Tagged: vinyl

March 8, 2014

Grün ist grau: green gets ground out on this post-industrial dystopian music travelogue

Ravi Shardja, Grün ist grau, Grautag Records, 2 x LP GTR#005 (2013)

Aye aye, Captain Shardja … green is grey according to this French improv musician who has been let loose on a bewildering variety of instruments here: electronic bass, guitar, mandolin, various hand-me-down synthesisers, a broken-down Yamaha mixing table and other musical and non-musical gadgets of varying ages and music-worthy (or unworthy) condition, to create monumental audioscapes of noisy post-industrial improv. Fear not! – the result is a travelogue through dystopian post-apocalyptic soundscapes where steel skyscrapers and other monuments to the Age of Oil now lie in ruins and are over-run by Nature exacting her due on presumptuous humanity, now long gone. While the mood of the album isn’t bleak or hopeless, the general feeling tends to be one of clinical curiosity, as if listeners have been invited as disinterested tourists to survey this devastated world as a lesson in not what to do before travelling to the next planet.

On the four tracks, each of which gets a 12-inch vinyl-platter side to itself, Shardja surveys a different part of the post-anthropic Earth: one track might pass for a quick lookaround of India, to judge from the presence of a sitar (courtesy of Jean Marcel Busson whom Shardja roped in from their band GOL to assist) which appears at various points throughout the track. The music can be dramatic in parts but it’s generally approachable and light in tone and delivery. There is sometimes a playful quality and even the most doom-laden sections never sound really very heavy or morose. The mood sometimes seems quite wry and deliberately down-played, the music appearing very po-faced at what it may be observing.

Track titles range from the absurd and amusing like “Bombay Boobies Battle” to the deeply disturbing like “Attaque sournoise du Kopassus a Wamena” (“Sneak Attack by Kopassus on Wamena”), the latter covering some sinister spoken-voice field recordings as well as some toy-box melodies that seem quite out of order here. While the music on this track can be quite jaunty in parts and becomes shrill and intense in its final moments, listeners should be aware that Kopassus refers to a crack special forces unit in the Indonesian Army that conducts unconventional warfare, counter-terrorism and special intelligence gathering activities and as such has committed human rights violations in various parts of Indonesia including Papua where Wamena is a major town. Why Shardja should give this piece such a startling title I’m curious to know: is he trying to stir up listeners’ jaded sensibilities, dulled by always expecting to be entertained by one short-lived thrill after another, or is he merely commenting in a casual, almost noncommittal way on one aspect of the chaos and almost banal repression and violence that always seem to break out in at least one corner of the globe every so often? (This would assume that human violence is something that happens because … hey, it’s human nature to be brutal and violent and we just have to live with it. Move on folks, nothing to see here. The notion that violence of a brutal and vicious kind is something we are taught through our total and involuntary immersion in modern Western culture from the moment of our birth never occurs to people.) Whether the listener can be bothered to find out what messages or non-messages Shardja is trying to convey with the various track titles (given in English, French, German and Italian) and the music they attach to is another thing altogether. At the very least, it’s disturbing that we have a track called “Attaque sournoise …” with no further explication from the artist (I admit I don’t have the actual double LP artwork which might explain a lot more in front of me) which leaves me as a listener guessing at what Shardja’s intentions may be – but possibly the fact that I have to guess may be the intention itself: it at least has roused my curiosity and interest.

Some passages in the four tracks can be very intriguing and enjoyable to listen to but on the whole this quartet can be something of an endurance test and attention levels can flag very quickly. This double LP set is perhaps best digested in separate chunks. Each track could almost be substituted for one another and you would not notice much difference. I feel a bit debilitated each time I listen to the album and I think that’s due to the dabbling and dallying out stretched out to an interminable length.

March 6, 2014

Toxic Beach Party

Old Komm
Ventspils EP
UK DISCREPANT CREP08 EP (2013)

Latvia’s sixth largest city, Ventspils, has been a shipbuilding history that goes back to the Sixteenth Century. The port’s ice free harbour still makes it an important transportation hub today, so a record which presents electronic music derived from field recordings made in various locations around Ventspils promises a vaguely maritime listening experience, or so I first thought. This is not the case. I failed to recognise any obvious sounds derived from water, ships, heavy plant, cranes and so forth.

An intriguing 12” ep here. Old Komm declare the presence of field recordings, broken synths, found sound and church pipe organs. The first side is peppered with vocal samples like “no other attempt was made” and CITE. Tones could have been supplied by machines from a dental surgery or the cardiology ward of your local hospital. Vintage voltage-controlled synthesisers boosted with Warfarin. The beats are minimal and sullen; they seem from another world on this side, helping as they do only to propel the sinister bass frequencies. After this, there is an interlude with what sounds like the auto-accompaniment feature on one of Leslie Crowther’s massive old one-finger Kimball home entertainment keyboards.

