Tagged: spoken word

May 12, 2013

Kentucky: an impassioned and fiery black metal / bluegrass clarion call for justice and the preservation of history

Panopticon, Kentucky, Pagan Flames, CD (2012)

My loyal, faithful fans – they probably number no more than a few misguided and socially maladjusted souls in desperate need of a more fulfilling life – who’ve been following my blatherings on TSP for many years will know that sometimes I get quite political and go off on rants totally unrelated to the music under review. Here at last is a recording over which I can now wax lyrical over politics and social justice; into the bargain also is the fact that it’s a black metal album! Yessiree, that most “apolitical” and socially apathetic of music genres has yielded an inspired and impassioned recording that comes down squarely on the side of one of the most marginalised, impoverished, embattled and least celebrated groups in modern America: the people, in particular the coal-miners, of the Appalachian mountain region in the eastern US. USBM one-man band Panopticon’s “Kentucky” revolves around the history of the struggles of the coal-miners of eastern Kentucky against their employers, the state and federal governments, and established religion for the right to form trade unions, improve their wages and working and living conditions, and give their families and communities a decent life.

The music is a splendid mix of aggressive and pile-driving black metal, stirring bluegrass music performed on banjo and violin, melodic post-rock and spoken voice and found sound recordings. Together with its subject matter, “Kentucky” comes close to being something a more fired-up Godspeed You Black Emperor could have produced if that band had incorporated some black metal aspects. Particular highlights of the album include Panopticon leader A. Lunn’s adaptation of “Come All Ye Coal Miners” which finishes with brief coal-mine work ambience and a brief speech on the history of the exploitation of mine workers and the land alike; “Black Soot and Red Blood” which details the battles the miners fought against a formidable multi-headed enemy; and the instrumental outro track “Kentucky”, a beautiful homage on banjo, resonator and mandolin to the mountains and forests of Kentucky state and the ghosts of people who died defending their lands and communities.

Songs on the album are arranged in a historical time-line form the early history of native Americans to the present and the music proceeds from the personal – two locations in rural Kentucky dear to A Lunn’s heart – to the historical and general.

Admittedly this is not a perfect work – some of the black metal can be repetitive and bombastic and the vocal on “Black Waters” is so distant and blurry that the lyrics can hardly be heard – but the sentiment behind the music is a deeply felt one and powers it all the way through the album. “Kentucky” is a clarion call to all decent-minded people to remember the history of the coal miners in Appalachia and their fight for a decent life, and to support present efforts of community and environmental groups to preserve the lands and natural resources of southeastern Kentucky.

Some of the profits from sales of this album are being donated to fight the use of mountain-top removal as a mining method in Kentucky. Mountain-top removal is a particularly hideous and devastating form of large-scale mining: it involves using dynamite or other explosives to blast away forest, top soil and hundreds of vertical metres of rock to expose coal seams. The debris is dumped into nearby valleys and river-beds, causing silt-up and disrupting the natural flow of streams and rivers. The consequences of this form of mining, while it dispenses with the expense and hazards involved in sending miners underground, can be imagined: air pollution including toxic aerial chemicals, increased soil erosion in affected areas, increased risks of flash-flooding and mudslides threatening homes and communities, pollution of groundwater to name a few.

In addition, the areas affected by mountain-top removal in both Kentucky and neighbouring parts of West Virginia state have historic, cultural and archaeological significance as several of them were the scenes of bitter fighting in the Battle of Blair Mountain, fought by 10,000 coal-miners and supporters against mining companies, local law enforcement and eventually the US Army, in West Virginia in 1921. Several thousand coal-miners who took part in this battle, the largest armed civil uprising in US history after the American Civil War, came over from Kentucky; the miners also received support from local communities, in particular from returned WW1 veterans and medical people who treated wounded miners. The uprising was crushed severely and miners were forced back into the mines on pay and working conditions made worse than before. However the battle also raised public awareness of and sympathy for the appalling working conditions that coal-miners had to face, and eventually in the 1930s the miners benefited from political, social and economic changes brought about by President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.

