Tagged: vocals

SHIJOX 009

… 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

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Synchronisms


I think we last heard from Noah Creshevsky with his 2010 album Twilight of the Gods, released on the Tzadik label, and there is also the 2008 item Favorite Encores where he teamed up with If, Bwana. Now here he is on Al Margolis’ label Pogus Productions with Rounded With A Sleep (POGUS 21063-2), containing seven recent-ish examples of his dazzling and impressive “hyperrealism” compositions. Creshevsky is a meticulous electro-acoustic maestro who uses an extreme form of editing, cutting and pasting together sounds from multiple sources; on this record, he does it using the recorded performances of numerous musicians, so we have a rich array of musical notes and sounds from clarinet, voices, guitar, banjo, steel guitar, cello, bass, and improvised piano music. Twilight of the Gods went all-out for the wow-factor with its intense and utterly impossible layered compositions, its runs of notes rushing past at ridiculous speeds, and a generally breathless tone throughout most of the album. Rounded With A Sleep feels somewhat more manageable than that tornado, and its keynote to me seems to be an intimate contemporary form of chamber music. This may be simply because there aren’t as many instruments to listen to, but this outlandish composer does not skimp on the “can such things be?” factor, presenting us with a lavish feast of layered, cropped, varispeeded and intricately assembled musical phrases, the like of which hasn’t really been heard since Frank Zappa overworked the Apostolic Studios board on the Uncle Meat album in 1968. This is particularly evident on the clarinet and keyboard interplay on ‘La Sonnambula’, and the astonishing recastings made out of Stuart Isacoff’s piano work on ‘What If’, which is like a surrealistic walkthrough the history of classical European keyboard music. If I knew more about the field, I might be able to identify resonances with Bach, Mozart and Haydn with more confidence, but as it is I can only effuse my vague ill-informed impressions. I’m on slightly safer ground with the guitar-based piece ‘The Kindness of Strangers’, which offers us a virtual trio of guitar, bass, lap steel and banjo players, refashioned in the studio to create an utterly mangled form of anguloid country and western music, where not even the singing voice is spared the full Creshevsky treatment. One is usually left somewhat exhausted by listening to only ten minutes of this dense music, but it is clear Creshevsky is not simply out to surprise or stun the listener with a zillion cultural references and juxtapositions in the manner of many plunderphonics artists over the last 20 years. On the contrary, he aims to advance music. His sleeve notes here offer a robust critique of the norms of classical music performance, highlighting the “bad economics” of paying “good wages to a live performer who merely sings a 10-second coda at the end of a string quartet”. Creshevsky’s hyperrealism, and by extension any music that has been collaged in a studio through judicious selection of the best performances 1, offers a viable alternative to that old 19th century concert-hall based model. However the composer is not out to completely junk the past, and he is driven by traditional musical values of virtuosity, sonic palettes, and the production of an expressive musical language. His edits produce a form of super-virtuosity from the work of the already highly-capable musicians he works with. If his music seems exaggerated to us, it’s because he feels he also has to compete with the excesses of the information age, where we have been exposed to so much culture that he fears the power of music may be diminished. Creshevsky’s response to the situation is far from pessimistic; he devotes himself to creating energised and uplifting music, that truly refreshes the sensory passages. From 17 February 2012.

The American composer John Bischoff studied with Robert Ashley at Mills, and was also a member of the League of Automatic Music Composers. The latter team of experimenters made use of early (late 1970s-early 1980s) computer technology to generate random electronic music in endearingly home-made ways. On Audio Combine (NEW WORLD RECORDS 80727-2), we hear five of his more recent works dating from 2004 to 2011, which are broadly related in their use of physical objects or instruments being employed to trigger electronic sounds. There are subtle variations to do with the use of amplification, timing patterns, and attempts to subvert or re-order the original time sequences by ingenious methods. Most of this very process-heavy music seemed uneventful to me, but I enjoyed parts of ‘Sidewalk Chatter’ which was made using the STEIM crackle box 2 and effectively documents some sort of interactive hands-on dialogue between the performer and a computer, via the exposed metal circuits of the box. ‘Surface Effect’ is also sporadically exciting and works on similar principles, that is the interaction between a trigger device and a computer program, but this piece makes more extensive use of pre-planned random structures and allows, in a control-freak sort of way, the oscillators to create unpredictable patterns. A complex form of a detuned and unstable synthesiser, if you will, which benefits from being entirely hand-made by Bischoff. From 20 February 2012.