But then things get a bit more abstracted.

From the robot cat purr paired with feedback samples played on a broken midi keyboard on an ironing board for a stand (perhaps) could be the source of the following musical development here – and musical it certainly is – despite their heavy use of samples and field recordings, these sources are arranged in a similar way as if they were traditional musical instrumentation.

Digital water drips, digital cowbells patter, handheld digital hard-drive recorders capture rain splashing on hot tin roofs. What’s interesting here is that Old Komm have an undoubted talent for production; for example, there are some cheap-sounding general midi-type sounds here but they are buried so low in the mix that their very nature is changed from the banal to the exotic. More vocal samples but detourned this time around – only vaguely reminiscent of human speech. A colossal, possibly the world’s largest, Leslie Rotary Speaker eventually comes to rest in a power cut while a Soviet politician rants and a “choir of angels” synth preset (038 on the Roland JV1080 or similar), while a car politely beeps its horn. Something extremely low-end attempts to shred my speaker cones before the sounds of waves breaking on a beach merge with the sound of fluff on the needle on a run-out groove (not mine – I checked), in a kind of post-apocalyptic beach party for the infected.

As I turn the record over, I’m expecting more of the same on side B, but am surprised to discover a completely different view of the city.

More heavy on the field recordings, but this time heavily processed and with a melodic low-register element hung off them. Its clear field recording techniques have been employed in the pre production, but the result is open, narrative and cinematic only without the detail and verve of Mecha/Orga or David Velez, for example. But these are perhaps unfair comparisons – Old Komm present themselves as an electronic act and not field recordists exclusively.

The nicely laid out sepia-toned cover is festooned with detailed photographs by Sergey Gorsky of Ventspils port itself, and the inner sleeve displays a series of shots of the interior of a ruined building presumably somewhere therein.

A vinyl edition of 250.

Discrepant

March 3, 2014

Back to the Future

Cavern of Anti-Matter
Blood-Drums
GERMANY GRAUTAG RECORDS GTR#006 2 x LP (2013)

Cavern of Anti-Matter is a project from Tim Gane, previously of Stereolab. Despite the ominous band name and moody black and white industrial photos that adorn the sleeve, this actually turns out to be highly melodic instrumental synth pop of a determinedly retro variety. Most of the songs are essentially extended grooves based around a certain repeated synth riff. Despite the album title, the synth is always the dominant instrument here, with any ‘blood drumming’ fading into the background as either minimal drum machine or simple rock beats.

Opener ‘You’re an Art Soul’ acts as a good primer for the ears. Structurally, very little happens beyond a repeated synth groove, but this just serves to emphasise the stereo panning effects and gradual changes in tone. ‘Hot Electric Insect’ presents layers of sequencer/synth riffs, sounding like banks of sci-fi computers talking to each other. Occasionally the band add some minimal guitar into the mix, with tracks like ‘Movin On Static’ featuring bright summery major chords for the chorus – all very jolly and upbeat, but the retro synth worship always moves back into pole position. There’s a distinct whiff of Giorgio Morodor about tracks like ‘Rotation and Particle Density in D’ and ‘Adventures in One Octave’, with the duppa-duppa style synths in full effect. ‘Dystopian Shopping Mall’ in particular sounds like such a homage it’s almost a surprise when Donna Summer or Russell Mael from Sparks don’t appear and start singing.

All pleasant stuff, though the most modern sounding artist I can compare this to are the mid-90’s grooves of Bentley Rhythm Ace (remember them?). In the late 70’s/early80’s this album would have sounded like a vision from an impossibly high-tech science fiction future, now it more sounds a little more like a knowing homage to the past.

March 1, 2014

Killer Drone

Guiseppe Ielasi & Kassel Jaeger
Parallel / Greyscale
AUSTRIA EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO161 LP (2012)

Two sides of pulmonary bass drones, growling sped-down tapes, and winter birch tree arteries of atonal synth – a kind of dystopian In C. Both these pieces are live documents of a new duo performing firstly, with all analogue equipment in Paris in October of 2011; the second, with a digital set-up this time, in Oreno the following June.

Giuseppe Ielasi runs Senufo Editions and has releases on Erstwhile, a 7” boxset on Holiday Records, and has contributed his mastering skills for certain releases on the UK’s excellent Consumer Waste label. Kassel Jaeger, I understand, has previous on Editions Mego, Senufo Editions, Unfathomless, and Antisolar.