However as the fight to preserve Blair Mountain from mining demonstrates, the battle for worker rights and to preserve the memory of this battle continues.

Contact: Pagan Flames

May 7, 2013

Cypher: black metal fusion soundtrack tracking our path to Hell

Spektr, Cypher, Agonia Records, ARCD102 (2013)

It’s been several years since I heard anything by this duo and one reason is that Haemoth & Co haven’t been very prolific: “Cypher” is their first release since “Mescalyne” in 2007. The major advance in Spektr’s music since then is the musicians’ incorporation of elements from several other music genres such as industrial, melodic post-metal, jazz and the usual musique concrete and spoken voice samples with the result that this album resembles a soundtrack to an otherwise silent horror sci-fi film. There is also much manipulation of atmosphere and emotion here.

What horrific futurist film might Spektr be offering on “Cypher”? It agrees more or less with previous work of theirs in which an intrepid adventurer, investigating the deepest recesses of the human mind, crosses into a realm beyond life where not even the dead normally go but some of heightened mental and emotional sensitivities, and some training in gnostic knowledge and ritual, might dare to enter. The volume of the music goes up and down as if the whole thing were animated by an inwardly-generated self-aware consciousness. The critical Rubicon appears to take place somewhere in track 3 (“The Singularity”).

Pivotal tracks are “Teratology”, “The Singularity”, “Antimatter”, the surprisingly blues-sounding (at least in its first few minutes) “Cypher” and “Le Vitriol du Philosophe”, this last being the most brutally industrial, ambient and futuristic, and the least black metal. Indeed, black metal figures much, much less than might be expected: the guitars are still sharp but have a more melodic bent. The long tracks rampage across the musical spectrum and dive into quite unexpected turns and twists; the short tracks are usually quiet ambient interludes between long tracks.

Only about 45 minutes, the album feels like a mammoth effort on the duo’s part to create a hellish odyssey into demonic kingdoms, out of which our explorer ends up crawling out of a wormhole into a future society run by self-aware machines powered by simulacra of human brains. There is not a flesh-n-blood critter in sight. One shudders to think that the one thing more terrifying than what Satan and his acolytes can magick up is the mind, individual and collective, that can imagine Satan and the demonic hierarchy in the first place. As I sit and type this review, am I already looking into the shape of Hell?

Contact: Agonia Records

January 3, 2013

Texts For Nothing

Got another couple of outlandish cassettes from Bryan Lewis Saunders which arrived 12 April 2012. I will declare an interest because although we never met, we collaborated on a book called Protective Geometry. This very extreme performance-art / writer / poet / painter from America knocked us for a loop-a with his drug-themed LP called Near Death Experience, and, making a rare appearance in the UK, he performed last month at Bristol Arnolfini and in Milton Keynes at the Secret Anarchy Garden 2012. These tapes however are to do with his ongoing project to express the workings of his hidden brain centres by recording his own sleep-talking while asleep, then transcribing the results, verbatim, onto the page. Accordingly these Streams Of Unconscious are being published in serial form as he finds suitable sound-art collaborators to contribute to the project. First three volumes in this series were noted here.

On Volume 5 (SUT-13.5), the A side ‘White Surrealist Nihilissmus’ is disrupted by the hyper-busy electronic scratching of Yoshihiro Kikuchi, who scrambles his insane electronic data through a clapped-out computer which he subjects to further abuse with his sharp fingernails and bony digits. These vicious and attenuated sounds are so thin and mean they almost etch themselves into your forehead. Kikuchi plays percussion too, beating his cymbals in the sort of urgently obsessive manner that betokens the soul of a thwarted volunteer fireman who only ever wanted to raise the alarm. Throughout, the voice of Saunders murmurs and whispers his menacing texts implacably. Sheer nightmare, only relieved slightly when the electronic din subsides into a slightly more manageable burring and whirring.

