieter over the last 10-15 years. One notable instance of their intense simplicity (one might almost say bleakness) was the 2003 double-disc set Duos For Doris, a release that’s come to be regarded by many as something of a benchmark. The recording session coincided with the passing of Tilbury’s mother and the music was suitably darkened, melancholic, and forlorn as an old letter stained with teardrops, or a room with the faded lace curtains drawn. Sadly this present release is another maternal elegy, dedicated to Rowe’s mother Eileen Elizabeth who was born in 1914 and died in 2009. Like Duos For Doris the music on E.E. Tension And Circumstance (POTLATCH P311) is stark, slow, minimal, and evokes a stern and sober mood which commands respect, a funereal atmosphere which is so intense and private that the listener feels almost like an intruder, as though our presence here were quite inappropriate. For the first third at least, the music is that brittle and delicate – a sheet of ice that barely supports us above the cold torrents of grief and sadness that lie beneath. At various points thereafter the musicians do allow a slight increase in warmth, occasion and event – resulting in a few more musical notes per square inch, the droning intensity of a strummed / fanned guitar string, or a second or so of short-wave radio humming. But it’s like the ghosts of AMM past. After we have driven through a tunnel of cavernous half-noise for about ten minutes, we arrive at the skeletal ending, where what little music there is left is gradually picked away from the bones, and there’s an intense bleaching process that carefully removes all presence of sound from the arena. This is done so slowly and deliberately it’s as if in accordance with the precepts of a Catholic rite, or an unnamed theatrical ceremony by Samuel Beckett. A remarkably poignant statement: I would like to think it empowers us all to face death or old age with dignity and courage. It was recorded in late 2010 by Jean-Marc Foussat, himself a fine musician and veteran of recording free improvised music (he taped Company events in the 1980s), and the felt-tip pen drawings are by another Rowe relative, Milford Charters-Rowe who died in 2008. They add colour to the otherwise all-black sleeve.

English field recordist Craig Vear has documented what he knows about the river Esk in Yorkshire on Esk (3LEAVES 3L012). In fact from his notes on the project, it’s clear that there’s very little he doesn’t know about the area, and he has probably tramped his hiking boots over this stretch of terrain more times than I’ve walked around my back garden. Harbours, river to sea, the changing of the seasons, the merging of springs into river, scientific interest sites; all of these feed into his carefully structured composition. He’s confident enough with his material that he presents it all backwards, as it were; the content was recorded in reverse order, and we are travelling backwards in time through the seasons and away from the source of the river when we hear the final playback of the work. Through judicious choice of technology, hydrophones and air microphones, Vear aims to reveal nature’s truth from the perspective of the river itself. He is quite clear he regards his lucid work as a “poem”, and indeed what shines forth is an incredible lyricism about the beauty of nature which never descends into sentimental twaddle. But he’s also bringing knowledge and understanding of the geography and ecology of the area, which deepens and enriches the work. Vear impressed us in 2010 with his Aud Ralph Roas’le record for Gruenrekorder, which made great capital from the vicissitudes of the English weather. Here, he makes an honest and clear statement about nature which is gorgeous to listen to. 100 copies limited edition. Arrived here 16 January 2012 from Budapest, courtesy of Akos Garai and his label.

Received a bundle of seven CDRs from Bryan Day and his Eh? label in Decorah, Iowa – they arrived 6th January 2012. Here are three of them. The Brooklyn trio Hag are doing interesting things with just a trumpet, bass and a single snare drum on Moist Areas (EH?56), as it were reducing a traditional jazz trio set-up to an atonal sound-production unit concerned with issuing forth rumbles, groans and agitated utterances from the lower registers. The snare drum in particular is most effective – it’s rarely struck, often rolled and rubbed to make it sigh like the stomach of a wounded bear. The freely improvising threesome of Brad Henkel, Sean Ali and David Grollman tend to eschew minimalism, and seem at their happiest when all three are letting rip at once with grumbly snorts and errant percussive bleats. The eight-minute ‘Moist Again’ is a real corker on that account, but so is the title track; it’s like hearing your favourite Pharoah Sanders records played at half-speed on a Dansette, while someone is also sawing the Dansette in half with a blunt instrument.

