The album itself almost divides into two halves, with the “melody” on the A side and the “atmospherics” on the flip, but even that is too simplistic an assessment as the main musical theme reasserts itself towards the end of the suite, thus creating a satisfying whole in the mind of the listener as said theme re-emerges with a certain triumphant flourish. Despite the slightly macabre undercurrents, Natural Causes is not an especially morose record, nor does Hawkins ever fall back on conventional pre-sets, lazy drones, or instant effects to achieve his aims; instead all the music feels solid, through-composed, and assembled with the deliberation of an architect. It certainly has a sturdy backbone, unlike some flimsy electronica drones I could name. Equipment fetishists may slaver with envy over his list of keyboards, which include assorted Korg and Moog branded devices, but once again Hawkins demonstrates it’s the imagination and skill behind the machines that matters most when the rubber hits the asphalt.

On his press note, Hawkins makes plain his debt to “kosmische” and “krautrock” music, and declares this record to have derived in part from his understanding of the “sonic textures of the 1970s Berlin-school kosmische drone and the more experimental side of krautock.” If it weren’t for the internet I wouldn’t know that this school is associated with the music of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Manuel Göttsching, who happened to be based in West Berlin in the 1970s. The aim of that label is to distinguish the music from the more rhythm-hungry types of Dusseldorf, such as Cluster, Can, and Neu!, and “Berlin kosmische” is seen by many as one of the progenitors of ambient music, as it has now become known. Hawkins doesn’t neglect rhythm completely on this record though, as side A marches along to its own ponderous and robotic tread with a solidity and weight that is distinctly Teutonic, yet clearly filtered through the mind of an American, an American who mentally overlays the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich with paintings from the Hudson River School. I mean there’s a real understanding of the sheer ruggedness of the forest, which comes across in almost every passing moment of Natural Causes, and a trait which would be welcomed by Walt Whitman and Thoreau alike. From 22nd December 2016.

In each of these three suites, working as The British Space Group, Ian explicitly plays homage to some of his favourite themes and preoccupations, and in so doing he also evolved an interesting working method. The first set, released in September 2010, was inspired by Doctor Who, and (needless to say) the music of the Radiophonic Workshop. Rather than simply pastiche the sounds and music of the Workshop, Ian wanted to work within a structure, and so he came up with an imaginary storyline to which he could compose the score. Well, almost – he got as far as devising enough plot points to create what he calls “a suitably vague story arc”. This saved him the burden of having to create a complete television screenplay, even though he has long wanted to express himself in this area, and it’s clear that in his own mind there’s a perfect Doctor Who episode which has never been filmed, but contains all the elements that excite his imagination (including “robot mummies…and Victorian sewers”). The provisional narrative as expressed in his list of titles was enough for him to create the music. And with evocative titles such as ‘The Control Room’ and ‘A Deeper Puzzle’, it’s likely that Ian has drawn deep from the well of the Patrick Troughton period. Accordingly, the music here – comprising short cues, some of them under a minute in length – strikes the perfect balance between suspense, humour, and pastiche. Full marks so far.

For Phantasms II, released April 2011, he applied much the same method to another source, the ITV series Sapphire & Steel. In his notes, I like the way he assumes his audience is as besotted as he is with cult TV and thus completely familiar with this offbeat series from the late 1970s, and feels no need to explain the (admittedly ambiguous) premise of this Peter J. Hammond creation, nor to mention that it starred Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, which to me is a casting anomaly bordering on the miraculous. Holloway remembers the strangeness of the plots, however, as a thrilling combination of the “mundane and the obtuse”, and he wanted his music to evoke suspense and “unease”. For the most part he succeeds, but Phantasms II is also a rather bitty collection and doesn’t quite hang together so well; there’s one too many “clunky” synth sounds and lame disco beats, though this may all be part of the subtle homage to the period. This was originally issued with a superb cover image, not present in this reissue, that strikes exactly the right note of creepiness and compelling eerie charm; he doesn’t quite capture that same tone in the music, but he tries. Again, a lot of the work is done by the titles, which do much to trigger the audience’s imaginative contribution; ‘Waiting in the Blue Room’, ‘A Hand In The Wall’ and ‘The Melancholy Machine’ are all plausible submissions as TV episode titles, or titles of fantasy paintings.

