Tagged: spoken word

December 10, 2013

Rubbed Raw / Volume IV: deranged outsider noise electronics skating close to madness and chaos

Rubbed Raw, “Volume IV”, Ormolycka, cassette (2013)

Wacky sped-up chipmunk vocals and glitchy rubber electronics herald this collection of often creepy electronics that almost verges on noise, isolationist dub and Whitehouse-styled power electronics. I have no idea who Rubbed Raw are and what connection they have to a character called Big Daddy Nugg who died in his early 40s in 2010, whether this person was a member of the band, a friend or a major inspiration. The A-side of the recording early on is dominated by a pounding percussion, wobbly watery sounds and deranged guitar feedback drone in parts, followed by a vigorous rhythmic stroll of more blaring industrial-sounding noise electronics with just a dash of techno thrown in. A later track consists of a spoken-voice recording overlaid by shimmering echo that renders the voice alien and sinister, and a quivering guitar feedback drone solo, leading into what sounds like a peculiarly sanitised exchange of gunfire as imagined on laptops and PCs.

Side-B is no less weird or abrasive with occasional rhythm loop forays into something quite funky and almost worthy of admission into dance clubs without fear of being thrown out by bouncers. Blasts of industrial-strength steel noise, searing guitar feedback drone and effects that fly in and out hold you spellbound. This is quite a short side compared to the A-side.

Although this recording seems very lo-fi, the composition, arrangement and execution of the sounds, rhythms, beats and field recordings are excellent and suggest the musicians, amateurs though they might consider themselves, have quite a long history of performing original music. The music is very edgy, skating very close to the jagged point of a sheer drop down into machine noise chaos. There’s a sense of the music being very deranged due to its extreme isolation from familiar music networks; that deranged attitude elevates the sounds into feverish paranoia territory. It can be terrifying to hear and it’s sure to warp your brain the more you listen to it. How can I get more of this stuff?

Contact: Ormolycka, PO Box 649, New York, NY 10163, USA

September 8, 2013

Minority Report

Slawomir Kupczak‘s Report (BOLT RECORDS BR 1015 / NIKLAS RECORDS n/009) is a superb piece of modernist avant composition from a contemporary Polish composer, who comes to us with an academic background and is also a member of the improvising ensemble Phonos Ek Mechanes. Report is a fascinating and bewildering assemblage blending spoken word with computer music; as soon as you hear the first spoken sentence, your attention is firmly grabbed by the chilling authority of the voice (and its sound). The texts may appear to be documentary clips from a TV show or radio broadcast, but it seems they are all scripted by the writer Pawel Krzaczkowski (the full libretto is printed as an insert, in Polish and English), and recited by two readers, Irmina Babinska and Jacek Paruszynski. These texts alone are worth your entry money; spoken in Polish, but judging by the English translations they are a series of impassioned observations about life, work, and ideas – a tapestry of quasi-diary entries or fractured anecdotes, amounting to a pessimistic and exasperated search for the meaning of life. As the title indicates, all of these stories are “reported” – which is to say they are mostly written in the third person. “What did he say about values?” is the first piece, mounting a series of interrogations which ends with “What did he say about life?”. It’s as though we’re hearing excerpts from an official report written by the great cosmic civil servant in the sky, filing his observations on the life and peregrinations of a Polish Everyman. “All of my life I’ve lived in a game of lies”, is but one example of the world-weary utterances found in the mouth of this contemporary put-upon and somewhat downtrodden character.

Kupczak’s treatment of Krzaczkowski’s texts are where he adds his compositional value on this single 38-minute composition. To put it briefly, distortion is his plan. The readers can barely get a word out before it’s subjected to studio interference – tape loops, overdubs, filters to mangle the syllables, backwards masking, and other layers of precisely-calibrated mayhem intended to place perceptual barriers between us and the content, blocking our understanding, scrambling the data. Yet the meaning continues to burst through the walls at every opportunity; the emotion, in particular that of the male reciter, is enhanced and magnified through these interpolations, his urgent statements increasing in paranoia the further he is pushed into the echo chamber. The female reciter is sometimes transformed into a cold authority figure (a doctor or judge) passing sentence on the listener. Elsewhere, the voice becomes the distant voice of officialdom, some faceless administrator speaking through a telephone, its clipped tones announcing a certain doom. Other voices become a sinister overdubbed murmur of whispers, as of an army of dispirited bureaucrats working steadily in the typing pool. All of these strategies completely reflect and support the tone and spirit of the texts; Report is a modern-day Kafka episode, with strong undercurrents of paranoia, surveillance, and nightmarish images about frustration, the “dead hand” of authority, the impossibility of escape.