Chefkirk is the American Roger H Smith, whose insane electronic music I first heard in 2003 with the release of 38-40cm. On We Must Leave The Warren (EH?57) he’s working mostly with a no-input mixing board and a sampler on these home-produced recordings from 2010 and 2011. He seems mainly concerned with the generation of deep electronic sighs and yawns, which fill the space of the warehouse where he’s currently building his 30-foot tall mechanical man. You may find yourself growing impatient at the apparent lack of development in these minimal sub-bass droners, but the single-mindedness of his mental trajectory has a certain grim appeal. I seem to recall his music being somewhat more agitated than the languid and unhurried tones on offer here, where each track takes about 11 or 12 minutes to traverse the metal-tiled floor rolling along on small mechanised wheels like a tiny vacuum cleaner. But check out Chefkirk’s back catalogue and I’m sure you’ll find instances of livelier digital mayhem; he’s a prolific guy.

Strongly Imploded are a loopy Italian quartet of players noted also here. On Twilight of Broken Machines (EH?58) they summon up an unholy cacophony with their unique live improv setup of guitars, saxophones, tape recorder, drums, and feedback. There’s a no-input setup to generate feedback, and a more complex feedback system which uses loudspeakers and drums in some ungodly fashion, as if devised by the bastard child of Max Neuhaus. Even Mario Gabola’s saxophone is made to feedback in some way. If this description gets your mouth watering in anticipation of an album full of loud dissonant squeals, you might be surprised at the degree to which these four young men manage to harness and control all the rampant feedback that was slithering around their basement performance space in Naples in 2010 and 2011. If they could pour it into jars and export it as a form of pickled jam, I’m sure they would. Midway between extreme free improv and harsh noise their music sits more or less, as fidgety as a schoolboy sent to a year below his normal grade, and bearing all the attendant resentment against authority you might expect from that scenario. Strongly Imploded flail and crash with frustration and raw anger as they create their percussion-heavy outbursts, throwing a controlled tantrum and wallowing in their own bitter puke. I always enjoy their surreal and contrived track titles, but even these seem to be dripping with attitude and sarcasm. How grotesque we have become, indeed.

June 30, 2012

What wind walks up above?

A Fold in the Fabric

Gill Arno has rescued a document of a performance piece from 2006, where he perfomed under his mpld name which is used for his amplied slide projection work. At that time it existed as a cassette edition of 10 copies, and now here is One More Episode In Between Recollection And Amnesia (UNFRAMED RECORDINGS U003) repressed as a CDR. When originally performed at a sound-art venue in New York’s Chelsea district, the piece was meant to accompany a series of art booklets, and the core performances are studio-based compositions where Gill is manipulating the sound of slide projectors. The tiny sound events which interest Gill include the whirring of the projector fan, the feedback that resulted from him clipping a small microphone to the device, or just the general “clunky dynamics” that came out of the performance. But what we hear on the CDR is even more rarefied, as the composer reworks the material, seeks to isolate sounds, and produce as much abstraction as possible. Tracks two through four are impressive enough achievements in this area, the piece ‘Stereoscopic Phase Adjustment’ in particular giving us a close-up aural picture of a fan which is about as powerful as a helicopter blade. A midget helicopter perhaps, one being flown by plasticine airmen wearing cellophane jump-suits. ‘Four flashbacks’ however comes in at twenty minutes, and is practically delirious in the way it piles up the treated and abstracted sound-events into a thick soup of electro-acoustic fog. Given the suggestion of “flashback” one is tempted to read this long piece as a sort of twisted memory or flu-ridden impression of the preceding pieces. At all events it’s a sufficiently wonderful set of aerated drones, lite-industrial grindage, and a concentrated effort to produce strangely compelling music out of non-musical sources. The release is topped and tailed with non-projector pieces, starting with 30 seconds of ‘Amnesia’ – a short metallic scrape episode which could almost pass for a prepared piano – and ending with ‘Afterthought: 061211′ which is exclusively made up of field recordings. Lastly we have the enigmatic cover image, which plays with layers of dust-coating on a slide and different focal views of the same image. This excellent quiet & minimal concept-work is another item from the bundle which Gill sent to us in December 2011.