The first side, designated Parallel, has tentacles like a giant deep sea octopus surfacing through the spume in horrific slow motion to drag an unsuspecting clipper to its watery end. There are bodies in the water but vital signs are barely registering. The flooded ship’s radio is producing tones that could be fractured Morse code or the reverb-tails of demonic tuning forks. Suddenly, the performance sounds weirdly digital – like there is the presence of software, but we are assured it is all analogue equipment being employed here. Then there’s the presence of what sounds like processed wind-buffeted microphones or the overheard heartbeat of something too near and too unspeakable. There is the sense that machines are at work here; but rather than helpfully and obediently carrying out the musicians’ sonic wishes, they are unstoppably macerating something organic. Tapes run backwards in one channel with digital artefacts running in the other. Fizzing, burning? Are they physically dismantling their machines in real time? I’m sure I can hear cassettes being manipulated/maltreated in the background.

Later, knives are heard being sharpened in an isolated tone-composition. Dangerous levels of moisture build-up on the leaves of plants, tendrils; excess oxide build-up on monolithic tape heads. The familiar and comforting sound of pitched down church organ, while the bearings on the capstan wear down and squeak.

Parallel is a massive, killer, sabre-toothed drone. Like the gates of hell are yawning open while the fragments of electronic pop song whip around in the maelstrom only visible now and again; like when anything accidentally gets sucked into the mammoth turbines of a hydro-electric plant – it doesn’t stand a chance. This is not quiet music; it’ll take your head off. Complex digital flutterings. Reinforced concrete stretches to breaking point, exposing the rusty reinforcement within, tarmacadam bubbles, masonry condenses and vaporises. That kind of thing. About as heavy as electro-acoustic improvisation gets these days. Warm and cold fronts collide. Or occlude. Whatever, once you sit this on your turntable’s platter you’re in for stormy weather.

The flip side, Greyscale is described as “…more laptop oriented”, and this is the performance from Orena, and is apparently only the second time Ielasi and Jaeger performed together. Here are sounds derived from rotation, possibly. Curiously, of the two, this one sounds more “live” to me despite the stated presence of laptops. New and devastating uses of DSP processing and mid-air refuelling. Satellites communicate; distant choirs transmitting from the 11th Century. Ruined abbeys protected by glass boxes – if you want to have a nosy around, its ten pound a punter into the pocket of the National Trust. Sounds grabbed from synthesisers combined with close-mic’ed table object manipulation. As regards an uninformed guess as to possible techniques employed, a lot of rubbing of the microphones themselves perhaps? A radio telescope being demolished slowly in remote woodland. Nature pushes back. Creepers creep, a briar curls over an abandoned stone cottage. If you sit in your car and fall asleep every time you visit a place of interest, it is no wonder your local knowledge is so poor. Just tell me which lay-by you’re going to be in and I’ll come and pick you up. They’ve mic’ed up a snake’s nervous system. Whoa. Back in the room. You’ve probably guessed that this is far more ambient to my ears than the Paris side. And all the better for it.

February 24, 2014

Another Green World

BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa
Góða Nótt
AUSTRIA EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO156 LP (2012)

Murky results from a piece of serendipitous endurance recording which mortally challenges the musicians’ minds and bodies, if you believe the snow-bound PR for this slab of worrisome and isolating drone-creep. Indeed, there is a cheerful account of being trapped in the studio in a particularly heavy snow storm on the editions Mego website. Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa somewhat matter-of-factly say this: “…so we decided to work on new recordings influenced by the situation.” Harrowing.

The first side of this long-player strongly evokes a feeling of growing unease. The music is a type of crawling, dark ambient affair, cataloguing ghoulish nocturnal manoeuvres; lunar orbits shifting, transient mortality; distended roots systems taking up brackish water. Saturated ground, saturated tape. Stunted seasonal growth. Weird shapes in the gloom. Time to break out the isopropyl alcohol and clean those heads? Abstract and mysterious concepts are suggested by this music. The sound is crisp and expensive. Clearly they’re using quality outboard in their icy, frostbitten studio facility; here and there a nice vibrato effect. But psychic rations are dangerously low: this music is more wary, and less exuberant, like a young tearaway grown old looking back over a meaningless, hedonistic life at the onset of dementia. Tired, sad, but confused and embittered too. It seems to me that the influence of Ligeti is noticeable in some of the drones used – a lambent echo of the paranoid presence of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or, it could just as easily be the sound of your central nervous system amplified through the PA system on the main stage at any major European music fest. Things you’d rather not know about happen in the distance; hidden by the dust and ash from a million volcanoes. Here be percussive sandstorms, and giant reptiles’ intestines rumbling. Disorienting. High voltage supply voltage lines act as perches for tropical birds. Shortwave radio transmissions almost blot out a very quiet and disengaged vocal right before the run-off groove.

