Tagged: sound art

Two Weeks in Alert Bay: spotlight on a traditional First Nations society in western Canada


Hein Schoer, The Sounding Museum: Two Weeks in Alert Bay, Germany, Gruenrekorder, CD Gruen 082 (2010)

I never know quite what to make of sound recordings like this one as I always feel I’m only getting half of what soundscape musician Hein Schoer experienced: something like this document needs to be visual and to be seen along with the soundtrack. For me, this project would have been much better done as a combined DVD / CD package so that I can actually see the Alert Bay, Vancouver Island, environment where Schoer did his research. Looking at the photographs of the bay, the forests that border it and the Rocky Mountains in the distant background, shrouded in white cloud, I am sure this landscape and the misty weather are as much a part of the culture of the ‘Namgis Nation that inhabits this part of western Canada; one imagines that the weather here is always cool, the air always feeling slightly damp or humid and that when one looks across the bay and sees the silhouettes of dark fir forests and the mountains rising behind them, their edges always look slightly soft and blurred and the overall mood of the area seems meditative and restful.

The tracks on offer here consist of field recordings of the natural sounds and wildlife of the Alert Bay area and of the activities of the ‘Namgis people. There are recordings of people performing traditional rituals and playing music, of children learning their culture’s traditional songs and their native language, and of men making traditional tools and handicrafts while the radio plays in the background. All very well but the listener has to take these recordings at face value and assume they are what Schoer says they are. There’s nothing or no-one on these recordings who gives a commentary on what parts of the soundtrack are about whatever the people are doing.

If only the CD had fallen into my lap and not any other material, and I were to play the CD as is, I’d have no idea from hearing the CD which part of North America and which First Nations group were being featured. There is not even a map of the area of Vancouver Island where Alert Bay is located and no information in the package about the culture of the ‘Namgis people and how it relates to other traditional cultures of western British Columbia. Having some knowledge of traditional culture areas of North America, I realise the ‘Namgis people would have been part of the Northwest Coast cultural complex in which salmon is one of the staple foods, a sedentary life-style is normal with people living in permanent wooden houses and organised in clans, and social hierarchies dominated society with the custom of potlatches to underline social status. In the area where the ‘Namgis people live, whaling would have been part of the culture. Most people outside Canada are not so lucky to know all this and would feel quite distant from the soundtrack here, not having any idea of what it all relates to.

The music is quite powerful and very rhythmic: most of the singing is done by men although there are a few occasions where children sing similar-sounding songs. There is no singing done by women but that may be because Schoer, not familiar with the culture of the ‘Namgis, did not know there might be some aspects of the culture out of bounds to him as a male; nearly every culture has some knowledge and traditions that are particular only to men, and other knowledge and traditions that only women are allowed to know. Certainly there is some solo singing here that imitates the sounds of animals and it could be this is shamanic singing, the singer attempting to contact an animal spirit for help or to gain power over some part of nature. Natural sounds include the sounds of ocean waves, trickling water and a waterfall, and there are also sounds of birds, bears, seals perhaps and howling wolves.

The CD booklet includes photographs of nature, illustrations of everyday life for the ‘Namgis people and a retelling of a creation myth in which a trickster figure called Raven steals the sun. The myth may have some meaning for Schoer who like Raven “steals” a little bit of an unknown culture to illuminate a path for listeners who may be inspired to investigate further the culture of the ‘Namgis and other First Nations people in western Canada.

Contact: Gruenrekorder

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Hive: a peek into five droning sound universes


Hive, self-titled, Debacle Records, CD DBL059 (2011)

I’m guessing this album is the first for the duo of Chris Phillips and Jeremy Long and the name is appropriate for the music and the album: the emphasis is on droning guitar dirges. Phillips has previously released electronic droning and soundscape music under the name Squim and has scored movies and video games; he’s also an artist and created the artwork covering the front, back and inside of the debut album cover.

The music on offer is calm and methodical, often quite stately and promising to do something spectacular but withholding that surprise. The musicians concentrate on creating and developing texture which can be very rich and quite atmospheric. There is always a strong sense of anticipation, of a constant build-up to something, but that something fades away when you most want it to happen … very frustrating but intriguing all the same! The major highlight of the album is track III which is a grand piece on the Maryanne Amacher scale: rich and lush, epic and majestic, annoyingly insistent and hard on the ears.

The duo may not be keen on fireworks and insist that you be patient and adopt a meditative attitude. There is enough though in the mood of tracks like III and IV to make you pause, drop whatever you’re doing and let yourself be spellbound. Track V is a powerful beast that must be heard really loudly – at Sunn0))) level is the recommended level (that would mean 120 decibels, I think) – to be fully appreciated for its distortion, needling textures and pulsing quality.