Phantasms III, released in March 2016 on Bandcamp, is the most ambitious of the three sets and contains some of the best music too. At first, Ian’s impulse was to apply his same method to Quatermass, one of the high watermarks of British sci-fi weirdness; through both TV and cinema versions, Nigel Kneale has permanently warped the minds of many a receptive English youth. Instead, Ian devised something original of his own, referring to the “partially formed unnamed travellers who have lived in my head for the last six years”. This is a very strong way of referring to the power of imagination and the effects of these sources, and indicates Ian is not merely some fetishistic fanboy obsessed with trivia and the minutiae of a science-fiction TV script. Phantasms III tells an ambiguous story of the travellers being summoned on a journey but saying goodbye to a comrade who they leave behind. A simple but evocative tale, expressed in 16 instrumentals of electronic music; it’s a compelling blend of alien strangeness, nostalgia, and poignancy. Once again the titles are an important prop; ‘Through the Skin of the Water’ is my favourite, and makes me think The British Space Group should have been commissioned to provide music for the movie Under The Skin by Jonathan Glazer. Holloway rarely hits a wrong note on this suite, and the music is genuinely unsettling, whereas the first two Phantasms are a tad soft-centred, perhaps hampered by their own need to align themselves with their original sources.

At a time when the Radiophonic Workshop and all things associated with their work have been thoroughly explored and interpreted by many imitative musicians, it takes a rare insight and talent to be able to come up with something as original and personal as The British Space Group. I just have to carp about one trivial detail, and that’s the inclusion of the Lewis Carroll couplet on the back cover. First, it’s been misprinted by one word, which (wearing the cap of a strict English Lit. master from the 1950s) I find unacceptable; Lewis Carroll paid close attention to metre, and he would never have added that redundant extra syllable to his verse, which was always as tautly-constructed as a piece of Victorian furniture. Second, why reference the poem Phantasmagoria at all? It’s a comic-supernatural story about a ghostly visitation, and a glimpse into the lives of the rather mischievous ghosts who haunt houses; I can’t see the connection with the futuristic sci-fi music here. This quibble aside, a lovely piece of work. From 7th July 2016.

Two personal favourites of mine are ‘Left Home’ from 1965 and ‘Polish Ballad’ from 1964, mostly I suppose because of the high gloom quotient – they are grey, bleak, and highly atmospheric. ‘Left Home’ was used for a theatrical piece by Tadeus Rozewicz, and comprises voice recording overdubs; the booklet invites us to see parallels with Penderecki’s more conventional choral scores from this period. You have to wonder what ‘Left Home’ was all about when you hear these intense and bleak sounds. A nondescript murmur and whine is punctuated with a slow typewriter click or metronome, creating instant gloom and tension. It feels close to the grand spiritual themes we know and love old “Penders” for. The echo chamber voice effects are juicy and weird, and the electronic music treatments are glorious.

‘Polish Ballad’ is another theatre piece, again heavy on the vocals; the erudite booklet points out things like the stereo picture being created, the “ascetic vocabulary of sounds”, and “electronics verging on brutal”. Me: it’s a gloomoid monster…heavy and ponderous groans, murmurs, passing like evil wind overhead. Some horrific vocal fragments that seem to be passing a death sentence on the listener. If this is a sound-ballad about Polish life in the 1960s, the sheer difficulty and pain of everyday life is what comes across most strongly. If you like classical electro-acoustic message to weigh heavily across your shoulders, tune in now. I do wish these cuts were mastered a bit “louder” though; maybe it’s something to do with the limitations of 1960s technology.