Glimmer in the Zimmer

Jacaszek‘s Glimmer (GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL GI-147) is slowly growing on me, and the surface effects that are most pleasing include his heavy use of distortion and simple repeated loops of musical notes. The source music which he works with was played using real instruments by three guest musicians, using harpsichord, bass clarinet, acoustic guitars and metallophon, recordings of which are collaged together with electronic music by the Polish musician Michal Jacaszek. He’s attempting to create a potent bittersweet taste in the listener’s mind, as melody and abstraction writhe back and forth over an uncertain ground, all of this struggle taking place behind what he aptly describes as “a curtain of dirt and fuzzes”. My initial impression was to mistake this CD for another slice of ordinary ambient laptop-drivel, but on the contrary this is a well-crafted piece of art, a fine collision of organic musicianship with thoughtful tape editing and studio skill. In places, it’s even quite affecting and moving. Was released early December 2011.

Prove it, just the facts

On (Fake) The Facts (EDITIONS MEGO DEMEGO 023), we also hear a collision between musical instruments and electronics, but this one takes place in an improvised real-time live arena. The players are dieb13, Mats Gustafsson, and Martin Siewert, and they did it in two locations (one live, one studio) in Vienna in Spring 2011. Swedish Saxman Gustafsson (who uses soprano and tenor saxes here) has been known to rasp out many crazy free-blowing sounds in his time, but on the 15-minute opener ‘Fact’ he resembles a trapped beast howling in melancholic pain through a blocked snout. Alongside him there is a lurching rhythm of fizzing manic energy which may originate either from dieb13′s jet-propelled turntables or Siewert’s unhinged guitar, but with all the free-flying electronic mayhem let loose in those four chocolate-lined walls on those fateful days, who can say for sure. Not since Evan Parker collaborated with noisester John Wiese have we heard such a potent blend of brass-lined puffing with inchoate crackling bursts.

The next cut ‘Rat’ is equally claustrophobic, and as the the three madmen tell the tale of this rat, they seem intent on clogging up the air with theremin-like squeals in order to emulate the voice of that rat. Said rat is poised in a perilous position, hemmed in on all sides by menacing saxophone moan-drones and ominous guitar rumblings of a dangerous variety. The atmosphere is as charged as a laboratory where cruel scientists perform needless experiments on rats. The difference is that now we are that rat, and death by dissection or electrocution is only a heartbeat away.

The flipside of this remarkably intense LP is the side-long ‘Zoom’, one-and-twenty minutes of steadily increasing doom noise where the three unhinged players do not relax the steam-pressure for the first half, blasting out with solid and heavy thunderbolts as they may. Such is the general blend of tones in this brick-like melange that it’s virtually impossible to discern one instrument from another, and the three European minotaurs merge into a single two-horned beast. For the latter half, they open the steam vents and finally give a man enough space to breath, and the remainder of the performance resembles a trip to Company Week in 1988 seen through the distorting lens of a dozen filter-pedals, before descending into a strange alien place where alien electronic chatter is accompanied by mellow jazz guitar strums and distant orchestral sweeps from a stuck record on a turntable. All rulebooks thrown into the shredder, this is one of those rare collaborative efforts where the fur really flew and everything caught fire, and it’s likely to produce similar sensations in your own personal wardrobe. Released as a vinyl LP in November 2011.