The only criticism I have is that all tracks are much too short for the music in each and every one of them to fully develop and turn into a real bristling sound sculpture universe. I feel as though I’ve just had peeks through short and narrow wormholes into five different planes of sonic existence and Hive are withholding a great deal. Aw, come on, please let us hear some more!

Contact: Debacle Records, Jeremy C Long, Chris Phillips / Squim

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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.

  1. 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. ↩
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Clap hands, here comes Charlie


The New York label XI Records has compiled TOOT! (XI 135) a three CD set of the music and sound art of Charlie Morrow, an American sound artist and composer who has been making music for about 50 years and yet does not appear to be that well-documented in terms of tangible releases. When you see the picture of his benign visage grinning from beneath a bowler hat, a piece of headgear which is one of the man’s “trademarks”, you might make mental associations with the late work of Rene Magritte, and might be forgiven for thinking we’re dealing with an eccentric/maverick along the lines of Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley or La Monte Young, all of whom have also displayed a penchant for colourful and unusual hats. However, where those three can be characterised within the “minimalism” school, Morrow is far harder to pigeon-hole. The first disc alone has a near-bewildering mix of sounds – field recordings, conch-blowing, ensemble compositions for horns or strings played quite slowly, a bittersweet tape-collage using the voice of Marilyn Monroe, and an overdub piece of chanting music sung by Morrow himself and resembling the voices of two undiscovered Inuits discovering throat-music through the aid of a shamanic medium.

All of these things are pointers to Morrow’s wide ranging interests, which include birdsong, windsounds, music derived from breathing and the rhythm of the human heartbeat, and a playful feel for “lowbrow” sources which almost aligns him with Morton Feldman and his love of a good greasy cheeseburger. Morrow’s a composer too. His ‘Central Park’ compositions are not simply made by sticking microphones in the trees of Manhattan’s green lung, but through the painstaking reconstruction and arrangement of scientific recordings retrieved from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. His long-form ‘Wave Music’ works, two of which are represented here on Disc Two, deploy large ensembles of musicians in certain locations and are conducted in such ways to follow, very slowly, the passage of time-based events; one of them attempts to mimic the “transition of sunset colours”, as if the composer has found a way to bypass conventional scoring and used the energy of nature alone to fuel his music. There’s also ‘TOOT N BLINK Chicago’, a beautifully rugged piece which co-ordinates a fleet of sea vessels alongside Chicago’s Navy’s Pier, where the captains sounded their horns and flashed their lights in accordance with voice commands relayed by radio. This is just to pass on a flavour of the collection, but I hope it conveys something of Morrow’s scope and breadth, which is impressive and grand, and seems concerned with shaping the totality of a musical environment. There’s not a piece of music on here which seems remotely capable of being contained by the restrictions of Carnegie Hall, and indeed the confines of a concert hall are clearly quite inappropriate in this context.

There’s plenty more music, and factual information to absorb; Morrow was a member of Tone Roads in the 1960s, where he played trumpet alongside Philip Corner, James Tenney and Malcolm Goldstein, which may help you situate him a little more (for me, Corner and Goldstein are two of my personal favourite NY composer-performers, and we’ve the Alga Marghen, New World Records and XI Records labels to thank for exposing more of their fascinating music). Morrow was also manager of something called the New Wilderness Foundation through the 1970s and 1980s, which though it sounds like it ought to have been a nature reserve programme, was in fact devoted to making cross-cultural artistic events of all sorts come to fruition. Plus he’s invented a stadium-scale playback PA system, and trademarked it as the Morrow Cube. Aye, American composers often think big and they do an awful lot of amazing things; I haven’t yet encountered the name of Richard Lerman in the pages of the booklet here, but I expect to do so soon when I’ve finished perusing the mini-essays by Julian Cowley, Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Freedman and Michael J. Schumacher. To us repressed English types, these notes are almost embarrassingly effusive in their generous praise for Morrow’s achievements, extolling the mystical dimension to breaking point, and you may come away with the feeling you’re about the hear the combined forces of Buddha, Descartes and Rachel Carson rolled into a single charismatic figure. Instead what emerges is quiet, modest, natural, slow, organic and near-magical music, benevolent and life-affirming.

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Random Errata


Warm Digits are a whole-hearted “retro” duo from Newcastle, producing a lively and hugely entertaining form of melodic Krautrocky-beat combo music on Keep Warm…With The Warm Digits (DISTRACTION RECORDS DIST22CD), and as their name suggests they reintroduce heat, passion and friendliness to the area of digital music, which may be in danger of growing too cold, clinical and sterile. Steve Jefferis plays guitar and synths, Andrew Hodson drums, and both are involved in the production of visual and video materials which I assume accompany their live sets. A couple of the jokey titles, such as ‘Trans-Pennine Express’ and ‘Here Come The Warm Digits’ admit to everything up front, pre-empting everything the critics are going to throw at them in terms of Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Eno references, but a “wacky” band they ain’t, and they do a much more convincing and danceable version of the electro-beat thing than the dreadful Add N To X, if anyone is unfortunate enough to remember them. A fab release.