Trophies is the oddball project of the Italian composer Alessandro Bosetti, a vehicle for his complex prose-poem concoctions which he intones rather emotionlessly on top of a free-form musical structure provided by the drummer Ches Smith and the guitarist Kenta Nagai. Bosetii also adds uncertain electronic tones, colours and washes, and Nagai’s guitar is fretless, meaning he is able to make music while avoiding constructing familiar riffs or tunes. These strategies add to the deliberately obtuse contours of the sound and the open-ended nature of the compositions, producing sensations in the listener that are very hard to explain. Six examples of this perplexing music can be heard on A Color Photo Of The Horse (D.S. AL CODA #4), all recorded in Brooklyn in a single day in 2010 under the production guidance of Alex Waterman. Trophies music is always a bit daunting and overwhelming to listen to. For starters, the music is half-familiar, half-unfamiliar; at times it almost resembles a form of dissonant experimental jazz-minimalism performed without any sort of underpinning rhythm or pattern, and at other times proceeds with the urgency of a tricky Trey Gunn riff from a latter incarnation of King Crimson. Mostly, it is dissonant and unpredictable, wriggling about the turf like a structural-materialist centipede. Then there’s the equally tricky lyrical content, a jumbled explosion of prose verbosity which may sometimes repeat certain phrases, and which occupies some halfway mark between Samuel Beckett and Lenny Bruce. As soon as I think I stand on the verge of grasping the meaning of these breathless texts, they almost instantly collapse back into a sea of absurdity and gibberish. The situation is not helped by Bosetti’s studied ambiguity as he performs his half-musical recits, at times almost parodying the emotional dramas of a soul singer or operatic diva, but mostly rattling through his forests of words with the speed and efficiency of a human typewriter. True meanings are masked in this post-modern diatribe. Make no mistake, this is a truly fine art piece of business – conceptual art trammelled up with music in ways that make Laurie Anderson sound like pop music. In some ways this could be the closest we’ll get to hearing a Raymond Pettibon drawing in sound. This release is one of numerous oddities, including some DVDs, we received from this inscrutable art label in January 2012. All of them are packed in sleeves which cannot be unfolded.

  1. By which I mean anything from George Martin with The Beatles to Teo Macero with Miles Davis. ↩
  2. The instrument has its origins in an invention of Michel Waisvisz, who made an LP of it for FMP records in 1978. The device was also used briefly by Derek Bailey on Domestic and Public Pieces. ↩
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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.

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Early Sumac vinyl


Here’s a lovely Yma Sumac 10-incher (CORAL CRL 56058) which I just received today from a dealer in Athens. I just had to have a copy ever since September this year, when I went to a record fair and saw a copy disappearing under my nose and beard into the hands of a German collector who got to the right box just seconds before me. I had never seen it before. Besides it being an item by my beloved Yma which was unfamiliar, I also fell in love with its yellow, orange and green cover design, and looked it up online. Turns out to be a collection of early recordings made in 1943, recorded some years before her famous debut on Capitol Records, but only issued in America in 1952 to cash in on her popularity after the phenomenal success of Voice of the Xtabay and Legend of the Sun Virgin. This was all news to me. And I call myself an Yma Sumac fan!!

The arrival of this fine item happily coincides with my reading of Yma Sumac: The Art Behind the Legend (NEW YORK YBK PUBLISHERS), a book by Nicholas E. Limansky. I’m just up to p 177 as I wrote these lines, and have learned the definitive tale behind her 1971 rock LP Miracles (another release which surprised me mightily when I saw an ex-library copy at a record fair one time and instantly snarfed it up). Limansky’s book is probably the best text on the subject you’ll ever read. He works very hard to give a balanced and nuanced account of this highly tangled tale, and gives fair dues to all the protagonists. I’ve already learned more about some of the key players who have been somewhat overlooked in the fan-accolades that are usually dished out to Yma, Les Baxter, and Moises Vivanco, such as the flautist Hernán Braña, the dancer Cholita Rivero, and of course Elisabeth Waldo whose Rites of the Pagan LP I have heard, but didn’t realise she also played violin on the Sumac stage tours. Limansky’s achievement in this book is to carefully and respectfully debunk all the nonsense and myths about Sumac (including all the self-made ones) and still leave the essential charm of her music completely Inca-Taqui intact. I can seriously recommend this excellent, thoroughly-researched tome to all hard-core Sumac fans.


Regular readers may or may not care much about my personal Sumac passion, which oddly enough began in 1981 when a friend Pete Woodin purchased the Sun Virgin LP on one of our regular shopping trips to a jazz & blues record shop in Birmingham (and if anyone remembers anything about this shop, run by two brothers named Ray and Alan, please get in touch). My friend plucked it out of the racks on the strength of the cover alone. The man behind the counter made a face, and played us a track in an attempt to bring us to our senses. Needless to say it had the opposite effect, and Pete bought the item on the spot. Soon after this, his hipster friend Pete Thompson found a magazine article about “exotica” LPs and sent us a photocopy. It made the connection between Les Baxter and Yma, and seared the image of the front cover of Baxter’s Jewels of the Sea into my brain. I guess a vinyl original of that item is my next eBay purchase. After that point my obsession truly began. Some indication of where it led me can be deduced in this fannish 1988 article I wrote for John Bagnall’s music zine Hairy Hi-Fi.

