Tagged: vinyl

April 21, 2013

Nada Será Como Antes

Symphony No 3: Siddharta Gautma O El Poder De La Nada (ROARTORIO ORAR 24) is a decidedly unusual and beautiful album which showcases the unique music of Nelson Gastaldi. Hearing it “blind” is enough of an experience. Something very puzzling about the recording quality. Maybe something to do with cassette tapes. Light distortion, distanced. The music is very layered, and the layers don’t quite match up. Like hearing one melodious fugue piled on top of another as if by random methods, or seeing superimposed photographs across different time zones. Swirling drones which we later learn are mostly processed sounds produced by keyboards, yet come across as clean and organic as though they were played by acoustic instruments. String sections from another dimension. Odd percussive interpolations that follow no obvious logic, yet appear as naturally into the vista as jackdaw or toucan cracking a macadamia nut while we’re listening out in the jungly wilds. Above all the persistent sense that we might be dreaming this music, making it up out of our imagination rather than hearing anything real. How many composers or musicians have aspired to creating that particular impression in their listener’s mind? Thousands, probably. Yet these three suites in this unusual symphony come close to it, patterning whatever underlying score or composition method there may be on the random logic of the unconscious mind.

We’ve got a sleeve note written by Roberto Conlazo, one of the original “unholy three” who created the Reynols madness in the 1990s. Anla Courtis was another of that trio, and he’s involved in the story too. Conlazo used to run a music school in Buenos Aires, and Nelson Gastaldi showed up there one day, leaving after a brief exchange about keyboards. Later Gastaldi met both Conlazo and Courtis by chance, and after a long talk about shared musical interests they had no hesitation in claiming this man as one of Reynols’ spiritual ancestors. Later still, they managed to interview him and have the results published in San Francisco’s Bananafish magazine, once the printed haven for far-out musical oddities of all stripe. If you like reading far-flung tales about strange visions and the power of ritual, it is certainly worth seeking out a copy of this text. Luckily it’s available on the label website. It persuades me that Gastaldi can probably be aligned with the magical-realist tradition of South American writers, like Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

One of the nuggets to spill from his mouth indicated that Gastaldi had a horror of all that was mainstream and successful in art, particularly music festivals, art galleries, and media coverage. He tended to see the dominant culture as a trap, a factory which just created “more of the same” and “parasite music”. This may account for why his own music has been kept out of the public eye for so long; perhaps he was a deliberately self-exiled Outsider. Like Charles Ives who worked in insurance for most of his life and kept unpublished scores in his desk drawer, Gastaldi worked for an electric company in Buenos Aires for most of his life. Only since his death in 2009 is the information and the music beginning to emanate out into the sphere of attention. Would he be happy about this? I’m always struck by the reaction of Henry Darger, whose secret cache of writings and artworks was discovered in his flat towards the end of his life, a revelation he was powerless to prevent. His reaction on hearing the news was one of unmitigated horror; the worst had happened.

We’d probably want to move back one or two notches from that end of the purist Outsider Art scale when accounting for Gastaldi’s music. After all, Roberto Conzalo was invited to the composer’s house and was extremely pleased to witness the bare-bones setup used by the artist to realise his music. Very basic tape recorders, cheap keyboards, some actual acoustic instruments including violin and trumpet, and lots of toys and percussion devices. It doesn’t take an expert to realise that the genius of this strange music is all in the imaginative power of the creator in this case, the resourcefulness that could make art out of almost anything; I am reminded of Joseph Cornell and his well-ordered boxes of cuttings, objects and commonplace found items that were reorganised into three-dimensional statements of profound beauty. This is one reason I always get so bored and fed up with electroacoustic music made by prize-winning composers in Canada who have expensive studios, keyboards, filters, computers and lavish effects at their disposal, yet what ends up on the grooves of their releases is boring, lifeless, academic tripe, for all its rich surface.

My own predilections in this area lead me to favour work like Gastaldi’s, which vibrates and floats with its own understated raw, uncooked energy. The work has been digitally restored from the composer’s home tapes, which makes me wonder if the wobbly tremor effects are part of the intended work or part of the restoration process. Either way they work beautifully. Lastly we have the title which may or may not be referring to Siddhartha, the 1922 novel by Herman Hesse. I was advised to read this book when I was 16 but I found it dull and unengaging, and since then have always remained unpersuaded by tales of spiritual illumination and self-discovery. I’m more attracted to the second half of the title, El Poder De La Nada which translates as “The Power of Nothing”. While Gastaldi’s music here may have some trace elements which put one in mind of the swirling mandalas of Popol Vuh or Between, there is also a very eccentric trajectory that causes the music to meander as inexorably as a huge river, cutting its way through inhospitable turf. From February 2012 – sorry to have been so dilatory in noting this release, but I find it is still in print. Recommended.

March 29, 2013

Right Heft

Concrete and Clay

I quite like the Gobi Wow (NEVER COME ASHORE NCALP1) LP from FvRTvR, which turns out to be the duo of the American percussionist Fritz Welch with German loonoid Guido Henneböhl working a mysterious home-made electronic monstrosity. Together they conspire to leak out disjunctive additive-free homegrown noise comprising electronic bursts, mangled voices, and hammered metallism. This pair were very good together on the Demon Cycle 1-9 release as I recall, a fairly fatal mesmerising diabolic charmer from which grotesque ancient voices would ofttimes creak. Gobi Wow has the same undercurrents of nastery, but is a lot more bitty…the general debris of the sound feels like broken masonry pieces scattered about the studio floor which cannot be fitted together, not least to reconstruct a Greek ruin. Add to that the general inclination of the two players towards refusing musical convention wherever possible, in favour of twisted, slimy and spiky eruptions. These strategies cohere to result in a difficult surface listen, full of uglification and indigestibility. However, what we can admire is the stern determination of the two farming-fishermen to keep going no matter what, even if the weather be inhospitable for planting oats, and the pond yields no more bream to the bitter worms that are suspended on their two rods. We haven’t come across this degree of coarsened aesthetic anti-pleasure since Adam Bohman played with Damian Bisciglia. Rachel Lowther did the modelling clay cover. And it is a good choice of imagery for the music, which has the rough and lumpy quality of a half-worked statement of rawness, ripped from the carcass of a two-headed artist-creating golem type monster. Arrived 25th April 2012.