For a more subdued take on electronica, there’s the new release You Can’t Get There From Here (MONOTYPE REC MONO038) from Scanner and David Rothenberg, where the laptop music of Robin Rimbaud meets the clarinet playing of Rothenberg; the album is a species of spindly lounge-jazz riffs, accompanied by filtered and pulsating loops in a vaguely art-gallery ambient setting. The combinations of sounds are pleasing, but I feel the performances don’t really develop, and each piece stands in one place like a sort of hologram artwork, sparkling briefly and saying little. I want to persevere with this one however, as David Rothenberg seems a very genuine and inventive polymath sort of chap, a nature-studying academic who integrates his ideas about birdsong with his clarinet playing.

From Holland, a tremendous team-up of two maverick eccentrics Adam Bohman and If, Bwana. Long have I admired their many manifestations and issuances, but I didn’t appreciate they were old friends since the 1980s. This session from the summer of 2010 sees them producing many a churning morass of grinding, scraping and vaguely spring-loaded tootling grumblement and moanage, presumably generated from multiple desktops and tables loaded with an array of non-musical devices; the very title, Adhesives And Grout (BROMBRON 18), shows they’re able to poke fun at their DIY and garden-shed approach to improvisation for this release. They also perform a few tracks of concrete poetry, in some cases apparently just plucking found words and phrases out of the local shopping paper and transforming their utter banality into sheer magic, by overlapping the dialogue and through the combination of their distinctive speaking voices: Bohman as plummy as a Christmas duff packed with raisins, Al Margolis withering everything in sight with his acidic sardonic whine. Lads, Bob Cobbing is smiling down at you from his corner of Heaven where he’s just opened an infinite version of Better Books. And just look at those track titles – ‘Rhubarbian Ruminations’ is the most perfect two-word description of the whole album, redolent of a secret allotment or orchard where the very fruits and vegetables are conducive to metaphysical contemplation. And who wouldn’t want to be a member of their ‘Pudding Club’? Let’s hope this is the start of a new musical genre…Groutrock!

Labyrinthe (BRUIT CLAIR BC05) appears to be the debut release from Emmanuelle Gibello, a Sorbonne graduate from Paris who has done some live performances with electronics and multi-media settings. Her approach to the field recording genre is highly imaginative and these four cuts (two of them quite lengthy and indeed very labyrinthine) will reward many further spins. Subtle and underplayed, her sources are I suspect not intended to be decoded or identified, so much as used as triggers for personal resonances and internal fictions; she admits to being inspired by literature and science fiction. It’s about time someone started putting field recordings to some compositional use, instead of inviting us to simply contemplate the immersive joys of nature for a change. Extremely “sensible”, in the French meaning of that word, these compositions have many hidden corner and still waters running deep…if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors. Check back in a few years and we may be looking at a worthy successor to Lionel Marchetti. And if you buy one of these 300 numbered copies, you’ll have her autograph in your collection. Roll them bones!

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Lost Corners and Brutal Pulses


Enigma of the day is Noise Without Tears (PILGRIM TALK PT12), a recording of extremely minimal dimensions recorded at Loop Line in Tokyo. Japanese players Utah Kawasaki and Takahiro Kawaguchi joined up with American Nick Hoffman for this 2010 event. What ends up on the recording is mostly not much more than an ambient room recording, with occasional crackle from an amplifier, some background voices, and other uneventful events. The party livens up for the second half of the first track, where the trio manage to create a bewildering and slightly chaotic sprawl of tiny electronic noises and hums, much like generators and small electrical household gadgets going wrong. We have heard similar recordings made at Loop Line from a few years ago on the Presquile Records label, but different creators were involved, and just as I thought I was getting a handle on the mysterious movements behind these sub-atomic antics, along comes this puzzling release to add further leaves of invisible papyrus to the archaeological mystery. The original issue came with a see-through lathe cut record which I think has now sold out. The CD artworks (drawings somewhat reminiscent of Denis Tyfus), and the title might of course lead you to expect something quite different from this record, but one prevalent image I find is a scrawled pentagram and the title is a reference to Aleister Crowley’s Magick Without Tears; this and the image of the long-haired creatures with bulging cones for eyes suggest the intention here is ceremonial, trance-like, mesmerising.