Another Penderecki goodie leads off the second disc, some 20 minutes of ‘Painters of Gda?sk’, realised for a cinema piece in 1964. Marian Ussorowski picked up the camera and directed this “panoramic” view of the artists working on their canvasses in her bid to do justice to the Gda?“scene”. Penders responds with a composite of nice instrumental passages, changing from one mode to another in highly fluid fashion. Organ and bass swing in a balmy jazz-like fugue. Pleasant flutes dominate a chamber music passage. Tape edits signal the changes of scene. Electronic treatments eventually kick in, shifting the balance even further towards the modernism of how I imagine these Gdansk daubers liked to work. Alternately suspenseful soundtrack music, then pastoral pleasantness, then just plain mysterious.

Also here is ‘Basilisk Encounter’, for a puppet show film made in 1961 by Lekoadia Serafinowicz. It’s a great title, but the music is not earth-shattering. Drumming fragments followed by whistles and tiny howls, slightly scary in places. Highly episodic in nature, assembled like a mosaic. Small mysterious fragments are produced by tape edits, producing that timbral cut-off so reminiscent of Schaeffer. Equally episodic is ‘Glass Enemy’, an animated film by Stefan Janik from 1961. Some jazz music fragments wander in among the sonic abstractions. The musique concrète elements were created using bits of metal and glass as a starting point; there are brief moments when the music shines like little points of light or snowflakes, but overall this is very slow and grey.

The set is top and tailed by two compositions of Eugeniusz Rudnik, neither one from the 1960s and it’s not quite clear what they’re doing here. ‘Birds And Men’ (or ‘Birds And People’) is from 1992, described as a concert etude for four artists, three violins, two nightingales, a pair of scissors and one village potter. It’s supposed to be a montage reflecting friendly disagreements and misunderstandings between the parties involved, and is humourous in intent. Electronic drones, voices jabbering and chanting weirdly, it does indeed convey the effect of a disrupted conversation about something, dialogue being blocked or interrupted.

1984’s ‘Homo Ludens’ is a radio ballet, again intended as humourous (the title is Latin for ‘Man At Play’), and laced with autobiographical elements. It’s a crazy collage of sound, voices, music and noise, whose sensibility doesn’t really travel and which has not aged well; in fact it would have felt dated even if released in the 1960s. Even John Lennon’s ‘Revolution 9’ carries more power and political weight than this stodgy melange. Songs, pop music, folk music…children’s voices, war sounds…laughter, and various stern lectures delivered in Polish. The booklet admits that the “abundance of sources carries the risk of creating Babel-like chaos”. But it does remind us of the skill in Rudnik’s editing craft, pointing to numerous witty juxtapositions in the tape (e.g. perhaps gunfire followed by laughter), and reinforces the personal and very human dimension to this composer’s work. In the end his themes are about humanity, not about abstract ideas; “humani nihil a me alienum puto” is his motto. From 12th February 2016.

Over 48 minutes we hear 22 snippets of music and spoken word; the initial experience of hearing this is not exactly jarring, but it is somewhat disorienting, as though we’re almost hearing a story that doesn’t quite materialise. I do like the essay style; long passages of music are interspersed with spoken interjections from Rudnik, where he talks in a simple and unaffected manner about his methods and ideas. He is enchanted with magnetic tape, amazed that he could “hold sound in his hand”. He is genuinely surprised by his own discoveries when he transforms sound on tape, and asks himself “what is really happening?” While it’s clear that he’s mastered his techniques, a lot of the time he wants to bring things back to a human dimension, speaking of the realities of emotion, the human voice, or the landscape; he doesn’t want to become completely lost in a studio-bound world of abstraction. This may be one of the aspects that makes Polish Radio distinct from the other schools of electronic and tape music, some of whose proponents clearly preferred the coldness of dreary abstraction to any grubby human reality. Rudnik’s quotes are spoken in Polish, but the English-speaking reader is helped by the enclosed booklet with its translations.

