Tagged: synths

December 22, 2012

The Laughable Barn

The Wake of the Flood

An astonishing production is Outside, The Great Drought (SMERALDINA-RIMA S-R-018CD), an excessive pop opera with grand ambitions, and a work which is the vision of American musician Colby Nathan. He’s the sort of multi-talented player who probably could have performed all the parts on the record by himself, but as one half of Hyena he’s assisted by main partner and percussionist Dylan Kumnick, and a small army of friendly musicians providing strings, brass, percussion, vocals, and rock ensemble parts. Though you might not realise it to listen to this overpowering multi-tracked epic, DIY-maestro Colby Nathan is not exactly a man of independent means and was obliged to assemble this great work in numerous places across America, working much like Orson Welles in his latter years shooting and assembling his European movies in fits and starts. Accordingly Nathan lists a catalogue of recording locations, all of them intimately connected with friends and colleagues, such that the very making of the record is like a private diary of his efforts. What of the content? Well, lyrically, if there’s an abiding theme to this sweeping portrait of life-changing weather systems and shifting geography patterns, it is expressed in concise poetic terms by its author on one panel of the CD insert. This economy of style hasn’t prevented him from managing a few magical-realist and surrealist literary touches within that text, elements which are also manifested in the song’s lyrics. Musically, the songs are a mixture of insanely urgent power pop sung with a barely-controlled hysteria (Nathan’s lead vocals at such moments remind me of early Russell Mael), or warped versions of acoustic guitar country-tinged tunes, as if rendered by the alien twin of Neil Young. Propelling all of this unusual song-form into the realms of overblown absurdity is the rag-tag rock orchestra ensemble, whose contributions add just the right degree of dramatic pomp. Colby Nathan’s work is new to me, but it seems we have to admit that Colin Langenus now has a serious contender to face in the arena of contemporary orchestrated avant-pop underground music. Even so, I don’t quite hear the Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks similarities which the press note advises us to look for; Colby Nathan doesn’t quite have their same knack for subtlety or understatement, but that isn’t to deny this isn’t a serious and impressive work of crazed visionary Americana. Arrived here 3rd April 2012; also available as a vinyl LP.

Resonant Drive Shafts

Recently I bought two LPs by Don Sugarcane Harris, the jazz-blues-rock violinist who played and sang with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention on such notable albums as Hot Rats, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, and Burnt Weeny Sandwich. Zappa devotee Edwin Pouncey reminded me of Zappa’s innate ability to identify many supremely talented musicians and harness their energy for his own grand projects, often persuading them to do things outside their normal comfort zone. Don Preston was such another, and he provided incredible piano and synth music for many of the finest MOI records of the 1960s and 1970s. What I didn’t know is that he was a serious student of contemporary music in the early 1960s, developed his own form of electronic instrument, and was friends with Robert Moog and Louis and Bebe Barron. Now we have the CD compilation Filters, Oscillators & Envelopes 1967-82 (SUB ROSA SR334) which brings together a number of otherwise unreleased experimental recordings from Preston’s personal history. The first one is called simply ‘Electronic Music’, and was realised in 1967. This is in some ways the most radical of Preston’s pieces on offer here; it’s certainly the most hand-crafted, with some rough edges and a palpable sense of Preston’s excitement of discovery. It was put together in between performing MOI gigs at the Garrick in NYC, and made with an unconventional setup – Preston’s own home-made synth, a tape echo, and a tape recorder. 15 minutes of understated abstract groans and creaks, occasionally punctuated with futuristic harpsichord arpeggios, full of unexpected but not shockingly crazy shifts and changes. This one could almost have been used as a backdrop to one of Zappa’s absurdist on-stage parody dramas, but it makes for delicious listening on its own terms. I suppose we can also detect some of Preston’s influences from the time, particularly Tod Dockstader, whose music he studied.

After this the CD jumps to 1975, by which time Preston is the owner of a “proper” modular synth built by Pat Gleeson; this is what we hear played on the seven parts of ‘Analog Heaven’, along with Preston’s mini-moog, and his echoplex unit. For a tasty example of Preston’s mini-moog mastery, listen to ‘Lonesome Electric Turkey’ on the Fillmore East, June 1971 album. ‘Analog Heaven’ is a much more restrained piece of music, and is evidence of Preston’s skill and patience in exploiting the “wonderful morphing ability” of these instruments; he spent many months experimenting with patches to create these textures, and yet the music itself also feels very spontaneous and free-flowing. Spontaneity is a very elusive and rare quality in most composed electronic music, particularly from the European schools; many classical composers also laboured long and hard to create their electronic music, and the effort was often quite apparent in the stilted and heavy results. But in 1975, Preston was making it look almost effortless.

The last third of the album is the 1982 piece ‘Fred & Me’, which appears to be a collaboration between Preston and the maverick percussionist Fred Stofflet. It combines low-key electronic humming with eccentric percussion instruments collected by Preston, mostly pieces of abandoned industrial equipment and railway parts. By this time Preston had worked on the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now, and one cannot help but hear this slow-moving music as a more nightmarish and muffled version of the end-credits music for that movie. A series of very uncertain half-tones, muted notes, and heavily-disguised percussive effects all coalesce to produce a dream-like and vaguely threatening sonic environment. The rapport of these two improvisers is apparent, especially in the blending of their respective sounds. Fine collection; Zappa completists will probably want to snap this up as a matter of course, though I can recommend it to all lovers of electronic music. Also available in vinyl form.

December 6, 2012

Magic Circles

Arealism

Areal (23FIVE 016) by Richard Garet was found in the April 2012 bag, probably part of a box containing vinyl and other materials from the eminent label 23Five – although it was in fact published in 2011. Garet is an American multi-media artist who thinks in grand terms and aims to create memorable mind-bending experiences in his installation works, which apparently transform entire spaces into strange abstract environments of sound, light and treated photographic images pulsating together in such ways as to make us question everything we think we understand about space, time, and our own sensual apparatus. With credentials like these, Garet probably fits the profile for everything 23Five stands for. I have no idea how the 53-minute Areal was in fact created, and confess I don’t feel exactly illuminated after reading the six lines of text printed inside – which refer to “distances among material and its phenomenology”, “sonic manifestations of electromagnetic waves” and “extended techniques to activate sounds within the perimeter of the working table space”. However, even a ninny-hammer such as myself can tell you this is not average “minimal” music by any means, and while it may progress slowly, Garet’s complex sound on this record has a scale and depth that is extremely impressive and compelling. We have heard him before with the ultra-minimal and rather conceptual record L’Avenir which he made for Winds Measure Recordings in 2008, but Areal is far more substantial and exhibits the kind of burnished perfection that shows how far the creator has been able to transcend his methods, whatever they may be. So even if I can’t fully grasp what is meant by his liner notes, I do understand he is thinking about mechanisms for communication which lie far outside the normal perameters of most sound art generation. Now to mesmerise myself by staring at the blue circles artwork on the slipcase.