Something, Anything

Lovely songs by Chris Weisman on his Fresh Sip (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR074) double LP. In fact the entire set is indeed like a “fresh sip” of fruit juice packed with goody vitamins. Chris did just about everything on the album, playing all the instruments and dubbing on tasty harmony vocals, and probably acting as his own producer between takes on what I assume were these home-made recordings originally produced in 2009 in his Battleboro home. There are two “suites”, and on Yen You, many of the songs could be said to start life built on a low-key electro-pop skeleton with a simple programmed beat to keep all elements working to order, but then again each song is also a springboard for rich harmonised vocal melodies, drones, guitar solos, and quite restrained supporting melodies played on nice keyboards. So far everything and everyone is doing flip-fops, lightweight acrobatics of poppy grace. There is a refreshing absence of freakery and psychotic weirdness from each of these sweet productions. Weisman has no interest in de-producing his own songs simply to demonstrate his studio know-how or to explode the mind of the listener, although this isn’t to deny his obvious recording skills. He just likes his art to conceal art. Another strong plus factor is quite simply the limpid beauty of the young man’s singing voice; The Association would have been proud to count him as a member any day. The lyrics seem quite poetic and personal too, with oblique and private messages that have a charm and a depth which you certainly won’t fathom with just one or two spins. Looks like this will be a grower. On I Don’t Care Again there are more songs in like vein, perhaps some of them weighted slightly more in favour of the acoustic guitar and the mysterious poetry and manufactured via a slightly more ramshackle production, but no doubt all four sides are cut from the same paisley cloth. The material was originally released on cassette in 2010 on Autumn Records, something I will never see, so this vinyl rescue is quite welcome. The sleeve design is understated to say the least, and may hint at something about the creator’s impish modesty. At a time when American underground music was in danger of losing its way in an ever-increasing spiral of eccentricity and insanity, it’s refreshing to find there are still some musicians who haven’t completely forsaken the craft of pop melody and concision in songwriting. The press notes make comparisons with Todd Rundgren, which are apt. From 31 May 2012.

Jollity Farm

Songwriting skill which soars and gallops on quite another plane can be found with the Happy Jawbone Family Band from Vermont, one of those wayward and very able combos which the USA seems to be breeding and exporting with considerable skill lately (Colin L. Orchestra, Trawler Bycatch, The Bird Names, King Kong Ding Dong). The songs on this hearty and extroverted freak-party album OK Midnight, You Win (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR063) are played with swagger and confidence, like a slightly tipsy form of country and western mixed with elements of raw psychedelia and played by mutant rockabilly guitarists, all of which would be welcome enough, but the real flavour of the album is to be savoured in the voice of the lead singer. He has a thick and clotted tone with vaguely nasal undercurrents, and he seems to be using a broad tongue which he wraps around each lyrical moment like it was a chunky golden nugget he’s about to chew. You never forget a distinctive singing voice. The effect is made yet more delicious with the additions of high-range female vocal harmonies and backing vocals, which have also signed up to the general agreement agreement to partake of the juice and rollick freely in a fun-loving balmy atmosphere. This may be as close as we’ll get in our time to a reincarnation of the great Kevin Ayers. But these crazed Yankees also have a slightly menacing side when they get warmed up, chanting and declaiming with emphatic mania like some militant hillbillies practising their war chants. Not every one of these melodies may be a memorable one, but when this group find the right couplet of dementia to savour, they’ll hammer it into your forehead with a six-inch nail. Beautifully recorded with a solid and punchy presence. I don’t really know who to credit with what in this loopy collective, although names are supplied on the insert, nor can I tell you what any of the songs mean. You don’t learn them with your brain, so much as feel them in the belly. All this issued under the wraps of cover art which proposes a mutant birth double-horse running every which way, and an insert textured with coarse animal hair.

This Heat

From same label we also have Cold / Burn (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR069), which is another kettle of bones and a return to the juddering noise-drone collective music thing we all love so well. It features Anla Courtis, Okkyung Lee, C. Spencer Yeh and Jon Wesseltoft, with Lasse Marhaug behind the controls – a major meeting of minds which I don’t expect will happen again any time soon. The album is two side-long improvisations made using violin, harmonium, cello and electric guitar, and oodles of instinctive inspiration. It’s one of those miracles of performed music where the finished product is full of paradox – a single wodge of monotonous sound, yet alive with teeming detail; staying firmly on one root note yet also allowing a million and one diversions to wriggle freely across wild scales and tonalities. What I also like is the slightly untidy quality of the playing, where no-one is paying attention to the strictures of performed improvisation, a genre which can have its own set of rigid rules. Nor do they hew to the self-imposed puritanism which can sometimes bedevil those who try to emulate the music of Terry Riley or La Monte Young. My hero on two legs is C. Spencer Yeh, the Bronze God from Brooklyn, who is supplying a good deal of the energy on these sides; when his bowing arm is coiled and unsprung he can piston back and forth continuously for as long as it take a dynasty in China to rise and fall. And any time Courtis steps into a studio or simply enters a room full of listeners, you can expect that room to become charged with his magical-realist visions as he spins his unlikely yarns of metaphysical heroism. Norwegian Wesseltoft, who also adds shruti box and organ to the droning churn, produced a memorable cassette called Singing Cobra Ecstasy for our ears in 2009, and here he just keeps up with a steady shimmering drone long beyond the point of normalcy or sanity would expect. Korean cellist Lee is that fragile genius who won us over with her understated work on the Anicca LP for Dancing Wayang. Besides gender balance in a group, it’s arguably important to get a good balance of acoustic and electric instruments, which may be which this session scores such a direct hit on certain nerval synapses and brainial cord-crakes. You gotta swallow the whole thing like a horse pill the size of a hockey puck to get full effect, and submerge both feet in the rich organic dronery which knows no boundaries, showing how the power of massed imaginative energy in a mutually respecting improv context can knock formal composition hollow, when the parameters are just right. Excellent. From 27th February 2012.

