Tagged: vocals

November 23, 2013

People Go into the Stratosphere

The Martin Archer all-you-can-eat buffet is open for business…better bring a big plate and an extra fork…we received the self-titled double CD set by Orchestra of the Upper Atmosphere (DISCUS40CD) on 19 November 2012, and it’s a real grand bouffe ¹. This is another grand scaled project organised by Martin Archer in Sheffield and released on his own Discus label. Archer, highly conversant with saxophone and electronics, has been a past master of small and intimate group situations involving those instruments, but increasingly these days he is thinking big; there’s a large number of gifted people involved in this ambitious project, and while the core Orchestra itself – mostly keyboards, electronics, synths and percussion – comprises just five players, there are also performances from La Garotte String Quartet, The Divine Winds (a saxophone and woodwind group), and Juxtavoices, the unique singing choir whose work is also represented on this label on the record Juxtanother Antichoir From Sheffield released this year. With this small army of musicians, this lengthy album presents a cosmic sprawl of massed organ drones and electronic doodlings, enhanced with jazzy brass blasts and free-style vocal episodes from the choir. Think of Tangerine Dream to the power of ten, joined by an early incarnation of the Mike Westbrook Band and the Scratch Orchestra – an early 1970s music fan’s dream come true!

On ‘Seen From Above Parts 1 and 2’, the Orchestra create a truly enormous and cavernous sound, occupied by detailed passages of free playing; it’s a remarkably sustained effort to keep the space as nebulous as possible, without allowing the work to collapse into a sludgy mess. Philip Glass saxophone arpeggios leak into this open-ended gaseous billow of Gong-esque organ and synth drone. ‘The Opposition Effect’ should appeal to anyone who enjoys the work of the John Aldiss choir on side one of Atom Heart Mother (and I know not many Pink Floyd fans do), with Juxtavoices chanting their clipped syllables in a strident manner to the backing of a lumbering rock beat, solid organ chords and flipped-out sax squawkings. “It’s a 25-voice choir that works on the premise that any 25 note chord is probably going to be OK,” is how Archer described the choir to me in 2011, reflecting on the mixed abilities of the singers in the group. “It’s more about text and performance and maybe experimental poetry.” That side of the choir is also to the fore on ‘An Open Vista Is Revealed’, an excellent short piece on the second CD, with the voices whistling and whispering in mysterious manner against a very restrained and open-ended instrumental backdrop. There’s more of their free-form poetry chants on ‘Star Procession’, which when combined with the dissonant string sections and electronic drones produces a heavy-duty dose of out-there weirdness.

Archer has stressed that he isn’t out to experiment with variety just for the sake of novelty; rather he regards his multiple approaches as different ways of solving the same problem. This double CD set abounds with experiment and innovation, exploring ways to make these group combinations work. On ‘Almost Unrecognisable But For Its Surface Markings’, the string quartet wander an alien landscape in amazement, while percussion clatters around them in tiny explosions. In that case, the keynote is uncertainty and doubt, but not so on ‘Duty Music’, a big-band escapade with the strings and brass creating a very forthright and upbeat mood. ‘The Umbral Length of Shadows’ is an extremely bold attempt to use most if not all of the musicians in one collective blast; a somewhat lumbering beast results, which misfires in places and gives us almost too much to listen to as it tramps along its path propelled by a faux-funky beat; but you’ve rarely heard such remarkable combinations of unusual sounds, timbres and pitches. And at 20 minutes, ‘Nimbus’ is another major showcase for noodling keyboards, heavy drone and errant string solos creating unearthly effects, only slightly let down by the rhythm section providing an unimaginative drum and bass beat which somehow falls short of the best moments of Can. That said, Can never used strings and brass to such powerful effect on their records.

With titles such as ‘Anti-Crepuscular Rays’, ‘Rainforest Tension’, and other titles quoted above you’ll have noticed the meteorological and sky-gazing themes of this release ². It’s a promise that is borne out by the very airy and open sound the Orchestra of the Upper Atmosphere are capable of generating with their competing frequencies and strange juxtapositions, at their best achieving the ethereality of the air itself. As to the music, which incidentally has taken three years to complete, the press notes make explicit aspirations in the direction of Terry Riley, Stockhausen, Alice Coltrane and Krautrock – which should give you sufficient orientation. I think this is an exceptional work, which testifies to Archer’s very sociable and outgoing approach to making music; he simply likes people and likes to gather them around him so he can perform music with them, and I would estimate that a significant percentage of this album is performed live or in real time. Certainly the electronic effects are kept to a minimum, with only a few audible foot-pedals to tweak the organ drone, and acoustic instruments abound, holding their own against the amplified section of the Orchestra. And the sheer length is mightily impressive. In duration alone this would have occupied a four-LP box set in the old days, a generosity that pays off even when the music does sag in places (‘Coherent Backscattering’, a rather formless and laboured piece, is one notable failure) and the work overall might have benefited from a little editing or a more selective production strategy. The major disappoint to me is the utterly unprepossessing cover art, a grainy image of hideous browns and blacks which eventually resolves itself into a murky treated photograph of the band playing a concert in a venue. The cosmic Theta on the back cover is a good notion ³, but this powerful sign has had its energy somehow sapped by digital imaging, and it floats vaguely against a bitty background of artefacts when instead it should pulsate with all the mystical power of the black monolith object on Presence ⁴. The cloud photos printed on the discs are slightly better and fit the concept of the record. But overall I believe the strength of the music is seriously under-communicated by these poor visuals. This plaint aside, Orchestra of the Upper Atmosphere makes good its printed claim to “propose an alternative reality”, and is warmly recommended.