Another strange one from Nick Hoffman is Lost Corner (ILSE 4) where he collaborates with Aaron Zarzutzki for a piece which was performed live on the air for a Chicago radio station in 2010. Be prepared for one hour of baffling sound art, full of percussive scrapes and bumps, where the “what is it” factor never lets up for a moment as we wander around a virtual warehouse of objects and events – as though two cargo handlers from the docks of New York were let loose inside the brains of Max Ernst and Rene Magritte, and started shifting around their respective catalogues of images as though they were shipping containers and wooden crates. The photo inside the release gives us a clue as to the activities: arranged on a circular table in the studio is a sewing machine, a crumpled piece of tinfoil, a thin sheet of metal and perhaps a chrome tyre hubcap (or a glass ashtray). These accoutrements are surrounded by effects pedals, portable mixing desk and microphones. Behind this table sits a grinning young man. In short this is close-miked “object-soundart”, which has virtually nothing to do with music creation, and is a strain of sub-culture which we have seen associated with the work of Jeph Jerman, and to a certain extent with the improvisers on the obscure CDR label TwoThousandAnd (run in the UK by Anthony Guerra and Michael Rodgers). Not exactly a “thrilling” release, this sonic jumble nonetheless has its own discreet charms, and puts the above record in a certain context where it makes a bit more sense. Released on Travis Johnson’s ILSE label.

I’m sure I received a whole bundle of CDs from Elia Casu, the Italian guitar player, but they are probably buried in another shopping bag and I can’t lay hands on them. For now, we’ll make do with Ongaku2 (TICONZERO TCZ009-1), a duo work he recorded in the studio with the drummer Paolo Sanna in 2008. Largely a guitar and percussion record, with occasional additions from zither, waterphone, and scraped objects, the album presents a strange mix of wayward avant-rock soloing, dissonant tones, emptied-out meander-scapes, desolate vistas delineated by a few scraps of percussion and guitar echo, and generally perplexing art-noise and abstracted instrumentals. If you’re a fan of the Fred Frith-Chris Cutler duos from the 1980s and 1990s, this will appeal to you; it’s much more about experimental free noise creation than following any of the precepts or etiquette of improvised music. I get the feeling all 11 tracks come from a single recording session and have been chopped into convenient slabs for our enjoyment, sometimes repeating certain sections to restate underlying themes, but it’s mostly a long voyage of exploration through the cranial channels of these questing Italians. Be sure to check back when I find the other albums from this Casu fellow and his “axe”.

Also from Italy we’ve got another growly groover from st.ride, whose Cercando Niente we heard and enjoyed in late 2010. On Primitivo (NIENTE RECORDS VOLUME 7) the duo of Edo Grandi and Maurizio Gusmerini once again blast forth with a disjointed collection of ugly urban anti-songs made with synth, percussion, guitar and a yelping voice full of brutal passion, perhaps bewailing the cramped circumstances induced by current economic squalor and other psychological restrictions that characterise modern man’s dilemma. 17 songs mostly around 2 minutes in length (gotta love that economy, that directness), each one a variant on the alienated howl of pain and refusing to follow any conventional rules of song construction, resulting in brilliantly ill-fitting and broken sensations as the tunes lope back and forth like wounded monsters cross-bred with hand-made robots fashioned out of birdcages, gear systems and old cartwheels. Every instrument burps out vile non-musical noises as though constipated – the synth has indigestion, the guitar has a splitting headache, and even the singer’s tongue has swollen up like a sponge. This is music whose very reason for existence is to express inexpressiveness and blocked emotions; facing the predicament where the very language of music is inadequate to express the conflicting and seething emotions that bubble in these Italians’ mental cauldrons. If you’re a fan of English post-punk music from the early 1980s with its “angular guitars” and other attempts at flirting with disfunctionality, this record will deliver if you want something even more raw and basic than that. It’s the real deal!

More “barely works” music from Swampdwarf, whose Swamp Harbour (TARUJA TRUJ009) is a CDR sent to us in June this year. This New Zealand combo have been playing for about six years and certainly embrace the DIY and lo-fi aesthetics with a passion as they trade their respective instruments (fuzz guitar, fuzz organ, fuzz drums) back and forth. Right away the sound of the record hits home – that clammy, moist, atmospheric heat-haze that typifies so much music from this country. I suppose they are closer to conventional rock than st.ride above, but their simplistic drum patterns and trance-inducing jam sessions never fall into the trap of turning into structured songs with repeated sections and middle eights. Instead, they just let rip and play – wallowing in the glories of distortion and amplification, and simply enjoying the business of abundant noise production like children playing with powder paints, wisely keeping each song around the 3-4 minute length rather than inflicting 30-minute guitar solo epics on the listener. Lively, messy, fun, and much more rewarding than some of the swampy and pretentious slow drone music that sometimes emanates from this part of the world.

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Fine Art Service


Inner Voices (FIREWORK EDITION RECORDS FER 1085) is another limited-edition art-object release from Per Svensson in Sweden. As you recall he was kind enough to send us his Intergalactic Box in 2008. Whereas that work was quite a memorable example of his more outgoing performances and installations, suggestive of his enthused communion with all sorts of exciting cosmic parties taking place across the universe, this one is as title indicates a much more inturned and introspective work. He worked with Leif Elggren and the two artists sealed themselves in “The Silent Room” at the Chalmers University in Gothenburg, there to make specialist recordings of the internal workings of their bodies. The assumption is that “all life forms…dead or alive” have certain common frequencies, characterised by Per and Leif as electricity flows and cell activity. We’re in a crossover realm of science, body art and sonic venture which is outwith my mental span, and it’s no wonder they needed highly sensitive microphones to detect and record these events so small, they can hardly be said to have taken place.