February 2, 2013

Two vinyl vigorators

Shattered Like a Glass Goblin

Who’d a thunk it…a new item from The New Blockaders that is actually a new recording. Gotta admit for a while it felt to me like the venerable Mr Rupenus was intent on reissuing his back catalogue in multiple formats and combinations, until we finally got the point. The reissue programme resulted in beautiful tangible products for sure, but for the listener it was also akin to receiving the same hammer blow to the forehead several times. After a few months of that kinda treatment, one wonders whether it’s time to change your hardware supplier. Of course that ain’t being fair to Richard R., as he has also been participating in split projects, ad-hoc teamups ¹, and collaborative remix jobs a-plenty, all to the betterment and expansion of the fundamental New Blockaders aim of promoting nihilism and despair through noise. In April 2012 we received this nice vinyl copy of Schadenklang (HYPNAGOGIA GOG03), an item recorded in 2012 at the famed location of Morden Tower in Newcastle (famed because it was also the site of the earliest TNB events and recordings). Rupenus is part of an energetic triumvirate, a trio if you will, with Messrs Michael Gillham and Hal Hutchinson flailing at the master’s side with notched axe and steel mace. Gillham from Middlesborough is a young battle-scarred foot soldier of the noise wars, who has seen many campaigns performing in assorted punkified noise-rock and improvising contexts, while Hutchinson crawls forth from a more vicious strain of the genre as I would guess it, since virtually all of his past projects and aliases refer to violence, death and killing in some way ². Given such credentials, these two would seem to be ideal contributors to the New Blockaders project. This particular vinyl two-parter is certainly characterised by a perfect rendition of what I would term Rupenus’s “Garden Shed from Hell” approach – pieces of twisted metal creating shrieking noises, rubble and glass being smashed up, and mechanical saws wreaking senseless havoc. While there is plenty of formlessness abounding, in many ways one of the Rupenus trademarks, there is also perhaps surprisingly some near-musical content almost emerging from the hideous wreckage and motorway pile-up that is taking place in slow motion. Such meagre beauty as there is has to struggle to survive though, much like a withered rose being buried under eighteen tons of solid concrete. This manifestation of TNB might not have quite the same ferocious push and forceful energy of earlier incarnations, but it does have the resigned and weary pallor of gloom in the “playing”, as though the execution of the noise were simply a rather tedious and unpleasant chore that had to be undertaken before dawn, like moving gigantic rocks from one side of the cell to the other. Issued with Rupenus artwork where once again he defiles and effaces a generalised image of European classical-enlightenment supposed perfection, juxtaposing it with paint-splatter process art in fecal colours, scuffed steel plates, sandpapery surfaces, and attacking any recognisable imagery with harsh stabbing marks. The back cover restates fiery statements, such as “We are the creators that destroy”, from the original 1982 manifesto.

The Corpse Grinders

The Basque agit-prop malcontent Mattin is another extreme noisester and like Rupenus refuses to give up, stating and restating his strident messages. Some of his anti-capitalist polemic has found its way onto the lyrics of Exquisite Corpse (OZONOKIDS OZKDS 017, AZUL DISCOGRAFICA AZD08, W.M.O./r 40), which is almost an album of sloganeering rock songs; one favourite snippet of wordage poses the conundrum “Attali advises Sarkozy / noise politics?” But the politics are only a small part of this unusual record. The main point of interest is the extremely spontaneous methodology used to create the record, which relied heavily on single-takes, sight-unseen readings of lyrics, a recording engineer who couldn’t wait to start the tape rolling, and a very laissez-faire mixing-editing technique. Mattin instigated these events, bringing in the talents of drummer Loy Fankbonner, bassist Margarida Garcia, and guitarist / pianist Kevin Failure. Keen to elicit an almost “absolute” degree of spontaneity, Mattin did not prescribe what instruments they should play nor how they should perform ³, and only supplied minimal information regarding the song content. They players were not allowed to hear each other, or the lyrics, in their headphones, and when all was finished (it was recorded in a single night) Mattin just threw the takes together on his computer with scant regard for “matching” tracks, a smooth production, or indeed creating a coherent musical statement of any sort. Through this process, he says, he expects the “exquisite corpse to vomit the new wine”. But he also regards improvisation as demanding a heavy commitment, and is clearly attracted to the idea that there is “no way back” once the statement is made. In that light, this record represents a somewhat more drastic enactment of that technique, where the stakes are very high and no quarter is given for self-congratulation, retakes, rehearsals, overdubs, or any of that namby-pamby stuff that other musicians do in the studio. I know that Frank Zappa occasionally made recordings where he would match up unrelated solos and other instrumental parts (he, or somebody, called it “xenochrony”), but Zappa was still pursuing some form of aesthetic beauty, which Mattin quite clearly is not. Rather, I suspect Mattin intends to lay bare the very process of making records in the same way he likes to expose mechanisms of thought and the inner workings of political practice in all areas of the great human machine. You could also regard this LP as adhering to the punk rock or post-punk ideals of one-take honesty and spontaneity, but that’s probably way off the mark too. I’d imagine that many punk bands did their songs in one take for economic reasons – they couldn’t afford to purchase any more studio time. At any rate, Mattin’s bold experiment catches fire in places on this record, which is chaotic, obnoxious, broken, disjunctive and verging on the unlistenable – but it is also fiery and spontaneous, a living thing of raw pulsating energies, and teeming with a life which has emphatically not been deadened or diluted in the studio process. I suppose we can all learn something from that. However, Mattin chose his collaborators wisely; I suspect there aren’t many musicians who’d be prepared to go along with an experiment as radical as this, and some might even regard it as a rather forced freedom, like being told you can do whatever you like at the point of a gun. The entire exercise is interleaved with fine art references; the “exquisite corpse” itself came from the Surrealists, and there’s a situationist slogan “Detourn Yourself!” scrawled on the cover, which is also littered with typewritten and scrawled texts from the lyrics, mixed up and tilted every which way, as if attempting to rekindle the power of a Futurist Words-in-Freedom page or the front cover of any given Dadaist journal. From 7th November 2011.

His meetings with Blue Sabbath Black Cheer were particularly hot conflagrations. ↩
For example Meatgrinder, Killed, Killer Department, and Threaten to Kill. ↩
“I hate other people telling me what to play,” he snarls on the back cover. ↩

January 20, 2013

Two Vinyl Voustpaches

Now Return Us To Normal

After his band Shockabilly broke up Eugene Chadbourne was slightly soured by the experience of playing in a trio, and pursued his solo career only electing to work with other bands in sporadic fashion, recording albums of songs where he would be backed up by a band whose music he liked. In this manner he recorded with various eccentric and underground US bands – Sun City Girls, Violent Femmes, Camper Van Beethoven, and Evan Johns and The H-Bombs. This tradition perhaps continues on his new LP Zupa Dupa Kupa (MONOTYPE RECORDS MONOLP007) with The Dropouts, a team of rampant madmen with wacky aliases who spurt out the sort of messy and enthused rock mayhem which frames his songs so admirably. On the more unhinged songs like ‘Forgiven’ and ‘Hendrix Buried In Tacoma’, everyone is clearly in their element and glorious chaos set to a primal beat is the sweaty result. Chadbourne also exhibits his familiarity with multiple musical styles, bringing in the familiar elements and stylistic plunderings from C&W, bluegrass, rockabilly and jazz (often within the same song) to flavour up the broth. The album begins and ends with two folky banjo and vocal solo spots which are quite touching, with their poignant lyrics, but also unsettling with their dotty images.