I refer to the film of this title directed by Marco Ferreri and released in 1973. ↩
For perfect conceptual unity, the record really ought to have been pressed at Nimbus, who manufactured most of the releases for Recommended Records. ↩
Theta is used in meteorology to represent potential temperature. ↩
i.e. the Led Zeppelin LP. The puzzling cover art is one of Hipgnosis’s best, in my view. Storm Thorgerson appeared on a recent TV documentary about the making of Wish You Were Here, and neatly summed up Hipgnosis’s cultural achievement; he was simply fed up of rock album covers that were no more than photographs of old geezers. ↩

October 24, 2013

Culture Clash

“…traditional song given a screaming punk twist…”

KIV Orchestra
La Roue
AURIS MEDIA AUM 035 / VIALKA VIA-012 CD (2012)

La Roue is a new collaboration between French-Canadian Turbo-Punk band, Vialka, and the Israeli Avant/Hardcore/Klezmer/Karate band, Kruzenshtern & Parohod. While the bands previously worked together in 2006 on a split album (aum011), this release represents the first time they have collaborated on new tracks under the moniker KIV Orchestra.

The result is a highly original and varied five track EP which, as expected, given the roots of KIV, reflects any number of cultures and musical styles. The EP opens strongly with the powerful ‘Bad Bad Horror’, complete with Marylise Frecheville’s unmistakable vocal, and continues to build momentum throughout.

Fans of the accordion and clarinet certainly won’t be left disappointed, as the instruments appear on several of the tracks. When combined with Frecheville’s emotive vocal, much of the EP gives off a distinctly French vibe. However, there are also traces of Berlin-style cabaret from the 1920s and some traditional Russian classics, which have been modernised to give the EP a definitely modern slant.

In truth, there are times when the influence of so many cultures and voices result in a bit of a chaotic and random sound, which may not necessarily be a bad thing, but does leave the EP lacking a certain coherence in places. This is especially true of the last track, ‘Po Shpalam’, a traditional Russian song given a screaming punk twist, which feels like it has muscled its way in from a whole different recording.

Overall, however, La Roue offers an accessible and interesting set of tracks that manage to evoke a traditional sound whilst also providing something new and innovative. This is just a sample of what fans and newcomers can expect from this ongoing collaborative effort; and no doubt any future releases will prove just as challenging, provocative and eclectic as this one.

This collection is an exciting introduction to the work of both Vialka and Kruzenshtern & Parohod, which no doubt many listeners will be inspired to further explore as they await the next release from KIV.

October 9, 2013

Eloquence Framed

Jessica Sligter
Fear and the Framing
NORWAY HUBRO CD2516 (2012)

With Fear and the Framing, Jessica Sligter has crafted an eclectic selection of tracks that serve to highlight the wide talents of this Dutch singer-songwriter.

Together, the ten tracks run the gamut from the gentle and folksy to the electric and dramatic. This contrast is never more pronounced than between track one, ‘Man Who Scares Me’, a beautiful, folksy ballad, and track two, ‘If That Was Crooked. This Is Straight’, a rumbling, unsettling instrumental. On first listen, such diversity only heightens the anticipation for the rest of the album, and thankfully the following tracks do not disappoint.

Fans of acoustic, guitar-based songs will find much to enjoy here, most notably on ‘The Perfect Vesse’l and ‘Fall, Here’; whereas tracks such as ‘Pricklet’ and ‘Scott Will Be Hierarch push’ the experimental boundaries. In lesser hands, the result of this mix could have been an unfocused collection of sounds; but here, each track is very much part of a unified whole, which is essentially held together through Sligter’s eloquent lyrics and haunting voice. The overall effect is a highly satisfactory, if slightly unnerving, experience.

Of course, with such diversity going on, this is not an album that will please all of the people all of the time, but it is never less than hypnotic and intriguing. In fact, listening to Fear and the Framing can be likened to coming across an abstract painting in a gallery that you just can’t look away from; the closer you examine it, the more its intricate detail and subtle layers are revealed.

Following her debut 2010 release, Balls and Kittens, Draught and Strangling Rain (which was released under the name JÆ), comparisons to such artists as Will Oldham and Linda Perhacs were thrown around; and there’s no mistaking the influence of Bjork on some of the tracks on this follow-up album. However, there’s also no doubt that Sligter is a true original and deserves to be recognised as such.