Flip over for Christopher Fleeger‘s additions to ‘Dolphin’s Revenge’. Fleeger works exclusively with field recordings here, but his choice of locales and sound sources is far from conventional – in his list, we have American burger joints, an Australian beach, a European haunted house, and something called the “wave organ” in San Francisco ¹. And some river dolphins, aptly enough. Most field recording phonographer types like to celebrate the glories of nature and tend to bring us uplifting and optimistic views of the rich environments in the world. Not Fleeger, who on this occasion creates grim sonic vistas of an unparalleled bleakness, where all the world’s resources have been used up, there’s zero movement or signs of life, and a horrible stillness abiding in the atmosphere. A more fitting accompaniment to Saunders’ texts is hard to imagine. He’s whispering in a cracked voice as though he were the last man alive on earth. Without a doubt this is a truly apocalyptic 21st-century update on Krapp’s Last Tape.

On Volume 4 (SUT-13.4), we first hear ‘The Severed Head’ with a musical backdrop by Love, Execution Style. This Tennessee musician has been wreaking his mutant form of far-out experimental music for 18 years like a cultural terrorist, only taking an interest in pop as a musical form he can hold hostage in his diabolical compound, and even managing to expand his work into film and TV soundtracks. Everything about LES, including the name, suggests a faintly pathological approach to life, and one senses the creator can’t rest until all his enemies are dead. On this cut he plays a combination of musical instruments and domestic objects, including the clothes dryer and the pork chop. It’s not that the sound he makes is particularly unusual here, but the most striking aspect is the extreme disjunctiveness of the performance – events just tumble out in deliberately haphazard and eccentric manner, and nothing makes any coherent sense. Again, this is apt for Saunders if I may say so – it’s music that comes close to matching the fevered half-connections of his short-circuited cerebellum activity.

The other side is tenanted by two improvising names from the UK – saxophonist Adrian Northover, and the godlike genius Adam Bohman. The suite of sound here is called ‘Squirrel Party at Sally Fields’, and given that both of the Englishmen are supplying additional text and voice elements to the piece it can at first seem as though Saunders is almost being side-lined by his own special guests. But instead these jumbled layers of vocals create a strong sonic conflict, a very distinctive taste. Bohman intones, as ever, in his very splendid sonorous creaky voice declaring little-known and overlooked facts about South London matters. Then American Saunders suddenly slithers into the arena like a sibilant snake, overbreathing his surreal texts into the microphone. Northover’s elasticated sax tones can be heard in the small intervals adding small touches of sweet squeaky improv tootling to the strange and dream-like quagmire of noise. I guarantee you won’t have heard anything quite like it.

Both cassettes are once again very nicely presented and all the texts are printed in full in dinky little booklets designed by Alice Lane. Good luck following the words. You’ll need whatever navigational help you can get when you’re adrift in these stagnant backwaters of the brain!

It turns out to be an acoustic sculpture sited on the bay. ↩

November 14, 2012

Refracted Light

True Mirror Microfiche / Double AA Side (D.S. Al Coda #2) is the vinyl viand of the evening. Pressed in red vinyl it be. It’s on a label called D.S. Al Coda. We may have several CDs received from this label as well. As yet, I don’t fully trust the vibe of what they are doing somehow. There is a bit too much text, context and meta-text for everything. This release is credited to Dexter Sinister though it is far from clear what this means. Alex Waterman and Dan Fox seem to be credited as principal instigators. The A side I liked. There’s music composed by Alex Waterman. Waterman is a significant composer associated with the Plus Minus Ensemble in Europe and the Either/Or Ensemble in New York; and he’s worked with Robert Ashley. Perhaps it’s a document of a performance which includes some music and some on-stage antics that involve footsteps, dimming lights, maybe a screen show of some sort, and a brief lecture. The music is beautiful at times, in its halting way. A trumpet played by Peter Evans, a violin by Hrabba Attladottir, and some turntable effects by Marina Rosenfeld. Gentle phonograph rumblings more likely. The music may have been scored or directed in some way to be as simple as possible. Basic patterns of notes just keep repeating. It’s quite soothing but also extremely enigmatic. It may be minimal but there are rough edges, overlapping vectors, patterns that don’t quite match up when you think they should. Nearly exact opposite of the usual control-freak perfection minimalist music. Another thing I like is that the ending of the piece is clearly stated, announced, and happens as a very concrete moment. And this may be reflected in the sleeve notes too. Again it’s a layer of meta-text we can probably do without, but I like concrete moments when I can get them. It feels like a document of a thing happening that is in some way beyond one’s reach, a statement of self-evident simplicity that is impossible for the mind to grasp.