Through the course of this journey, whose trajectory I suppose is largely shaped by Solakiewicz, we’ll traverse many strange aural terrains – and I’ll quote some of the titles here to pique your interest, including ‘Grinding Bird Bones’, ‘Dinosaurs Walk And Roar’, ‘The Golden-Mouthed In The Mist’ and ‘The Typist’s Syncope’. Any one of these could be the title to a modernist painting in some idyllic pre-war European country, before the invention of drip painting and colourfield abstract art which ruined everything. The sonic excerpts are, on the CD at least, arranged under headings which attempt to characterise and describe Rudnik’s experiments and techniques; they include, for example, “Inventory of Listener’s Associations”, “Human Voice Distorted”, and “Repetition”. Along the way there is a train journey, a sojourn in the “Electro Meadow”, and the very evocative “Warsaw Mists – Collage”.

At the end of this one feels a bit closer to understanding something of the mind and method of Eugeniusz Rudnik; both film and CD soundtrack serve this purpose, and are clearly done with warmth and engagement, to provide a sympathetic portrait of the man and his music, even at the risk of being too subjective in its interpretations. One can’t imagine Stockhausen ever having much truck with an ambitious young film-maker approaching him with ideas about buildings and human bodies, but then Stockhausen already did a very good job of controlling just about every aspect of his work and its perception. Rudnik’s open-mindedness and sense of wonder about the possibilities of magnetic tape might be seen as refreshing. It’s also fair to say this release is making a strong bid for the assertion of Polish culture, and the CD back cover carries no fewer than 18 logos of various National Institutes, record labels and cultural establishments, endorsing its value. From 12 February 2016.

Unlike most of what we’ve heard on the Noble label, it’s hard to characterise this release as “pop music”, mainly due to the lack of cohesive melodies and the generally “difficult” surface, full of changes and strange effects, which makes Moon a pretty tough listen unless you’re fortified with a few cups of Joe. Hattori is a child prodigy of sorts, gaining a place at the Film School in Tokyo aged only 15, and completing a music course there during which time he had free access to the recording studio, thanks to sponsorship from a large record label. When he picked up his diploma on graduation day, the mortar boards flew up in the air as is customary, but when they fell back to earth Hattori was nowhere to be seen. With this vanishment, so began his mysterious bout of international travel and overall air of unapproachability, aided by his inscrutable mask and his cloak of invisibility.

The present album has some connection to a movie called Technology directed by Maiko Endo and due for release in 2016; this French-Japanese co-production was shot in Iceland and India and appears to be some sort of modernistic science-fiction parable, laced with strange symbols. Takashi Hattori’s album is more than just the soundtrack to that film, and is intended to stand as a “conceptual instrumental work” on its own terms; and it is indeed composed in a structured manner, even if that structure appears random, restless, illogical. Indian music, and Japanese court music, are layered into the mix, not just as glib samples but derived from his travels and experiences in some way. It’s clear that he perceives the world as a fairly surreal zone where anything can happen, but also a place full of puzzling beauty.

It’s impressive; I’m assuming he’s still quite young, but his work carries a certain authority and depth, and is always delivered with assurance and confidence. Amazingly, it appears to be his first full-length release. From 7th October 2015.

If we take the new record Arc (HOLOTYPE EDITIONS HOLO4) you might at first think the title refers to a rainbow, the arc of a bridge, or even an abstract painted shape which he glimpsed, and then later studied, on a canvas by Joan Miró. In fact it refers to Joan Of Arc. The record connects to Joan Of Arc in at least three interesting ways: firstly, it was originally used as a soundtrack to the 1928 film of the saint’s life by Carl Dreyer, in one of those tacked-on affairs that so often blight modern festivals; this one was INMUTE in 2014. Secondly, it was composed using “music from Joan’s time”, a detail about which I’d like to hear more, but may refer to 15th century church music or liturgical music; perhaps Kirkegaard has reprocessed classical recordings, or recomposed themes by composers such as Thomas Fabri (I’m not at all familiar with Fabri’s music, but he’s the only one I could find whose dates were contemporary with Joan Of Arc).

Thirdly, Kirkegaard is attempting to psychoanalyse Joan Of Arc herself, or at any rate provide a soundtrack that is in some way sympathetic to her struggle, her plight, or her sacrifice. There’s no explicit reference however to her religious visions, her faith, or even the Catholic church; not even much of an attempt to put things in the historical context of the Middle Ages. Indeed the press notes, for which I do not hold Kirkegaard personally responsible, attempt to modernise The Maid Of Orleans and make her out to resemble a disaffected and neurotic student on her gap year: “Joan lives in moments of transition”, indeed!