Having spun Presenting Yma Sumac on my Bermuda Dansette, I’m not only delighted to have this missing piece of the jigsaw in my hands, but also find the music is wonderful too, even if it’s quite some way from Baxter’s amazing orchestral confections from 1952. It’s basically Peruvian folk music presented in a popular style, but enhanced by her lively and youthful vocal trills. I particularly recommend her rendition of a song called ‘Indian Love’ which is packed with drama and dynamics. Unusual also to hear Yma singing actual words, instead of wordlessly vocalising in such ways as to show off her range – but I’ll leave that sort of analysis to Mr. Limansky. I just hope that German record collector is deriving as much enjoyment from his purchase as I am!

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Animalia Corolla: beguiling fairy folk psychedelic music with environmental themes


Jüppala Kääpiö, Animalia Corolla, Omnimemento OM04, CD (2012)

Ha- ha, I was fooled into thinking Jüppala Kääpiö was indeed a Finnish folk group beavering away on portable electronic gadgets and handheld instruments in a little log cabin in dense forest somewhere far from Helsinki or Tampere or any other major centre in Finland, keeping to themselves most of the time except on the rare occasion when one of their number would shyly venture to the local community store to post a few CD copies to a generous and kind-hearted distributor like Fonal Records or Aquarius Records in San Francisco or even Ed at TSP. In fact the only real Finnish deal about Jüppala Kääpiö is the name: the Belgian-based act is actually made up of Japanese sound artist Hitoshi Kojo and Swiss singer Carole Kojo. The music they play is based on environmental themes and folklore traditions drawn from various countries and if I listen carefully, I swear I can hear something almost like Okinawan folk music: light, sunny and on the playful side.

The album proper begins with “Yokoso”, a beguiling neo-primitive ditty that repeats over and over with fairy-like chanting and ululating glossolalia, supported by quaint gentle percussion. “Pollen Penetration” follows in a similar vein in a more relaxed manner. “Yetti Frottage” features the kind of delicate abstract fragmented and slowly evolving improv music that once upon a time the label Music Your Mind Will Love You championed; there is even the ghostly and slightly sinister ambience and the quivering violin that I associate with the label. Now Carole Kojo starts singing in a more natural voice that seems at odds with the spooky space critters floating over and above her head: her voice might remind one of Tara Burke of Fursaxa, Merja Kokkonen of Islaja and in parts the girl vocalist from Paavoharju.

As the album progresses, the music becomes more lavish and lush as though the fairies, confident that they have got our attention, are now bringing out more elaborate orchestras of fairy and insect musicians, all playing exotic instruments of which no two are alike, and each and every one of them revelling in the peculiar and unearthly melodies they release from their strings, blow-holes, drums and chimes. Fairy choruses croon and wail their fragile songs of nature, the ever-changing seasons, the fleeting quality of life, the shifting images of beauty and the longing for good times and merry-making long gone.

This is very beguiling and magical music which deserves to be more widely heard. Perhaps a better sound production that would bring out some of the background sounds and enrich the textures of the music – the album might have benefited from different sound atmospheres and a bit of reverb in parts to give some songs a more sculptured feel – might bring “Animalia Corolla” to greater public attention.

Contact: Omnimemento

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Astromancy: outsider avant-rock / pop with hiphop and funk rhythms and film-noir ambience

Fastest, Astromancy, Galaxy Records, CD (2012)

Misfit one-man band Fastest returns with his seventh original full-length album to deliver yet another sermon to the world. The music is a strange mixture of deliberately awkward and lumpen funk rhythms played on old cheap electronic keyboards from thirty years ago, synthesised percussion from the same period with hiphop influences, a declamatory vocal in near-gruff tones, sonorous brass orchestration, weird effects and lite-metal guitar. A curious smoky film-noir atmosphere hovers over most songs; the Fastest man’s voice might be that of an extra hard-boiled detective who’s seen too much unpunished crime, too many corrupt police commissioners, too many duplicitous blonde babes and too many gangsters with their feet in concrete thrown over bridges into rivers below. The songs are usually quite short and tight in their delivery with not many instrumental passages, and this gives the album a lot of urgent energy.

“Fantasy II” is a strong start to the album with its clarion-call introduction, stuttery drumming and hurried vocal delivery. “Southern Mankind” mixes up the pace by switching from one set of rhythm and melody to another and back or to another. “The Wind” features for once a beautiful acoustic guitar tune, only for it to be mussed up by another bumptious rhythm loop, some pumping tuba sounds and thumpy synth-drum noises. “Cruelty” features some scrapy metal sounds that attempt to imitate barking dogs, more stuttery drumming and hoarse Christian Bale / Batman singing, if indeed Bale’s Batman can sing. “Through your Eyes (Vannesa’s Secret Version)” is a surprisingly dance-worthy piece albeit with a rather dark distorted vocal and the track could almost fall into the current dark techno scene. In “Divine”, the Fastest guy decides he wants to sing more like Tom Hardy’s Bane character, if indeed Hardy’s Bane can sing with the gas mask off. “All that’s left” comes closest to being a mood song with plaintive 80s-style synth tones.

Final track “Katrina” with its faux harmonica tones and stop-start rhythms is Fastest’s reference to the hurricane of the same name that ravaged New Orleans in 2005. It’s less angry than I thought it might be and it fades out in a hurried way that doesn’t do the album much justice to my mind.