The B side is by turns annoying and intriguing. Dan Fox may be the perpetrator. He describes his work as “sound intervention”. Spoken with a very Home Counties accent is a self-important and rather pretentious diatribe, an art history lesson that takes in the Armory Show, Marcel Duchamp, and aspects of popular music too. It somehow draws a line from Duchamp to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Byrne / Eno) and back again, with many cultural stations on the Bakerloo line of the mind. It’s punctuated with radio dial interference effects and snippets from music too. It’s probably very serious in intent. The bits I liked was where the whole wordy business appeared to be folding in on itself in some way. Paragraphs repeated or restated in a different context, or read in a new voice. Quotes within quotes in some way. Playback of an earlier tape which contains the whole phrase or paragraph which was only excerpted previously. The experience is even more confusing if you try to read the printed text as well. It doesn’t quite match. Neither a proper transcript nor a palimpsest. It reminds me in method of The Post Nearly Man by Mark E. Smith, a very odd spoken word record whose cultural importance still doesn’t seem to have been properly appreciated by that many people. You may take issue with the specious art history conclusions drawn by this piece (I know I did), but the form it takes is interesting and innovative, like a lecture or essay illustrated with small sound bites, which tend to pull the train of thought down some odd sidings.

Another offputting part for me is the inner sleeve. It contains enormous wodges of printed text. I cannot be bothered to read them. These texts seem to conceal as much as they reveal. They refer to trivialities as if they were incredibly significant, and make insider references to things / events / places in the career of the creator(s) which we could not be expected to know (or care) about, yet he/she/it treats them as though they were common knowledge, widely appreciated and understood. Or is the whole thing a constructed fiction to add yet another layer of obfuscation? I experience the same exasperation when I read about the finer points of some absurd Fluxus performance or event, which didn’t mean much outside of a circle of five friends in New York. Sorry for incoherence, I could have been more careful in the writing but I feel like only a semi-distracted associative ramble through my half-baked brain will do when attempting to sum up this unusual work.

October 26, 2012

Sozialistische Musiker Initiative: a quaint historical futuristic recording

Max E Keller, Martin Schwarzenlander, Sozialistische Musiker Initiative, Creel Pone, CDR CP059 (2006)

Attractively presented with a reproduction of what I presume is the original LP cover with the Konstruktivist-inspired image of a red fist striking down a terrified man (I’ll pretend that fellow is Rupert Murdoch – now that makes me feel better!), this blast from the past combines spoken word recordings, musique concrète methods and experimental studio-recorded music and sounds into a very intriguing and strange recording. It sounds at once futuristic, stern and scientific in an old-fashioned sort of way, and something rather quaint and twee, like an amusing antique not good for anything at all but surviving down the ages at the whim of indulgent archivists and historians. Certainly some of the found sound recordings of electronic voices and fragments of analog synthesiser tones and twiddles have something of the droll character I associate with old Thunderbirds episodes in which huge transport vehicles drill deep into the earth or space rockets shoot high into the stratosphere and beyond with all the cheerful insouciance of a society with a boundless faith in science and technology. The overall sound of the album is light and quite pleasant to hear and the ambience is positive, even beckoning.