At any rate, the above information may help you perceive the nuances and shifts in this slow-moving drone music which, in places, resembles choral music and attempts to vaguely illuminate the ecstasy of religious experience, while still remaining as non-specific and nebulous as possible. From 7th October 2015.

Which brings us to The Magnificent Pigtail Shadow. In front of us we have the soundtrack CD, but it’s a much larger project – there’s a film (DVD available from Wow Cool), and a book of images and stories called Sunbeam On The Astronaut which is not unconnected to the project. The audio CD totally stands up as a work on its own terms, and it’s a highly distinctive statement. Cerio composed the music and wrote the text, and plays a good deal of the instrumentation himself in the form of percussion and keyboards, but also has assembled a small army of guitarists (including Marc Arsenault, who runs the Wow Cool label in California) to realise the music, along with many other musicians – playing strings, woodwind, brass, percussion, and electronics. The libretto is read out by Kristin Hersh, intoning the texts in her usual self-important lugubrious tones (I have never particularly cared much for Throwing Muses, and her contributions are a sour note for me here). The CD comprises the original score and a further 8 bonus tracks of outtakes from the recording sessions.

So far, the popular-prog fan might mistake this for an avant-garde update on a Rick Wakeman LP from the 1970s (who can forget the abomination that was Journey To The Centre of The Earth, with the story read out by actor David Hemmings in front of an orchestral backdrop and Wakeman’s grotesque pseudo-symphonic keyboard bombast?). But if there’s a story unfolding here on Pigtail, I’m hard pushed to discern it; no characters, no scenes, no conventional clues to narrative development. Instead, a series of surreal disconnected snapshots illuminated by meagre clues in the allusive text, and accompanied by extremely strange mood music. With its visions of animals, nature, and candy, it’s almost like a Children’s Book from the 1950s gone bonkers; Cerio’s Little Golden Book. The music is quite beautiful in places; the powerful acid-drenched opening made me think we’d be in for a modern psychedelic rock fest of some sort, but the majority of the tunes are near-shapeless experiments in drone and instrumental noodling staying in a single vague key, rich in atmosphere but short on progression. Even when instructed to “rock out”, the band deliver a wodge of melded sound and mixed chords that’s akin to a guitar-wielding version of Tangerine Dream. It’s compelling, but somehow lacks musical force or energy. Maybe that’s the point, but by end of play I didn’t feel I’d advanced one inch down any particular road, just stayed in one enchanted place for a long while.

The Sunbeam On The Astronaut book is a treat for the eyes, assuming you’re prepared to spend hours decoding these incredibly intricate and layered images. Last time I looked at Cerio’s work, it was all done by hand – the obsessive pen and ink scrawls which you’d normally associate with a psychedelic artist working for 36 hours non-stop and producing highly intricate but formless cosmic visions. He’s since discovered the computer, and uses it to add vector images, drop-shadows, multiple generations of images, impossible layers of depth, and typeset captions that tell stories (or obscure them). Exhausting. Yet these bright and cartoony images don’t feel like the exact visual counterpoint to the music, which is haunted, melancholic, possessed of the stark witch-like weirdness that makes every track appear to be unfolding under a full moon. I realise I’m missing the third part of the puzzle, i.e. the film itself, so if I ever get to see a print one day you’ll be the first to know.

Many artists, including for instance the surrealist Max Ernst or the Outsider Henry Darger, have created entire worlds from their imagination, replete with impossible detail, which the viewer can get lost inside as we explore. With a work as opaque and fully-realised as The Magnificent Pigtail Shadow, Steven Cerio is surely ready to join them. From 21st July 2015.