Muddy the Mudskipper

Last heard from Goh Lee Kwang, the Malaysian sound artist, in late 2009 with Hands which he made for his own Herbal International label. Like Garet above he also makes installations, and this dimension of his creativity shows up in his very immersive music which clearly aims to create an “all-around-you” effect. In the case of _, And Vice Versa (HERBAL INTERNATIONAL CONCRETE DISC 1103), he does it by submerging us in a gigantic bowl of vague and muffled music as if we were goldfish, or perhaps more accurately a type of mudfish. That’s the impression given by the two longest pieces here, of which ‘wEIghtOfdUst’ is 15 minutes while ‘wEIghtOfwAx’ lasts for a generous 37 minutes, moving us spatially from one end of the art-cannister to the other, feeding us only on conceptual vapour and blanked-out clues printed on empty sheets of newspaper. Disorientation, uncertainty, and time-displacement may all be relevant keywords here. Although Garet’s installation work has been likened by other writers to mind-washing or thought-control experiments, Kwang wins the golden biscuit for his vivid realisation of a sensory deprivation tank here. It’s a laudable aim, although the benchmark of quality in this area has not been surpassed since 1999′s Music for an Isolation Tank on Rhiz Records ¹. Kwang also provides variations on his theme with ‘AclOsErlOOkOnwhItE’, a 5-minute noiser which has the nerve-shredding jangliness of a thousand alarm clocks, and ‘EndlEss’, a little hymn to the power of entropy and decay. While still minimal in tone this at least has more definition than the afore-mentioned cotton wool mind-swaddlers. Come to that, ‘EndlEss’ is digital-glitch supreme; it would feel right at home on a Raster-Noton compilation, if it were a little more mechanical in its aims. It resembles the brain of a computer who wishes it were a begonia plant. There’s also the rather shrill tones of ‘jUctIOn’, which we assume was produced by the same inscrutable production methods, yet resembles the cries of a seagull flying backwards in time over the Bermuda Triangle. There is a pronounced contrast of tones across this CD, which is reflected visually in the artworks by Wong Min Lik (fluffy, soft, pastel tones) and those by Wong Eng Leong (disturbing, stark, monochrome). From 24 April 2012.

Jendon’s Tendons

Neil Jendon is a highly capabale analogue-synth musician from Chicago whose Corporate Laughter (CIP CIPCD026) represents his first proper CD release after a few years making do in the land of cassettes and CDRs. He favours long tracks of around 10-15 minutes apiece, which give him the space he needs to unfold his strategy; start out simple, and develop into something monstrously overloaded and complex. While not all of his work fits this schema, it’s a convenient way of understanding the ambitions and scope of a piece like ‘The Morbid Age’, which begins in the Emeralds-like land of drifty Tangerine Dream marshmallow pillow worlds, but ingeniously grows multiple layers, tentacles and limbs, and evolves into powerful heat-death blasts of controlled noise underpinning the whole seething mass. ‘Static After Static’ is another instance where the synth programs are gradually allowed to lose control and march off into a cyber-world of their own, as though the very printed circuits of the equipment were sizzling and popping, then mutating into a colony of enraged fire-ants. That said, ‘Always and Only’ is quite different, an exercise in clarity and stark outlines where the chilling musical patterns are like the shadows cast on a planet surface by ultra-sleek rocket ship fins. The 17-minute ‘Cataline’ which closes the album may at first be mistaken for a workaday piece of ambient drone, but on closer examination it too proves to be enriched with subtle details, insertions, and variations. For me, it paints a touching picture of some form of terminal decline. If Jendon’s “corporate laughter” is that of the business-suited bankers and excessively rich tycoons who caused the global financial disaster, then I suppose we can only hope that they are the ones in decline, and that ‘Cataline’ may be their swan song. However, that is merely wishful thinking. From 17 April 2012.

By Fennesz, Zeitblom and Rantasa ↩

July 27, 2012

Archer Heights

Split for the Coast

The eleventh release on the Spectrum Spools label is Soft Coast by No UFO’s, which is the work of Konrad Jandavs from Vancouver. Once again John Elliott rescues an obscure piece of music from a small-run cassette label origins, and reissues it on luxury vinyl. I like a good deal of what Mr Jandavs is doing here with his synths, beatboxes, sequencers and filters, especially those cuts which maintain a good solid beat to support the layers of droniness. In some ways it’d be nice to hear him try out the long-form La Dusseldorf thing and see what part of the melodic backwoods his Winnebago takes him, but there’s also a lot to be said for his generally economical approach here, curbing any tendencies towards wallowing in self-indulgent filtered ecstasy. No UFO’s also has an uncluttered and fresh approach to the construction of each piece, such that we’re not wading through layers of overdubbed fug; there’s a simplicity and directness which appeals, even if the melodic figures are not especially strong or original. From December 2011, and likely to grow on us with time.