Overall, this is a distinctive album that is at once soft and jagged; requiring several listens in order to fully fall under the spell of this talented singer-songwriter who will no doubt find her fan base has swelled considerably as a result of this latest impressive offering.

October 5, 2013

Three Rotary Roarers

Boy, are things frustrating me lately. Maybe I just need a half of minim…mind you there is nothing like starting off a crisp autumn morning with some twisted and alienated guitar noise, and that’s exactly what is on offer from Clifford Torus, a three-piece whose self-titled cassette (DRID MACHINE RECORDS DMR4) in a lurid orange dayglo cover was sent to us on 19 October 2012. I felt much better after immersing my bonce in these rich metallic shrieks for 30 mins. The guitarist Horacio Pollard has made his electric-shock presence felt to us on at least one CDR of his scalding and bittersome electric noise, but here he’s opting for a slightly more traditional avant-garde rock setup. For this activity he’s aided by two of the best like-minded players a man could hope for: the bassist Kjetil Brandsdal from Noxagt, and Anders Hana who drums for MoHa! That’s a dream team in anyone’s book. Just six tunes on this little power-pack, but it’s enough to recharge the flagging batteries of any jaded nightclubber as they stagger back from Vauxhall on any given Sunday morning. This trio’s particular take on the excessive amplified doom-noise thing meets many of our exacting standards: monotonous, flailing energy, mumbled half-screamed vocals when they appear, and a continual sense of teeth-grinding alienation underpinning every moment of luscious grind. Kjetil is an asset, rarely departing from a single root note for most of th’ tunes; he almost hammers his bass like a percussionist. Although only guitar, bass and drums appear in the instrument credit roster, there are occasional burstings of strange and unidentifiable screech which somehow leak into the sounding-box, at times resembling a mangled saxophone or a crushed synthesizer. Maybe Pollard is just very well-equipped with hideous FX pedals purchased from planet Jupiter. Only sometimes does the energy level droop a little, and I wished they coulda sustained that power for a few more minutes (especially on the crunch-worthy opening number) but when these three lads get into their “groove”, it’s obvious they are mesmerised by a higher power from the dreadful zones, and nothing short of a steamshovel will ever dislocate them. When this tape was sent, it seems the threesome were about to play a free gig at Bohemia in Hackney. True to form, this blog is a year late with the hot news!

Here’s another fine cassette, also realised by a trio, but this time the players weave a somewhat more abstracted and dynamic form of electronic noise. Destruction Des Animaux Nuisibles #1 (ALTERACTION ALT01) features our good friend Xedh (i.e. Miguel A. García), the Prince of Spanish experimental music who has proven himself a nonpareil when it comes to realising fatalistic nightmares and uncanny experiences in sound, often with a grim caste. Here he is joined by Enrique Zaccagnini, the two of them forming an eerie backdrop of sinister electronic purring and grisly loud noise, tempered by the unsettling vocalising of Marta Sainz. I suppose it is she providing the strange whimpering sounds on side one, a ghastly sobbing effect which arouses our empathy as much as it sends tremors of terror running up and down our spinal columns. We could be hearing the voice of an exiled ghost, doomed to replay the same traumatic moment in her life for all eternity. Enrique and Xedh produce an accomplished tapestry of complicated noise for this after-life symphony, where the startling eruptions into ear-splitting volume are reined in and controlled, forming part of a fascinating and constantly-changing slow-motion whirlwind of textured sound. The B side feels a tad more pedestrian somehow, not as “composed”, and emerging as a jumble of clatter and screech which is heaped up into a pile rather than arranged in a garden by architects using rakes and blueprints. Even so it doesn’t stint on serving up the manic energy that noise-freaks go for. Marta’s excessive vocals make it clear she’s aiming for a gold medal in next year’s Junko-soundalike contest, to be held in 2014 in Budokan. Lastly we have the grisly cover image of ten dead rats caught in traps and apparently pinned up for display in a shop window in France. Since the title of this release translates into “destruction of harmful animals”, evidently we’re supposed to use this cassette as a cheap alternative to mousetraps or cockroach poison ¹.

We’ve also been sent four cassettes in a box from André Foisy in Chicago. As well as playing in Locrian, it is he I suppose who masterminds the Land Of Decay label and blog, specialising in doomy rock and noise that inculcates decrepitude and ruin. Cultus Sabbati – another trio – have about five albums released at time of writing, not to mention a few video works whose titles betray an interest in the written works of Poe and Lovecraft. This anonymous band conceal their work in a fog of mysticism and cast about references to ritual trance magick, witchcraft, and Norse mythology, revealing little of their musical methodology as they foregather in unknown locations to emit strange dark ambient drones. Thanks to Sunn O))), pretty soon every metal band in the world will end up sitting in a circle in a lonely forest wearing cowls. To some extent all of this does cover ground already well-worn by many other projects in this and related genres, but The Hagiography Of Baba Yaga (LOD 039) does evince some powerful moments of doom and horror in among the general murk and turgidity of its throbbing drones. Echo and reverb effects are used with scant regard for good taste, and evidently Cultus Sabbati believe in saturating every other musical utterance with as much artificial enhancement as they can generate from their small black boxes of evil, undercutting the swampy sludge with whispered chanting vocals and crazed guitar solos so acidic you could use them to unclog a kitchen sink. Track titles like ‘The Attestation Of Vasilissa’ or ‘Koschei The Deathless’ are like the titles to lost Lord Dunsany stories, and when raging at full stretch, the threesome can produce music that will either instil a deep supernatural fear in the listener, or suffocate us within the writhing coils of a deathly inescapable curse. Nice typography on the cover with its saturated golden-brown autumnal colours, images of forests and deadly mushrooms, overprinted with runes and magic circles. From 17 October 2012.