Which seems a good moment to mention the lyrical content. Chadbourne has always admired the honesty and political integrity of Phil Ochs, and since the 1980s he has yawped out barbed political satire in the form of zany and frantic songs. Natch, he had a field day under the Reagan and Bush administrations, and on the present LP he even revives his old song ‘Sword & Shield’ from that period (it was a swipe at the Strategic Defense Initiative). But the events of the last ten years have given him plenty of ammunition for this album, and while he continues to fire his darts at the usual targets such as the White House or the industrial-military complex, there’s also a few digs at the iniquities of the financial ruin that has been ravaging the world since the banking and mortgage scandals brought about collapse on a global scale. In ‘Bird Song’ he likens society’s modern enemies to various sorts of unpleasant avians – greedy, hypocritical, and scavenging, and identifies many new virulent strains of evil yuppies. These creatures walk among us, Chadders warns us, and they are evolving in cunning ways. Then there’s ‘Pod’, which is the best song on the album, finding a brilliant metaphor for the ways in which we all try to cushion ourselves from reality these days, expanding the comfort zone until we never have to deal with anything difficult again, whether it’s by hiding from society on Facebook or shutting out the ugly noise of humanity through our iPod earplugs. Or by making silly amounts of money through casino banking, more than a human being could possibly spend in ten lifetimes. No-one in society is safe from Chadbourne’s barbs on ‘Pod’ as he raps out his shopping-list in the manner of a young Bob Dylan, and the church and the politicians are the first to be lined up in the sights of his airgun.

Plus there are other comical songs which verge on the surreal with their baffling themes, especially ‘The Dentist’ and ‘The Devil on the Radio’, a demented horror-movie song about CB radio sung in his spoof Nashville style. Not only that but we have Chadbourne’s madcap singing voice which is still as cracked as ever, injecting additional laughing gas into the stream of events. And if you just like super-fast guitar runs packed with reverb and oomph then the Euge zips through the history of American guitar-picking like a hot rodder zonked on acid and bourbon, though I must admit I stole that last metaphor from an old NME review. It often gets overlooked in the steamy excitement of his jumbled records, but Dr Chadbourne can read sheet music and has transcribed complex be-bop jazz solos into scores for the guitar. He’d have been a session player deluxe in the 1960s, the cream of the Wrecking Crew. Lastly there is the sleeve’s anarchic cover art featuring his collage and doodles technique which has stood him in good stead for about 30 years. The last bit of the mystery is why this wackeroo got released on the Polish art label Monotype Rec. Maybe they, or someone, needs to start reissuing his old cassette tapes from the 1980s, which were quite numerous and apparently notorious for their terrible sound quality. Who could resist?

Lying Snowblind In The Sun

Now for something from Winds Measure Recordings. There’s an art label if ever there was. Though I start out daunted by their blank covers and severe process-based art music, I always end up loving all of their ultra-minimal releases without really understanding why. For some reason they often make me feel like I’m trapped in the snow, or make me want to reach for snow-related metaphors from my big book of writing techniques. It so happens that today is pretty snowy in London, as I write. It might be the way that any given WMR release sounds like radio waves emitting from a tiny shack in the middle of an Arctic waste. Or that one of their obscure sonic scientists has attempted to document the sound of a snowflake falling, for reasons that remain obscure. Or they have somehow turned the microscopic crystalline form of a snowflake into data which we can hear replayed over an advanced form of media player. Well, I’m certainly in my element with this new vinyl LP (WINDS MEASURE RECORDINGS 25) from the label. They have done vinyl singles but this might be their first 12 inch LP. It’s pressed in white vinyl, the colour of snow. It’s a split between Will Montgomery, who is actually a snowman, and Robert Curgenven, who once saw a picture of some snow on a field in an art gallery. The side by “Monty” is pretty compelling, an industrial vision from South London using a radio receiver and a coiled piece of wire acting like a spirit-communication telephone device. He calls it ‘Heygate’. The whole thing might be a clever combination of radio waves and field recordings. I have the sense of machinery failing to function, but failing on a grand scale, like a large-scale refrigerator unit going wrong in a large meat-packing plant and causing all the sides of beef to spoil. There are also episodic bursts of static noise which are quite good. They are liked failed distress messages from the lonely radio, a device which warms up and then cools down again as the skipper tries another frequency, then turns it off in disgust. And some other events too which can’t really be described. Now and again “Monters” manages to tune or detune his solid feedback hums into a sound which could almost be identified as a root chord, which is counterbalanced by another chord, but then the music which is almost forming is bent back to the main path, which is the generation of pure sound and abstraction. If there was editing going on here, he’s been ingenious at concealing his steps. But that’s the way snowmen work.

Robert Curgenven made Silent Landscapes in 2008 using field recordings from Australia. His side is I suppose slightly more musical than the flip, to the extent that a very sweet and dreamlike electronic drone persists through most of its 20 minutes. It vacillates a little, and may not actually rest on a single note, but it has vibratory powers that can soothe away the headache from a grumpy old sea-lion. The quality of this tone is also incredibly pure. It has the clean signal that most radio engineers and studio producers have spent their entire careers trying to replicate. As Curgenven’s ‘Looking for Narratives On Small Islands’ continues its floaty and drifty voyage through space and time, hovering above the earth like a time travel bubble, then other textures and field recordings pass by the barometer and scanning units, building up a minimalist frieze of events which is inscribed on the vinyl canvas. You notice how the word “frieze” sounds like “freeze”. That is completely intentional and convinces me this music will make a perfect accompaniment to a walk in the park next to my frozen pond. This is a crackly, crunchy and tone floating masterpiece of slowness and stillness produced by superficially non-artistic, process-heavy means. It’s something to do with guitar feedback, binaural microphones, field recordings from around the world, and industrial fans. And something called the transparence dubplate. Maybe it’s this engine that produces the stuck-record effect, the crackle of old vinyl which bubbles in now and again. As ever with this label, a very thoughtful presentation in the design, an all-white letterpress cover with odd abstract shapes embossed in blind, plus obi and insert. A great one from March 2012.

January 14, 2013

Four Vinyl Vamaritans

The Bunwinkies LP Maps Of Our New Constellations (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR062) is a collection of acoustic songs from these fey American types who play plenty of acoustic guitars and sing, adding many pleasing instrumental touches from the piano, slide guitar, autoharp, melodica. They are particularly good with the percussion which ornaments in spare and original ways. So far we have like a model version of a country and western backing band, only reduced and updated for the no-nonsense 21st century. But there is also the strong singing voice of Beverly Ketch put to the fore, a voice which once it’s heard will bring a ray of sunshine to every tear duct. Her lyrics are about flowers, colours, life, skies, countryside, the weather, the seasons, the grass and the trees, and such. Mainly about the joys of looking at beautiful things and what we can learn about life thereby. Only a miserable bitterling could complain about that. Another telling song on side one is celebrating the values of the family and the simple country life, as opposed to being ruled by the tyranny of the clock and working for another man, presumably in the city with a huge pocket watch strapped to the back. This is sung by one of the male Bunwinkies. Apparently they like to project the idea of a rural family ¹, even if the band members aren’t all quite related. The production is direct and clear. I like the very simple and plain arrangements – nothing is “hidden” or occluded under studio cloaks, and all the plain instrumental technique is there on full display. Pieces of homespun furniture might adorn the living room of this rural family if we ever visited. If carping, I might say their tunes are not especially original or memorable, and often the singers (the men in the band also vocalise) default to rather obvious melody lines which are already implied in their chord changes. But it’s still a jolly and assured sound they sing out with as they swagger and swing along the country road, without any free-form burbling or off-key nonsense that has oft-times been associated with lesser entries in the “free folk” genre. The album is a pleasant piece of non-weird Americana. From December 2011.