There’s so much on each and every song that the danger here is that the brain just can’t take it all in and so the album might pass in a blur of awkward rhythms, bursts of drumming, weird hushed vocalising and dark secretive ambience. The songs are all very consistent in their ornery nature and energy though after seven albums I’m starting to wonder whether Fastest has got himself in a bit of a rut and needs some friends to help him find an undiscovered part of himself, something that perhaps he’s repressed for too long for fear of being thought weak and vulnerable, that would enhance his music.

Contact: Aquarius Records

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We The People

Métal Urbain

Here’s TSP favourite Franck Vigroux with a new solo record, his first for about two years since the exciting and pessimistic Camera Police, which took a stern unblinking look at modern surveillance methods. We (Nous Autres) (D’AUTRES CORDES RECORDS DAC 2021) is not informed by so specific a theme, but the titles such as ‘Death in Paris’, ‘Ininferna’, ‘Fire’, ‘Crash’ and ‘La Mort’ should alert you to the inflammatory nature of the music here. Many tracks demonstrate Vigroux’s strong capability in terms of manipulating and sculpting electronic noise on a grand scale. There’s a very physical, manual quality to the way he assembles sound, smearing vats of lard with one hand while controlling an enormous derrick with the other, swinging steel-like girders of digital burr and buzz into place. When he’s not hammering another rivet into the cast-iron coffin of 21st-century schizoid man, Vigroux exhales from his poisoned lungs bleak and foggy atmospheres such as ‘Bruisme’ or ‘Ashes II’, which are positively Ballard-esque in their remorseless misery. There’s also the splintered and nightmarish consciousness of ‘Death in Paris’, which in less than two minutes posits a horrifying future where your modernistic all-automated apartment (all its utilities computer-assisted, natch) is rebelling against you at every turn, and gloomy resigned robots wait outside with the express task of hammering your face into the wall with mighty metal mitts. Speaking of Ballard, there is the 14-minute ‘Crash’ which in title at least pays homage to the respected English dystopian, and concludes the album by leading us on a lengthy tour around many aspects of the modern urban hell we are doomed to create for ourselves, and combines most of the techniques used so far into one monstrous track – vicious electronic growls, fragmented inhuman voices, white noise, and depressingly vacant ambient fogs. Even if this cut ends the album on a relatively serene and calming tone of minimal drone, you’ll still be crushed into a compressed block of meat by the claustrophobic weight of Vigroux’s brilliant music. Listen out too for the “abrasive distorted electronic beats” as noted in the press pack, and the contributions of vocalist Annabelle Playe. Vigroux uses a lot of electro-acoustic methodology in all his music, but I sense he works in a very intuitive and painterly style, rather than assembling content laboriously like a formal composer. The results always pay off, and his dark imagination flourishes. Received 18 March 2012.

Proteus Gowanus

The Gowanus Session (PORTER RECORDS PRCD-4068) is a fabulous suite of free-jazz-improvised music created by bassist William Parker, pianist Thollem McDonas, and Nels Cline with his electric guitar. Californian improviser Cline may be familiar to you from records he’s made with Thurston, Zeena Parkins, Chris Corsano, Alan Licht, Henry Kaiser and many other untamed Americans. The Gowanus Session does contain two or three high-energy type cuts, which propel themselves forward admirably without the aid of a drummer, but the trio exercise considerable restraint as they explore puzzling metaphysical mysteries on the quieter, slower tracks. The album is mainly about the combination of unusual and far-out sounds, textures and tones, and it’s loaded with tasty, dense musical fillings. Parker for one serves up a fabulous range of techniques, such that his bass performs as a growling droner or pattering percussive instrument as the situation demands. McDonas supplies rich and baroque chord shapes, melodies and patterns, while Cline is generally let off the leash to go completely bonkers – aggressive feedback blasts, intense high-octane soloing, and amplified curved shapes that fall out of his solid-body guitar like dollops of Baskin-Robbins’ finest. Recorded and mixed by Peter Karl in his studio, and it’s got cover art by Cork Marcheschi, a former member of Fifty Foot Hose. How much more hip could it be? Received 20 March 2012.