Finnish ! Freeze funk ! Skweee !!! Hard-hitting percussive synth trash carries the hip hop flow, here, and right in your face down to your eager feet. Synthetic fiesta, plastic funky party within a vintage video game, halloween program for colorful bleeps and bumps, aimed at cool swaying, bouncing bodies, with a cheap feel, oceans away from the austere coasts of experimental concrete microtonal improvised reductionism, to say the least. Defying gravity and concern (both). Reasonably dynamic, entertaining in a juvenile paradigm; Hardly music to analyze, dissect, or listen to. Some insist on all the Skweee characteristics embodied, to which I won’t object. Scandinavian rapper CLAWS CASTEAU and turkish MC ETHNIQUE PUNCH give it the vocal pulse it somehow deserves (otherwise the instrumental bouncing tracks fly by at mid-velocity, cruising speed). Actually, not too hard to read, except the textures coating the beats here sound excessively rich, scorching with poisonous microdots that tend to stimulate both cortex (on fire) and legs (in a trance).

Erik Friedlander
Nothing On Earth
USA SKIPSTONE RECORDS SSR017 CD (2014)

Cellist Erik FRIEDLANDER plays along Satoshi TAKEISHI (percussions) and Shoko NAGAI (accordion, piano, mini-xylophone) as to musically complete NOTHING ON EARTH, a splendid documentary articulating a filmed journey up on the desolate magnificence of the Ice cap, Greenland ! The music herein delivered suits the travelogue with efficiency, and aptly punctuates the hard progression through this hostile white environment (hostile from a metropolitan view) instead of smearing legato strings on the lacrymal channel : Erik FRIEDLANDER plucks his instrument up and echoes your body hair raising as the temperature probes downwards. The soundtrack displays a narrative form, somehow verging on a spanish-eastern feel (nomadic feel ?) at times, with silences, stop/starts, rendering the unfinished journey with footsteps, difficulties and astonishments at once, solitude and a world thriving with life nonetheless. Quite catchy, the melodies take the listener on a ride, marrying both enthusiasm and despair, allure and depression. The cello either carries the melody, or the basso obstinato (as it sustains the accordion’s voice). The noticeable side is that this music never stagnates, thus avoiding the freezing and dying > constantly moving from one shelter to another, under the sameness of the icy landscape.

So there’s this strong time factor emerging from the music : each part sounds like a new day, a new uncharted territory to cross, a new step into predictable hardship and occasional wonder (or the other way round). In the white, seamless spread over snowy carpet and the occasional icy water, the trio staples humanly markers right into the permafrost, so that you never lose track or sight of the right path (if there was one), and you walk, ride, stumble, fail, and wonder along with them, as both problems and magical moments occur.

Both the film and the music aim at space, not viewed from a distance, but rather a land which you’re part of : this takes me back to French “sino-“philosopher François JULIEN, who deals (among other questions) with the landscape issue : do I contemplate from a vantage point, or am I part of it ? This music, I feel, never casts you aside, as a listener, never alienates you from its matter; you’re part of the adventure, if you play the listener’s game, thanks to the all-inclusive progression of the music.

Mathias Delplanque
Transmissions
PORTUGAL CRÓNICA ELECTRONICA 088-2014 CD (2014)

This project took place in Cholet (in the Maine-et-Loire department, France) between 2008 and 2014, associating an artist, Mathias Delplanque, with students in a technical school there. Some of the sounds were recorded in the local textile museum (Cholet has a tradition in this industry, specifically in the making of handkerchiefs). Resonances and rhythmic regularity are what we hear first, through large movements and tiny punctuation, chimes/ signals and implacable clocklike beats, but nothing like your usual monster industrial music (cf. Futurists’ dreams re-loaded). The successive tracks display a large range in the noises collected and organized, sounds within which you never drown : room is made for short breaks, distance, silence, tiny details, coming and going action.

There are intros, outros (slow dying before motion stops), voices (of mechanical sources) emerging and vanishing again, space !

The audio results generally sound very smooth, indeed. Undeniably object music, machine music (though not “metal, rather wood), thing music. Which is just contradicted by the last track : a lengthy, wooly, ghostly exit without angles or edges, widespread as in slow motion, endless. Above “poetry”, it is just the (unasked for) audible proof that machines at work can make original art pieces, like music, for instance.