The longest track is Keller’s “Sicher sein …” which is a meandering piece of spoken voice material and sounds and melodies loosely strung together. It all seems very mysterious as though we are eavesdropping in on an alien conversation via radio transmissions from millions of light years away. The two tracks by Schwarzenlander are different but no less strange: the earlier piece features more female voices and seems a lot bolder than the Keller piece (it could be that the sound quality is much better) with more twinkly tunes and a repeating loop of a church bell sounding off urgently. At about the ninth minute the track starts bubbling and foaming with electronic blips, blops and bubble pops which are soon replace by quieter if rather more boring drone tones. The later track has proto-noise elements (which sound more Fennesz than Merzbow actually) as well as more spoken voice recordings and found sounds and background recordings which make it a very busy piece.

Listeners might get more value out of the recording if they know some German – there may be some humour there that’s going completely over my head – but apart from that this is an amusing and quite droll recording of historical value for the music and sounds found here and what they represent.

Contact: Mimaroglu Music Sales

August 24, 2012

Shapes of Things

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

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

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

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

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.

May 8, 2012

Great Explorers: gentle surf music and psych-pop amble through Cambridge

The Doozer, Great Explorers, United Kingdom, Pickled Egg, EGG76CD (2010)

A very pleasant psych-pop amble through his home town of Cambridge in the UK this recording seems to be for The Doozer, to judge by descriptions on the Pickled Egg Records’ website. The doozy one sings and plays all instruments (guitars, keyboards, percussion) save for three tracks where someone else takes over on drums. Gentle surf music of The Beach Boys’ sort and a slightly dark and melancholy ambience meet exotic foreign, even tribalistic, influences to create a subtly rich sound tapestry that, however modest and small-scale its aims are, suggests it is capable of scaling great Himalayan heights.

An early highlight is “Hornbill”, boasting rhythms that might be based on gamelan orchestra and bamboo instrument rhythms and sounds and featuring a voice-over that might have been sourced from an old recording made by Edgar Lustgarten (died 1978) as the voice sounds so much like that writer’s. Spoken-voice recordings are also a feature of “Semut 1″ along with a gentle blurry electronic drone. Most of the time the CD lopes along at an easy pace, quite relaxed with sometimes unusual rhythms that come to be anticipated rather than surprise. The title track starts off as a fairly ordinary piece but expands into a quaint folksy jaunt with strange electronic connections. Imagine a bunch of hillbillies in the Ozark hills building their own spaceship from scrap metal using instructions left behind by aliens that last visited Earth a thousand years ago and you get some idea of the song. “Decisive Mind” gives us a deranged and twisted lead guitar melody.

The album does feel as though The Doozer is holding back something, perhaps because this is his second album and he’s not yet confident enough to tackle larger-scaled themes and ideas that could expand his music’s scope and take him into more ambiguous territories. At times the recording sounds as if it’s retracing parts of itself and is in danger of falling into a rut. The bland vocal does start to grate after a while and you start to wish Dooz would try some actual singing instead of pretend-singing, even if very out of tune and with a breaking tone.

Contact: Pickled Egg Records

February 25, 2012

Towers of Silence / Identity is Death

A couple of items from the Israel label Heart & Crossbone, which has for some years now been feeding me with mind-blasting examples of obscure extreme metal music in many mutant forms. This record by Eric Lunde is not in that genre, but is more like abrasive electronic art music from this Milwaukee industrial musician who used to be part of Boy Dirt Car in the 1980s. He has since proved his mettle as a visual artist, poet and writer, and produced books of his art prints as well as some 35 solo albums. A World Of Hurt in the Kingdom Of ~~God~~ (HCB 035) comprises some very bleak and fascinatingly mesmerising stretches of monotonous, claustrophobic electronic music, which simultaneously envelop you with the cold comfort of an ice-cold hot water bottle and repel you with their inner core of seething hate. Not an assault of noise music, this is a creeping disease of sound that winnows away your outer defences with its ghastly lurid effects, vile buzziness, and unpleasant distortion. Among these 13 tracks, two are extracts from live performances, and three comprise readings from a prose work entitled Prison Sex, a counsel-of-despair polemic which outlines mankind’s dilemma in stark tones, resigned to what Lunde regards as the permanent state of cruelty and inhumanity in a literally God-forsaken world. There are some performance artists who use their recits to express vehement rage and outbursts of anger to vent their frustration. Eric Lunde, by contrast, seems to be utterly defeated and drained by his pessimism as he wearily delivers himself of these bitter spoken-word rants, some of them spiced up by many four-letter words and strewn with many unpleasant images, thoughts, and deeds. ‘Clock Says Done’ may be a key track, its sense of utter finality leaving you in no doubt that we’re hearing a mind at the end of its tether. A strong piece of work which may not be to everyone’s tastes, but the grisly brooding music Lunde makes is crucial, and abides in your system as efficiently as a virus.