The work also includes computer-based music, of course. Taken as a whole, it’s a compelling suite of sinister abstract droning which binds together the texts into a coherent whole, before climaxing with a refreshing melody of a synth-pop tuneage which somehow succeeds in striking a note of total triumph while simultaneously undercutting it with the certain knowledge of imminent defeat. Along the way we hear a fascinating array of intelligent ambient textures – a lonely attenuated drone, a chaotic chatter of renegade machines, the abysmal soothing background hum of a shopping mall, and abstract squiggles that come close to delineating the condition of madness in sound. Kupczak’s compositions for electronic music are refreshingly free from cliché, especially in the sound, and he has found new and subtle ways to give voice to computer music without once leaning on over-familiar pre-sets. Every episode is given its own musical identity in this thought-through work, and there’s not a moment of wasted space.

Report amounts to a moving and impassioned portrait of modern society, with enough layers of conundrum and enigma to repay further returns. It’s a triumphant blend of libretto and music, where the elements are fully integrated into a carefully planned compositional schema. A modern opera for the alienated and disaffected. (28/11/2012)

Slawomir Kupczak
Bolt Records
Niklas Records
Distributed by Monotype Records
Hear excerpt on this TSP podcast

This CD is part of a generous bundle of items on the Polish Bolt Records label received here in November 2012, including a massive 3-CD survey of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. We have a lot of time for this label so I hope (eventually) to give many of these CDs the attention they deserve.

August 19, 2013

Articulations

International SoundArtFestival
Playing with Words: Live
GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 083 DVD (2010)

This DVD is a video document of the live sound art and spoken word festival ‘Playing with Words’ that took place at the Gallus Theater, Frankfurt on May 21st, 2009. The festival was part of collaboration between Kulturnetz Frankfurt and CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Art Practice) at the London College of Communication, a project that also yielded the anthology Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice edited by Cathy Lane. Having generated some positive reviews, the anthology looks set to become a key work in its field. It brings together some useful texts by complimentary practioners who are rarely collated within such a cohesive frame. Although not as comprehensive due to the obvious restrictions of the event, Playing with Words: Live is just as valuable as the anthology particularly because it dispenses with theory and presents practice: sound art offered and understood as an act of performance.

Shot by Bernhard Bauser, the DVD features footage of each of the 6 international participants: Nye Parry, Sianed Jones, Ansuman Biswas, Jaap Blonk, Jörg Piringer and Dirk Huelstrunk. Although ‘sound art’ is a broad church this was not an evening of ‘tablecore’, noise or electronic music despite the use of digital technology and various forms of manipulating amplification. The focus in each case was on the range, potentialities and extremities of the human voice. Each artist took the voice (their own, and in the case of Nye, that of his friend Gordon McPherson) as their primary instrument and the performances set about deconstructing its abilities as a generator of sound.

This obsessively sonic remit along with the bare theatre setting begs the question why go to the trouble of releasing a DVD at all? Surely this could have been better served as a CD to parallel the book?

Well, no actually. What the DVD shows is importance of the visual information in the understanding of the performative and material aspect of sound art. For instance, whilst Blonk creates extraordinary sounds the key to understanding his piece lies not in trying to translate or decode that which is heard. Instead the significance is connected to the way he tugs and pulls on his throat and face to actually produce his sounds. His voice is used as an incorporated instrument, one that projects itself out into the air but is at the same time embodied within the architecture of the larynx and mouth. Much the same can be said of Biswas and Huelstrunk. They both start with breathing techniques and short grunts which build into contorted, seemingly glossolalic articulations. Biswas’s is the more conceptually defined of the two performances, taking the form of a fractured, self- conscious lecture that struggles to bridge theory and practice. In both cases though, it’s essential to see the actual manipulation of the voice in order to get a sense of it as a corporeal entity.