The Ship Chop LP (DEKORDER 059) is edited by Daniel Padden, the talented and visionary Glasgow composer who is also known as a member of Volcano The Bear. His Pause For The Jet LP for this label remains a fave in these quarters. This newie is a cut-up special, the result of a pro-active guerrilla raid on a record collection, perhaps his own, of ethnographic recordings. Apparently when he started his labours, he began keeping careful notes of sources, dates, countries, and other salient details that fell into his sampling sack, and then found that the work he produced was taking on a life of its own, at which point he decided the notes became superfluous. Or at any rate they were a degree of administrative detail which hampered the creative process. I take this to mean that he started out with an interest in significant geographical connections between the history of indigenous music, and then grew more interested in creating these exciting and weird collages that are a law unto themselves, coiled with an internal logic that only a Padden can explain. The results burned onto the vinyl are certainly rich in content. At any given time across these 11 tracks we could hear recordings from “at least three different countries”. Samples, snatches, loops, overlays, cut-ups, and multi-layered playbacks are among the techniques used to create this impossible fantasy of world history, expressed in tongue, foot, hand and arm. A great deal of ingenuity has been used in building these musical juxtapositions. Melody lines from weird bagpipes and horns, vocalists intoning in foreign or lost tongues, and invented rhythm patterns made perhaps from gamelan and drum samples. Unlike Ghédalia Tazartès say who would make it his mission to use ethnographic music history to terrify us with its strangeness, Padden takes a more approachable view and arrives at a sort of latterday Exotica concoction, applying the mannerisms and stylings of Martin Denny and Les Baxter as he boils and fricassees the record collection in the hard drive. He completes the assemblage (and emphasises the artifice of it all) by adding wonderfully contrived fragmented titles, some of which read like lost counsels from the writings of a wise Chinese philosopher, while some of them are just shopping lists of objects which might feasibly have been found in 1930s Africa, Peru or Thailand. Arrived November 2011.

Unusual and striking experiments in song form called Always Already (ASH INTERNATIONAL ASH 10.1) by Purity Supreme. I like the way the package presents a stern countenance explaining very little, assuming that we all know the parties involved; already the release feels like an odd riddle. Two songs on the A side. The main attraction to the listener is the singing-intoning voice of the lead ~~fellow~~ singer, who may or may not be the French half of the act. Cracked and dusty ~~his~~ their vocal cords be, whether through mannered device or naturally desiccated, trying to convey the effect of a dissolute and broken ~~man~~ person. Just right for followers of Wm Burroughs we might think, but this sort of prose-speak-sing also shades into areas once occupied by Nick Cave or Michael Gira, as does the lugubrious and dense content. The lyrics are highly ambiguous, even when they seem straight to the point and use plain English at all times. I like to hear multiple repetitions of slightly mysterious phrases in songs and Purity Supreme does this trick very well. The first song keeps saying “It’s Nice To See You”, when the mood of the singer and indeed the music itself is expressing the exact opposite of that sentiment, and it’s a song that wishes we would just go home and stay there. Angst-ridden steel strings and a relentless drum pattern make this snarky item a vicious twin brother to Leonard Cohen’s later works. The second song is slightly more recognisable as something a weary Lou Reed might have recorded at any time between 1975 and 1988, and with its basic guitar and drum sound could almost pass for any decent slab of indie art-rock music. On the flip, even more words and more repetitions in the two remaining songs. So many words, these songs are more like recited poems or short stories really, very much like a slightly nastier Tom Waits or what we might hear if Charles Bukowski turned his throaty husk to song. Indeed the words are privileged by appearing in full on the front cover. And there’s a very strong cinematic component too, with vivid film noir images somehow encoded in the very sound of the record. Narrators alluding to scenes unknown, to backstories we cannot know, and delivered with a snarling curl to the lip at all times. The creators here are the French musician Christophe Van Huffel, and the American writer-composer Leslie Winer. Quite unusual, muscular, and opaque music from these offbeat modern beatniks.

[Updated above review 16/01/2013: I think I got genders wrong and misidentified performers.]

Big Shadow Montana (HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY HMS020) is a rich abstract droner from BJ Nilsen teaming up with Stilluppsteypa. As electronic ambient mood music goes this is surprisingly rich and full of hidden information. A lot of hidden layers are buried in its vaguely shifting masses of treated sound, and odd segments bob to the surface until we can make out their shapes in the cauldron, at which point they vanish below again. Heavenly choirs, church organ, opera singers, and even some sitars are among these semi-occluded elements. The record even manages to morph into some musical passages now and again, rather than simply meandering around the textured fields of digital linoleum in padded Turkish slippers. To yield these results, much judicious selection and assembly of sources would have been a requisite discipline, methinks. A great deal of time spent by the creators listening and editing. Nilsen is very good at bringing a multitude of field recordings and samples together into a small space and somehow getting them to tell a story, in very loose terms. This one is like a psychedelic sleep-walk episode through a dayglo Tibetan landscape. It is divided up into subtle little episodes, and moves forward on its sluggish feet from one ambiguous stepping stone to the next. Lots of keyboards in evidence, in case I didn’t mention that. And a knack for breaking into a little pop melody when you least expect it. Arrived here 16 February 2012.