The searing record by Balata carries the incendiary title We Are All Terrorists (HCB-034), a record made by the duo of David Opp and Aviad Albert. David Opp (Openheim) owns the label and is also a member of Lietterschpich, Cadaver Eyes, and bARBARA; as Cadaver Eyes, he also made Mesarveem Lihyot Covshim (“Refusing to be Occupiers”) with its bomb-blasted building cover art in 2010, letting you know how he feels about the Arab-Israeli situation in a way we cannot possibly misunderstand. This new release picks up the theme. While taking its name from a Palestinian refugee camp on the West Bank, the band hurls its sonic-doom venom grenades at specific targets – the Israeli government, its army, and its citizens, with the singer railing against what he perceives as needless cruelty and political apathy, but also the sheer madness brought about by random decisions made by the madmen in charge. All five short songs on this CDR are disguised under pseudo-sweet titles on the back cover, but you need only spin the disc to immerse yourself in inchoate metal doom rage where every drum beat is a hammer blow on the coffin of humanity, or something like that. The singer is screeching fit to propel his viscera out through his nose, but if there’s any lyrical content to match the anger (e.g. political slogans, critiques, incitements to uprising) it’s all buried in a stew of distortion and noise. However, a few moments spent in the midst of this maelstrom of disconnected metallic horror with its spastic stop-start rhythms and near-unlistenable feedback grind will convey the reality of an insufferable situation apparently characterised by absurdity, blindness and flailing fury. Borrowing its title from The Pop Group and quoting Mark Stewart in the press release, this is a record that doesn’t intend to let anyone off the hook easily, including us poor schmoes in the audience. 30 minutes of severe mental discomfort await the listener brave enough to admit this CDR into their home.

Now for another record of black doom noise, but situated in a rather more fantasy-like occult setting than the two previous items, which are each determined to face reality square in the eyes and stare it down. I refer to Infernal Affairs (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR146CD) by MZ.412. I’ve been working my way steadily through the items in this series of reissues since December 2010, and I sincerely hope this is the last one. ¹ To reiterate, the Swedish genius Henrik “Nordvargr” Björkk who calls himself Kremator is the principal creator for this music, regarded by many as an innovative strain that blends industrial noise and Black Metal in a lethal cocktail. While he’s sometimes aided by collaborators, it so happens Infernal Affairs is a solo record, and it’s one of the bleakest and most terrifying in the set. Ghastly electronic sounds, militaristic drum beats and inhuman whispered vocals conjure up dark stories of the legions of the damned gradually taking over the civilised world. Track titles such as ‘Wounds of a Fallen Warrior’ and ‘Overthrowing European Christianity’ confirm the destructive and nihilistic agenda of MZ.412, as indeed do the other albums in this set, and the ambitious sweep of the man’s totalitarian vision is extremely single-minded. Very little in the way of tunes or songs on this record, rather more a collection of stern and depressing atmospheres swathed in sub-zero blasts from the Russian Steppes, but they are very unusual and unique musical statements of understated power, never once slipping anywhere near the familiar pitfalls of the “dark ambient” genre. Indeed Björkk prefers to think of his performances as “rituals”, and there’s plenty of evidence layered into these dense cuts to suggest he does a lot more than enter a recording studio with lots of synths and microphones, perhaps enlisting support from the diabolical hordes. The powerful imagination at work behind these chilling, ice-cold doomscapes is considerable.