Resultant recordings from this intensive three-hour workout were sent off to the American researcher Michael Esposito. Chicago-based Esposito is both an artist and one of the world’s foremost researchers into EVP, or electronic voice phenomena, and he’s a singular fellow who can trace ancestral links back to the partner of Samuel Morse and to Thomas Edison. Matter of fact I seem to recall that the idea of finding dead voices recorded on tape can also be traced back to Edison. Needless to say it’s the name of another Swede, that of Friedrich Jürgenson, who has become frequently associated with this area of speculative research 1. Esposito conducts his work as part of “Phantom Airwaves” and has released not a few records and films that relate to the theme.

Esposito’s job in this case was to mine the recordings of Per and Leif’s bodies, and extract any voices he might find. What he did find ends up on B side of the 33RPM seven-inch record, while the A side is the original source material from the two miked-up Swedes. Amazingly, it seems he did succeed in locating something unexpected – but I won’t spoil the surprise, in hopes that you will seek out a copy for yourself. The A side is mostly a set of rather quiet grey drones, and as a listening experience this record may tend to be rather a minimal affair, but a different sort of minimalism to that (say) released by Winds Measure Recordings, which I have been thinking about for the last ten minutes ever since that idea about “cell activity”; it reminds me of the Cell Memory release, although it has to be said Ben Owen’s label, while extremely metaphysical in nature, has never delved explicitly into the matter of psychic research.

The release is packed in a fine box with lots of related images from art exhibits, past and present, inside a full-colour booklet which also has explanatory notes printed in English and Swedish. I found Leif’s Table Of Death, with its speakers adhering to the underside of a highly-polished and oppressive piece of antique furniture, particularly affecting. The image of the silent room itself, with its rather disquieting red chair, is to me just one step away from this famous print by Andy Warhol from his “Death and Disaster” series. An exhibition by this title took place at the Kristianstad Centre for Contemporary Art earlier this year.

  1. Personally I maintain a certain bemused scepticism about the EVP thing, which in my view has generated a lot of hysteria and pseudo-science, but I make no strenuous objection when it’s used as part of an overall speculative framework to generate conceptual art, as in this case. ↩
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Mind Forests / Virtual Walks


Harvesting Metadata (PFMENTUM CD058) by KaiBorg has been here in the boxes since February. I may have been putting it off since archival metadata is something I have to deal with in my day job, although as a way of managing technical and descriptive terms it may not have much connection to this collection of performed electro-acoustic music, recorded at California in 2009. David Borgo plays a long list of exotic instruments of which only a few names are familiar to me, but they mostly appear to be wind instruments; Jeff Kaiser has his trumpet, flute, and voice and they both use their laptops to do real-time processing of audio and video signals. In places they sound like Evan Parker fighting for his life on board a sailing ship in a heavy storm. At other times it’s a bit quieter, resembling cyborg frogs gulping the day’s news at each other in between darting tongues at passing flies. Quite studious and portentous in approach, but the sounds are exciting and texturally rich. Gotta love the technical-sounding titles they wrap around their work, like ‘Maladaptive Optimization’ and ‘Resumption Tokens’, which may indicate how far IT jargon has advanced at the University of California.

The JazzFakers (NO NUMBER) is a side project of Robert L. Pepper from P.A.S., playing his violin and keyboards with a trio (Isaac Taylor, Steve Orbach, Dave Tamura) to produce some quite entertaining and unusual instrumental tracks on this upbeat album. The word “jazz” is a little misleading as mostly what we hear is straightforward four-square rock beat music with virtually no syncopation, but the melodies are freer and are given an intriguing sheen by the discordant keyboards and electronic swoosh of Pepper and Tamura. Tamura does sometimes add his saxophone to the tunes, either extremely melodic or decidedly skronky, but Pepper’s scrapey violin stabs are the star for me; thankfully he doesn’t see fit to emulate Jean-Luc Ponty in this context.

In March we got a couple of nifty little net-label oddities from Phantom Heron Seas in Dorset. The Unkindness of Ravens (DEAD SEA LINER 27) is presented in two parts on a mini disc, and seems to extend far beyond its allotted twenty minutes as it quietly and confidently paints an endless landscape of great beauty. This is executed with a slowly rising and falling drone, apparently derived from a mandolin, and the surface is greatly enhanced with tiny sonic details that are extremely enticing. This may not be massively innovative as a compositional approach, but the record does have warmth and even spiritual depth. Well worth investigating. The item with the blue owl on the cover is by French artiste Max Bellancourt, who has one record on Dead Sea Liner but his Mind Forest is released by RECKNO. This is five short tracks of quiet sylvan wandering which makes a very appealing record; unhurried, peaceful, and with some pleasant tones being generated in amongst the vague crackly and crumbly field recordings, full of leaf and twig. The long opening track is particularly affecting and makes you afraid to breathe in case you miss something; certainly a nocturnal disk, and it’s not just the owl hooting when I tell you that.