May 13, 2012

You’ve got some Nervatura

We received a generous bundle of recent releases from Gill Arnò in Brooklyn which arrived 20 December 2011, representing output from his Unframed Recordings label. Among the audio items is Nervatura / U (UNFRAMED UF/U006) released by Arnò himself, and it comprises three pieces he realised at Campo in Chicago, wrapped in a sizeable artwork which unfolds concertina-like into a frieze of thermal-sensitive images. This CDR is a second edition of an item previously released (just ten copies) as Unframed 10.e006 in 2008. The first short 6 minute piece contains identifiable field recordings rescued from the street, including what may be trolley cars or trains passing by, but somehow Arnò has managed to capture a snapshot of urban life that pushes the inhabitants right to the background, even pushing them out of the picture altogether where possible. This is followed by 11 minutes of very abstract wind-like droning sound, but if we can hear past the semi-opaque layers then the street sounds begin to reaffirm themselves, perhaps the warm chatter and clink of a crowded restaurant. It’s like riding on a subway train and being able to simultaneously see all levels of a transparent shopping mall rising above us. The droning rumble drops away and the picture of the muted crowd gradually comes into focus, soon to be overlaid with a slightly higher sound which may have been drawn from another level of the imaginary city palace, on another day completely. The long list of map grid references which follow the titles of the work start to make sense, and Arno’s compositional method is to overlay and contrast the varying timbres picked up by his sensitive microphones from these different locales. Part three stretches out for a good 19 minutes, and feels like it’s emphasising the sound of machinery and metal, perhaps the whirring of an active elevator shaft, or the collection of trashcans taking place some 500 feet away from the recording site, or a very dormant and sluggish railway yard slowly coming to life. Gill Arnò’s achievement here has been to assemble his sources into subtle yet meaningful arrangements, which communicate strong impressions of space and shape without too much heavy editorialising. There have been many attempts by field recordists to reveal the hidden face of the city, but this one succeeds without any pretensions towards mysticism or psycho-geography, and is an honest and convincing piece of work. As to the artist’s own statement of intent and methodology used, see the image from Gill’s letter.

Francisco López is one who has famously used processed field recordings of urban areas and arrived at results that are totally different to Gill Arno’s impressionistic pictures. On Untitled #275 (UNSOUNDS 26U), which we received in November 2011, López turns his craft in a more musical direction, applying a live multi-channel recording system to the prepared piano of Reinier van Houdt. On the first movement, Houdt’s piano is to the fore, and that instrument pounds out a series of quite alarming percussive minimal strokes that sonically sit halfway between machine-gun fire and the keys of an old-fashioned typewriter, said device being operated by a loopy Dadaist poet composing a vitriolic message against the petit bourgeoisie. About mid-point the piece enters a mood of dangerous seething calm, before gradually building up the tension again with carefully-orchestrated keystrokes, each one a bundle of constrained emotion – isolated notes, dissonant chord combinations, and a relentless metronome-like patter characterise this section. It’s almost a relief when this neurotic torture ends, and the remaining half of this 22-minute opus drifts away on a sea of near-silence and suffused slow chords that resemble the ghost of Satie paying a fleeting visit to the salon. If there is indeed a mechanism involved somewhere in this prepared piano set-up, it’s as though the clockwork device had run out of steam halfway through, leaving us to confront a void.