Death, Thou Shalt Die

Just noted Steve Roden yesterday and here he be again, this time in a team-up with Steve Peters. Not A Leaf Remains As It Was (12K RECORDINGS 12K1069) is largely a vocal record of extreme delicacy and subtlety, with near-hesitant vocal wisps unfurling their washed-out tones to the accompaniment of gentle ambient music and small percussive sounds. The content for the lyrics was derived, in an extremely circuitous fashion, from a book of Japanese Jisei, a form of poem supposedly written by Japanese monks at the very point of death (though according to some scholars, warriors and poets did it too). Neither creator can read or speak a word of Japanese, but they weren’t about to let a little thing like that stop them making a covenant with this highly charged spiritual content. Sorting out the poems using a classification system that would have delighted both John Cage and Brian Eno (a methodology that involved using index cards), they proceeded to perform the fragmented texts in a remarkably selective fashion, at times settling for the utterance of a mere syllable simply because they liked the taste of it in their intoning mouths. Even English translations of the Japanese words were fair game in this phonetic approach. It’s thus something of a lottery whether any of the original jisei texts get through at all. In this manner, they hoped to avoid all the obvious pitfalls that await any Westerner who attempts to flirt with Oriental cultures, so there is not a trace of Zen Buddhism anywhere in the finished product. Seattle studio whiz Doug Haire has to be given a lot of credit for making the final assemblage and mix from these evanescent sounds, a task which to many would seem on a par with knitting fog. To its credit, this album completely eschews the use of electronic instruments, and any sounds which we may at first mistake for commonplace “ambient” drones are largely produced by the combined voices of Roden and Peters, as they quaver and whisper like avant-garde choirboys in Westminster Abbey. It’s also notable how, despite being so far removed from the original source material by dint of the elaborate near-conceptual cut-up methods used, the record still resonates with a deep spiritual feeling. It also preserves the very starkness of the jisei, a form which ought to “vividly express the sentiments of an individual standing face-to-face with death.” 1 Received 18 March 2012.

  1. From http://japanesereligions.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/japanese-death-poem-jisei.html, retrieved 07/10/2012. ↩
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Rare Cases


From Montpellier France comes Horse Gives Birth To Fly, a name which is very reminiscent of the uncanny phenomena which J.G. Posada delighted in engraving on his Mexican woodblocks (he called each one a caso raro), but in this instance the name is connected to Amon Duul II and Deutsch Nepal in ways we cannot fathom. HGBTF are a duo of French players who perform what they would like to term “ritual noise”. They’ve been enacting these private ceremonies in sound since 2008 and have an impressive series of CDRs, splits and compilation appearances lurking in their stable, or equine cave. Langue De Fièvre (NO LABEL) contains many lengthy drone workouts, generally rather eccentric in nature and enriched by a bewitching, almost supernatural sound. Part of the eerie charm is no doubt due to their insistence on all-organic, home-grown DIY methods of sound production; the two voices are usually the key component, wailing, moaning and muttering in invented alien languages. Then comes the instrumental layering, involving not the deployment of expensive synthesisers and filters, but very basic guitar work and simple devices referred to as “space toys”. Two of the untitled tracks contain the spooky outer-regional vocal wailings, the third revolves around a primitive circular guitar riff, the fourth brings down rain gods and other deities with the use of “tribal” drumming and insane percussive metal clattering. The record gets a shade too “Tibetan” for me after that point, but there is a closing track which invokes an epic, monstrous apocalypse worthy of any given medieval draughstman. Plenty of denatured and thrilling non-specific noise on offer, but we also have to admire the restraint and simplicity of this pair. Kriss and Miccam put a lot of effort into summoning unfamiliar effects and sonic adventures, both from their instruments and from their mesmerising droney voices, which have a full range of timbres and shades within their peculiar chatterings. The cover collage artwork evokes exactly the right degree of fetid swampiness with its dank shades of green and Mocha-esque overlays of curlicue shapes going mad. Girls, their heads replaced with the heads of dogs, lounge on armchairs wearing kinky boots, inviting us to enter this peculiar world. Received 14 March 2012.

Some home-recording experiments that don’t quite gel for me from Captain Super Scranchin on his CDR release. Nine tracks veer between playful manipulations of synthesiser effects and frantic explosions of cymbal-heavy percussion, all deliberately recorded in lo-fi with one microphone and a lot of distortion. Scranchin’s efforts are further disrupted with layers of recording hiss, wonky tape speed playback, and overlaid foreign elements and found sounds. It’s a little hard to see much underlying structure here, but the release reminds me of 1980s bedroom cassette releases and has a roughness in its passion that some listeners may enjoy. No website; try email to scranchin@hotmail.co.uk. Received 19 March 2012.

A highly baroque oddity of outsider classical-pop is Last Wane Days (SQUIB-BOX NO NUMBER). Initial hearing caused my beret to fly off my head in surprise, while my noggin teemed with soundbites like “Kate Bush meets Luciano Berio during a performance of The Living Theatre”. It’s composed by the London musician Neil Luck, sung by Fiona Bevan, and played by a small avant-garde chamber ensemble called ARCO who wield acoustic instruments (strings, bass, piano). This two-part weirdie lasts only 18 minutes, but it compresses huge volumes of detail into its strange, ever-changing fabric. Broken, disjunctive passages of discordant music are punctuated with brittle percussion effects and daring gaps of silence. Holding everything together is the astonishing voice of Bevan, who slides effortlessly across genres, moving from classical operatic to easy-listening by way of Weimar cabaret. I’m not making much headway with the lyrical content so far, which is spoken, sung and chanted (sometimes mathematically so, in the manner of Einstein on the Beach), but that’s hardly surprising as most of the loopy libretto has been derived from cut-ups of the notebooks of Richard Foreman, a writer whose work I am not familiar with. That said, there are at least two songs woven into this uneven and over-decorated magic carpet, one of them with lyrics penned by Bevan herself. It’s described in the notes as a “monodrama” and a “dislocated song-cycle”. With its wild dynamics and unusual sound, Last Wane Days is an unusual record which many will find an acquired taste, but none should doubt the skill and artistry at work here. Received 21 March 2012.