Almost New York (POGUS PRODUCTIONS 2057-2) by Alvin Lucier came out in January. Two discs of quiet minimal music which is astonishing in its spartan and focused discipline, but what else should we expect from one of Lucier’s stature. Well-known as a groundbreaking electronic composer in the 1960s, Lucier increasingly found himself being asked to score music for chamber instruments since the 1980s and liked the challenge of seeing if he could “achieve the same poetry with acoustic instruments”. His approach seems to be to deal in pure sound waves, and by using variant tuning systems among the instruments he can achieve interesting pitch changes. The works here are played on cello, flute, piano, vibraphone – almost the “classic” Morton Feldman set-up. In fact the lovely ‘Twonings’ played by Charles Curtis and Joseph Kubera is like a schematic version of a Feldman composition, if you can imagine something that stripped-down and simplified. While that piece is more mosaic-like with its long stretches of silence in between pointillist decaying notes, ‘Almost New York’ is continuous sound, and uses the flutes of Robert Dick with “slow sweep pure wave oscillators”. A mesmerising proposition I trow – rarely have we heard such “clean” sounding art music. ‘Broken Line’ uses flute, vibraphone (Danny Tunick) and piano for another stately Feldman-esque walk around the vacant loft spaces of a virtual Manhattan, with Dick’s flute glissandoes tracing strange lines in the air. The second disc, not yet heard by me, is devoted to ‘Coda Variations’ played by Robin Hayward on his tuba; the label is justly proud of the “leading new music performers” who have been assembled on this excellent collection.

United Scum Soundclash, or U.S.S., have been going since 2004 and already have released themselves as a v2 as if they were a piece of upgraded software. Maybe they are. U.S.S. is a large-scale conflux of American and Portuguese players put together under the auspices of Jonathan Saldanha and Scott Nydegger, who summon the players from the four corners of the globe using blown conches and everyone assembles somewhere in a big barn to make their heroic large-scale big-band music. In a sense they’re like the Justice League of America, superheroes who didn’t get much done but sat around and discussed things a lot. My alarm bells are usually triggered when I read about “genre-hopping” and “previously unexplored musical realms”, and the long list of players here is also daunting. What they produce is a rather overblown species of free rock played on electric guitars, and it’s very percussion heavy, with some jazzy bursts courtesy of the sax section, plus electronic dabblings from the synths, and bizarre vocalising episodes…on paper it all ought to fail massively, but I kind of like bits of this Machine Gun (SOOPA) release when the loud and sprawling music is juxtaposed with recordings of warfare, gunfire, and radio messages – which is indeed the “theme” of this release, hence the title. Given the grandiose feel of much of the music, and the fact that the players sometimes lapse into a marching beat, it’s hard to tell if this really is an anti-war statement or what. The project’s avowed aim is to “take a cinematic approach to sound”, but then the problem is that their record ends up resembling the soundtrack to films such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, or Blackhawk Down; a bit of a cliché really.

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Esoteric Volumens


From 11 April, two monsters of evil noise arrived from The Netherlands. Both these spray-painted CDRs by Doodshoofd are pretty striking examples of non-stop intensive feedback grind, or HNW as the connoisseurs would have it. Geenheidsworst announces its obnoxious presence with two long tracks that will destroy 23 minutes of your peaceful life, and somehow finds space for pouring out a further 45 minutes of remorseless hell, defying the restrictions of the CDR format. Politiestaat erupts with seven slightly shorter works and a shade more “variety” in the way it executes its brutalising slabs of painful, hot scalding acid and chainsaw attacks, but still ends up delivering the necessary punch to leave most listeners in a swoon for eight days. Doodshoofd, whose name translates as Death’s Head, comes from Almelo, celebrates the power of anger and despair, and doesn’t stint when it comes to spreading these destructive emotions thickly all over his power-noise work, of which these two examples are packed in scuzzy grey xeroxes of a sort which I’d thought we’d lost in the 1980s. Distributed by Stirner and SkumRex.

Cough Cool‘s self-titled CD (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL055) is a reissue of his first cassette, remastered onto CD by this Seattle label. Seven songs in 20 minutes reveal the complex and unusual emotions which traverse the brain of Dan Svizeny, which he delivers with an idiosyncratic mix of minimal synth, guitar and drum music, occasionally allowing his electric guitar to roar in loud sweeps. His vocals invariably reach us through filters and distortion effects, adding to the sense of distance and remove. This could prove quite a grower; I like it best when his lyrics remain dumbed-down to the point of incoherence and he seems unable to do more than mumble the same inexpressive inanities over and over in time to his off-kiltre chords and beats. This was released early April.