Dead By Dawn

Now here’s a lively and spicy mixed-up morgeroon from Anders Hana, who’s a Norwegian loopoid from Stavanger associated with such fine acts as MoHa!, Noxagt and Ultralyd. Also Blodsprut, Circulasione Totale Orchestra, Clifford Torus, Crimetime Orchestra, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Quintet, Jaga Jazzist, Morthana, and Pokemachine. Matter of fact if there’s any far-out underground music going on in Stavanger it’s fairly likely that Hana will be involved in some way, either organising the venue where it happens or tearing the tickets on the door with a surly grunt directed at all incoming punters. On the single-sided vinyl object Dead Clubbing (DRID MACHINE RECORDS DMR2), he plays all the instruments including guitar, bass and drums, adding demented saxophone noise and groany synth passages, thus performing as his own one-man stoner-rock heavy-metal beat-jazz free-noise experimental-electronics combo. When you’re in the mood for something rich, thick and zesty, Hana is the man who’ll spread hot sauce over your French fries using a trowel for the purpose. Aye, nothing less than high volume and full-intensity performances will satisfy his creative urges on this salvo of grapeshot, and primary colours are the only oil paints he’ll deign to scrape with his nine-inch palette knife. What’s not to like? Well, only the slightly clod-hoppering and clumpy dynamic of the whole LP gives it a slightly awkward feel in places, like a Sherman tank stuck in first gear or a 30-foot giant with impaired motor functions, but that’s all part of the unkempt charm of Mr “no hairbrush for me thanks” Hana. The six dense pieces are generally short, obsessively repetitive and extremely – erm – direct. The label also operates as a fine-art screenprinting joint in Stavanger, and the actual artefact (I only have a promo CD) has visuals printed directly onto the vinyl and onto the PVC sleeve. 300 copies only of this drool-worthy red pancake.

Free Fall

Deeply impressed by Airfields (MAZAGRAN mz005), a new composition by Cypriot genius Yannis Kyriakides which we’ve had in the pouch since December. We noted his double-CD set Antichamber in TSP19 and I think it was around then we started to find a way into this dense work with its blending of acoustic chamber music with electronic sounds and strange effects, whereas previously it had seemed a bit daunting and unapproachable. This Airfields piece, a 12-part composition played by musikFabrik, an ensemble of classical players, with live electronics by the composer, really hits home – a very interesting take on spectral music, all players producing uncanny tones and unfamiliar sounds from their carefully-woven shrouds of woodwinds, strings, piano and percussion. In his notes, Kyriakides tells the story of how the piece came to be, and it’s a tale that involves a composition for the Siren Orchestra (who derive ideas from the futurist Luigi Russolo and the scientific theorist Heimholtz), and another composition for the Seattle Chamber Players. Since 2008, Kyriakides has been developing his own form of unusual graphic scores, working with photographs taken by satellites which he manages to recast into sonic information. As that technique improved, he found ways to render parts of these graphic scores by hand, translating the contours of these aerial views into scores which musicians could read. I like the idea that the musicians playing this unconventional sheet music are “put into a metaphorical orbit”, and it’s no doubt this methodology which accounts for the unusual, dizzying sensations of Airfields – sometimes we feel we are indeed falling through the sky in a semi-controlled way, taking a reverse parachute dive into another dimension. It’s entirely subjective, but I think this compelling and strangely melancholic music would make a perfect accompaniment while viewing Le Drapeau Noir, a 1937 painting by René Magritte. Further ghostly timbres arise in this, the third version of the evolving concept, through his placement of the brass section on the balcony of the performing space, to assist with the natural echo of the other musicians on the stage (a radical rearrangement of orchestral convention of which I’m sure Stockhausen would’ve approved). A live recording made in Amsterdam, the disc is issued with a booklet of full colour photographs.

July 21, 2012

Desks of Steel

Gimlet Eyed Mariners are the English duo of Michael Fairfax and Barry Witherden. On Dark Secret Love (SLIGHTLY OFF KILTER SOK040) they offer us four examples of their all-improvised, no-overdubs and one-take approach to making music using two Korgs, guitar, percussion, computer, and other keyboards. ‘In the howling storm’ has a nicely aggravated edge to its bleak and slightly formless soundscaping, but ‘Great Central Lake’ is somewhat more structured, arriving at a sort of open-ended melody which unfolds for 11 minutes on top of a simple keyboard pattern. This one reminds us of a very long Residents tune or a less-polished version of a lost track from the Sky Records label circa 1982. So far what they have working in their favour is a very “quirky” sound where the unadulterated voices of wonky synths shine forth with little attempt to file down the edges with some “tasteful” filter effects, which is generally a good idea for synth combos who don’t want to end up like Colin Potter has done. GEM also keep all their “mistakes” in the final product, thus proving they aren’t really mistakes at all. Next to be scanned by the laser device we have ‘Fifi catches the Voodoo Up’, which is a deliberate joke on the famous Miles Davis title. In fact the band consider this 15-minute whirlamaroo to be their “Miles Davis” piece. Reading this prepared me to expect some sort of harsh 70s evil funk, but it ends up as an endearingly British version of lo-fi bedroom warped disco with barely a danceable moment to be had in among the awkward avantish blocks of noise. Percussion loops clatter like tiny bracelets and synth lines swirl and wobble in crazy doodle shapes. After all that fun-loving rodomontade, the title track returns us to their version of “dark industrial murk”, with its semi-comical distorted murmuring and gabbling voices and shudderingly wayward dronescapes pulled out of the intestines of the synths with many gasping protests. This track could well be the one that earns them the Nurse With Wound comparisons, if they wanted to tread down that route for their next release. Mr Witherden wrote the notes to this release, and he is at pains to stress the absence of pre-conceived ideas in their working methods, pointing out that the track titles are only added after the fact and are not intended to colour our views of the music in any way; the music, he insists, is only “about itself”. Fair enough, but I remember when I was 19 my art-college buddy Albert tried the exact same line about “no pre-conceived ideas” with regard to his paintings. The tutor, Harry Weinberger, was having none of it and responded with a long lecture about how that was completely impossible, that every visual stimulus you see influences you in some way, and there was no such thing as this sort of “free painting” ideal. This one arrived 17 January 2012, and the duo are described as “more mature music makers”, who are also evidently quite literate and draw some inspiration from the writings of William Blake.

Improvisation of another kind now from the duo of Rhodri Davies and Mark Wastell. The Welsh harpist Davies is forsaking his usual stringed instrument to manipulate his live electronics set-up on these old-ish (2005) live recordings, from Melbourne (the small English market town, not the Australian city). Mark Wastell likewise has left his tam-tam at home and is electing instead to play lots of close-mic’ed objects, along with his CD player, mixing desk, and electronics equipment. We don’t hear so much of this kind of playing in the improvisation world these days. At one stage there seemed to be a minor upsurge in the incidence of players seizing inert materials like plastic bags or blocks of polystyrene, rubbing them together, and using small contact microphones to amplify the results. Often the results were quite boring, in spite of all that avowed “experimental” activity. Live In Melbourne (MIKROTON RECORDINGS MIKROTON CD 10), I am happy to report, is very successful on the musical front, contains a lot of incident and interesting sounds (no long pauses or pointless silent contemplations), and above all is clear evidence of strong musical skills and an outstanding rapport between the two players. 36 minutes of intense and absorbing abstract micro-shuffling mixed with controlled feedback drones and high-pitched whining sounds. From Russia, this arrived 31 January.