By contrast, the flip is a film of speeded-up crane arms circling around a (sub)urban horizon. A beleaguered vessel far out at sea. A slowed-down, super-annuated organ grinder; his aging monkey’s final breath. Storm clouds gather. The thermometer drops, and the monkey is watching Tron with the sound off. The inaudible digital screams of dying computer servers in an overheating machine room on a distant planet. Fifty years of accumulated dust ignites. The first violin section of the London Philharmonic all wearing skinny black jeans and fluoro-orange Crocs as they are led into the cryogenic chamber. Sheet metal peels back like tin foil as the cockpit shears off and turns to face the wrong way. Barometric pressure is measured by the tonne. Four blows of the lump hammer. Music you can barely hear, like it’s coming from the other side of the planet. Even its creators seem a little disorientated by the results, stating “…as we doctored the tapes of our recordings we seemed to have created weaknesses in space and we developed a total, complete darkness finding ourselves out of this world, travelling without moving, into the flickering green light.”

Cover images made by Franz Graf.

February 23, 2014

Hip and Deranged

J Marks / Shipen Lebzelter
Rock and Other Four Letter Words
UK PARADIGM DISCS PD28 LP (2012)

Here’s a real one of a kind item from 1968, reissued in 2012 by Clive Graham on his own label…once in a while Graham gets his hands on some real freakeroonies, such as Beyond The Black Crack by Revd Dwight Frizzell and the indispensable Bunhill Row by Adam Bohman. Rock and Other Four Letter Words, as a partially spoken-word LP, also fits into his personal interest in the Sound Poetry genre, and he has played it on his radio show Sound Poets Exposed alongside the works of Peter Handke, Kenneth Gaburo and Lou Harrison.

The original album was put together by J Marks and Shipen Lebzelter, and released by Columbia Masterworks. The story of it is that J Marks had just compiled a paperback of this title for Bantam Books featuring photographs of contemporary rock stars by Linda Eastman, with quotes from Hendrix, The Doors, Janis Joplin, The Bee Gees, The Mothers of Invention… The record we now hear was built around his tape recordings of these interviews. I should say that this LP is very far from being the “album of the book”. In fact neither these tape snippets, nor the LP itself, really explain anything about the rock musicians or their music. Instead their statements are largely fragmented, cut up and rearranged with tremendous care to form ambiguous and witty collages. It’s form of electro-acoustic manipulation, and does in some sense qualify as “sound poetry”. At least four of the tracks here allow us to hear imaginary surreal dialogues and conversations taking place between Townshend, Page, Grace Slick, Tim Buckley, Lou Adler, the Dave Clark Five and other luminaries. In these meticulously assembled segments, can we expect the “truth” about rock music in 1968 to leak out, Burroughs-style, from these compressions and cut-ups? Hear (and read) to judge for yourself. On ‘Eine Kleine Hayakawa’, Marks edited together various out-take portions – strings of pauses, yawns, mutterings and stutterings from these genius rock stars, not necessarily to make them look stupid, but simply to create 90 seconds of gloriously loopy mouth-gibberish.

I suppose we might expect “rock music” to appear here somewhere, but apart from a “rock riff” supplied by J Marks on the first track, there isn’t much of it. There is gospel, soft pop, absurd songs, microtonal chanting, and an orchestra of session musicians playing all sorts (some of them are from a free jazz background, see below). It’s a verbal and vocal album – if I can state the obvious, there’s a lot of vocals on this album, and they’re producing a veritable tidal wave of verbal information, crashing against your brain in slow motion. “This is the Word” is the opening statement on the insert, as if we’re being read scripture from the Gospel of Rock. On top of the recorded voices and cut-ups, we’ve got two separate choirs – the Gregg Smith Singers and the Greater Abyssynian Baptist Choir, and occasional lead vocals from Marks and Lebeltzer joined by the soloists Hilda Harris and Carol Miller. Harris and Miller do a fine turn on ‘It’s True’, one of many easy-listening swoonalongs on the record, Lebeltzer recites a poem on ‘Essence of its Own’, and all four are featured on ‘Greatest Hits – Love Your Navel’, a vaudeville parody song with absurdist lyrics which would’ve felt right in place on the first United States Of America album (one of this disc’s progenitors, in my estimation; another would be Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy). Harris and Miller are also called upon to recite random words plucked from US sportscasts as the libretto for ‘Poop for Sopranos and Orchestra’, another grandiose nonsense which inflates the ridiculous into the size of a Macy’s parade balloon. To their credit, the very professional singers take it all perfectly seriously, never once cracking an audible grin. Can this possibly get any better?