About time also we took note of Ritual Productions, the London label which kindly sent us a couple of albums by Ramesses in September 2011. Possessed By The Rise of Magik (RITUAL PRODUCTIONS RITE010) is a great slab of good old-fashioned occult heavy metal, complete with a cover decorated with arcane symbols and signs; recorded in a studio in just two days with only a few overdubs for vocals, the music shows this English trio creating that delicious brand of thick, overloaded evil guitar music that is meat and drink to Black Sabbath fans like myself. The drummer Mark Greening is pretty much the founding member, who put the band together with Tim Bagshaw and Adam Richardson in 2003 after he left Electric Wizard, another splendid English metal combo in thrall to the Sabs. Feel free to enjoy the sensations of being bludgeoned by mighty bass guitar throbs, drenched in excessive power-chord sweeps, and sent into a fitful sleep-state by the relentlessly circling guitar riffs, but it’s the exceptional drumming of Greening that truly makes Ramesses stand out in this already overcrowded field. His main skills are that he knows when to leave gaps, and even when to stop altogether, without ever letting the music come to a dead stop in its ceaseless crawling along its abject path. Even more impressive is that he can do this at such a measured, slow pace; that’s real assurance for you. The guitarists perform well, but the drums are truly at the core of the Ramesses sound, directing and propelling each sickening fuzzed-up guitar solo and bass whomp to give it additional punch. Where MZ.412 intends to bewitch you with his complex Arthur Machen styled fantasies, Ramesses entice you into a world of witchcraft and black magic through suffocation, prolonged sessions on the rack, and beatings with iron rods, thusly producing a sensation in the listener amply described by the track title ‘Safety In Numbness’. In fine, lovers of rich, noisy metal and sludgy doom will not feel short-changed by this album.

Follow these links for reviews of Domine Rex Inferum, Nordik Battle Signs and Burning The Temple Of God, and In Nomine Dei Nostri Satanas Luciferi Excelsi. ↩

December 29, 2011

Round-up of Rotary Rogues

Some fine cassettes pulled out the boxes of late. Dead Girl’s Party is a Scott Foust (Idea Fire Company) side project where he teams up with Matt Krefting, who I think has occasionally played in live IFCO lineups. The Things I’ve Lost (ENTR’ACTE 106) combines droning synths, electronics, radio waves and guitar with vocal wailings, tending to convey a raw sense of desperation and futility on dirges such as ‘The First Pill’ and ‘U-Boat Flu’, or a postpunk-riddled anger on ‘I’m A Tick Tock Bomb’. Their spare sound and interminable repetitions are highly commendable, and at times the tape harks back to Foust’s first band XX Committee from the early 1980s, although Dead Girl’s Party are not quite as suffocatingly intense. Foust would probably disavow it, but I think this 2010 release could appeal to listeners of the so-called “Cold Wave” genre, and with its generally bleak tenor it sometimes feels like a lost record from the United Dairies catalogue.

Swedish electronicist Joachim Nordwall has penetrated zones of deep gloom and anxiety with his grimoire-styled work as one half of the noisy Skull Defekts, but his cassette Ignition (ASH INTERNATIONAL ASH 8.9) contains five rather subdued drone-pieces made from analogue synthesizers, fed through effects and computer processing, and most of them purr along quietly in the layered idiom with tinges of the sinister curling around at their edges. Assembled over four years and in several different international locations, the actual musical content of Ignition may not be large, but your listening pleasure is delivered by the subtle changes in timbre and texture that are gradually enacted. Largely a slow-moving album, although there are passages where sequencer rhythms and patterns are overlaid together to create vaguely hypnotic op-art effects. Using the cassette format appears to have enabled Nordwall to really stretch out into infinite lengths in ways which are not possible on the CD, even. The mysterious track titles, almost like chapters from an existentialist horror story, do not exactly inspire good cheer.