On Lichtung (EAT SLEEP REPEAT ESR201201), field recordings meet up with low-key ambient music in an art gallery installation environment, assembled by the duo of Steve Roden and Machinefabriek. The original installation also had a visual component from Sabine Bürger, partially represented via the cover and booklet photographs of this CD release, which comprises edited highlights from the event. The original commission was intended to express the German idea of “heimat”, a word which roughly means “homeland” in English, but I believe it corresponds to a deep-seated cultural emotion about the environment and one’s place within it which is rooted in the Germanic bones, and which may not have a direct counterpart anywhere else in the world. The sensitive and nuanced response of the artists here has been to work with very evocative and misted-over field recordings which deepen the overall sense of ambiguity, and to incorporate local natural elements (leaves, twigs and water) in the finished installation piece. Small and intimate sounds, of which Roden is a masterful and subtle sculptor, characterise this record, but so too does the nostalgic and understated half-music of Rutger Zuydervelt (i.e. Machinefabriek). Some records in this vein can depress me with their undernourished sounds, which can appear minimal to the point of utter vacancy, but Lichtung has warmth and depth. Received 23 March 2012.

Simon Balestrazzi has come our way in the past with his hypnotic electronic drones which sometimes have an occult side, such as A Rainbow In My Mirror and his spooky Candor Chasma collaboration. On The Sky Is Full Of Kites (BORING MACHINES BM38), the work has all been generated out of his modified and home-made instruments, including the “prepared psaltery”, plus synths, oscillators, and the laptop all providing so much thickened and glutinous electronic buzz you can almost measure it by the acre. According to the press notes, the keywords we should be bearing in mind are to do with industrial landscapes and the weather, and the music here does indeed convey the sensations of unpleasant, drizzly grey skies hovering over a ruinous once-proud city of dead machines. Balestrazzi’s textures and layers are impeccably rich, and he has put in a lot of time and effort to invoke the dark forces which intrigue him, but most of the album feels like a bit of a sprawl to me, without sufficient forward movement within the tunes to lift the listener from the quagmire of desolation. The title track admittedly has a little more agitation to assist its moribund atmosphere, and a vague pattern can be discerned in its leisurely rise-and-fall shapes. Daniele Serra, who also illustrated the Candor Chasma CD, provides notably odd artworks where cityscapes, machinery, and insect-like forms are combined in unholy marriages. Received 27 March 2012.

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Vox Humana


Imaginative and inspired use of the human voice to make modernist compositions by Leo Kupper on his Digital Voices (POGUS PRODUCTIONS P21060-2). Kupper is from the Belgian school of electro-acoustic composition and founded an important studio there, besides having worked with Henri Pousseur. The voices of Barbara Zanichelli, Anna Maria Kieffer and Nicholas Isherwood are all to the fore in these works, even when electronic music is involved; and while some studio technique is involved to enhance the voices (overdubbing, maybe a little reverb), much of the creative artistry is in their powerful singing, speech, and other vocal gymnastics they perform. Zanichelli turns in a sort of super-mutated birdsong catalogue on ‘Aviformes’, in ways which would make Olivier Messiaen glow with quiet pride. Kieffer sings and murmurs with overdubs of herself on the four parts of ‘Kamana’, along with a rich electro-acoustic backdrop woven by Kupper from a carefully-selected range of sources. ‘Kamana’ seems to be neither speech nor singing – Kieffer’s “vocal expressions” are remarkably fluid and agile. The suites ‘Paroles Sur Lèvres’ and ‘Paroles Sur Langue’ are presented as a connected “diptych”, and in these the electronic music is foregrounded; the human voice elements provide a sort of subliminal church choir effect in among the dramatic electronic and percussion music, creating a near-surreal impression. The intoning basso-profundo cantor on Track 18 is particularly stirring, reminiscent of a Russian Orthodox high priest. No less spiritually moving is ‘Lumière Sans Ombre’, which uses recordings of Slavic liturgical chant and the bass vocals of Isherwood with its burnt sienna-styled electronic music. The vocal-heavy CD is divided in two by the track in the middle, where the composer plays the santur and arrives at a species of warped Persian soundtrack music. The release arrives with a chunky full-colour booklet of notes, images and photos, and Kupper is given ample room to describe his compositional technique and methodology, and while this may give the impression that Digital Voices is a rather process-based work, Kupper’s intentions are in fact to keep the music as “abstract” as possible, and thereby arrive at an international language of spirituality. He is very articulate and passionate about the expressive and emotive possibilities of the human voice, and for those who seek more of it, a related record Ways Of The Voice can be found on this same label.