Well, there’s Gregg Smith Singers who on side one perform ‘In the Middle of Nothing’ which is a gorgeous Fifth Dimension soundalike with a suitably smooth arrangement, but they also sing a remarkable free-form microtonal piece on ‘Essence of its Own’, worthy of a Ligeti choir piece. At moments like these it’s clear the record has an artistic side and the creators’ printed dedication to Karlheinz Stockhausen “who destroyed our ears so we could hear” is not merely empty posturing. Besides that, they somehow recruited Alan Silva to contract some of the session musicians, and he brought in some of his free jazz friends – Andrew Cyrille, Roswell Rudd, Stephen Furtado, Martin Alter…seems astonishing that CBS would have lavished all this money on such a bizarre project from two unknowns, but I suppose this was a more innocent time. The back cover blurb “Featuring a cast of thousands” isn’t far from the mark…and that phrase resonates nicely with the hucksterism promised by the front cover, which resembles a Barnum & Bailey circus poster as much as it’s inspired by Dada typography.

It’s one thing to zoom in on various odd aspects and single tracks of this unusual album, but the totality of it is a very well-integrated and strangely mind-sapping listen. It hangs together beautifully as a fuzzy, dream-like and hilarious-serious album. It’s a unique counter-culture statement of some sort – using themes from underground and mainstream rock, free jazz, gospel, easy listening, poetry, Burroughs cut-ups…and released on a major label. “Remarkably, it is also the first record either of them made,” points out Clive Graham in his sleeve notes. “Nothing of [their] later work compares with the grand scale of their debut.” Graham has done his research, too; J Marks appeared on one other album for the same label by the 1st National Nothing, a colourful rock-theatre combo from California who wound up in NYC. After this he seems to have become Jamake Highwater and is claiming a Native American heritage in his writings and documentary works. Lebzelter’s story is no less strange; he joined The Trees Community, a travelling Christian group of folkies who made a record called The Christ Tree in 1975, which has since acquired some of the same cultiness that attached itself to Father Yod. A fine reissue job, and particular care has been taken with the insert to approximate the wild typography of the original. Groovy! Mad! Intense & really subversive but reasonable!

February 22, 2014

Lava Bombs

Geir Jenssen
Stromboli
UK TOUCH TONE48 LP (2013)

I first sought out Geir Jenssen’s work in 2005 after a short tour around the UK, when Biosphere’s output was strongly recommended at 3am, after a concert in someone’s basement in Salford, by a man wearing a t-shirt that stated, simply, “Listen To Grindcore”. Obviously, as you can probably guess, it was the t-shirt that made me take him seriously. He challenged me, sloshing his tin of lager about in the air for added emphasis while staring vengefully through whatever stimulants were keeping him awake, equally simply but also somewhat more emphatically and deadly serious, to “listen to Biosphere”. So, not having come across the name before, when I got back home, I did.

And I’m mostly glad I did. I’m not really that interested in the early techno stuff, but for sheer sonic depth and immersive cold ambience, Geir Jenssen is quite rightly considered the man to go to, and his curriculum vitae will back this up.

With this release, Jenssen leaves behind the massive clubs and outdoor events, the advertising commissions and jet-set lifestyle of the techno producer and enters the world of the field recordist – he leaves behind the Nike Airs and v-neck t-shirts and puts on his stout trainers, cargo pants and fisherman’s waistcoat. These items are particularly favoured by field recordists with their handy pockets for wind shields, battery packs, adaptors, Kendall Mint Cake and other necessaries for extended periods out of doors. Jenssen is now forever lugging around the signature fluffy-baffled shotgun microphone over one shoulder with a matching portable multi-track hard drive recorder over the other. You get the idea. On Stromboli, as well as the opportunity to imagine Jenssen additionally possibly donning a heat-suit, we get to hear the hissings, explosions, and the pattering of falling rock of Stromboli, an active volcano in Italy, and presumably also the sounds made by 700° C lava creeping languidly around his feet.

Stromboli itself is of sufficient importance with Volcanologists to warrant a volcanic phenomenon being named after it. So called Strombolian eruptions are volcanic eruptions which can send incandescent cinder and lava bombs into the air to heights of up to hundreds of metres.