For other examples, perhaps see The Grateful Dead and the verso of their Aoxomoxoa LP cover; and Quicksilver Messenger Service, with their outlaw ranchhouse lifestyle. ↩

December 15, 2012

Deliberate Mistakes

Home Service

The latest entry in the Vernon & Burns catalogue sees this Glasgow duo teaming up with Lied Music, the duo of Luke Fowler and John W. Fail. Lost Lake (SHADAZZ SHA.11) is one of the stranger and darker emissions from these talented creatives, particularly if you care to compare it with the sometimes more playful assemblages of V&B, or the deliciously offbeat melodic avant-pop tunes created by Fowler as part of Rude Pravo. At first spin the record is a near-bewildering toasted-cheese sandwich, a concoction which contains at least a zillion ideas apparently thrown together any which way. Faced with such an array, discerning avant-LP listeners may want to reach for The Faust Tapes as one touchstone, but another credible precedent is the unearthly Bladder Flask LP ¹, that ne plus ultra of cut-up sound art put together by a teenaged Richard Rupenus as if possessed by some fevered desire to surpass the worst excesses of the lunatic fringe end of the United Dairies catalogue. But the Bladder Flask release had the underlying sinister aim of sending all those who heard it mad, through highlighting the complete absurdity and futility of everything. Lost Lake has a more benign mission, thankfully. The album has been very carefully crafted, using sets of recorded improvisation sessions produced by the four players, aiming to resculpt the near-chaos of that source material into a coherent structure. Within that structure, fractured songs and equally fractured stories emerge; yes, a scrambled form of a radio listening or cinematic experience, which is an effect Vernon & Burns have striven for with a good deal of their work (and have produced many items expressly in radiophonic mode). As to the cinematic, Fowler is also a film-maker. There is a logic to this scheme, but it is hard to follow and weaves its way around in a highly secretive and intuitive fashion, like an errant underground stream full of eccentric fish and darting river-insects stained in unnatural colours. We could account for some of this quirkiness by pointing out that all four creators were involved in the refashioning process, rather than a single editorial hand behind the editing knife; one can imagine the clashing dynamism generated by four powerful personalities, each of them bending the path of events in their favour. Additionally, the source material itself was not exactly straightforward music to begin with, but created using the now-virtually-standard set-up of the modern improviser, that is amplified instruments, toys, found tapes, field recordings, and live electronics. From this rich stew, voices and tunes emerge from amid a varispeeded and highly layered humid aggregation of extremely strange sounds. And yes, like the Rupenus LP, it is quite absurdist, but I like to think it’s a fun and cartoony absurdity, rather than bleak and Beckett-like. That said, this aural bric-a-brac crawls out from a dark attic of the mind, and is as much an unsettling listen as it is entertaining. Corin Sworn’s cover art encodes all the above information quite perfectly. Using collage technique (naturally), it depicts a figure sitting on a sofa surrounded by hideously “tasteful” drapes and furnishings. This image of bourgeois normality is thoroughly disrupted by replacing the outline of the figure with fragments of urban horror and machinery, then further scrambling the visual schema with concentric rings and diagonal bars, suggesting the power of the aural emanations on the record. The album is, we are told, a sequel to a 2006 release called Lied Music vs Boy-Band Tax Returns, which we reviewed in our Vinyl Viands issue.

Pedal to the Metal

A promising experiment in steam-driven innovation is the one-sided 12-incher by DJ Mistakes (PHASE! RECORDS PHR-81). The two creators are Casey Farnum and Elliot Hess, who built a complex apparatus allowing them to power their turntables using bicycles; the cover art and the enclosed drawing, as if torn from the pages of the English comic illustrator Rowland Emmett, give some indication of the set-up and its concomitant paraphernalia. These drawings also reminded me of the sketches Hans Reichel used to include on his early FMP albums (e.g. Bonobo Beach), indicating how he assembled his own hand-built guitars. On the record, we actually hear live recordings of the infernal machine, made in Brooklyn in 2006-07 and also using gongs, microphones, a mixing desk, and of course records on the turntables. The artists may be slightly poking fun at the conventions of DJ culture, but also intend to put more spontaneity back into the artform, and they hark backwards to the time of the hand-cranked Victrola, harbouring a certain intellectual nostalgia for an undefined early modern period when “gears and bicycles were the stuff of aural and physical revolutions”. If I were a writer of the Ken Hollings school, no doubt I could bring forward numerous references to the place of the bicycle at key political moments of the Russian revolution, the First World War, or in the films of Eisenstein, thus making ingenious connections across political and cultural history. Farnum and Hess may even be attempting to begin that undertaking with their front cover collage, which although let down by rather murky printing, does suggest a darkened industrial landscape where the bicycle wheel on the horizon resembles part of a mining operation, and the two men in old-fashioned suits have their heads replaced, John Heartfield style, with objects which I assume are bicycle seats. Unfortunately, the record itself doesn’t live up to much of this promise, and is merely odd and amusing where it could be radical and wild. Some unusual moments can be heard, but it is mostly a lot of wobbliness and speed variations, which is pretty much what you’d expect. This arrived around June 2011.

The Charred Rise

The double LP Atonal Hypermnesia (MEGATON MASS PRDUCTS PIKADON002LP) by French avant-metallists P.H.O.B.O.S. is their third release and arrived here in June 2012. We last noted them in 2009 with their album Anœdipal, and this new release provides an even more remorseless manifestation of their craft. They began life in 2000 using the “conventional” four-piece set up of guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, and vocals, but from the start their driving mission has been to create a degree of sonic intensity that transcends the conventions of the many generic labels that are flung in their direction, including Black Metal, doom, stoner, sludge, noise, industrial, etc. As a matter of fact the principal creators are proud of their “maximal” approach to amplified noise, which while it may use a lot of churning, droning effects is arguably more “eventful” than any given release from the Sunn O))) school of imitators. They also aim to structure their tunes, rather than merely reverberating their Marshalls into infinity. Stefan Thanneur once again provides the cover artworks, but where the Anœdipal record made provocative use of religious icons, the keynote this time is heavy abstraction, a restricted colour range which allows only black (lots of it) and silver, and an allusion in the direction of geological formations, intended to suggest this is music that causes earthquakes or was engendered inside the crater of a volcano. As a listen, it’s very heavy going; treated guitars, much studio fog and choking drone effects, solemn vocal grunts, and relentless hammer-blow drums throughout. In fact I can’t stress enough how inescapable these drum beats are. They strike their way into the very fabric of the music like geologists’ mallets, and serve mainly to illuminate how trapped we are by the cavernous walls of this extreme sound. These drums make the entire sonic environment sound hollow, and start to make me feel hollow inside too. As to the guitar and electronics (if indeed that’s what we hear), they produce endless, clotted clumps of noise, and to endure them is like eating lumps of burnt coal or solidified nuclear waste. Certainly this is very well-crafted music and is quite some way removed from the more primitive end of Black Metal (e.g. Striborg, Bone Awl, and Beherit), and the elaborate titles such as ‘Solar Defrag’ or ‘Necromegalopolis of Coprolites’ point to a strongly intellectual influence on the work, adding additional layers of context to what is already an extremely dense statement.