Savage Pencil also used this trope in the 1990s for the noise band Ultrasonic Attack Wave Pestrepeller. ↩

October 2, 2013

Creamed Coconut

So, with CD player newly repaired and listening once more free from the shadow of equipment failure let us see if this newly de-stressed set-up has had a benevolent effect on my reviews:

Let’s consider Alessandro Bosetti and Chris Abrahams matt varnished digifile opus We Who Had Left (MIKROTON RECORDINGS CD 19).

Instrumentally it’s all about piano and electronics, approached with an appealing sensuousness which touches on such worlds as jazz and sound poetry. Chris plays piano in The Necks, I gather. I haven’t actually heard The Necks, but the internet told me that and I thought I’d save you opening any extra tabs by passing on the information.

The first track, ‘We also dress today’, doesn’t give too much away, a spare but approachable construct consisting of the piano riffing on one note, loose-connection bass pulse coyly flirting with being a kick-drum and a sprinkling of pattering, looped polyrhythm. The second track, ‘We arrange our home’, is more representative of what the duo have to offer: light, silvery runs up and down the keyboard backed with electronics, in this case an electronic wandering bassline shadows the piano while breathy samples which sound to me like down-tuned whistles are mixed into a gauzy background wash, giving a hovering flute-like exotica tinge. In this Exotic Forest you half expect some Martin Denny birdcalls to start up as you pass the next tree. It’s a coolly strange environment, like Ballard’s crystal jungle relocated to Tahiti and populated with silent Gauguin beauties.

‘We cannot Imagine’ introduces vocals, softly spoken and Italian-accented, slowly repeated and unpicked phrases unravel over the course of ten minutes whilst they are tentatively wafted into song by gentle puffs of piano and the quiet electric whistle-flutes, floating softly around the listening space. Quite a lovely effect, very delicately performed. Bellisimo.

Sound-wise this isn’t quite the Doobie Brothers, but there is a certain smoothness, more evident in some tracks than others, a quietly polished finish you might actually expect of an ambient album. However, when Chris Abrahams strikes or rather caresses a chord or note, ably counterpointed by Alessandro Bossetti, it is mighty enjoyable whatever burnishing methods may or may not have been applied.

‘When they are overhead’ starts a little like Charlemagne Palestine writ medium accompanying a clog-dance and Google party thrown by Santa’s elves. It certainly has the potential to achieve elevation and hits a nicely rolling green-ness towards the end. If you’ve ever seen the BBC Krautrock documentary where Iggy Pop drills a coconut (a fine cultural moment) while describing the music of Neu! you will recall he uses the phrase ‘psychedelic pastoralism’ while sunset silhouetted pylons recede field by field as seen through a car window. My pleasantly wandering mind was reminded as this track progressed of a similar sensation to that evoked by this scene.

Our journey finishes with a cover of a Bill Evans tune, Waltz for Debby. Debby is ceremoniously draped in a belligerent sinusoidal lap-top as our romantic Italian croons and serenades the album away over a seductive tinkle of the old ivories. That’s amoré!

Kakawaka
Ein Fröhliches Lied Auf Den Lippen Den Wandersmann Kann Nichts Erschüttern
NO LABEL MC CASSETTE

What have we here? A short but sweet cassette (the mini hi-fi system which includes the aforementioned CD player also has a tape player, conveniently), two 10 minute-ish sides. Seit ein: blind munching of psychotropic worms, bursts of computer overload, pitch shift metallic glissandi, the frog chorus and Michael Caine’s heel hitting the concrete in a deserted East Berlin basement, unt so on. Crude methods yield deceptively crude results. Vignettes change like clicking the button on one of those red slide-viewers with the slides on a carboard disc that you used to get. In the background those worms are munching in the dark, converting rainforest decay into putrid phosphorescence. A lesson we can all surely look to apply in our daily lives.

The insect life returns in the second of our sides wherein a flea-bitten, moth-ridden, valve-driven, ragged organ vamp is nibbled on the toes by beetles. Uneasy reposes occur, always while the mandibular chatter soothes away those aches of the day. A muffled noise like a plucked double bass loops away somewhere under the floor like Poe’s tell-tale heart thumping in a bath of mellow vibes. The beetles (John, Paul, Ringo and Jaws) organise a hunt, paint their concave carapaces carmine and set out in slow motion across a shifting carpet, their horns echoing lugubriously. Enchanting and finger-snapping, needless to say.