There’s a different but no less important emphasis on visual meaning in Piringer’s piece, the first one on the DVD. The performance involves the repetition of individual letters which are gradually accumulated into a modulating drone. This is also played out alongside a projection screen that shows similar letters spread out, colliding and overlapping. His vocal work with the phoneme is thus reflected in the spectacular pile-up of corresponding graphemes. There’s the obvious influence of concrete poetry here (Ernst Jandl comes to mind) but what’s distinctive is the animated nature of the projections. This permits typescript, that which is usually spatially determined, to be included into the temporality of the vocal performance as it moves up, down and across the screen.

In the case of Parry and Jones, the visual impact of their performances comes with their use of self-accompaniment. Nye works with a disassembled answer phone message broadcast via a portable stereo and Jones uses a violin during her extended vocal performance. These instruments initially work as support to the voices of Nye and Jones but they are gradually integrated into the looping structure of the performances themselves, suggesting a wider interest in echo, feedback and dialogue.

Playing with Words was obviously a fascinating event. The DVD is a slightly riskier prospect because these things can so easily become souvenirs: interesting only if you happen to have been there. What redeems this document is the consistency of the performers. As sound artists they’re working with very different methodologies but seeing them together in succession brings out their collective rationale. There’s clearly a reason why they should be on stage together and that’s the reason why you should watch this.

Gruenrekorder

August 8, 2013

The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor: hear the movies behind one man’s shut eyes

The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor, Torpor Vigil Industries, TVI-CD03 (2004)

Holding my breath for over a decade for another collection of slumber soliloquies by Dion McGregor was excruciating at times and threatened to pop my eyeballs but the wait’s been worth the damage: this set of 25 would-be one-man drama performances definitely does not disappoint. Fully formed scenarios that might come straight out of day-time soap opera or prime-time reality TV, often transmitted in ways to suggest two entities were at perpetual war within McGregor’s feverish unconscious mind, range from party games to bizarre lists, a tour inside a labyrinthine TARDIS-like house, visits to the future and visits from little extra-terrestrials in one’s backyard. Compared to the “Dion McGregor Dreams Again” CD (Tzadik, 1999), this one is slightly cleaner though it does have its hair-raising moments and just might pass muster as general family entertainment with an MA rating. The emphasis seems to be on multi-dimensional travel through time and space.

Leading off with “The Scavenger Hunt”, in which participants must find the most improbable items such as the Chattanooga Choo Choo, the swan from Swan Lake, David Susskind’s mum and someone called Nobody along with his sister, we slime our way through a new dance called “The Snail” and spin a tray of chocolate eclairs, of which one is laced with poison, in “Food Roulette”. We watch Myrna Mango performing the “South Sea Squirm” while surrounded by cat-calls and stare with voyeuristic relish at the tiny inhabitants of “Midget City” along with the proud pet-shop owner-narrator. We’re hurled into the future world of “Tenses” for which the expression “be careful what you wish for” is never more apt as life is measured out in beads on a string. Another whimsical SF fantasy is “Snowflakes” in which McGregor discovers each snowflake on the ground is a planet with its own people.

Funniest track of all though has to be “Snail Time” which reprises the dance of “The Snail” with the appropriate dance rhythms and accompanying song and adds a deliriously demented dialogue in which McGregor instructs his female dance partner on how to say “I am Dolores” in English. (Of course, the mincing shy-lady talk is McGregor’s own voice.) The “Mansion For Sale” runs a very close second: a real estate agent shows prospective buyers through a house that turns out to be a veritable torture chamber of fiendish instruments of punishment. The “Raining” track features idioms and free-forming word associations that turn into reality as raining cats and dogs come alive only to be impaled by pitchforks and drowned in urine. “Down From the Wall” features unusual abseiling activity that literally ends in objects falling and crashing as does also “The Horseshoe Crabs”.

As expected, several of these tracks end in McGregor screaming himself awake – small wonder that he ever got much sleep or was able to function properly during his waking hours. One thing with this CD is that it has to be played fairly loudly as the age of the original recordings when they were transferred to CD and the background traffic noise ambience on them – McGregor was living in New York City in the 1960s at the time – can soften and blunt some of what he says and obscure the tone of voice. Each track follows its own logic which can sometimes be dictated by the words used and their multifarious meanings and associations. Etymologists and psychologists will have a field day trying to sort out the train of word associations and their possible meanings.