One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling, originally released in 1981 on Orgel Fesper Music. ↩

December 9, 2012

Two Vinyl Voltaggios

Colour Field

Texas musician Rick Reed is here with a sumptuous double LP called The Way Things Go (ELEVATOR BATH eeaoa035). I am ashamed to say we have had this in the vinyl waiting list since May 2011, if the release date is anything to go by. Reed is a composer who layers his tones using tone generators, synths, and radio waves, and believes in long-form duration to achieve his aims. There are only six tracks across this 83-minute double package, which gives you some idea of his sense of scale. Each work is an enormous abstract expressionist painting, with dramatic timbral shifts taking place across unexpected and subtle turns. Reed is not one of those near-silent mysterious droners, either; he gives you a lot to listen to, a lot to digest, and as well as thinking big, he also believes in making it loud. For full appreciation of these solid and very very continuous electronic drones, turn up amplifier loud and prepare to float in a colourful and intense atmosphere that has no end in sight. At least three titles give us a clue to the Rick Reed aesthetic: ‘Mesmerism’ is the effect he intends to have on your psyche, lulling you into a trance with his throbbing tones; ‘In a hazy field of gray and green’ is the precise visual analogue we need to understand the contours of this near-shapeless music, and through naming colours he suggests its rich tonal effects (unlike some droners, Reed does not neglect the root note); and ‘Celestial Mudpie’ indicates the more spiritual claims to his music, promising a heavenly experience to the listener, while at the same time admitting it’s not so grandiose, and he might not be much more than a kid in a sandbox making mudpies. I should stress that “muddiness” is not one of his characteristics though, and this heavy sound has been so well realised, recorded and pressed that when spun it passes on the complete desired punch, groove for groove, in highly vivid manner. Reed did the cover paintings too. The label is still puzzled why Rick Reed is not better known as a composer, and it’s true he does have enough droney capacity here to outlast any of his English counterparts – e.g. Colin Potter, Nurse With Wound, Mirror – who continue to receive many plaudits.

Expecting To Fly

A truly uncategorisable item is Come Ho Imparato A Volare (CORVO RECORDS CORE 002) by the Italian artiste Ezramo. This is evocative, lyrical art, created by a very gifted miniaturist. In just six short tracks we hear a bewildering variety of musical and sound-art techniques, all in the service of Ezramo’s peculiar minimal-poetry lyrics; she sings, plays piano, zither, harp and bells, and also collages field recordings. She also produced the drawings and texts for the whole sleeve. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that this gifted woman is primarily a gallery artist, who assisted at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and that this LP has its origins in an exhibition of the same name which was shown in 2009. In the two years following her Stuttgart success, she developed this music which I suppose (not having seen the exhibition) might be an aural rendition or re-casting of the same themes. She is interested in insects and larvae, as is Irene Moon but in a quite different way, and she intends to explore the idea of “transformation”. All the album’s titles refer to this concept, either obliquely or directly, and if you think the image of being wrapped in a cocoon is going to depict a comforting interpretation of human existence, quite the opposite. It’s fairly clear that the entire experience of “How I Learned To Fly” is sad, painful, uncertain, and even racked with torment. Despite moments of respite implied by the romantic piano fugues, the core of the work is quite insistent on these raw emotions, many of which are clearly very hard to express. I welcome this degree of honesty and truth in art, which is very rare. The printed text inside just sings to us about the painful primacy of existence, and our responsibility as human beings: “Wake up!! It’s not a dream…this is your resurrection, your gothic metallic electronical freakin pathetical southern bloody blooming resurrection”. It’s also evident that the gifted Ezramo, whose real name is Alessandra Eramo, knows exactly what effect / meaning / substance she is aiming for with each note she creates; not a single wasted moment across the entire LP, which is compact and accurate as a jet of ice cold water between the eyes. I also welcome this sort of discipline and economy in art. As to what it sounds like, besides the piano music episodes, there are two or three abstract tracks of intense hissing sounds which deliver all the tension and fear implied above; there are overdubbed vocals chanting absurdist la-la tunes in a stark manner; and an opening track that is an expressive metallic rattling episode, highly reminiscent of Ashley Paul’s music. The LP ends with a collage of sound effects and field recordings that seems to depict a dramatic and near-nightmarish Cinderella story – footsteps running, voices muttering, something going badly wrong at a concert with choral music and brass music. 300 hand-numbered copies of the “trade” edition, and 50 art edition copies which were inlaid with original drawings by the artist. Released in March 2012, this is one of the most beautiful records (aurally and visually) I have received this year.

November 14, 2012

Refracted Light

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

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

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

October 29, 2012

101 Silhouette Strings

This Andrew Pekler LP is a decent collection of “intelligent” electronica music, by which I mean he pays close attention to odd dynamics, unusual filters, amorphous shapes and the production of pleasing sounds; there may or may not be a melody attempting to escape the cloying embrace of these downy, pillow-like eruptions of fluff and marshmallow. So amorphous indeed are his tunes that they seem to drape themselves around the room like deflated Andy Warhol silver balloons. But Sentimental Favourites (DEKORDER 061) also comes wrapped up in a heap of contextualising baggage; it’s a pastiche of 1960s-1970s easy-listening music, and the innocent-seeming digital melodies just drip with longing and nostalgia for a time of lost innocence and mainstream appeal. The sleeve art joins in with the game; the front cover is a collage of tasteful romantic advertising images (sunsets, flowers, countryside, candles), while the back cover lampoons the sort of trite and gushy sleeve notes we might have found on any given LP by Henry Mancini or Les Baxter. The track titles are carefully-composed hybrids of corny old standards; to read the listing is like chancing across a Carpenters LP that never was. There are even printed images of two faked LPs supposedly released in the series, and each tune refers to a non-existent movie or Hollywood production by an equally fictional production company. It lacks but a “Living Stereo” banner across the top of the cover to complete the effect. The final touch is that a limited number of the print run were housed in “salvaged” LP covers from second-hand shops, repurposed and redesigned to complete this audio handshake with the past.

Many there be who have tried to pay homage to, or cruelly satirise, this harmless form of music; Nurse With Wound has made ingeniously snide cutups from such LPs, People Like Us has continued that tradition in even more voluminous terms, and before them many artistes in the LA Free Music Society were extolling the virtues of Arthur Lyman, Esquivel and the charity shop rummage long before it became fashionable. Others, like P Miles Bryson who made Megalomaniac Decorator’s Quarterly for the Illegal Art label, have détourned easy listening music to such a degree that it becomes a weapon trained against the bourgeoisie, music rebelling against the very audiences it was originally made for. Pekler isn’t quite a member of any of these camps, and has worked hard on this LP to avoid even the slightest hint of irony. Instead he intends to fuse and meld his own style of electronica music directly with this “abandoned genre” of music as he would have it, and makes the record as charming and user-friendly as he possibly can. He wants to take back “mood music” and “sentiment” back from those cynical entrepreneurs who hijacked these things purely for the sake of record sales, and give them back to us in a more genuine, credible form. This Russian-born composer living in Berlin has some slippery ideas; we noted his Entanglements in the Orthopedic Sensorium LP from 2009 in issue 19 of the magazine, and that was further evidence of his deflective skill behind a mixing desk, resulting in a record that kept you guessing at every turn. One strategy in this instance has been to segue each piece with sumptuous recordings of rainfall, a fireside hearth, ocean waves, birdsong, owl hoots, and so forth; a kind of aesthetic reclaiming of the most absurd and banal cliches, replayed in the service of his eccentric minimalist drones and loops. Another strategy is one which I’d never thought anyone would dare try again, and that’s the addition of faked vinyl crackle over certain tracks, especially on side one. In many other hands, all of this would have resulted in a candy mountain of pure kitsch. Pekler somehow pulls it off, and manages to have his cake and eat it.