All in all, very relaxing and swinging and suitable for your next cocktail evening or canasta party if James Last Non Stop Dancing fails to deliver the goods.

September 8, 2013

Exit! Pursued by a Flare

Fire! Orchestra
Exit!
NORWAY RUNE GRAMMOFON RCD 2138 (2013)

Probably not a precedent, but interesting enough a concept is the power jazz trio that always amounts to more than three. Fire! comprises multi-disciplinary heavyweights Mats Gustafsson (sax, Rhodes and electronics), Johan Berthling (bass, guitar and organ), and Andreas Werliin (drums and percussion), and is typically an extra-curricular venting venue for the three mainstays. Their two previous outings were collaborations with Oren Ambarchi and Jim O’Rourke respectively, but Exit! sees them fortified by a further 24 Scandinavian jazz musicians and the group’s name is expanded in a manner commensurate. Given the injection of so much new personnel, it is unsurprising that this venture exhibits wilder, more chaotic personality traits than the preceding team-ups.

However, with small measures of bemusement and disappointment I found that in spite of this feral enhancement, Exit! frequently stops short of an all-out jazz attack on the listener, articulating an operation somewhat less excessive than it is an exercise in restraint. Mysteriously so in fact, for both of the album’s long-form pieces are themselves bisected into sections of only anecdotal resemblance, when the four tracks that served the predecessor so well might have worked better.

‘Exit! Part One’ adds a beat to the club-footed lope of the last track of the Jim O’Rourke collaboration, (‘Unreleased?’); adopting a self-assured strut, which is realised in rising triplets. Swiftly enough, a sultry chanteuse enters the scene, her piercing ululations signalling the entry of some blazing Batman brass, which flares and fades in succession like a fleet of passing Cadillacs driven by Sun Ra. The vocals recede and return, delivered almost atonally and lacking – alas – the meaty delivery that made June Tyson so much more powerful than her pugilistic namesake.

The lyrics – to my ears – (a further innovation) are nondescript and a tad too rarefied, relating to ‘the possibility of improvising in actual space, and the ties ropes and teachers in many online spaces and programs’. As a consequence, the musical space reserved for voice feels like it could have been put to better use. However, ten minutes in and things start to gel a little more: bass and drums adopt a slower, pendular swagger; shimmering organs and horns render a background full-bodied but non-intrusive for further post-modern ruminations, resorting to shrillness only in the energised, final few minutes.

‘Exit! Part Two’ begins uneventfully, but tension mounts with a urinary urgency that finds a delayed but welcome release as a cascade of shrieking brass, which obliterates all memory of the innocuous yelps leading up, which might well have fled from Bono’s throat during scale practice. The rocking rhythm that drives this one, ebbs, rises and expands even when punctured by stabs of saxophone.

Inexplicably, this titanic machine halts in the eleventh minute, to be usurped by one bleating soliloquy and then another. The searing backdrop that hitherto rendered such ululations palatable is now gone and a full five minutes is spent building steam from squeaky fluttering, only to spazz it again, in the absence of an appetite for vocal histrionics. Mercifully, a fireball booms out of the void and burns a giant cigar hole in the speakers with a comet trail four minutes long, affecting a tentative redemption in the album’s dying minutes.

The flaws (by my reckoning) in this album are quite unnecessary: the weak vocals and the peculiar structure, to identify the principal culprits. The sense arises that errors of judgement are difficult to undo on a project of this scale. A brave face is needed. Which is not to say the album is a dud – probably it will knock many listeners out – and in its stronger moments the band hits a mean stride, sounding unstoppable. I don’t get those lost minutes back, but I do know when to put the kettle on.

August 31, 2013

Key Acoustics

The plaintive cry of Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille is I Wish I Didn’t Dream (NORTHERN SPY RECORDS NSCD 031), on a highly opaque CD of intense experimental guitar murk and equally plangent vocalising. These short, clipped poem-songs are exemplary manifestations of the Emily Dickinson approach taken to its post-modern extreme – broken images, unfamiliar emotions, and nascent ideas stumbling into the world scarce half made-up. Who better to delve into these uncharted seas than the two talented Americans in this duo, who singly or collectively have been producing musical puzzles for over thirty years, producing a large body of work that’s proving impossible to decode – and the problem only increases when you have obtuse, distanced and frown-inducing releases such as this one. We last heard from them as two-thirds of Haunted House, a group producing the wonderful Blue Ghost Blues for this same label in 2011, whose hard-rocking and lengthy guitar noodlings may well have struck a chord with all good lovers of avant axe-excess, but this particular sleep-talking mystery bucket of murmurations and unfinished utterances is quite another brisket of bones. The guitar meanders and squeaks, producing icy cold tones from a meat locker situated thirty miles from the studio. The vocalist is closer to hand, her urgent whispers magnified in a small echo chamber, but her cryptical half-sung sketches – fleeting portraits etched on a frozen window pane with a dusty twig – will have you straining to catch the implications behind each intimate gasp. This is blanked-out, impenetrable minimalist art music of the highest water, a more austere version of Annette Peacock and Joni Mitchell running across the snow with the distorted and attenuated guitars of Japanese ghosts in pursuit of their threatened souls. It also comes with a booklet of stark abstract paintings by M P Landis, completing a package that’s guaranteed to confirm everything you ever suspected about the emptiness and futility of life. Gradely! (01/11/2012)