Another item from the bundle of Unfathomless CDs is Aguatierra (U06) by Juan José Calarco. It’s two long suites, mostly captured from the Xohimilco Ecological park in Mexico City, where the artist pursues his interest in canals; there are also sounds from a nature reserve in Argentina, and a collaborator Pablo Reche assisted with parts of the work. As the title suggests, the sound is an elegant and seamless blend of water sounds and earth sounds. The cover artworks also achieve this blending; they were assembled by Daniel Crokaert, using artworks by Calarco. I like this one better than the previously noted item from this label; Calarco seems less “mystical” and more plain-spoken in his artistic deliberations, and the work has a clarity and simplicity that can’t fail to appeal to lovers of the “phonography” genre. Purchase this for a relaxing and slow journey through a very calm and serene landscape / waterscape, with the gentle songs of birds and chirring of insects to pass the hours.

The diametric opposite of calm and serene is that strange inhuman noise offered by Keroaän, on a mini-CDR called Daunting In Its Variousness: First in a suite of an Indeterminate Number of Pieces (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYR03). This crackling and human-crushing diabolical noise may have had its origins in computer code, if the notes are anything to go by; they refer to Keroaän artificial intelligence, developed by Ian M. Fraser and Reed Evan Rosenberg. The actual music of course is performed by Keroaän itself “without any human intervention whatsoever”. Give yourself time to work through the unfamiliar and near-painful sensations afforded by the gritty surfaces here, and eventually you may be rewarded with near-musical swipes and unearthly screams of complaint issuing from the bowels of this huge chunk of code as it passes through the functions of a media player. The performance is also chopped apart into segments that incorporate heart-stopping silences in among the grunckering brattlements, acting in a grotesque parody of conventional musical dynamics. It may seem stilted and unnatural at times, but the achievement here is the glorious impossibility of it; no human being could ever bring themselves to the point where they might conceive of making noise music in this way, let alone have the courage to execute it. Proof once again that the machines are taking over, and they will win. Fraser and Reed may one day manage to write a machine-readable script that acts as a simulacrum for a virtual Merzbow. Note also the use of the Cagean term “indeterminate”, and the painterly brush work on the disc adding a splash of fine-art loft-scene vibe. From 16 January, another nifty slice of marginal New York experimentism.

March 10, 2012

Automatic / Detours

Beuys Keep Swinging

A very fine avant electro-pop oddity from Poland’s Audio Tong label. Go-Go Beuys Band (AUDIO TONG ATCD17.2011) rescues 1985 studio recordings put together by the composers Krzysztof Knittel and Marek Choloniewski, working with their guitars, synths and beatboxes at the Electroacoustic Music Studio in Krakow. That’s odd enough already for me – 1980s pop music being produced at an experimental studio by modernist composers. They were joined by the saxophonist Marek Nedzinski and the singer Olga Szwajgier, plus Janusz Dziubak (a 1980s free improviser who made the LP Tytul Plyty in 1984) contributing the texts for a couple of tracks. By this collaborative effort, they arrived at their own twisted brand of synth-pop music with weird vocals, solid drum machine rhythms and stark melodies picked out on Roland and Yamaha synths, coming close to the same sort of sweetly-rendered dementia as Ptôse, The Residents, or Cabaret Voltaire (although other writers also make comparisons with Throbbing Gristle, Faust and Kraftwerk).

This CD consists of two separate suites, Automatic Pilot and Go-Go Beuys Band, both of them excellent and bizarrely entertaining warped pop music, although Automatic Pilot scores slightly higher for me with its adherence to brevity, its crisp three-minute pop tunes and winning off-kilter melodies. Then again the second set has more prog-like variety in its instrumentals, there are more and lengthier saxophone solos, and the vocals are slightly more declamatory and sonorous, as if reciting an Eastern European morality tale or political diatribe rather than spewing the usual pop-song fare. The singing voices throughout are one of the oddest elements; where the keyboards are relatively familiar, the unusual vocal intonations of Knittel, Choloniewski and their friends take us directly into Eastern European art-rock territory. Don’t be misled by the apparently conventional song titles like ‘China Wedding’, ‘Heavy-Love’ or ‘Rock-Body’; this is 1980s pop music rethought as a surreal pastiche of elements, including both high-art modernism and moments of supreme kitsch. How many other bands would have the sheer audacity to conflate the work of severe conceptualist Joseph Beuys with disposable pop music in their name?

The operation seems to have a semi-temporary studio affair for the most part, although we are informed the two main protagonists did perform some concerts in Poland, Austria and Germany in 1986; and they may or may not have been responsible for other lost, unknown, untraceable and non-existent band projects called Island Of Love and Non-Existed Monastery Group in 1987. On this matter, the elliptical sleeve notes remain obscure, and maybe even the enclosed photographs are part of a conspiracy of misinformation. Nonetheless, the music here is excellent – melodic, oddball, parodic, slightly dark, and beautifully realised. Just imagine what would have happened if this team had been chosen to produce a single for Tears For Fears, Wham or Madonna. The results might not have been world-wide smash hit records, but they would have been distinctive and intellectually satisfying, pop history would have taken a different turn, and we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today. Available in an outsize card cover about the size of a seven-inch single, or can be downloaded in a digital manner for 7 Euros.

Divertimentos

Speaking of avant-garde composers producing pop music, when I heard the 2007 CD issue of Out Of The Blue by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, I waxed lyrical about what might have happened if this lovely US composer had gotten the chance to produce Joni Mitchell or Steely Dan in the 1970s. When you hear the immaculate songs on that CD, you’ll understand what I was blathering about. Now here comes Detours (UNSEEN WORLDS UW07) from the same label, released January this year. No songs this time, it’s all solo piano music by this Mills College maestro, and apparently the first time he’s released an album of new piano works since 2003. However, it is likewise immaculate music which you should all welcome into your homes. There’s the 12-minute suite ’13 Detours’, short compositions that feel like an update on Mussorgsky’s ‘Promenade’ as Tyranny ups the ante and leads us into philosophical diversions of thought, using a form of mental gymnastics learned from the San Francisco composer and film-maker Phil Perkins. It’s music for taking a walk outside your own mind. This turns out to be an underpinning theme for the album, proposing strategies for forms of mental liberation. Even the front cover depicts a “helping hand”.