This torment is positively benign compared to the horrors of ‘Movement 2′, where López takes the above recording away in a tumbrel cart and subjects it to what he describes as “evolutionary studio treatments”. There’s a euphemism if ever there was. It’s more like a radical reconstruction of sound, occupying a nether world between composition, field recording and electro-acoustic music, and in this rather nightmarish zone each percussive bleat of the prepared piano is transformed into the clankings and groanings of an infernal machine. Even the smallest of Van Houdt’s keyboard-playing gestures has been fiendishly detoured, such that he is now pressing the buttons that operate a factory of doom, a winch of death, or a murderous metal robot. Thankfully, the violent and dramatic opening does subside eventually, and the piece mutates into a bleak, desolate world of abstract cloudery where the horizon starts to fade away and we lose our footing. Occasional forlorn piano notes, by now heavily disguised and muffled, attempt to peek through the canopy of gloom and provide some warmth, but it’s a desperate, futile action. There’s a strange beauty to be found in contemplating this washed-out environment, an activity with which we can occupy ourselves before the mechanical watch-grinding effect start to reassert itself after 20 minutes. Thereafter, it’s merely like being mashed in the gears of a gigantic clock for ten minutes, praying that we can somehow avoid being clubbed into a pulp by the chiming hammers when midnight finally strikes. López has indeed created a very “immersive” record here, it just depends if you can face being immersed in its bittersweet combinations of machine-like violence and baleful gloom.

March 15, 2012

Monadology

Eyvind Kang has realised an intense LP of enchanting and stark acoustic music with Visible Breath (IDEOLOGIC ORGAN SOMA004), clearly paying audible homage to the “spectral” composers of the 20th century, but also other important moderns such as Morton Feldman and Stockhausen. While he composed and played his viola, Kang was joined by a dream team of players in his ensemble – Julian Prester, the trombonist from the Arkestra; the New York composer Miguel Frasconi; the Vietnamese trumpeter Cuong Vu; and many others, including Timb Harris, Tania Karr, Stuart Dempster and Susan Alcorn. The vocalist Jessika Kenney, who accompanied him on the astonishing Aestuarium (reissued by this label), is also a contributor. All the compositions feel quite open-ended in their approach, perhaps semi-aleatory, allowing for some improvisation; the title track is the one that most resembles Aus Den Sieben Tagen, albeit a much less flabby and self-indulgent version of that windy composition. And I cannot help but think of Morton Feldman’s work for small ensembles when I hear the exquisite plaintive notes of ‘Thick Tarragon’. All the musicians explore extreme sound ranges, including the lower depths of the piano register and the insistent high-pitched scrapes and plucks from the string sections. This is not an empty pastiche of former modernist glories, but a heartfelt and vibrant piece of living work, somehow reaching for ideals more perfect than humans can possibly achieve.

Some quite good field recordings by Emmanuel Mieville are presented on Four Wanderings in Tropical Lands (BASKARU KARU19). The lands in question are Costa Rica, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, and Mieville brings back the usual aural reports – insects, running water, traffic, dogs barking, birds, wildlife, and so forth. On the second track he plays some wood and metal sculptures. Parisian Mieville has impeccable credentials (studied at GRM, radiophonic productions, plays ethnic instruments) and his recordings are vivid and strong, while his editing strategy aims to subtly point out the contrasts between nature in the raw and the interventions of mankind. These vignettes may proceed at quite an unhurried pace, but there’s a lot of detail to be retrieved from Mieville’s wide-angle sweeps.

Ben Owen is the American sound artist who kindly sends us releases from his ultra-minimal label windsmeasure recordings, items which are often so inaudible that the sounds on the disc are barely there at all – quite often I think I just dreamed that I ever heard them. On Birds and Water, 1 (NOTICE RECORDINGS NTR018) Owen is somehow finding ways to go beyond ultra-minimal, with a cassette release that works very hard to push the envelope in terms of long duration, uneventfulness, refusal to admit variation, and the extensive use of low-key and indiscernible sounds that make about as much impression on the ear as a small feather denting the side of a granite mountain. Owen deploys his work at considerable risk of boring the audience, pushing the pain threshold beyond the impossibly dull and taking us into a new realm of dullness where deep aesthetic appreciation starts to take over ¹. These pieces were created in 2010 at a place in New York called the Experimental Television Center, and are the result of processing audio and image information in exciting ways which I don’t fully understand, but the process seems to have involved vintage 1970s video systems (all analogue, of course) in combination with op amp generators. There have been many artists who attempt to probe the potential of abstract audio effects generated by video equipment, but often they end up wallowing in obnoxious system noise. Owen’s subtlety, control and mental rigour result in these very gentle and minimalistic effects, far more rewarding to my mind. On side one, this tape does everything it can to drill down into the very grain of microscopic sub-atomic sound, creating some mighty perplexing and oddly compelling effects. On side two, there is mostly a mechanical whine noise which will test your endurance to new limits. You might think I’m describing an insufferable way to pass 80 minutes, but Owen’s approach to this material is disciplined and thoughtful, and there is enough of an underlying structural pattern going on here to guide you safely through. You will come to love these inexplicable tiny chirring and chirping sounds and greet them as a Chinese mountebank greets a swarm of cicadas in the dawn light. Limited edition cassette of 200 copies with screenprinted covers and video still inserts on printed card,

