Ralf Wehowsky & Anla Courtis
Aseleuch Tendrradero
HONG KONG NOISE AND HATE N001.2012 / ULTRA-MAIL PROD. U.M.P.-022 CD (2013)
Incidentally, is this presentation a noise label recognising encroaching moribundity of cliché and embracing a re-invigorating polymorphous approach? Pleasurably mutant smears of jellied sound make me hope so.
They have built a Petri dish from their combined saliva and clouds, and while everyone has access to these methods and resources one can only applaud such particularly transparent, frictionless yet tactile tongues and eyelids.
-Smooth ripples of reflective concrete suppleness.-
Guitar strings in aspic. (They are in there, I assure you [1. Angurnor Pa Gombtem (On the release titles are ALL UPPER CASE, I am applying here the popular ‘Capitalise The Beginning Of All Words’ guideline used on the Discogs database.)])
An enjoyable melding of concrete, electronic and electro-acoustic techniques for the 21st century. I won’t lie to you, there are others as well. This is nevertheless a fine platter prepared by our two chefs. I would certainly give them the full 5 stars for their kitchen hygiene and they can display that in their window with pride. Customers can expect gleaming steel and disinfectant.
Take that old chestnut about moving glass (that it is flowing, albeit at a very slow rate relative to our time perception [2. ‘I can hear the glass grow’ Roy Wood did not sing. But he may have heard rainbows in the evening with the help of Courtis and Wehowsky.]) Well, this is certainly is a ‘shifting sand’ of granular smoothness, guaranteed to pour syrup on your rubber sheet. Delicate slumps of surgically extracted mechanisms spiced with abstracted acoustics. In amongst the anti-static plastic wrapping [3. Faint allusion. The Raster Noton ‘Anti-Static’ series from the turn of the millennium. There are ghostly resonances and contrasts. I leave them to you to catch a glimpse of.] syrupy inclines, bowed guitars like a low-rent avant Jimmy Page [4. ‘Dazed and confused’ recast as gnomic and internally consistent.], quivering pink slivers of vocally derived sound, pressed between microscope slides.
Hermetic, at first; then, when your ears are accustomed, quietly revealing explorations of micro and macro and microbial and the material properties of this mutable duration space. Atomic glimpses of everted worlds.
-Bruised and muted greys, greens and reds.-
Entopic sound-pieces floating in the darkness of the Martian ear canals glow more perceptibly with each subsequent listen. An intangible sound abstracted from the physical becomes a precipitate in the alembic of the glassy head [5. A number of Akai reel-to-reel tape recorders from the 1970s boast this anatomical marvel.].
Shifting wodges of nocturnal molasses landscape snipped with a butcher’s tweezer and through the looking glass square interstices. Noise and Hate? More like Restrained Volume and Obscure Emotion (by clouds).
One can only applaud such particularly transparent, frictionless yet tactile tongues and eyelids.
(This review was written in chronologically reverse order. However, if you start at the end you won’t end at the beginning)
THOMAS SHRUBSOLE