On the long piece ‘George Fox Searches’, Tyranny uses the sleeve notes to tell the remarkable history of the 17th-century Quaker George Fox, who fled religious intolerance in England to settle in America where his enlightened visions about tolerance, peace and compassion found a more receptive audience. A self-declared agnostic, Tyranny has nonetheless attended Quaker meetings in his time and drawn inspiration from the silence of their prayer meetings, and the spontaneous utterances which might occasionally reveal deep truths; these experiences he effectively recreates in real time on this gorgeous 20-minute piano work, and with characteristic understated genius he also manages to layer in subtle references to the life of Fox, creating music that matches well with Fox’s psychological condition as he undertook his spiritual journey with uncertain steps. Warmth, sympathy, honesty; all good things I associate with this musician.

‘She Wore Red Shoes’ was composed in 2004 as a dance piece for Stefa Zawerucha. In that symbolic work, she enacts a dilemma about life choices no less crucial than those faced by George Fox; the dilemma is represented by a large mandala drawn on the dance floor, sliced into portions that represent past and present influences on her existence. Tyranny’s sprightly music here, a sort of syncopated foxtrot, suggests the protagonist faces her dilemma with calm unwavering dignity, and at the end she “abandons her former life” without regret.

The five-minute ‘Intuition’ piece, though the shortest on the album, is much harder to sum up. In six minutes the uncertain and ambiguous piano and tape music seems to drift freely across an abstract realm of thought where almost anything is possible. This seems appropriate for a work where the composer is trying to digest and sum up various conflicting “cosmological views” of existence, in the end shrugging his shoulders and admitting “I haven’t got a clue”. But he goes on to state he intends to “re-imagine the nature and role of music”, an ambitious undertaking which is performed in a quiet and modest fashion, and like the ’13 Detours’ piece it passes on something useful about the process of thinking intuitively. A very satisfying and approachable record of modern music, rich with ideas and humanity and refreshingly free from any form of arrogance, pretentiousness or impenetrable mysticism. Also available as a limited edition LP.

March 6, 2012

The fur really flies

A Ukrainian release for the Portuguese duo of Sturqen, who beef up their dark electronic tones with brutally simple techno beats. Praga (KVITNU 21) may be heavy on the filters sometimes, but I like it when Rodrigues and Arantes keep their work stripped-down and shorn of any processing ornament, and try their hardest to inject passion or excitement purely by the method of dynamics and drop-outs in the mixage. Some of the short tracks, like ‘Xacal’, bypass the beat grid-system altogether and just plump for puzzling episodes of arbitrary sounds stitched together. Their music makes with a muscular and surly vibe, clearly not out to win many friends or engage directly in the expected social milieux of techno music. Nice embossed package in shades of black.

Another creator who might be considered to edge towards the “antisocial” in his music is the American Daniel Menche, who at times is the equal of Z’EV in his single-minded pursuit of remorseless process-based noise. Guts (EDITIONS MEGO EMEGO 138) was created entirely from the insides of pianos, and perhaps we should have included it with our other recent item of “dead piano porn”, not that we’re trying to start an unwholesome trend in that area. Menche goes one step further and informs us that the piano guts were “abused and thrashed”, adding an element of torture to this particular fetish, and as such it fits right in with his numerous records of martial avant-percussion music, which I can’t help but hear as bloodthirsty and pagan hymns to our animalistic urges. Where ‘Guts 2 x 4′ is an intense and almost painful listen of impossible sound, perhaps concocted from multiple layers and reprocessings, ‘Guts One’ is a dismal survey of a ruined landscape of acoustical death, where Menche the overlord is presiding over the spoils of war and the implied death of music itself as he shakes vibrating tones and mournful hums from these smashed string and wood frames. That particular track soon takes a more violent turn, planting sure feet into the sort of territory Merzbow would respect, except that Menche is doing it with mostly organic materials rather than blocks of steel. The other tracks, each around 19 minutes in length, likewise alternate between violent strikings and fiercely resonating harmonics, and the music hews between a cruel form of beauty and an abiding air of pessimistic grimness. The pianos, mutilated as they are, still seem to breath, wailing and complaining at their harsh treatment. Overall, the album arrives at the sort of startling effects that electronic musicians would give their left oscillators for, yet it gets there by electro-acoustical means. This is testament to Menche’s musical imagination, but also the fact that he’s every bit as “non-giving-up” as The Terminator T-2 robot. Exists as a double LP for those who need a vinyl edition of this assault.

A split between Sujo and Korperschwache (INAM RECORDS 087) makes perfect sense…both are strong exemplars of sonic excess in the avant-rock arena, with the latter K-Men borrowing an ounce or two of Black Metal to add to their specific compound. Sujo pours out three lambasters of loud guitar music with solemn beats, using the multiple layers and distortion that are almost the “house style” of this label. His ‘Siem Burns’ has a heroic Death Valley-styled beauty that outdoes Nadja without even trying, but ‘Paraffin’ may just win the prize with its implied streak of venom and destructiveness. Austin duo Korperschwache are conspicuously out of character with ‘The Golden Hammer’, a gorgeous meld of puzzling ambient tapes and acoustic guitar gentleness that more resembles Wooden Wand than it does Burzum, but they’re back on blackened form with ‘Divine Teeth’, a nasty snarl of metal excess where the guitar just bleats in despair in time with the dismal, stark drumming on this downer epic-song. ‘The Healing Power of Xanax’ is a treat for effects lovers; the dominant sound is just pure filtered power chords with tons of fuzz, reverb and sustain. Yet the track feels like the band are treading water for 8 minutes. I prefer this to their recent half-hearted effort on Crucial Blast (Evil Walks), but it still feels like a collection of cast-offs.

