Second album from Kassia Flux, following on from her solo turn I Hear You from 2018. Today’s offering Ergot In The Wine (LINEAR OBSESSIONAL RECORDINGS LOR 128) offers more instances of her mysterious and idiosyncratic approach to voice-based sampler craft. I wasn’t 100% won over the first time, and still not completely convinced by today’s listening – she makes so much effort to be obscure and opaque that she’s at risk of failing to connect with the listener. On the other hand, there’s much to admire in the way she assembles and builds these audio mosaics, evidently working in a very patient and methodical fashion with samples, loops, field recordings, and her own heavily treated voice. I love a puzzle to solve as much as the next banana, yet on one level, there’s so much going on aurally that it’s almost like we’re being given too many clues – and even so the jigsaw still doesn’t quite coalesce into a meaningful whole. I like the idea that she might be inserting ergot into the wine – suggesting a wild hallucinogenic state will be ours, simply by quaffing a glass of her unique brew with our ears, but it’s a promise she doesn’t quite deliver on. From 17th May 2019.
Not deriving much pleasure from darkvoice (TRANSACOUSTIC RESEARCH tres 010) by Jorg Piringer, in spite of its deliciously paranoid tone and its up-to-date pessimistic messages about society. A lot of manipulated voice samples form the core of these 11 tracks, along with the creepy electronica sounds, and at its worst it sounds like some pretty naff beat-boxing. Piringer’s dark fears are to do with cyber-space, surveillance, electronic communication, the dark side of the web; he supposes that a secret language is evolving in these new spaces, one that we can’t possibly decode or understand. Evidently, he’s terrified by this very modern development, and this album may represent an attempt to purge his fears. Besides being unsettling, these forces are evidently quite aggressive and invasive too, and as he imitates their dynamics, Piringer becomes equally breathless, never leaving us a second to think in these very cluttered, textured mosaics he throws out. Along with the treated voices, he also uses “sinister typography” and other aspects of digital technology to realise this work. There are videos too, and in June 2019 he toured it all as a show in Vienna and Zurich. (08/05/2019).