Another American who, I suspect, is no stranger to staring the Gods of futility in the eye is our good friend Nick Hoffman, the sullen and stern genius who utters little while issuing great but perplexing music on his Pilgrim Talk label. One such batch arrived in November 2012. Cockroach Boy (PILGRIM TALK PT22) is a teamup with Satoshi Kanda, one of his many connections in the steaming continent of the East, and they also made a split cassette for this label in 2010. Kanda has been improvising since 2003 using nothing but an electric bass and some empty milk bottles. Well, he certainly delivers the cream on this recording! It’s one of Hoffman’s “play it and guess” recordings where absolutely nothing is explained and it’s up to the listener to decide when the duo have started or ended performing, and whether or not what they are creating can even be called “music”. Ultra-minimal, confusing, yet it’s full of the unbearable tension that these dangerous situations can often create. Soon you too will be drawn into contemplating these strange tones and lengthy silences, and wishing you were nailed inside a coffin at the cemetery in Fukuoka, where this was recorded. The lengthy title to this 40-minute work, if indeed it is a title, compacts references to demons, corpses and Gods and also retains the air of a schlocky horror movie, in keeping with the grotesque Insect-Fear cover art by Hoffman. I love the way this music consistently refuses easy digestion, and all these Pilgrim Talk releases are recommended. (09/11/2012)

The Polish trio Sonda recorded Sonda (AUDIO TONG AT26.2012) in Sopot, a little town abutting the Baltic Sea, performing in an attic space in 2006. Now released on Audio Tong, it’s an engaging set of music played by the drummer Krzysztof Topolski and the guitarist Marcin Dymiter, with vocalist Tomasz Pawlak “Czaszka” joining them with his husky yawps for three tracks. In their endearingly untidy music, the group make a point of confusing musical genres, aiming to indulge their love of “rock, blues, metal, drone, punk, electronics and improvisation”. Two of the seven tracks are a species of obnoxious guitar grindcore racket that should grease the wheels of die-hard Napalm Death fans, while two other tracks are meandery improvisation of the rattle-and-creak variety, with much emphasis on the metallic resonances produced by cymbals and metal-wound strings. Other pieces are just plain impossible to categorise, although the 12-minute ‘Wszystko Dobre, Co Sie Dobrze Konczy’ has a definite vibe of Can threaded into the sinews of its drumming and electronic drone, making snake-like movements across the carpet with the help of the violinist Marek Dybusc. Competent enough performances, but the trio ultimately lack force and conviction, no matter which style they adopt. Lovely deep sea cover art. (02/11/2012)

Strange furry thing from Jüppala Kääpiö, the duo who brought us Spring Promenade in 2010. Despite their Finnish name this band is actually two Japanese musicians Hitoshi and Carole Kojo who live in Belgium. Rewound Grooves (OMNIMOMENTO OM 07) may be a concept record telling the story of the Krampus, a vicious and hairy beast drawn from Alpine mythology who is associated with Winter and may be the enemy of St Nicholas – a sort of early manifestation of the Grinch. The music by Jüppala Kääpiö is however anything but beastly, and comprises four lengthy and limpid drones of ambient swirlery, all created from numerous layers of gentle electronic tones, breathy vocals and endlessly spinning tape loops (probably enhanced by digital means). The album strikes a thoughtful and contemplative pose, and is generally soothing and positive, with only the third track ‘From Veins To Nebulae’ introducing an element of drama or danger. Somewhat diffuse and static music, but there is much craft in the Kojos’ sound-generation technique, and they rarely commit a careless or half-baked statement to tape. Besides the fake fur wrapper, there is also a screenprinted band of card which can be worn like a mask. (29/11/2012)

If you’d prefer drone music with more darkness lurking in the corners, then as ever Sum Of R will satisfy your thirst for all that’s lugubrious and sombre. The sounds on Ride Out The Waves (STORM AS HE WALKS SAHWLP001) are produced mostly by Reto Mäder working in the studio overdubbing his keyboards, bass, electronics and percussion, although Julia Wolf (what a brilliant name for a supernatural horror combo like this one) adds poignant stabs from her fatal guitar at chosen stages on the forest pathway. I tend to remember Sum Of R records as an unbroken feast of thick occluded dark ambience, but Ride Out The Waves has a lot more variety and incident than their usual output, each track quite unlike the last, until the LP becomes the soundtrack to a very disjointed and episodic horror film. Said film, if it exists, is characterised by much bloodshed, sabres, and men on horseback cutting down villagers with a pitiless scowl of contempt. Aye, there is still plenty of the characteristic bubbling black tar music which induces fear and misery, but the heavy metal guitar swipes add a very welcome element of tension, plus the spare percussion will appeal to all you hard-boned stoner freaks – just check out the slowed-down battering effects on ‘Alarming’, the truly apocalyptic nightmare that brings the album crashing down into ruins. I’ve always said Reto Mäder should have made a Black Metal LP, but I feel that genre may sadly be in decline now. Even so, Mader should join forces with MZ.412 some day, and the results would be truly monstrous – they could produce the ultimate “atmospheric dread and cold death” album. The photo shows a promo CD, but the release is vinyl.