Inner Self Globophobic Clown Tester (Part One) (WILDRFID WLDRF005) is a jolly compilation LP showcasing various acts and projects on the obscure Swiss label Wildrfid. On it, we find some bafflingly odd pieces of music and collaged sound-art from Exteenager, Anita, Donald Suck, Cancelled, Uiutna, Bulb, and GB, some of whom may simply be aliases of each other (or they may all turn out to be the same person). But I’m not complaining when I hear such fun-loving examples of absurd synth pop and colourful instrumental keyboard ditties, clearly put together by people enjoying themselves and also doing so within the confines of the two-three minute pop song form. At first spin, I guess Uiutna and Anita offer the most straightforwardly “musical” outings (in a decidedly Residents-styled offbeat manner, that is), Cancelled is the most “serious” musician in the set, and Donald Suck is the joker in the pack with his deliberately silly vari-speeded concoctions that wallow in infantile glee and gurgly voices. But the whole comp is entertaining; not sure how this was overlooked for the radio show when it arrived 2-3 months ago, but we’ll be rectifying that in due course. 11 wind-up mechanical confection toys for your ears; the LP edition has a silkscreen cover.

January 2, 2012

Vinyl Sevens Round-Up (Part 1 of 3)

Here is a round-up of many of the vinyl seven-inches to have reached us in 2011. The post is so long we present it in three parts. The Pitchshifters have two near-perfect pieces of intellectual Japanese synth-pop music on Goshen / 828 (MEEUW MUZAK 040). The A side is a romantic instrumental barely shading into ambient tones, while the B side uses quirky beats and quirky melodies. Hideto Aso makes all his work with cheap keyboards and equipment that delivers a finished production that exists two or three notches below the ultra-polished sound which so many Jean-Michel Jarre followers crave. Thus does Aso inject much humanity into his music. Some perceive him as a modern antiquarian or a primitive futurist. We heard two fine CDs by Pitchshifters this year, but his enjoyable music sits well on the 45rpm format.

Bruce Gilbert‘s Monad (TOUCH SEVEN TS 12) is the 12th in the series of the Touch Seven releases, 45rpm singles of art music that are packaged in sturdy card sleeves with spines, as though they were LPs. For ‘Ingress’ and ‘Re-Exit’, this English hero of gallery art, modern music and post-punk rock greatness creates two mesmerising pieces of synth music on his Korg Monoton and other equipment, a full list of which appears on the front cover. Wozencroft’s wobbly vision of trees reflected in a rippled pool suggests a network of information (black twigs and branches) going haywire, an image which is picked up on the back cover which shows a synth programming diagram distorted in Photoshop. Gilbert first utters a simple analogue drone, then a slightly more menacing throbber on the flip. Two distilled examples of supreme electronic music in less than three minutes each; the compression of information may be what has earned this music its “monad” status.

We received three excellent releases from California on the Emerald Cocoon label, in the series Alone / Together. Among other things, the series aims to highlight the solitary aspect of playing records – “home alone you spin the disk”, yet also stresses how an artist can communicate with you through music, even though both parties still end up being alone together at the same time. I like the notion that each record is a “recording hanging unfinished, waiting for the listener to start the conversation” – that certainly strikes a chord with me. Without embarking on an essay on the subject, I have long believed all art to be a two-way process and have actively sought out music (art, books, films) which allows space for the audience to participate in some way, as opposed to music which does all the work for you and provides all the answers flowing in a single direction. Christina Carter‘s Obelisk / Tholos (EMERALD COCOON 003) was made simply using small bells and her own singing voice intoning wordless chants very gently – and there are the bells string on the wall behind her in Giddings Texas, half sculpture, half ornament, half instrument. With many contemporary American artists such as Fursaxa and Pocahaunted still wishing to invoke a vague and non-specific sense of “ancient ceremony”, Carter succeeds with something much more heartfelt with far less hoo-hah and pomp, opting for quietness and intimacy instead of full-throated chant-wailing. I have a sense of ancient history as rewritten from the female point of view.

The second in that series is Hidden Face / Leave Mine (EMERALD COCOON 004) by Ashley Paul, the talented New England musician whose mysterious and fragile solo work we have a lot of time for. Using guitar, saxophone, percussive cymbals called crotales and her own voice, she ekes out her musical information in small broken phrases, as if somewhat uncertain herself of where the process will lead her. Yet the results are very satisfying. It’s as though she is carefully drawing a map, for her own use, of unknown territory, slowing circling in on the destination. I’d love to understand more of her compositional process – I have some idea of how it might be possible to approach writing a song, but Ashley Paul seems to be building songs backwards, having taken apart their constituent elements and refashioning them in a strange new way. Her mother Gayle did the cover artwork, and the photo is by the New York musician Eli Keszler, with whom Ashley has often collaborated.

Third in the series is by Yek Koo, the solo project of Helga Fassonaki from Los Angeles who was also part of Metal Rouge. Here she offers two songs ‘Oh Woman’ and ‘Flame Creation’ (EMERALD COCOON 005). Where Carter and Paul have opted for quiet reflective minimalism and a rather restrained tone, Yek Koo’s record is comparatively lush, complex and upbeat. Through layers of rhythm loops and distorted guitars or synths (I can’t tell which), we hear her highly-processed singing voice making a sort of keening chant out of her own lyrics, and arriving in our ears from such a distance it’s like she’s singing from the bottom of a valley two miles away. The surface feel of this disc is rather bleak and weathered, yet both the songs remain uplifting anthems – though anthems to what, I can’t say for sure (hard to decipher the lyrical content). Complex stuff. Now I’d like to look for her 2008 solo album on Digitalis, which is sure to be sold out. Come to that, all of these Alone Togethers are limited pressings (300 copies), so be quick in nabbing your copies.

Post continues

December 21, 2011

The Voice of Unreason

Univrs. (RASTER NOTON R-N 133) by Alva Noto is a record which I would like to think celebrates the joys of typesetting – Univers is everyone’s favourite font – but in fact it’s a follow-on from a previous release Unitxt, and has something do with the properties of a universal language. Given Carsten Nicolai’s very digital predilections, you can bet his conception of language and universality has little to do with quaint notions such as Esperanto, The United Nations or international détente (how very 20th century, my dear), and instead features the microchip and the modem as the mandatory basis for all communications henceforth. As is customary, Alva Noto does a son et lumière version of this record which also involves computers, digital images being manipulated by audio signals and projected on a screen. One digital language mutating another, as it were; I seem to recall this particular trope was meat and drink to Farmers Manual and Hecker over ten years ago, but in some cases artists who followed this path of interchangeable digital information ended up with endless streams of gibberish on their records. Not so our Alva Noto, whose impeccable logic always produces clean and rigourous music, like a diagram for club music, expressed as unadorned thumps, clicks and burrs.