As Biosphere, Jenssen has worked with field recordings before, notably on Outside By The Fjord and Cho Oyu 8201m – Field Recordings From Tibet. And as a mountaineer in his spare time, (he scaled the Himalayan peak Cho Oyu in 2001), I’m sure he was able to get himself into some good spots on the volcano to record. It is interesting that he has chosen another, not unperilous, environment to work in, what with flowing lava and hot flung debris. Although how near he actually had to get to the crater itself to capture these noises is not clear – some sounds seem distant while others I’m sure are worryingly close. The record sleeve states that the recordings were made “…at Stromboli’s crater edge (924m)” but that would certainly be 923m too close for me.

In terms of Jenssen’s previously released field recordings, Outside By The Fjord is a film documenting a field recording excursion in Sørfjorden, near Tromsø, Norway commissioned by Fondazione Musica per Roma in 2008 and Cho Oyu 8201m – Field Recordings From Tibet was a collection of recordings made during his climb which were destined for use in the making of Dropsonde.

So what was the intention? Simple documentation at first seems the most likely being as they are a quite dry although undoubtably courageous documentation of a dangerous natural phenomena. Unlike other practitioners such as David Velez, Simon Whetham, Mecha/Orga, Jez riley French, Angus Carlyle, Peter Cusack or Lasse-Marc Riek, there is no sense of a journey, narrative or transition or sense that the artist has attempted to create something other than what simply meets the ear. Even the nature-obsessed Chris Watson’s work relies heavily on a sense of editing clarity and compositional brevity. Stromboli for all the excitement of the subject matter, suffers, perhaps, for its authors lack of commitment toward the material’s presentation. Or maybe that is the point – in releasing a straight field recording under his own name, Jenssen is deliberately disassociating himself from the lush productions of the Biosphere entity. Alternatively, Stromboli could have been a showcase for Jenssen’s location recording skills. Is he casting about for work in television for natural history or geography documentaries? Perhaps the National Geographic Channel aren’t hiring at the moment.

The percussive nature of the explosions of the volcano put me in mind of 17th Century ships’ cannon. The hissing and fizzing noises could also be mistaken for the sound of rolling waves out at sea. I wonder if there is a maritime connection in Jenssen’s mind? Maybe if you played this album over a film of period ships, (or even Pirates of the Caribbean), would it fool the brain? It also put me in mind of the sounds that emanate from all that Ministry of Defence land in Dorset near where I grew up, where the Army practice manoeuvres with live rounds.

In a way, travel is bound up inextricably with field recording practice – searching out the unusual, alien, exotic, unheard. Jenssen officially joins the ranks of these sonic H V Mortons in search of something else; and I’m keen to hear where his next postcard hails from.

Quite a curious prospect this, then. The sleeve offers up photographs taken at night; on the cover the volcano itself, on the reverse Geir Jenssen manipulating his equipment. Couple this with the malevolent nature of the audio and I’d say this is a good record to put on to augment the sounds of Bonfire Night next November.

February 21, 2014

Bristol’s Event Horizon Presents…

Ensemble Skalectrik
Trainwrekz
EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 169 LP (2013)

A Proust moment! Dropping needle on this unknown, recollection of past experience swiftly follows: fortunate was I to witness the silhouette of Ensemble Skalectrik aka Nick Edwards (on the night) along with Mordant Music’s titular Baron hunched over a portable lab at an ‘F.C. Judd Reinterpretations’ launch last year. About six other people attended that fog-filled flight of the supernatural. Six. The next night a packed-house went crazy over some lame-ass indie rock showcase from London that I made the mistake of taking a punt on. What the hell is wrong with these garbage-chewing idiots? Lapping it up like so much milky tea. I split during the first act: a stoned trio of Coldplay wannabes who couldn’t muster feedback without piercing every eardrum in the room; and still the hypnotised applause. Score one for mediocrity.

Said cognoscenti would have grimaced (and good for them) at this fine follow up (of sorts) to Nick Edwards’ Plekzationz LP (as Ekoplekz, also on Mego), which forsakes the latter’s long form format for far shorter, improvised and individualised, studio-born homunculi that nonetheless bear familial resemblance to that double LP’s weightier portions of black-dimensional slithering, and for which many reviewers were unsparing in their admiration. I suppose qualifiers such as ‘side project’ and ‘sketches’ might raise a supercilious eyebrow or two, but they needn’t. Of the three jam sessions that yielded the contents of this record, we have but six, supple, post-produced tracks, not one of which I would advise to diet or take more exercise (several hours’ excess fat splodged the editing suite floor, presumably). One might regard this as an exercise in ‘spontaneous’ creativity after the compositional rigour that yielded the non-linear, musically concrete elder sibling. Perhaps even – gasp – a tip of the hat to Edwards’ home-taping halcyon days!

