Second of two cassettes from Bryan Day’s Eh? Label in California…
Box of Black (EH?120) is credited to Ypsmael, something of a mystery figure who has been operating for around the last 12-14 years, mostly making live appearances and sporadically issuing a few self-releases and CDRs for selling on tour…they also go by many alias names, each of which happens to be an anagram of the word Ypsmael. Their real name is not widely known and they don’t even consider themselves to be a musician, preferring the term “experimental music conduit”.
It seems that Box Of Black is the only “official” release after this bout of self-publishing, and it comprises a selection from live events which happened between 2012 and 2018 in the UK and Europe. The fellow certainly has an intriguing method, for the most part eschewing computers in his work; he hasn’t managed to exclude digital tech from his set-up completely, but it seems the focus is on analogue and handmade devices. At any rate, he’s very interested in glitch, noise, and any imperfections resulting from the recording process, as well as exploiting things like “room tone”, something which is very evident in all these pieces; you can really feel the enclosure of the small spaces where these performances were realised. I’ve found myself most engaged – and also alarmed – by the long track here, ‘Ah, quelqu’un!’, which is quite effective in building up a tense atmosphere, full of increasingly clogged-up sounds and a certain remorseless forward-movement in their deployment.
In doing this, Ypsmael stops short of producing old-fashioned “noise”, and remains true to exploring the grains and textures of his materials; it’s that genius in the build-up that he’s aiming at, producing a very strong cumulative effect through sheer persistence, and letting the materials and processes speak for themselves. Even so, I’m left with the feeling that I want him to go a lot further with his explorations, and really start testing the limits of the spaces he’s intent on probing, working his objects so hard that they almost break. If he could do that, I think he has the potential to create a very distinctive language of his own. Promising. From 13th December 2021.