Recent sleep research suggests that McGregor would not have been dreaming during his ramblings but instead his unconscious mind would have been processing and sorting out all the various inputs past and present received by his senses. That his somniloquies have a strongly cinematic structure is not at all surprising when one considers that McGregor loved watching movies; some of the dialogue heard and most of the scenarios he goes through sound very much as if they were lifted from Hollywood flicks and made to serve whatever his unconscious mind was mulling over.

Once again, if you need something to hold your friends spellbound at parties – plus some ideas for party games like scavenger hunts, spin the cake stand or how to decorate the house for prospective buyers to inspect – don’t go past this bizarre collection of screaming (not dreaming!) mad mono-slumber-logues!

Contact: Torpor Vigil Industries

July 21, 2013

Manners Maketh Man

Alessandro Bosetti‘s work grows more complex and more fascinating with every day. The first things I heard from him were rather enigmatic assemblages of field recordings and sound art, but in recent years he’s become more focused on using the voice – quite often his own – to make dazzling pieces of sound poetry, cut-ups, song-speech and unclassifiable statements, some of them within the context of his post-jazz post-pop trio, Trophies. Der Italienische Manierismus (CON-V CNVCD006) is a collection of seven unrelated pieces, all of them quite astounding, and making different observations about aspects of cultural history in the most eclectic way possible. If it weren’t for the artist’s notes in the enclosed press release, I’d have no idea where to orient myself. The abiding theme is to do with “mannerisms”, hence the title – Bosetti freely owns he is drawn to the contrived, the artifice, the stylised and the mannered in art, whether from the renaissance or baroque periods, and translates these preoccupations into his extremely rich sound art. Just starting off with ‘Rosso’, for example. The music itself is a thick layer of abstract electro-acoustic noise, underpinned by Bosetti’s own melodic doo-wop styled backing vocals, and is extremely puzzling. It’s something to do with “rhythm and drapery”, as if Bosetti had spent months studying the finer points of how folded cloth was rendered in Italian renaissance art, which he probably has; and then found a way to translate this visual information into sound art.

On ‘Fantozzi Vs Dalla’ the artist claims to be paying tribute to two popular Italian singers. I suppose one of them was Lucio Dalla, the singer-songwriter who died in 2012, and was one of many post-war musicians dubbed “cantautori” who spoke to a disaffected generation with their lyrics about society’s ills ¹. Dalla also loved opera, jazz, film soundtracks, football, and made many best-selling records. Bosetti is a fan, but declares he prefers the “early yells” of these singers. On the track here, the sampled voices of Indra Klimaite and Valentina Picello are rebuilt into strange barks and discordant parodies of opera singing, wailing in alien fashion over a layered woodwind drone. This is the deconstructionist approach taken to a remarkable extreme – it almost lays bare the mechanics of popular song, reducing it to a disjointed yet strangely beautiful sequence of events that don’t quite match up.

Another enjoyable piece is ‘Sigmund Holmes and Sherlock Freud’, which at three minutes is almost a throwaway piece in among this clutch of more serious essays, but it’s sumptuous. Described as a “madrigal soaked in reverb”, it’s like the evil ghosts of The Beach Boys surfacing from a nocturnal ocean with twisted, Gesualdo-like harmonies emanating from their pallid lips. The title here is something which I’m sure Anthony Burgess could have made into a perfect short story.

‘Dolce Stilnox’ is one of the slightly less challenging cuts on the album, with a musical backdrop that could almost be mistaken for lite-funk disco music with its rubbery pulses and electric piano samples, but even here the genre has been turned in on itself in a highly mannered fashion, producing a music that’s almost a sarcastic parody. The art dimension comes from the sampled voice spitting out fragments of disjunctive phrases, apparently taken from “insomnia drawings”, whatever they may be.

There are also pieces about the writings of Proust and one derived from a study of the avant-garde poet Corrado Costa (the insufferable ‘Our Positions’). I was more drawn to ‘It Is An Island’ which is dedicated to Guiseppe Arcimboldo, the painter who made figures and faces from assemblages of fruits, vegetables, animals and so forth. Since Arcimboldo’s one of my favourite painters, I had high hopes, but the track is one of the most mannered and irritating pieces on an album which, some might think, is already being too clever for its own good. Bosetti’s voice intones in dry emotionless fashion, describing a landscape in minute detail much like some 18th century Romantic poet or novelist. Gradually his verbal descriptions are overlaid with sound effects and field recordings, to bring the tableau to life with the sounds of water, wind, beach and birdsong. It works well on paper, but it’s not an easy listen – the edits are deliberately jumpy and jarring.