Got a couple of newish Black Metal releases which arrived 11 April from Ladlo Productions in France. Numen are a five piece of pagan folk-metallers from the Basque country in Spain and the self-titled CD (LADLO PRODUCTIONS AO-004) is a re-release of their 2007 album. They’ve been going since the late 1990s and sing all their grisly yet hearty songs in the Euskera tongue, a tactic which may endear them to fellow Basque countryman Mattin. Competent enough fast guitar work and screeching songs is what they give us, seemingly “following the path of the ancient cult”. Cult Of Erinyes have released A Place To Call My Unknown (LADLO PRODUCTIONS AO-003), a more recent endeavour recorded last winter and offering nine songs about oppression and torture, in the “ritualistic BM” mode. Again, fast and overloaded music is the keynote here, but Corvus (main man who plays almost all the instruments) sometimes leads the drummer down some unexpected side trails.

Inside an elaborate chip-board outsize wallet is housed Mathieu Ruhlmann‘s latest endeavour of subtlety ANÁÁDIIH (3LEAVES 3L006), a 40-minute meditation in six parts which contemplates the beauties of the forest, plant life, the skies and mountain-dwelling with an enraptured awe. Banks Bailey is co-credited with producing these recordings, which to my ears seem to include many choice fragments and selections from nature’s bounty – insects, birds, horses, fire, water, weather and air, and certain unseen activities that might cause the bark of an elm to creak in sympathy. There are at least two layers of recording in motion at any one time, and sumptuous overlaid beauties emerge like multiple exposure photographs. Our Hungarian friend Ákos Garai did the mastering for his 3Leaves label on this, one of the clearest and most straightforward things I have heard from Ruhlmann’s catalogue (he can sometimes indulge in opaque murk and metaphysical conjecture). Comes with a tipped-in colour cover and a printed insert, and a paper band around the package. Arrived from British Columbia, home of the huge wooden log, on 04 April.

WP31 / REDUKT 014 is a CD packed in a DVD wallet on the Wachsender Prozess and Reduktive Musiken imprints from Germany, although my copy arrived from France on 18 April and was sent here personally by one of its creators, the impenetrable genius of “quiet noise”, Guido Huebner. As Das Synthestiche Mischgewebe, he performs the first long composition on this split CD with the title ‘Notre Besoin D’Attachment Est Aussi Celui De Rupture’. Unlike some of DSM’s compositions which have involved fragmentary cut-ups, this piece feels like it’s more of a start-to-finish document with no edits, but what strange event may have been transpiring before the microphones of Guido and Samuel Loviton is anybody’s guess. DSM specialises in this producing this extremely puzzling and alienating effect in his sound art that is well-nigh impossible to understand; this instance may start out like errant birds rattling the tops of empty milk-bottles, but it soon becomes a complex and difficult episode of vaguely electronic effects, rattles and pops. TBC‘s contribution, ‘They Never Come to Hit the Public’, has more substance than DSM on first impression, using synths and tapes and various processes to produce exciting variations on traditional musique concrète techniques. Moving freely over imaginary and real terrains in just 20 minutes, TBC is capable of a rowdiness that DSM would probably find most unseemly. But the combination of the two on a single release is just perfect; TBC’s piece is like a walk in fresh air after the cramped confines of DSM’s obsessive and vaguely neurotic internalising.

Simon Balestrazzi (1980s veteran composer and member of T.A.C.) kindly sent us three excellent new items on his Magick With Tears label, which have been languishing here in the box since 31 March. These mini-CDs (all 20 minutes) are limited editions and handsomely packaged in unusual outsize cartons which resemble slim volumes of esoteric texts. Uncodified: released Involucri (MWT 03), 20 minutes of splendidly supernatural droney effects whose single-mindedness I find most enjoyable, like being led down a strange tunnel below the surface of the earth by a big owl. All the more credit to this Italian musician for eschewing the use of computers in creating these strong and complex drones. Simon Balestrazzi‘s A Rainbow In My Mirror (MWT 01) is a lovely jumble using many acoustic stringed instruments (including a psaltery), organ, tapes and electronics; a rich and complex work that remains all of apiece despite meandering into many forbidden sonic territories. He does indeed imbue this 21-minute work with a sense of the possibility of time-travel or supernatural scyring, and it’s decorated with numerous images of skeleton siamese twins. Simon resurfaces on Untitled Soundscapes (MWT 02) as one-third of A Sphere Of Simple Green, an improvising group which also includes Adriano Orrù and Silvia Corda. Matter of fact his psaltery makes a reappearance here, along with his trusty VCS3 murmuring minimal mysterious electro-utterances that are quite sublime. Prepared piano and bass are the basis for most of this work, creating all manner of unholy textures with their hearty full-bodied scrape and nerve-shredding jangling. Kind of like a speeded-up and impatient version of MEV with added dark clouds of aural uncertainty, these three guys get the job done in half the time and for a fraction of the cost. Only the indifferent front cover disappoints here, although the interior is more intriguing with its gallery of abstract drawings.