October 28, 2012

Three Vinyl Veclarates

The Pit and The Pendulum

Pendulum Nisum is another Reto Mäder studio project with a sinister and gloomoid bent. This time the gifted Swiss muso-technician teams up with Mike Reber, whose principal contribution is to supply vivid sound effects to blend with the musical concoctions on this self-titled LP (HINTERZIMMER RECORDS HINT 16). Mäder himself plays a considerable number of keyboard instruments, strings, percussion, electronics and electro acoustic devices, and presides over the mix like a gourmet chef in front of an enormous kitchen table, master of the spice rack and king of the ladle. Everything is slow roasted for extra flavour and there’s a big delight in every bite. Reber adds additional synth, percussion and horn playing to the already dense mixture of layers, but as ever with the maestro Mäder the delicate balance of sounds never turns into a sludgy bowl of stale pancake batter. Given that the album opens with a very immersive rainfall sound, I thought it might be scripted to a “weathery” theme, but instead Pendulum Nisum plumps for invoking a more general tone of “uncanny atmospherics”. Albeit not so uncanny perhaps as the outright supernaturalist records Mader has also mixed and performed in his time, specifically as one half of Ural Umbo. Another suggested theme is a vaguely esoteric one, as embedded in titles such as ‘Secret Mystic Rites’ or ‘The Sacred Temple Behind the Light’. Drone music with Illuminati-type subtexts is an area which the English solo act Xela has also carved out as his own special niche, so if you’re a fan of Xela’s records, then you’re in for a grand time with this primo example of Swiss mixing board bake-off championships. One layer peels back to reveal a dozen more layers, creating infinite patterns that recede and wander backwards into the past.

Fork Out

Blood Stereo is the duo of Karen Constance and Dylan Nyoukis, an enlightened couple of geniuses who have done many great things for the continued health and betterment of the underground in this country – staging events and gigs, running the Chocolate Monk CDR label, producing incredible noise records, and mainly just meeting interesting talented people and making things happen in the culture bunker in the micro way. This social dimension has fed into the making of the LP The Larval Tuning Fork (& Other Visions) (TWISTED KNISTER KNACK 004), which comprises two-side long tape suites which use the voices of guest musicians and artists, recorded surreptitiously or otherwise at gigs or other events, and knits them into a tangled knot of sonic blather along with snippets of music, played objects, and other foreign bodies. A list of some of the unwitting participants, representing a swathe of underground geniuses from all walks of UK life, is provided in the insert. But this isn’t to suggest the record is an in-joke from within the confines of an elite circle. The construction of Larval Tuning Fork has resulted in an idiosyncratoc form of sound poetry, along the lines of the great Bob Cobbing, with vocal hints, whispers, mutterings, and semi-magical utterances carefully spliced and looped into a quiet and understated spell. The record is very suggestive of a coven of witches and warlocks, drip-feeding fragments from their secret receipts. The recording devices of Constance and Nyoukis act as Freudian seismographs, picking up dreams, jokes, wordplay, and other effluvia from certain loci of the subconscious. Parts of the record, especially those with mad cackling laughter and silly-sounding voices like a nightmarish strain of Monty Python, also have affinities with the madcap escapades of Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Baer. Besides the above, the only nearest aural neighbour would be the music of the Bohman brothers. This record is almost cut from the same cloth as the Bohmans’ shared tweed jacket, full of creaks, snores, and non-musical sighs heaved from a collective diaphragm of half-mad creators. It also sounds positively dank, as though instead of something pressed on vinyl, the object itself were made of compressed peat moss or lumps of soggy mud. To complete your brain-melt experience, we have the nutsoid collage art of Nyoukis on the back cover, and one of Karen’s beautiful paintings on the front. Her intense and colourful take on surrealism laced with violent and morbid imagery is always stunning, and as a painter she can do no wrong for me. After looking at one of her images, the real world can seem disappointing. And after 30-40 minutes spent in the company of this night-sweat unreal weirdie record, you’ll be only too willing to retreat back into the comforting world of your own dreams. Buy now…for its ability to confound common sense in the most unnoticeable ways, this record is a secret weapon.

Tape Decay

No less unreal on account of its intensely abstracted field recording approach is The Decline Effect (THE HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY HMS021). I think this double LP is the first piece of vinyl I’ve encountered from Jim Haynes, whose understated and near-mystical sound art I’ve enjoyed in CD form for many years. This format seems to suit his work quite well and serves up four examples of his craft as discrete side-long tracks, and the whole package with its photographs resembles a miniature art exhibit with four uniformly-sized canvases of minimal art. There are also some brief but useful sleeve notes. As far as I can recall Haynes has generally declined to explain in much detail how his work is made ¹, but here we have not only hints of the original source materials in two cases, but also some indicators of his methodology. In the case of the latter, the salient points seem to be (a) identifying and exploiting mistakes and faults which arise from the recording process, faulty microphones, or the decay of magnetic tape; and (b) an erratic programme of work, where the artist eschews normal continuity and executes each piece “in starts and fits”, a strategy which presumably allows the sound to build and accrete its layers naturally. It also seems to mean that a piece is never really finished, and can remanifest itself in other situations, such as ‘Ashes’ here which is evolving as the soundtrack to two avant-garde films. Further, Haynes allows the work to be derailed by “factors beyond his control”, a fate which befell ‘Cold’ on side D where what we hear is simply a rescued portion of another project which had to be abandoned. All of this says to me that Haynes and his art are as much a force of nature as the same forces of nature he is examining and attempting to render. Of course as forces go, they are not as powerful as a cataract or a hurricane or a forest fire. In fact they are rather hard to perceive – small-scale, fleeting, modest, and not even especially loud. Some of the source materials he’ll admit to on this collection are thermal vents, geysers, radio waves, and wires. To enjoy or even to half-understand this brand of minimal sound-art, you may have to relax and listen quite hard, and accept that each listen is as much a discovery for you as it was for Jim Haynes. Judging by the title there is also a degree of entropy and decay involved, as though elements of the natural and man-made world were in slow decline, and it’s now becoming a process which we can observe as it happens. Arrived 16 February 2012.

For a long time it was usually cloaked under the mysterious statement “I rust things”. ↩