July 31, 2013

Moëvöt (Best of): barmy Satanic ritual horror with equal parts experimentation and kitsch

Moëvöt, Best of, Sanity Muffin, cassette s/m#40 (2013)

As far as I know, this tape collects everything that was done by the one-man French Black Legions project Moëvöt in the 1990s. Moëvöt was one of the more distinctive Black Legions acts, eschewing raw black metal tremolo guitars and drums to be a completely black ambient entity relying on mood and melodic but fragmented minimalist song structures to convey the artist’s particular view of the world and humanity. There’s very little information carried on the cassette sleeve about the music – the number of tracks and their titles are not printed – so I’ve listened to the entire cassette as if it were a massive one-track soundtrack to an imaginary impressionist movie. The music actually stands up to that treatment: there are long pieces and there are short ones as well, most of which are repetitive and appear to go nowhere, describing perhaps a scene in some detail in a particular point of time or in a nouveau roman narrative.

As a whole, the music often has a camp horror quality especially during those songs dominated by raspy BM-styled vocals that chant a dark Satanic litany. Passages of dread, sorrow, despair and desolation with slow music and choirs of pure-toned though anaemic voices are threaded throughout. Musique concrète elements appear and there is experimentation with different sounds and tones to achieve particular moods and a growing sense of dark horror. Singing can be near-operatic on a number of tracks and this helps to strengthen the music’s ominous horror.

Quite a number of synthesiser-generated effects are deployed here, making for a work hard to pigeon-hole with labels: a black metal sensibility does exist but the music also aspires to a Gothic-Romantic artistic level which includes mock horror opera and arty kitsch. As the album progresses – by the way, I’m not assuming everything has been assembled in chronological order – violin and cello join the fray, and sounds that blend voice and keyboards or strings are sometimes hard to pick apart. More experimentation abounds: a creepy Whitehouse-like track composed entirely of trickling water, scraping metal and a woman’s panting breath appears along with other strange noises that come and go. One other track seems to be all wandering bass guitar melody.

Other Black Legions bands may be more raw in sound, louder, angrier, more energetic and better known but the Moëvöt man, playing out a weirdly complex movie of Satanic ritual horror and artistic and intellectual pretensions and aspirations from his overactive imagination, may have carved out a unique if barmy underground cult status for himself and his project.

Contact: Sanity Muffin

June 15, 2013

The Purloined Letters

Omnivore is Glenna van Nostrand from Cambridge, MA. On her self-titled LP (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR072) the gimmick is that she records her voice through old telephones, whose small microphones presumably give her what she seeks in terms of an interesting filtering effect and a non-digital warmth. To advance that strategy, she records everything using amplified radios. Strip away that technology, though, and what we have is an odd album of acapella songs. I do like the way she has assembled her songs with much care and craft, overdubbing voice recordings to build a virtual doo-wop group out of her own personality, and making clever use of repetitions in these simple round-like compositions. She’s like a minimal version of Bobby McFerrin, even supplying her own percussion and rhythm section through voice. It would be nicer if she could manage a bit more variety in the vocals though. I’m not hoping for a Coasters-styled vocal group with alto, tenor and basso profundo effects, but everything Omnivore does is pitched at the same level, meaning that the songs lack musical depth and become monotonous. Her lyrics mystify me, but she’s plainly from the school of disaffected modernist poets, making a virtue out of inarticulacy. We are invited to enjoy the dislocating effect taking place as she apparently forms her thoughts before us, in real time. The cover image also tells us something’s wrong; but for the woman’s troubled face, it could almost be a faded snapshot from the cover of Better Homes and Gardens in the 1950s. (31/05/2012)