Dag Rosenqvist is one of the Swedish melancholic types who has provided some memorable moments of wistful sorrow in ambient music form as Jasper TX. Here he is teamed up with Aaron Martin from Topeka, and the duo call themselves From The Mouth Of The Sun on their debut album Woven Tide (EXPERIMEDIA EXPCD021). It’s a mixture of mournful chords and swelling string sections, aligned with somewhat more “atmospheric” sounds to produce pleasing blends. Most of it resembles rather sentimental soundtrack music from a Norwegian arthouse movie I just made up, about a young woman who falls in love with frogs in the snow, but I liked ‘Color Loss’ where the balance between the melodic and the abstract feels just about right.

Errors Of The Human Body (EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 140) really is a soundtrack album, for a German feature film made by Eron Sheean, but this CD and double LP was composed by the Australian Anthony Pateras. He’s got a small chamber ensemble with him (strings, woodwinds and brass) and a percussion group, although a good deal of the music is based around the piano, organ and electronics work of Pateras. I’ve heard one or two of the insane and energetic electronic records he’s made for this label when teamed up with Robin Fox, but this is nothing like those disjunctive roman candles. Sober and restrained, EOTHB is a studied exploration of different tones and textures, with minimalist arrangements that emphasise mood and atmosphere. It’s like generic soundtrack music for an intellectual thriller, only given a vaguely “experimental” slant. Technically flawless on the surface, and the playing and production have an attractive polished sheen. I found some of the pieces a bit shapeless and unfinished, but perhaps the aim is to leave the listener hanging in a state of perplexed expectancy. Each track almost ends with a virtual question mark.

We received a bundle of items on 16 February 2012, including some vinyl, from the publishing wing of the American independent organisation 23five, but for today here’s an excellent CD by Helmut Schäfer called Thought Provoking III (23FIVE 017). This is the first I heard from Schäfer, and it seems this Austrian chap has a reputation for uncompromising and near-brutal electronic music performances, but this release is uncharacteristically quiet. Eerie, understated, but positively rigid with tension and bristling with excitement, this composition is an unusual performance/installation/composition realised partly in performance in a church, and partly at Helmut’s own home. On this 2006 recording (and incidentally only the third time the work has ever been performed), he’s joined by the violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner and the percussionist Will Guthrie. The first thing to note is we shouldn’t really think of it as a musical performance. It’s mostly process sounds created by organ pipes, said pipes being in the personal possession of Helmut Schäfer and laid on the floor of his house while he was “recuperating” them. When he puts hair dryers at the mouths of the pipes and switches them on, they blow air along the pipes and interesting resonant sounds emerge. He adds live electronic processing to this set-up, and the contributions of Gmeiner and Guthrie are likewise captured within that processing field, such that their strings and percussive blows are also drenched in the resonant atmosphere. According to Guthrie, nobody really had to do very much playing at all – the pipes were doing all the work. It is utterly compelling music, with plenty of incident and action (none of your reduced improv here thanks) and shot through with a core of inner blackness that means Thought Provoking III exudes a heavy vibe of brimstone and brooding. Acoustic industrial music, almost. Other recent experimental types come to my mind who have dabbled with the organ pipes or the church organ, and usually come off the worst, but Schäfer is clearly the sort of fearless larger-then-life personality who wrestles crocodiles just for fun, and he masters the pipes in like manner. I mention the crocodile because this particular set-up reminds me of the music of Yoshi Wada, and while Wada is strong on your basic resonant acoustics and gigantic pipes, his uplifting and joyous music is nowhere near as dark as this particular blackened groaner. Next time I’m having a nightmare about vultures gnawing my liver, I’ll know what music to use as a suitable backdrop. Purchase now to bathe your sinful soul in 24 minutes of breathy doom, and as an added bonus you get ‘Averaging Down 20XX’, a piece by that well-known sonic ogre of noise Zbigniew Karkowski which he made using Thought Provoking III as a sound source. A double dose of very unique and powerful art music.

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Liquid Fear and Pez Rock n Roll


A hefty bundle of CDRs and CDs arrived 14 February 2012 from digital sadist Miguel A. García in Bilbao. We last had news from him in May 2010, though I still recall his earlier Armiarmak record with fondness as a stern and brooding monsterpiece. There’s Cooloola Monster for starters, his team-up project with Carlos Valverde. Canciones Del Diablo (MASK OF THE SLAVE MS 027) is a bracing blast of distorto-filthed-up songs heavy with plenty of clanking rhythms and disgusting noise effects, plus additional voice hideousness provided by guest Ohiana Vicente. How often do we hear something that celebrates the joys of plague, Vlad Tepes, the ‘Curse of Akerveltz’, a journey ‘Into the Crypts’, Judas and The Antichrist, all in one single album? In these bizarre parodies of vaguely rockist electropop music with added scuzzerment for nutrition, Cooloola Monster provide a very imaginative and dynamic angle on the above shopping list of supernatural-horror themes, veering between deconstructed song-form and grisly Saturnine atmospheres of sonic murk. Good abrasive junk. A nifty start to the evening.