Worthy of its own Editions Mego sub-label is Sensate Focus: the ongoing collaboration between Mark Fell and (Vladislav Delay aka) Sasu Ripatti, yields as gripping and high-potential a collaboration as that found between wood and graphite; Fell gene-splicing his warped geometry techno with the low-blows of Ripatti’s velvet-punching variety. Forsaking the traditional A/B side format, the duo split the results between vectors X and Y for the first instalment: 1.6666666(…), which pairs two, ten minute tidal swells of post-industrial house comprising split-second garage samples, which are cut, pasted, looped and layered into a juddering swarm of skewed time signatures, while remaining somehow rhythmic. These teasing tussocks gain terrific momentum, with significant pitch and tempo swings as they wind up for a terrible blow that never actually lands, as if we could live on the cusp of a killer beat forever. As approximations of dance music go, this is original and exciting stuff in a field so utterly homogenised by ubiquitous pre-sets so I’ll be looking out further volumes. And as a bonus (wood and graphite fans take note): ordering the record directly from the label lands you a free pencil, so get write on it!

Jerome Longhi
Sonameon
GERMANY EMPIRIC RECORDS EMREC5 MAXI-SINGLE (2014)

This downtempo debut 12” from producer Jerome Longhi offers us listeners a welcome break from the need for adventure in our lives, like an idyllic seaside postcard that becomes fleetingly real. The immersive new-age prelude of A-side’s ‘Sonameon’ is a slow, shimmering synthy sunrise, not unlike the new-world ambience of ‘90s Future Sound of London, with misty-morning, exotic-girl chants, vocodered warbling, and ponderous beats that rise and fall from the other side of a coma. A shade darker on the B-side, on ‘Sonomeon’ a maudlin piano phrase leads into a rain-drenched trip-hop number with a sinister ‘someone’s coming’ bass-line keeping watch over an assortment of skulking rhythms, distant birds and a mild synth wash that lends an ‘80s B-movie vibe. It’s not the most adventurous of listens, but nor has it any such pretensions; its charm lying entirely in its lack of exertion, and the refinement of its lilt and lift over the course of its eighteen minutes.

Emanuele de Raymondi
Ultimo Domicilio
ITALY ZEROKILLED MUSIC ZK013 EP (2014)

Also evocative of idealised locations is Italian Composer Emanuele de Raymondi’s debut EP (but not album) Ultimo Domicilio (‘last address’): a travelogue of sorts, which follows a journey started by photographer Lorenzo Castore in 2008, covering five international ‘domiciles’ (in Italy, France, Bosnia, USA and Poland) that are claimed to have ‘a strong connection to stories of exile and war in European history’. The photographic project led to a collaborative video documentary exploring ‘the concept of individual and collective memory through the 5 domiciles’, and reading into the specifics of each location, it becomes clear that the connections Castore established between them are more tangential than initially stated: at one extreme he briefly chronicles the centuries-old home of an aristocratic Italian military dynasty, and at the other an apartment in Krakow he personally inhabited for six years. Artefacts constitute the underlying theme: photographs, documents, possessions and memories, which relate stories about a space and its inhabitants over the years.

Persuasive cohesion arrives in the form of this seventeen-minute soundtrack from De Raymondi, whose tools are the piano, guitar and sampler, with which he has constructed – without unnecessary contrivance – pieces that accommodate evocative rumours of dark ambient, doom metal, noise and modern classical genres. These five compositions pulse with satisfying immediacy for (alas) unsatisfying durations: big brother ‘Brooklyn’ clocking in at fewer than five minutes. Still, the music is far less maudlin than one might expect from a meditation on memory: big gauzy drums propel glitch piano fragments through the dusty murk of ‘Sarajevo’; heightened alertness manifests in machine gun rhythms and an upward swell of urgent refrains against a wall of doomy guitars in ‘Brooklyn’; a feeling heightened and suddenly severed in closer ‘Krakov’. Foregoing the temptation to drift on a sea of false nostalgia, De Raymondi seems to have responded quite authentically to the specifics of each home, reflecting of an attitude of perseverance in surroundings traumatic or simply subject to the erosive effects of passing time.