The American sound artist Yann Novak mainly works with visuals and installations, so in one sense the Presence (HIBERNATE HB35) CD could be read as the soundtrack to such an installation, or another rendering of the same materials used in that situation; indeed it began life as an event performed at the Torrance Art Museum in 2010. His project intrigues me for its determination to transform the digital materials he collects and hoards, and this doesn’t just mean audio files – he reworks image files too, so maybe it’s possible that buried deep in his work we’re “hearing” the sound of a Tagged Image File. The images and sounds have personal meanings to him, and I’d like to think he curates his hard drive with the same diligence as Joseph Cornell used to tend to his boxes of objects and the magazines which he reworked into collages. Of course, by the time Novak has finished processing his materials, the results just sound like a nebulous veil of droney ambient minimalism with no tune, content, or meaning – at least that’s my impression of this CD. And yet a force still draws in the listener, as though the faintest possible “ghost” of the original digital files were still embedded in the smallest shard of sound. That, at any rate, is the intention, to pass on tangible sensations the audience can relate to. Sources in this instance were originally captured using a cell phone rather than a conventional microphone, and there was also a notion connected with ‘altered perceptions’ informing the work. Imagine the CD cover to this one blown up to 20-foot high projected images and allowed to meander slowly across the white walls of your local art gallery, and you’d soon be having some pretty ‘altered perceptions’ of your own. This may not be a record that you’ll find requires daily listening, but I do like the printed statement that it’s “intended to be listened to at a relatively low volume”. It makes a change from the usual “Play Loud” nonsense.

I must confess this phrase is lifted almost word for word from what I remember reading of an art critic’s assessment of some drypoint etchings by Sol Lewitt. ↩

January 14, 2012

Young Theorists

People think I’m insane

More from the Pilgrim Talk label sent to us in late October. The Pilgrims there just keep on coming up with surprises, just after one was tempted to tag them as a strictly “art” label. Back Magic are a duo of young men from Illinois including the prolific Nick Hoffmann who I think runs this label. Their Dream Lover (PILGRIM TALK PT13) is an engaging tape of rather spooky and skeletal garage-punk toons, played with just a guitar, drumkit, and a wailing voice. It’s futuristic rockabilly for Halloween midnight capers. The vocalist is capable of creating some deliciously odd effects with little more than a cheap echo unit to propel him into the supernatural zone; at times he resembles a mad monk, a muffled choirboy from the nether regions, or the writer of some twisted liturgy. This adds a whiff of Black Metal undertones to what is described by the label as “trance punk” rock. Hair EXP and Terror Trans are brothers, and to keep things in the family they recorded this lo-fi miniature epic on their grandfather’s tape machine. Let’s hope it was an old Webcor or Revox ¹, which might account for the faintly disembodied tone of the tape, although a lot of the atmosphere is down to the skilful playing on offer. The guitarist can eke out a forlorn and stripped-down melody with the sort of shrill plangency that makes you want to cry and shudder at the same time. Distorted heavy metal this ain’t, although they do assay a version of The Sabs’ ‘Paranoid’ on the B side, where the riffing is hollowed out into a shell of its former self and the vocals are, frankly, quite freakish. A real grower…100 copies.