In any event, fans will not exhibit a jot of surprise upon learning that the Radiophonic influence is just as strong on Trainwrekz; syphoned from the deeper and darker end of that hallowed gene pool albeit. (In fact, when my girlfriend remarked thus during the first spin she received an immediate, looped cry of ‘DOCTOR!!!’ by way of reply; and who am I to gainsay a synchronicity?) Along with allusions to our favourite vintages of Time Lord, this swirling atom soup ripples with all sorts of supernatural sounds summoned from selected grooves of his ritually abused record collection, from the mean-spirited, marauding grind that opens to the comparatively pastoral, delay-drenched whirl of closer ‘Wreksikz’ (yeah, all the titles feature a ‘Wrek’); ever adorned with vari-speed wobbles, rattles and ruler rumbles. In this dark Fantasia, the studio comes to life in accordance with the capricious will of our sorcerer’s apprentice, and at times the sickening loops look likely to rend the fabric of space itself with roll after cavernous roll of reverbed matter timewarped from the B-side of White Noise’s Electric Storm LP, or from somewhere deep inside Mr Bungle’s ‘The Bends’, or even from Daphne Oram’s bubbling cauldron, which inquisitive listeners of ‘Oramics’ might have been allowed to pop over to see if they’d had the presence of mind to take her up on her end-of-album invitation. But I digress. I would recommend this album most to those least likely to enjoy it. We can all benefit from the odd dose of existential dread in helping us get to grips with who we are. Why should it be wasted on those of us who will simply derive pleasure from it?

February 16, 2014

One Harp, One Guitar

The Harp of the New Cambria

Yeah…Rock! Rhodri Davies finally discovers the power of heavy metal! For years this Welsh genius (improviser, composer, innovator) was known for producing extremely quiet and minimal music with his harp, often in the company of other minimal improvisers, although admittedly he was recently drawn to use of the ebow as a process whereby he could extend the resonating strings into a powerful, humming, ultra-long drone. As is well known we love his work here and some of his recent records (e.g. 2010′s Carliol with John Butcher) have been exemplary in terms of their stripped-down astringency, their frightening sense of purpose, their deep-frozen “core of ice” affect such that to listen was like being stabbed in the head with an icicle. Now on Wound Response (ALT.VINYL av038) he’s embracing amplification and distortion, and with these groovy cuts he’s turning himself into a Welsh avant-garde version of Jimmy Page or Leslie West, riffing away in gorgeous circular patterns with a strong sense of simple melodic drive, anchoring down his quicksilver inventions with a solid root note, and generally updating the blues / rock mode in his own shimmering image of palpitating atonal holydom. In fine this is the sort of harp record that Keiji Haino probably wishes he could have made, during that creative purple patch when he figured he was tough enough to play any instrument known to man and create a hideous racket on it, including the hurdy-gurdy which he memorably transformed into a shrieking wheezy monster of steel and wood. Now Haino must surrender his laurel wreath to a new victor.

Davies is getting this fab new sound from use of transducers, contact mics, a volume pedal, an overdrive unit and two amplifiers, the sort of setup that produced those side-long versions of ‘Dazed and Confused’ (although in fact a theremin was also used I believe). The volume pedal in particular is one of my personal favourite devices and isn’t used enough in my view, ever since Derek Bailey trod his well-brogued foot on one of them during his brief but memorable “electric” phase ¹. Mostly of course the quality of the music here is produced not by means of electronic assistance, but through the sheer dazzling brilliance of Rhodri’s attack. Man, you could use these fingers to mow an entire field of wheat – he’s his own combine harvester! Speed and coruscating energy are the order of the day, at times making music that resembles the hammered dulcimer or autoharp of an acid-fried folk musician, perhaps named Barney Pembleton, on the most gloriously impossible folk-rock record that never existed and was in fact purposely suppressed by Elektra, Island and Transatlantic working in an unholy triumvirate of conspiracy to conceal dangerously good music from the crowd. Now through the gift of channelling the spirit of Barney Pembleton, Rhodri Davies has succeeded in unleashing that monster from the vaults. Lovely screenprinted card presentation on this beast, with drawings by the organist / composer Jean-Luc Guionnet, a Phil Begg recording, and title borrowed from the musician’s personal bookshelf of great literature. And it’s pressed in clear vinyl, which ought to be the clincher. From 26 October 2012, and a total goodie.