Mubles is Miguel with Alvaro Matilla; Miguel does all the instruments, which on El Accesso Al Ser (YOUNG GIRLS RECORDS YGR45) consists of spartan electronics generated with his familiar oscillators and a no-input mixing desk. Alvaro does the vocals and wrote the lyrics, but in case you were expecting Rush mixed with Blue Oyster Cult, their mis-conception of the song form on this occasion is about as radical as the brick foundations for a black cathedral of death. García grinds out fatal noise bursts, grim chugs, painful feedback squeals, menacing drones, and nondescript rumblings fit to raise Bedlam in your listening parlour, while Alvaro simply stands there and whines interminably through his nasal-throat orifice, complaining bitterly about who knows what. In short it’s like a slowed-down Spanish poetry-rap chanted and spat out by disguntled bees to the backdrop of a formless, shape-shifting electronic ghastliness. Or it’s like the Spanish version of Mark E. Smith growling away alongside the dark brother of Martin Rev. It’s great! Plus three guest players supply organ, electronics and more voice. Their name means “furniture” in Spanish, or it would do if they weren’t missing one letter E. Cutely, the CDR displays picture of furniture when played on a PC. Odd bestial sex in the back garden cover sketch is by Raul Dominguez. Eccentricity score so far = about two thousand points. Can it get even better?

Much the same instrumentation is played by García in his Xedh form. On Anekkyy (TRAIT MEDIA WORKS TMW029) he does it with Jon Imbemon, equipped with his guitar and effects pedal. This is just a single 50-minute track, hopefully done live in one take at a studio where the engineers chose suicide by hanging with a flex rather than endure another minute of this grim musical cacophono-fest. Ferocious, abrasive and poisonous sheets of noise just pour out of this deadly duo’s fingertips like death rays emanate from the gun of a hostile alien. Matter of fact I suspect Xedh could cause instant concussion to the skull just by pointing one finger at his chosen enemy. As noise explosions go, this Anekkyy is a deliberative and controlled assault on the senses, and I love the way it proceeds at a remorselessly measured pace, mowing down acres of goldenrods with the awesome certainty of the Grim Reaper himself. The duo leave plenty of space for each other, allowing heavy and angular blocks of sound to protrude from the mossbed of hissing fuzz as needed, creating fascinating abstract shapes of black monumentality. Another chompworthy cake, and released on the label associated with the great Eric Lunde. Box score to García = 3 out of 6.

Here’s one he made with Richard Kamerman, released on the latter’s NYC label. Homophest 20110921 (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYRL04) I take to be a document of some live event or other. After the previous three scorchers, this 31-minute dose of electronic sandpapering can seem comparatively restrained, but ye must persevere to be rewarded with extremely sullen and bad-tempered murmuring, as unvarying pitches of solid tuneless drones invade your personal space like a scowling man with a heavy, Frankenstinian brow. To make the experience even more insufferable, the duo keep stopping and starting what they’re doing, allowing the noisier aspects to drop out suddenly and leaving you face to face with an inexplicable, mysterious rattling. It’s the aural equivalent of watching your favourite appliances (TV set, fridge, washing machine) start to conk out and die, as you despairingly search for the number of a repairman and then realise nobody does call-out repairs any more. A fine set of contemporary minimo-noise art.

More collaborations on Exiled In Bilbao (DIM RECORDS DIM023 / GOLDSOUNDZ GS#111 / TIBPROD TIBCD127 / SERIESNEGRAS SN008), performed by Larraskito Audio Dissection Unit, an eight-piece of Spaniards who manipulate live electronics, objects, guitars and radio (on one track); García joins ‘em for three of the seven cuts, which are probably edited highlights from lengthy jams. Competent enough work, but this is the only one of the six CDs to misfire for me. Put simply there’s just too much going on with this laptop-based orchestra, and the photos of the men hunched over their mixing desks and banks of pedals doesn’t promise much in the way of healthy interaction between humans. Admittedly, the guitar players do much to liven up the solemn tone with their obnoxious axes belching stinky fire into the room. But mostly, proceedings just drift from one formless overcrowded and “textured” drone into another.

Lastly we have a Miguel A. García three-incher, called Red River / Rio Tinto (GHOST & SON GHOST5). This snakey little gemuloid is blessed with a Nick Hoffman colour drawing of cobras on the cover, and its hot pink printing has been flaking off into the case and littering my floor for the last few months. For me it’s a welcome return to noisy spirited chaos and lava-fuelled mayhem, a Habanero chili rammed in my mouth. Its uproarious mood cancels out the polite stiffness of the preceding arty CD. It’s ironic that García credits himself with “constructing” this errant jumble of insanity, when it’s about as broken as an old china plate in 16 pieces. All the gang of buddies are here for this toxic picnic. Alba Burgos and Ohiana Vicente give us their shrill screaming voices, Raul Dominguez hammers percussion like a baby with biscuit tins, and Carlos Valverde mangles guitars sadistically. Nine tracks, most of ‘em in the two-three minute area lengthwise, and it’s like how three year-old lunatics would imagine punk rock, if allowed to get their hands on flamethrowers and sticks of dynamite for instruments. Urgent, passionate thrash-racket laced with electronic vomit, power noise, and idiotic non-riff guitar riffs. Irresistible!

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