To die by your side

From same label, a shorter release (a C10 to be precise) from sound artist Richard Kamerman, whose lament for the day is I’m Sick Of Coming Up With Titles (PT17). This fellow has done some punishingly intense work for his own Copy For Your Records label and this little bruiser doesn’t disappoint, managing to induce near-physical sensations in the listener with its powerful hurlements – even if it does start out small and mysterious, the music soon expands into a grand abstract statement. We learn from the press notes that he likes small sounds, accidents in performance, collecting trash to make sounds, and that he plays his boardful of “repurposed electronics” much like a percussionist, hammering on old printed circuits like a demented fiddler crab or moving mechanical parts around in his claws. The B-side contains an unaccompanied version of a Smiths song performed against electronic wheezes and burrs; the washed-out timbre of the wraithlike voice makes it appear to be beaming in from the other side of the grave. 50 copies of this curio.

Noise Pollution

Speaking of that label, they kindly sent us a copy of Joe Panzner‘s Clearing, Polluted (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYR006) in October 2011. Not exactly a prolific creator (which is always a good sign), Panzner hasn’t done much sonically since 2006, although he used to be one half of Scenic Railroads with Mike Shiflet. This new release of his is severe and difficult in the extreme; not especially loud in volume, but the crunched-up digital textures are distinctly unpleasant, and feel like they’re being extracted from the innards of a computer by means of a highly painful procedure. If your laptop had varicose veins, this is what it would sound like as a surgeon slowly pulled them out with enormous tweezers. No less unsettling are the abrupt and sudden shifts in tone and timbre, which blow up in your face like so much hot gelignite just as you’re bending into the speaker because you think nothing much is happening. All the more alarming because Panzner’s plans are quite opaque and nothing is announced or mapped out in his sealed-off compositional scheme. Most of the murderous train-wreck catastrophe music is on the middle track, sandwiched either side with long stretches of ambiguous gloomy poison gas and venomous barbed thorns; a bit like No Man’s Land in Passchendaele, in fine. A tough listen, but I like the composer’s refusal to explain very much and the stern-faced impassive manner in which he presents his work.

Can white men play the blueprints?

Back to Pilgrim Talk now for the CDR by the improviser Graham Stephenson. Defiantly Not (PT 15) is a collection of trumpet solos boosted with the help of a microphone and some editing software. It’s another example of the improvisational school of “air moving through a brass instrument” which has been spreading across Europe for many years thanks to the efforts of Axel Dörner, Robin Hayward and Stéphane Rives, and I also think a case could be made for the inclusion of American Greg Kelley within that cabal. I have exhibited some impatience with the genre over time, but I like what Stephenson is doing here. He’s not afraid to vary his tone, there is a lot more incident and playing going on than we find with some “purist” aesthetes of reduced improv, and he also plays actual notes once in a while, rather than just inviting us to admire his rigid breath control and his enormous lung capacity. A quick survey of the accumulated effects on offer yields the following laundry list: wind tunnels, high-pitched squealing, rattling and rumbling, collision of metal with mike stand, whistling gas jets, clucks and gulps, semi-mechanical clunks as valves are depressed and released, and strange monotonal whines. But a mere process-art album it is not; what abides is Stephenson’s compelling sense of determination and concentration, which somehow keeps me listening, regardless of how slowly the story unfolds. I suppose this is what is meant by his “steadfast logic” as praised in the press notes. We are told we’re hearing a “blueprint of the inner workings of his instrument”, which is true, but I sense we’re also learning about the musician’s very inner being. His gatefold cover looks like frames from an avant-garde cut-up movie, and so does his webpage above.

It turned out to be a cassette recorder but it is about 30 years old and functions oddly. ↩