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Fists of Glory


From the Canadian artist Absolute Value of Noise, we have an audio version of a gallery sound-art installation he did called The Silent Speaker. This is an intriguing array of fractured texts and fragmented narratives, pitched by the speaking voices of Glenn Skene and Lori Weidenhammer, making their utterances and readings against erratic bursts of electronic white noise, humming amplifiers, and static – all of which appears to be generated by a clever radio transmitter-receiver setup. The texts and underlying concepts are drawn from stories by Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of them united by the strange possibility of living backwards. Through these means, the creator perhaps hopes to cause a violent disruption in the fabric of continuity. Sonically, his electronic noise may not be quite as violent as his avowed influences Merzbow or The Haters, but it still has much meat, malevolence and very physical presence; at times the reverso-energy of his secret radio waves appears dangerously serene and still, lulling us into a false sense of security.

Quite nice lyrical and dreamy ambient textures from Swedish poet and sound-artist Johannes Heldén on Title Sequence (IDEAL RECORDINGS IDEAL080), on a release which uses many fine photographs by Birgitta Heldén to evoke forgotten memories of families, places, and travel. By no means as conventionally “dark” as some of the music to have reached us from Sweden of late, Heldén’s music uses structures that are so unobtrusive as to be almost invisible, and dynamic developments that evolve at about the same rate as cloud formations on a windless day in the Autumn. There’s a slight risk that some of his highly-processed and synthesized sounds may be a bit over-familiar on the ear, but this risk soon evaporates when his gaseous nebulae gather enough momentum to take off like a helium-filled object and dangle threads of enchantment over the heads of many. The general dreamy caste of the album is deceptive, as things could turn surreal and weird at any moment.

Ivan Pavlov performs as CoH, producing a tremendous guitar record called IIRON (EDITIONS MEGO 114) (a follow-up to his LP IRON of some eleven years ago). This Soviet composer moved to Sweden in 1995, and has a discography stretching back to 1998 that requires immediate investigation. Brilliantly-executed instrumental compositions using electric and acoustic guitars, but also electronic beats, drones and noise and some ingenious recording strategies that sometimes bleed the fleshy excess from his set-up until only a metallic skeleton remains standing. Each piece is almost like heavy metal rock music, yet it isn’t; it’s both more simple and more complex in the same breath. Stark, irresistible, ingenuity from this gifted creator who in his time has had some associations with members of Coil and Throbbing Gristle.

Over the last couple years we witnessed a small rash of London guitar groups with some impressive debut releases such as Shield Your Eyes and Nitkowski. Poino are also an avant-rock trio from South London and Moan Loose (HORSE ARM RECORDS HAR CD01) was released just at the end of last year. All their constrained energy is force-fed through the conventional guitar-bass-drum setup and emerges as something bitty, angry, and flighty; like some sort of multi-dimensional road digger that, Transformer-like, grows mighty fists, feet or other weapons as needed, to demolish any opposition. Like Shield Your Eyes, Poino are very accomplished at doing the weird-dynamic thing, changing time signatures and erupting into unexpected batterings of shouty blat, then reining in their collective steeds and resuming a steady canter for 16 bars. Their produced sound is stripped-down, no-overdub garage mode, and delivers a solid thwack to the chin every two minutes. The singing voice is the only slight problem for me; he can’t seem to modulate his way out of the pained screaming mode, and the lyrical content (there’s plenty of it) comes out mangled. It’s like being hectored by a drunken loon at Speaker’s Corner for 45 mins, where not a single phrase makes any sense. Nonetheless, some exciting and rough music lifts off these grooves.

The mighty Z’EV continues his long association with the Japanese heavy-hitter KK Null on Extra Space, Extra Time (BROMBRON 17). 6 tracks of extremely exciting and maximal music, Null’s thrilling and inventive combinations of electronic music played in numerous modes along with Z’EV’s magickal percussive actions. Seasoned professionals both; every second of this lean, sinewy music just exudes assurance and deliberation. Null is in full control of a considerable range of various effects, not one of which is tainted by the curse of over-familiarity, and he seems to be hard-coding his own personality into the very circuits of his devices. Every note of music is stamped with his remorseless attack, even when creating non-noisy ambient musical bursts. Null creates sequenced rhythms and patterns into which Z’EV inserts himself expertly, finding large chambers of space to deliver his machine-like hammerings, executing precise counterpoint rhythms which you or I would never have even discerned within these strange musical fabrics. An essential work!

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