I have a lot of time for Hate-Male, the English creator of very extreme and very loud noise music, even when faced with the rather unsubtle and near-crass imagery that he sometimes uses. The cover for Total Fucking Hate (DOGBARKSSOME DISCS DBSD18), with its lurid pulp paperback gouache image of a fearsome moll in a red dress with an armful of murderous hardware and an expression you could use to sear a ribeye steak, is certainly quite – erm – memorable. The music is pretty hard to recover from, too. On these 11 tracks, one experiences the familiar sensations of tumult and catastrophe normally reserved for earthquakes and collapsing buildings, but in between the now-commonplace harsh noise bursts Lawrence Conquest is making strong use of the human voice, sometimes sampled from records or used as the voice of a mechanical man barking out unintelligible commands, such as on the very effective and nightmarish ‘Live In Vegas – White Night #1′. Guest player Jennifer Wallis adds vocals to the album, maybe here and on ‘Live In Vegas – White Night #2′, but if so her tones have been subjected to some ultra-insane processing method that renders her quite inhuman. Powerful stuff. We also have the lengthy rhythm and echo attacks, such as ‘Under the tent of their rough black wings’ and ‘Taste The Poison’, which are both very heavy going – the noise-listener’s equivalent to a 40-mile forced march in the desert with full military kit. Throughout, Hate-Male is at all times wild and full-on, but also very thoughtful in executing his absurd and crazy dynamics; he uses the digital delay like a paintbox, and he can manipulate tones to ensure that certain abstracted curls and shrieks are foregrounded, so they really stand out sharply from the background fuzz. Among noise-men, many of whom are content to push their pedals to the floor and keep them there, this is a rare talent.

Get Lost (EDITIONS MEGO 123) is the title of a Mark McGuire collection showcasing the solo guitar and synth work of this young American player, fairly well-known by now as a member of Emeralds, the electronic drone-ambient trio from Cleveland. Not especially experimental, this one; a highly melodic release produced by carefully crafted overdubs of stringed and keyboard instruments. The Mike Oldfield of the present time, perhaps, although McGuire doesn’t have quite the same gift for a memorable tune.

On same label as McGuire but a guitarist of quite another stamp is Bill Orcutt, the Harry Pussy guitarist whose return to the performing and recording arena is a well-told tale by now. In February we raved about his A New Way To Pay Old Debts record for this label which compiled some of his earlier private press records, and now here’s How The Thing Sings (EDITIONS MEGO 128), seven new home recordings made in San Francisco. Titles like ‘Heaven is Close to me Now’ and ‘No True Vine’ may put you in mind of Rev Gary Davis, but the comparisons with early pre-war blues have been done to death by now, and in any case they won’t stand when faced with this onslaught of biting, aggressive free guitar improvisation. Orcutt’s technique is to play like a condemned man, packing as many notes as possible into each musical moment, using lots of shorthand and abbreviations, compressing the vital information into taut and urgent phrases before they wheel him away to fry in the hotseat. Plenty of hammering on, string-pulling, unexpected flurries of strumming which stop equally unexpectedly; it’s almost an alarming listen. Lovers of Derek Bailey’s music will find much to admire in these fragmented, tuneless clusters, but even Bailey stopped short of putting so much raw emotion and sheer volumes of angst into the steel strings as Orcutt does. And if you like to share another man’s pain, you’ll love his vocalising too – unrestrained yawping with no attempt to form recognisable words, adding to the sense of near-demonic possession. Essential record, 34 minutes of electrifying acoustic playing that instantly forms a cage of barbed razor-wire around your head.

On Deus Ignotus (EPIPHANY 06), English folk singer Andrew King moves away from his recent sea-faring themes in song and makes a return to what he knows best, that is highly personal interpretations of gloomy old ballads and songs sung against industrial-music style backdrops with tape loops, drums and drones. I can’t resist any record which is front-loaded with two all-time great ballads, ‘The Three Ravens’, a song about carrion birds who find a knight’s dead body in the field, and ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’, a supernatural winter-time song where a mother’s drowned sons come to visit her for one night. For the latter, King’s sepulchral and quavering tones are aptly suited to the grisly and unsettling content, and he transforms that ravens ballad into a sort of inverted battle-anthem with martial drums and declamatory chanting. Other traditional ballad material in like vein on the record includes ‘Edward’, ‘Sir Hugh’ and ‘Lord Lovell’, but the material that represents something of a departure from the norm is that inspired by texts from the gospel and church singing; this includes ‘In Upper Room’ and ‘Judas’, the former King’s interpretation of a poem-novel from the 1950s by David Jones called The Anathemata. I need to research these properly, as they look fascinating. For all these astonishingly innovative and unusual works, King is joined by the musicians Hunter Barr of Knifeladder, industrial music veteran John Murphy, and Maria Vellanz, who adds some devilish violin work. The entire record is an intoxicating mix of industrial music, traditional folk, religious song and psalmery, and interminable harmonium drones with doomy drumming, and with its mixed content and wide variety of singing styles, it refuses any sort of easy categorisation. As usual, it’s all tied together by King’s concise annotations, citing his sources and inspirations, drawn from music, literature, and history; 24 pages of information, libretto and images, set in tiny 8pt type, for you to digest and enjoy. King’s music is an acquired taste (like the voice of Peter Bellamy), but it’s hard to overlook the depth of his scholarship and the originality of his ideas. I support him totally, and this – which apparently took over nine years to realise – looks to be one of his best works.

December 10, 2011

Dead Occasions

Under Japanese Influence

Expo 70 are Justin Wright and Matt Hill. On Blackout (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL054) they play a couple of half-hour cosmic improvisations using guitar, moog, Korg, drum machine and bass guitar, doing it live in parts of New York while they sat on the floor wreathed in a crepuscular haze. Pretty good mind-numbing drone and proggy sludge pours out of their set-up, resplendent with the characteristically “thick” sound of many experimental rock and prog LPs from the 1970s, and you can almost imagine the band travelling in time to the Osaka World’s Fair from which they take their name, only to be greeted with bewildered looks and numerous Polaroid flashes. Especially effective is the layering of insane synth curlicues on top of Stooges-like guitar riffs that chunter away insistently until dawn breaks. The first track is the fugged-up rockin’ beast, the second one drifts more towards the New Agey and ambient side of their krautrock collections with its languid echoplexed guitar licks on top of melodic keyboard inventions. One of three releases from the ever-productive Seattle label which arrived here 14 February 2011.