Lastly I ought to mention the cover art, which is almost a direct lift from the work of Peter Max, the American poster artist who was incredibly popular in the 1960s with his watered-down appropriations from psychedelia and hippy culture. If I am right, this pastiche-of-a-pastiche fits right in with the intentions of this very unusual record. Arrived September 2012.

Essay question waiting to be set here for sociology students. The same strain of post-war disaffection gave us Krautrock in Germany, Merseybeat in the UK, and Tropicalia in Brazil. Discuss. ↩

July 14, 2013

Don’t Eat the Grass

Another odd entry in the Bryan Lewis Saunders Stream Of Unconscious series of cassettes where contemporary sound artists interpret the dream-diaries of this very extreme American performance artist. On Volume 7 a lot of leeway is clearly given by the creator to his collaborators, and these two contributions are indeed very free and imaginative interpretations of the source material. On ‘French Spies’, Joke Lanz may or may not have been given an original tape recording of Saunders’ sleep-talking, but he has elected to re-record the text using his own speaking voice. That alone kicks things off in a fairly unsettling fashion. It feels decidedly odd to be listening to the American’s speech patterns and slang words recast into this rather formal sounding vocalising, as if Joke were acting out the role of a rather strict and stuffy Swiss official like a schoolteacher or customs officer. This contributes no end to the utter surrealism of this fragmentary and illogical story involving broken bones, a French family, eating grass and cooked eggs. Natch, Joke Lanz is no stranger to extreme performance art himself, need I tell you…I gather that you’d be safer letting a firecracker explode in your face that get near this man when he’s in full spate in an underground bunker armed with his noise devices and microphone. For this recording though, he tones things down to an almost glacial degree, and his additions / interpolations in terms of sound effects and tape manipulation are relatively subdued, all in the service of making the text appear as strange and unnatural as possible. Odd giggling effects and bodily-function burbles, perhaps making a passing reference to the granddaddy of all literary sleep-journals, Finnegans Wake. ¹ In short, although the actual recorded voice of BLS may be missing from this experiment, his inner core of warped dream visions still hit home, regardless of which voice may be speaking them…

The B side is even more triumphantly surrealist. ‘It’s Parents Like You That Are Flies on the Horse’s Face’ is credited to Dylan Nyoukis, although Elkka Reign Nyoukis also contributed vocals, and various friends who were also captured in the tape machine of this eccentric Scots genius who lives in Brighton. Nyoukis has created a turgid tape collage that’s as thick and swampy as ten-day old porridge, and laced the brew with potent hallucinogenic drugs. Within this completely insane swirling melange, we hear creaking, musical fragments, muttering voices, bird song, snatches from TV or movie soundtracks (perhaps); but mostly unidentifiable and puzzling sounds. These are stitched into place in erratic fashion around whatever segments of the original Saunders tape Nyoukis has managed to salvage in what (I hope) was a gloriously untidy and somewhat dangerous exercise, involving tape splices made with razor blades on the breakfast table while the family were still trying to eat breakfast, and the splashes of blood were indistinguishable from the raspberry jam. Through his wild-eyed and half-mad method, the artist succeeds completely in capturing the crapulous effects of a nightmare, by turns horrifying, hilarious, and mostly just plain bizarre. Whether this matches Saunders’ original intent is irrelevant, as his crackpot texts are Grade-A bughouse to begin with, and in any case the curious reader can decipher the transcripts printed in the enclosed booklet as needed. Animals, insects, drugs, and a strange scenario about a school day trip are among the many elements in this tangled tale. On the portions where we can hear Saunders muttering, he sounds like a more tremulous version of Tex Avery’s Droopy. For the rest, he’s just one more player in the cast of thousands that constitutes the psychotic inner world of Dylan Nyoukis. Another essential entry in this cassette series!

No, I never read it all the way through, but I understand that snoring, coughing and indigestion sound effects are all worked into Joyce’s prose. ↩

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.