The double album Electric Cremation (GRAUTAG RECORDS GTR#003) by Pharoah Chromium was released in 2011. The performer may or may not be Ghazi Barakat who also records as Boy From Brazil. He did all the work here with some help from Timothy Gane, who added synths in places and recorded and mixed the album in Berlin. The large amount of material has been organised so that each side has its own distinct mood and flavour, as indicated by the titles “Atomic Side”, “Feral Side”, and so on. The record starts off with a song, and ‘L’Age Atomique’ is a splendid piece of bleak minimalist electro-beat, sung with perfectly calibrated icy precision by guest vocalist Becky Ofek. This gem turns out to be untypical of the remainder of the set though, which I would characterise as assorted forms of drone, synth sludge, distorted guitars, and noise. A few interesting sounds struggle to the surface of this swampy heap, but the cumulative effect of this formless music is smothering, and rather depressing. The generally apocalyptic tone is reflected in the track titles on sides A and B, which paint grim portraits of urban decay, ruin and pollution. I might add this is entirely in keeping with the aesthetic scheme of Nicolas Moulin, who is the curator of Grautag Records, and freely owns his preoccupation with boredom, depression and futility in the accompanying sleeve note, giving visual expression to his afflicted state ¹ through his grey photographs of desolation printed on the gatefold sleeve. Meanwhile Pharoah Chromium moves on from the harsh and aggressive tones on the “Feral Side”, to wobbly and offbeat ambient drones on the “Ghost Side”, whose quasi-mystical titles represent a small window of relief from the general sense of occluded misery we have endured thus far. The closing “Arabic Side” is suitably tinged with Eastern intervals spicing up the guitar melodies. Not an uplifting album, and one which might have benefited from some editing to shorten the longeurs of certain keyboard passages, but as a coherent statement exploring a colossal sense of existential emptiness and futuristic dystopian nightmare, it takes some beating.

Tom Recchion brings us Proscenium (ELEVATOR BATH eeaoa037), his album of beautifully-crafted electronic music that is his first release since Sweetly Doing Nothing in 2006. The music has its origins as soundtrack for the work of a film-maker and puppeteer who was producing a theatrical adaptation of a story by Edgar Allen Poe, and at one level Recchion has no other ambition with these reworked versions than to create a set of suitably morbid atmospheres. Typically however, Recchion’s vision reaches farther than that and when realising that stage-bound experience, he staked a claim on the soul of each member of the audience, wishing to pass on a sonic experience that immersed them in abstract intangible murk while they were watching the play, and kept on deepening gradually until, without realising it, they were up to their eyes in bone-chilling liquid fog. Even as they went home and attempted to forget about it, this persistent globule of fear would cling to their clothes for days afterwards. A similar experience – Recchion calls it “an ongoing series of atmospheres” shall be unleashed if you dare to uncork this vinyl bottle, whose bounty extends to two sides of a thick and crusty long-player and a 45RPM single, the potent charms enscribed with evocative titles such as ‘The Haunted Laboratory’ and ‘The Mesmerised Chair’. Clearly, Recchion has studied his Poe well; music like this would make a most fitting soundtrack for M. Valdemar as we watch the decay and corruption of his mesmerised body as it is suddenly released from suspended animation. Naturally, this professional and well-burnished music – it has a presence as expensive and sleek as a black diamond – is some way from the more raw and experimental work that this creator produced as a member of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, but it still carries a similarly obsessive artistic charge. This is creepy music that stalks you, with the tenacity of a silent assassin. (24/07/2012)

One of the proposals he advances is that we should adopt “Grautag” – literally, “Greyday” – as a day of the week in our calendar. ↩

February 16, 2013

… if a night: trippy jazz big on smooth and suave tricks and not much else

Shijo X, … if a night, Bombanella Records / Five Roses Press, CD (2012)

A very nice surprise here … this is the closest I’ve come to reviewing something that could have been recorded for a James Bond film. Song titles like “Zabriskie’s bench”, suggesting a secret yet commonplace rendezvous (like a bus stop outside a nondescript safe house in a quiet leafy street) between spies, certainly suggest as much – and then there are tracks that count the graveyard hours like “02 a.m.”, “04 a.m.” and “06 a.m.” that bookend the album and cut it into its A-side and B-side. The music sounds as if it was performed by a band but it’s actually the output of an Italian duo, Davide Verticelli and Laura Sinigaglia.

Sung in a sultry and sometimes bellowing voice by Sinigaglia, the songs are short and have a cool trippy lounge ambience. The clean, cool sound is at once the duo’s strength and weakness: the music has a precise, but not too sharp, sound which showcases the singing and the instrumentation clearly but lacks warmth and depth. This throws the vocals and melodies into much sharper focus than might be usual for this kind of music so performances have to be top-notch. I sometimes wish the songs were longer so there would be room for improvised instrumental passages in which atmosphere of a smoky, noirish sort would be pronounced but the choice of instrumentation, musical style and the production prevent this.

Overall the album is very busy and business-like but there’s not much on it that leaves a deep impression or has you thinking of late nights in dimly lit bars where bartenders are packing up, pulling down the blinds and casting sideways glances at the lone customer hunched over in the cubicle staring down into his glass, lost in reminiscing about the mystery blonde with the Veronica Lake peekaboo hairstyle and the silhouette figure in black, tottering down the street in stilettoes towards her gangster boyfriend’s car … and of whom he (the private eye) hasn’t seen or heard in the last five years. He wonders if he should look her up in the battered phone book nearby … then he remembers that news story tucked away in the corner of page 6 not so long ago about a woman’s body answering to the lady’s description being fished out of a polluted river.

Lots of smooth and suave tricks abound but an album of this kind of trippy jazz needs to rise above the cliches and stereotypes associated with the music, and include something that really sounds as if it’s coming from the heart.

Contact: Five Roses Press, Shijo X