Misty Roses

More missives flying out from the contemporary American synth-playing retro-scene that’s spreading across the continent like the silver flying glove of Klaus Dinger. Mist have an entire double LP called House (SPECTRUM SPOOLS SP004) on which John Elliott and Sam Goldberg play their Moog Voyager, Korg, Roland and Prophet synths, while Dave Smith adds something called “instruments morpho” which may be a form of post-production which equates to what Dr Moreau is to surgery. Nothing unpleasant about this rich and melodic instrumental music, which is almost indistinguishable from any given record released on the Sky Records label between 1977 and 1987. The sound of Mist is ultra-clean and the players clearly relish the possibilities afforded by their filters and sequencers, filling every available moment with incident and flourish.

Inverted Liturgies

I’ve kind of lost track of which point we have reached in the MZ.412 reissue programme from Cold Spring records, but presumably a lot of lovers of extreme occult-metal horrendousness have been made very happy in the last 12 months. Domine Rex Inferum (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR145CD) is another one in the set of works masterminded by Kremator, and was originally issued in 2001 on Cold Meat Industry in Sweden. This one isn’t so heavy on the sheer sonic violence as others I’ve heard, and it stresses the ritualistic and curse-spinning side of this bleak noise project, most of the music amounting to a set of very ominous low-rumble synth growling and equally ominous percussion rolls. Even the titles, with their combination of strange made-up words in unusual languages with numbers and punctuation lined up in a very particular order, are as precise and deathly as a warlock’s spell or witch’s receipt. Governed by strange and unpredictable dynamics, this music has a terrifying weight and authority, and is not afraid to keep the listener waiting for hours in the corner of a cold marble temple set in a grisly wind-swept plain while we wait for the next fearful event to pass before us. Sheer desolation and abandonment will descend and sit heavily on your soul. As such, all these MZ.412 records make most “Ambient Black Metal” releases look pretty ineffectual.

Autumn Cannibalism

Cock E.S.P. is one of the “big names” of the underground American noise scene, a force of nature set into trundling motion in 1993 in Minneapolis and currently involving Emil Hagstrom, Elyse Perez, Matt Bacon and a host of imaginary members with absurd pseudonyms. It’s thought they took their name from part of a Hanatarash release, and to this day they’re doing everything possible to keep alive the flame of chaotic Japanese theatrical noise, in a way that even Boredoms have long since abandoned. In May 2011 Emil kindly sent us a copy of Historia De La Musica Cock: A Tribute to Experimental Music 1910-2010 (SUNSHIP SUN56 / LITTLE MAFIA LM078 / BREATHMINT BM330), a powerful tour de force that at once sends up, mocks, mutilates and celebrates the history of free music as it’s been manifested in the 20th century Western world, and as such it contains insane pastiches and parodies of (for instance) free jazz, punk rock, psychedelic rock, krautrock, avant-garde composition, cut-ups and sampledelica, and even noise music itself. The resultant splintered and mosaicified record, realised with the help of a significant number of guest noiseicians, is an unparalleled act of auto-cannibalism, the sort of thing you’d expect from people who have incredible record collections of insane and iconoclastic music, yet who are often seized with a mad impulse to throw all that rare and important vinyl onto a bonfire and dance around the crackling flames as they watch plumes of acrid black smoke rise into the air. There are 99 very short tracks of intense energy and hysteria, they’re divided into eleven episodes arranged as a grotesque parody of the history of music, and the titles are packed with knowing, snide citations and clever détournements; you could use this insert as a baseball scorecard or personal IQ test as you listen your way through the sizzling racket. To put it another way, it’s your map across the sonic minefield where every sniggering aside is another grenade in the face. These titles also revel in puerile humour with their incessant pornography, sodomy, fellatio, scatology, onanism, and of course much phallocentricity and anal-fixated references. I’m not quite sure why I’m using all these two-dollar words to describe this joyful and playful inanity, but you get the idea. An exciting and violent (and hilarious) record and one that ought to reinvigorate your love of music, because only by smashing and destroying the things we love in a bonfire of the vanities can we renew ourselves and return to music with a fresh pair of cleansed ears. Rest assured, Cock E.S.P. will also be thoroughly cleaning out all your other body cavities in ways you can’t begin to imagine. Arrived here 05 May 2011.

Loop Di Love

For a more respectful, one might even say reverent, approach to the modernist composers of the last century, we might turn to Loops4ever (MAZAGRAN MZ001) by Manuel Zurria. Here, following on from what he did on Repeat! in 2008, the Italian flute player offers 12 performances of compositions by Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzweski; pays homage to more recent contemporary maestros such as John Duncan and Jacob TV; and to remain loyal to his home country, the double-disc set leads off with a version of a work by the great Giacinto Scelsi, one of the most severe and problematic of the modernists. A flawless selection, even if the music doesn’t always excite or challenge us as much as I feel it should; quite often Zurria gives the impression he’s lost in his cloudy world of digital recording, loops, electronics and multi-tracked overdubs, simply enjoying the waves of minimal sound for their own sensual pleasures. But his seventeen minute rendition of ‘The Carnival’ by John Duncan is strong, a piercing work featuring the high-pitched whines of a piccolo flute enhanced with loops, electronics, and the laptop of Duncan himself; it’s got a good feel for the mesmerising and immersive terror that I associate with Duncan. Elsewhere, Zurria’s take on Lucier is slow and minimal, and yet not yet minimal enough; for me there’s just a little too much body and volume in the combined flutes and oscillators of ‘Almost New York’. As to Oliveros and Curran, they come out a shade too sentimental and melodic, as though Zurria were reading a bit too much meaning into the musical text. That romanticism does come in handy on the second disc though, when he applies his flutes and temple bells to performing ‘A Movement in Chrome Primitive’ by William Basinski, the New York composer who is an unabashed Pre-Raphaelite of modern composition. By this point I wondered if Zurria would have made a good addition to the Zeitkratzer Ensemble, but I think he’s just too interpretative for that. The enclosed booklet is overflowing with contextual interpolations, with detailed notes on each piece and sometimes short interviews with the collaborating composer.