Four from the Australian label Room 40 which is often home to art-ambient drone type music.
Rafael Anton Irisarri of New York with Agitas Al Sol (RM4158) which was recorded at the same time as Solastalgia which we heard in 2019, but it’s only now coming out as a vinyl LP. He used the same source materials and even the title here is an anagram of the original record. I suppose this indicates that letters, words, and their meanings are interchangeable to him, and he applies the same approach to his library of source materials. Slow-moving and inconclusive driftings are the results.
Yui Onodera is slightly more melodic than Irisarri above with his washed-out and non-associative tones. She made Too Ne (RM4172) out of field recordings and an electric guitar. She’s trying to keep everything as static as possible, so be prepared for tracks which hardly vary at all for seven or ten minutes at a time, exploring their very limited harmonic range. In Japanese culture, “too ne” refers to distance and faraway sounds, but Onodera signally fails to capture that essence with these flat and uninteresting episodes, which lack depth. She may aspire to emulate “cherry blossoms whirling in the wind”, but there’s no corresponding movement in her music.
Antti Tolvi has two long-form pieces on RM4142. Spectral Organ was made in a church in his homeland of Finland, a country which boasts “acoustically amazing spaces” in its many villages according to the creator. Entering one such space, he played the organ for 21:23 mins and didn’t do much more than slide the stops back and forth, but a nice mixed chord results in what might be called a spontaneous piece of long-form minimalism. He would prefer to think of it as “spectral sound sculpture”, making shapes in the air, and aspires to the same sort of static feel as Yui Onodera. On Feedback Gong, he didn’t play anything at all – the gong, part of an art / sound installation, was just hanging in space with two microphones pointing at it and creating feedback through a nearby speaker. One can’t escape the feeling this is just a record of process art, but he has given a lot of thought to the parameters of the feedback loop, allowing tiny fluctuations to produce subtle variations in the long drone. Considering where this took place, the result is surprisingly muffled and cramped, with no sense of spatial depth or air in the room. The release reflects Tolvi’s status as operating in the spheres of both music performance and gallery art.
Quite different to the above droners is Singles (RM4161), credited to Vladislav Delay and Eivind Aarset. Here be rhythms, beats, patterns, and exciting and imaginative electronic sounds, with almost every track coming in at pop-song duration (3-4 mins) thus making its point with somewhat more urgency. As far as I know these eight groinkers weren’t released as separate singles, but both our players are devoted experimenters rather than crossover dancefloor types. Finnish creator Delay continues to surprise us even after 24 years of listening, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand what fuels his eccentric music. Norwegian guitarist Aarset (who appeared with Delay on the odd 500 Push-Up record in 2020) has success in jazz and instrumental genres, but to prove his experimental street-cred he is currently exploring new “harmonic and timbral” possibilities on his axe. Singles is full of pretty wild contrasts, lulling you to sleep with one dreamlike sojourn only to blast you back into normality with an abrasive rasp five minutes later. I sometimes wish I knew more about the process behind records like this; it’s so odd and unpredictable that I’m disappointed to read these bland press phrases such as “moments of fluid improvisation”, which don’t seem to account for anything.
All the above from 13th July 2022.