The Persian Version

Last heard from Yek Koo with her single Alone Together, now here she is with an entire album recorded for the same label called Love Song For The Dead C (EMERALD COCOON EC009). Yek Koo is Helga Fassonaki from Metal Rouge, working solo with guitar, percussion devices and her voice for this uncanny limited-edition vinyl item, released at the same time as her one-person show at the Human Resources gallery in LA. The order of the day on this highly discursive and ghostified dron-gronathon is a fairly skeletal approach to music-making, selecting bare twigs or bent wire sticks, remnants and rags of material and assembling them with the intuitive flair of a collage artist or maker of bricolage. These tunes unfold in real time, coming to life on the gallery wall rather than enduring a half-life as tracks etched into dead vinyl. There’s a gloriously delirious tone which the press notes describe as “drunkenly stumbling”, to account for the free-swimming odd mismatches of sound-generation here. The very body of each tune appears fragile, so brittle that it might shatter at any second, or so nebulous that you could disperse the entire album by turning on the fan. Yet Yek Koo’s music keeps on going, and the mysterious drug-like logic of her music is as potent as a spell from Circe burning evil incense blocks in her copper bowl.

Everything is suggestive of alienation and distance – distorted, weirdly-echoed effects, beautifully badly-played electric guitar to produce unearthly tones, an out-of-tune waily voice drifting in from a secret chamber – yet in the final analysis, it’s the most honest and intimate music you could hope for. It’s as though Fassonaki has found a completely instinctive way to outwit the subtleties of our own mind games and ego tricks, and bypass normal channels of communication to arrive at a very direct statement delivered from the heart. The label exhibits a certain pride in the “tradition of the great outsider sides of the early 90s”. Although “outsider” is becoming a commonplace term these days, the point is well made, and even the cover art with its simple pastedown wraparound is trying to forge a link with the 1990s “tradition”, if indeed there is one, when great underground music was packaged in master bags with paste-on covers (mainly for economic reasons) and released in near-secrecy. Of course this attentuated, formless wailing sound she makes isn’t going to appeal to everyone, but I personally am completely enchanted with this LP and it’s highly worthy of your attention. Received 22nd May 2012.

Best heard on the classic LP Domestic and Public Pieces. Let me know if you ever find a copy. ↩

January 23, 2014

Factual Entertainment

Russell Haswell
Factual
AUSTRIA EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 157 LP (2012)

Clocking in at 28 minutes, this is either a very short LP, or a very long 12” single (take your pick).

The record kicks off with a track called ‘Black Metal Instrumental Demo’, though if you were expecting the genre’s usual emphasis on guitars you’ll be disappointed. Instead, a glitchy, reverb-drenched low pulse stutters into play, before being joined a few minutes later by random hits from a snare drum, not following any recognisable beat. The effect is not unlike listening to a (black?) metal drummer warming up in some vast underground cavern, his legs pumping away frantically at his double kick drums. After about 4 minutes of this, a warm fuzz of synth static enters and gradually buries the drummer alive. The drummer fights back with more regular hits from his snare drum, and the synth finally coalesces into a recognisable four-note riff. Having been beaten into melody, the synth retreats (shamefully?), and the stuttering drums emerge victorious.

‘Urban nOise’ is essentially the sound of a distorted synth wrestling with itself, while ‘Killer Snakehead’ features a looped synth line held in check by a regular pulsing dance beat. Highly repetitive, this sounds like the death-rattle of an old Sega Megadrive game that has crashed and is looping itself into infinity. ‘Record Shop Day’ is perhaps the closest the record comes to ‘pure’ noise, in the free-wheeling unstructured Merzbow style. Perhaps intended to replicate sonically the chaotic hordes of punters fighting over rare vinyl? Whatever, the distorted synth sound is again very redolent of 80’s videogames. For ‘Rave Nihilation’, the sound is stripped back to a meandering distorted synth line that simply wanders around a bit before expiring.

Taken as a whole, this record is sonically uncluttered experimental noise (with a small ‘n’), with a strong emphasis on distorted synthesiser sounds. The promotional material makes a point of highlighting ‘real-time, one take’ recording techniques, and whilst this makes for a very pure recording, for this listener at least, it often felt more like a clinical ‘lab-coat’ wearing exercise than the passionate kick in the head of more emotional and ‘busier’ noise. The record ends with ‘Sheffield’, a brief live performance, featuring more manic and frantic distorted synths swooping and swirling through an echoey hall. The live nature of the recording makes this sonically inferior to the studio cuts, but ironically the sounds here seem freer and more unhinged than most of what makes up the rest of the record.