Dag Rosenqvist is one of the Swedish melancholic types who has provided some memorable moments of wistful sorrow in ambient music form as Jasper TX. Here he is teamed up with Aaron Martin from Topeka, and the duo call themselves From The Mouth Of The Sun on their debut album Woven Tide (EXPERIMEDIA EXPCD021). It’s a mixture of mournful chords and swelling string sections, aligned with somewhat more “atmospheric” sounds to produce pleasing blends. Most of it resembles rather sentimental soundtrack music from a Norwegian arthouse movie I just made up, about a young woman who falls in love with frogs in the snow, but I liked ‘Color Loss’ where the balance between the melodic and the abstract feels just about right.

Errors Of The Human Body (EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 140) really is a soundtrack album, for a German feature film made by Eron Sheean, but this CD and double LP was composed by the Australian Anthony Pateras. He’s got a small chamber ensemble with him (strings, woodwinds and brass) and a percussion group, although a good deal of the music is based around the piano, organ and electronics work of Pateras. I’ve heard one or two of the insane and energetic electronic records he’s made for this label when teamed up with Robin Fox, but this is nothing like those disjunctive roman candles. Sober and restrained, EOTHB is a studied exploration of different tones and textures, with minimalist arrangements that emphasise mood and atmosphere. It’s like generic soundtrack music for an intellectual thriller, only given a vaguely “experimental” slant. Technically flawless on the surface, and the playing and production have an attractive polished sheen. I found some of the pieces a bit shapeless and unfinished, but perhaps the aim is to leave the listener hanging in a state of perplexed expectancy. Each track almost ends with a virtual question mark.

We received a bundle of items on 16 February 2012, including some vinyl, from the publishing wing of the American independent organisation 23five, but for today here’s an excellent CD by Helmut Schäfer called Thought Provoking III (23FIVE 017). This is the first I heard from Schäfer, and it seems this Austrian chap has a reputation for uncompromising and near-brutal electronic music performances, but this release is uncharacteristically quiet. Eerie, understated, but positively rigid with tension and bristling with excitement, this composition is an unusual performance/installation/composition realised partly in performance in a church, and partly at Helmut’s own home. On this 2006 recording (and incidentally only the third time the work has ever been performed), he’s joined by the violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner and the percussionist Will Guthrie. The first thing to note is we shouldn’t really think of it as a musical performance. It’s mostly process sounds created by organ pipes, said pipes being in the personal possession of Helmut Schäfer and laid on the floor of his house while he was “recuperating” them. When he puts hair dryers at the mouths of the pipes and switches them on, they blow air along the pipes and interesting resonant sounds emerge. He adds live electronic processing to this set-up, and the contributions of Gmeiner and Guthrie are likewise captured within that processing field, such that their strings and percussive blows are also drenched in the resonant atmosphere. According to Guthrie, nobody really had to do very much playing at all – the pipes were doing all the work. It is utterly compelling music, with plenty of incident and action (none of your reduced improv here thanks) and shot through with a core of inner blackness that means Thought Provoking III exudes a heavy vibe of brimstone and brooding. Acoustic industrial music, almost. Other recent experimental types come to my mind who have dabbled with the organ pipes or the church organ, and usually come off the worst, but Schäfer is clearly the sort of fearless larger-then-life personality who wrestles crocodiles just for fun, and he masters the pipes in like manner. I mention the crocodile because this particular set-up reminds me of the music of Yoshi Wada, and while Wada is strong on your basic resonant acoustics and gigantic pipes, his uplifting and joyous music is nowhere near as dark as this particular blackened groaner. Next time I’m having a nightmare about vultures gnawing my liver, I’ll know what music to use as a suitable backdrop. Purchase now to bathe your sinful soul in 24 minutes of breathy doom, and as an added bonus you get ‘Averaging Down 20XX’, a piece by that well-known sonic ogre of noise Zbigniew Karkowski which he made using Thought Provoking III as a sound source. A double dose of very unique and powerful art music.