Schloss Mirabell
Ghosthour Diary
POLAND MONOTYPE RECORDS MONO079 CD (2014)
Poland’s Monotype label has been providing safe haven to idiosyncratic and inconspicuous electronic artists for nearly a decade now. Fitting snugly into good company is Schloss Mirabell, whose spectral scrapbook of semi-organic electronic snippets I’ve been turning to in times of too much trajectory. There’s certainly little trace of that in this casual alternation between fragile and tentative electronic rhythms, breathy interludes and low register, textural ruminations, into which Mirabell imports small fragments of her conservatory training, as on ‘Little Cygnet’ – with its brisk sweeps of cello echoing achingly into cobwebbed darkness – conveying an unusually explicit musical identity amid more generic ambient vignettes that pass – not unpleasantly – into the realm of the forgettable. As a testing ground for her new ideas, it’s an experimental endeavour with as much propensity for failure as success. Points must be given though for her lightness of touch, which elsewhere might have landed us a neophyte’s ham-fisted spell of drum n’bass-isms or Thom Yorke-ish lugubriousness. She is measured; even cautious: just hints of bleep, brutality or a watercolour-in-water streaks of vocal play. Her sensitivity yields ambivalent, in-between moods, which are perfectly capable of sustaining attention.
CoH
To Beat
AUSTRIA EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 197 CD (2014)
From waves to beats and back: in his latest album for Editions Mego, CoH aka Ivan Pavlov makes the transposition explicit from the start with ‘WAVE TO BEAT’, in which a lifelike pulse evolves from a decelerated sine wave, setting the agenda for a set of explicitly rhythmic pieces in the process. Of no small significance is the sense of fun that animates this new chapter in his work, with ‘Meguro 10-6’ onwards coming on like melodic dial-up tones from an alternate reality in which Kraftwerk see to every aspect of our lives: garbled samples slotted between mechanised bleeps and static blips to convey a whimsical image of robots dancing. This newfound friendliness is welcome development in a hitherto austere (though no less interesting) body of work, much of which found apposite residence in the Raster Noton fold. I experienced this new awakening quite physically after nodding off in a chair at a sound art event, during which interval our man kicked off his gut-rumbling set with the accompanying splendour of psychedelic visuals resembling the sleeve image (which happens to be a depiction of the above transformation process). It’s not all fun and games admittedly – slower sections such as ‘eena ferroix’ and ‘Helicon’ invert the extroverted dynamic a little too much perhaps, though presumably as a precursor to the closer ‘BEAT TO WAVE’, which should demand no further explanation.