Just mentioned English noisester Hate-Male the other day, and I forgot we had this odd tape from him also. Reversible Tape #1 (EAR EAR RECORDS EER006) is a powerful electro-acoustic experiment built out of voice tapes, guitars and laptop processing, but it’s the voices – echoed, overlaid, multiplied – which form the core of the work, and three friends add their voices to Lawrence Conquest’s to supplement the eerie vox humana wall. In the context of Hate-Male’s other brutal releases, this tape is quite subtle and approachable, and might be a good starting point if you’re tempted to investigate this creator’s world of surreal insanity and sonic violence. The keynote of Reversible Tape #1 is sheer gaping horror rather than violence, and the unsettling Otto Dix cover painting which reminds us all of the fleeting joys of youth and our own approaching mortality, is just the beginning. A truly grisly ghost-train ride in both aural and psychological terms, and the light at the end of the tunnel is a long way away. The tape purports to play the same content both sides; the B side may run backwards, but I can’t verify that.

No less unsettling are the Streams Of Unconscious (NO LABEL) tapes sent to us by the American writer and performance artist Bryan Lewis Saunders. Three volumes I know of so far; the first is Replicate, a collaboration with Hopi Torvald, and Kommissar Hjuler and his wife with Red Bugs. Saunders has been documenting his sleep-talking and dream states for many years, even recording his own sleep-talking on tape. For this series of projects, he sends out the tapes to musicians and sound-artists to refashion them as they will. Torvald creates a suitably ambiguous tapestry of nightmarish ambient music, whose very disjunctiveness does its level best to follow the twists of Saunders’ mind. For this side of the tape, Saunders’ continual mumbling becomes one more element in the mix, and the overall effect will gradually unhinge your mind. Full transcriptions of the sleep-raps are included inside little printed booklets with the releases. The Kommissar Hjuler side is quite different, looping and repeating a single short phrase of the sleep-talking as the basis for an invented song, a dark nursery-rhyme plucked from the deepest recesses of the brain. The endless repetition of ‘objects…supernatural’ will probably send you to the bughouse in short order, but since Hjuler is a Dadaist nutcase of the first water anyway (and I sincerely mean that as a compliment) he is a perfect candidate for a marginal aural experiment of this nature. Also pictured, not yet heard: Volume 2 with Razen and Classwar Karaoke Friends, and Volume 3 with Evil Moisture and Wehwalt. If you’re a fan of the record Dion McGregor Dreams Again, prepare for something so powerfully odd that McGregor will soon seem positively quaint and charming in comparison.

More Richard Rupenus product arrived in September and November, cassette reissues of existing works, both in limited editions of 200 copies. Mixed Band Philanthropist‘s The Impossible Humane (HYPNAGOGIA PN01), mostly recorded 1984-1984 and now remastered by Paul Coates; and Simphonie In A Major (HYPNAGOGIA PN03) by The New Blockaders, a 1989 recording originally issued on vinyl in 1991, now here with new sleeve art. These items have already been covered in previous issues of the magazine, and this is just to let you know the tape versions exist.

The Chica-X (HEWHOCORRUPTSINC) tape is an oddity we’ve had in the box for some time now sent to us by André Foisy of Locrian. The story behind it is explained on the enclosed letter written on a bright pink index card, which I have photographed. Chica-X, just ten years old at time of recording although she’s been doing it since age seven, sings her take on modern electropop and raps her little heart out; the way she intones “To the library…and step on it!” is sheer brilliance. I thought this release might be somewhere in the area of The Shaggs (untutored / naïve expressions of pop music) but of course it isn’t; Chica-X is clearly as well-informed and sophisticated as you’d expect from a 21st-century urban American youngster and probably has more street smarts than the average X-Factor wannabee from Solihull. The main listening interest here derives from her distinctly odd and highly-enthused way of burbling out the words in her thin but feisty voice. If anything, the musical backdrops supplied by her Dad are the boring bits; he may play in an experimental band, but here he’s transformed himself into a cheap karaoke machine. Not sure about availability of this tape, but these five tracks are available as a digital download; and there are YouTube videos of Chica-X too.