Three new items from the Swiss label insub.records.
Le Secret (Bells) (insub.rec.cd22) turns out to be the second avant-garde record we’ve received themed on the practices of Alpine farmers and shepherds…the first one was Paratopia, released on this same label from 2021, when Jason Kahn and Antoine Läng revived the antiquated practice of using a metal milk funnel to amplify the voice and call in the sheep or deliver a prayer. On this record, made by Cyril Bondi and d’incise, the pair of them decided one day to investigate the mysterious world of bells – bells as worn by a herd of cows in the Swiss mountains. What makes a good bell in this context, wondered Bondi to himself, and what decisions must be made when manufacturing them? (Further musings were cut short when farmer Brunner appeared with a shotgun and warned him to stop pestering the herd.) Luckily, they located a fine collection of these bells in the hands of Olivier Grandjean, and their researches began. You might find yourself underwhelmed by the slow and uneventful aural results here, but I think the relevant process was largely an intellectual one, as these two composer-improvisers thought long and hard about how society, finance and basic practical considerations all impacted on the choice of the bell. They arrived at the idea that there’s a secret involved somewhere – perhaps a closely-guarded code of the alpine farming community, and this tended to complicate the matter still further. In the light of this proposition, the simple embroidered motif on the cover is no longer an example of rustic folk-art, but it starts to assume the aspect of an emblem of secrecy to rank with those of the Alchemists.
Kauma (insub.rec.cd20) is a solo set by d’incise, here performing on the MS20 synth along with plenty of analogue filters and spring reverb (plus some digital / laptop / software input too). These four long instrumentals are just great, remarkable examples of poise and restraint, and the sound of the MS20 is wonderful too. According to its manufacturers Korg, this beast is a patchable semi-modular monophonic analog synthesizer and was in production from 1978 to 1983. Probably highly sought-after by collectors I should think. Here again our Swiss creator cannot resist musing on his work and supplying obscure, intellectualised ideas along with the music; it’s partly a play on words on the Greek word Kauma. He rejects the word’s actual meaning of “heat”, and insists the word gave us such derivations as “calm” and “caumer” and “chomer” and “coma”, allowing him to speculate on such matters as not-working and resting in the shade, and even passing into a deep sleep (a coma). You can practically see the gears of his mind whirring even as he makes this very deliberative music. I’m not sure how seriously to take it, especially as he also alludes to such concepts as “false loops” and “dubious Chinese components” when contemplating his Korg synth. And then there’s the hibernating bear on the cover…even so, the music is a delight, like a sort of scaled-down miniature of Terry Riley played underwater in slow motion, for the benefit of goldfish in a small bowl inside a plastic castle.
Can’t find anything about the intentions behind Delve II (insub.rec.cd21), a composition of the Norwegian guitarist Fredrik Rasten and played here on his 12-string guitar, along with French player Léo Dupleix on the spinet. I’ve struggled before in my attempts to crack the Rasten code, with his previous releases for Sofa Music and Inexhaustible Editions. Maybe I’m over-thinking it and he just likes the sound of playing the guitar; he says on his site he enjoys the “almost tactile experiences of acoustic phenomena”, and you can certainly generate a lot of that commodity on a good 12-string. What we have on Delve II is a series of very short musical phrases and patterns, repeated over and over for a very long time, changing gradually as the players subtly shift what they’re doing, adding and subtracting by the ounce or quarter-ounce as needed; if they worked in a 19th-century chemists, you’d be waiting for 25 minutes before they’d successfully measured out a dose of smelling salts for your grandmother. I mean they are very exacting. The spinet seems an ideal choice of instrument for this kind of music that apparently demands a tremendous amount of precision and rigid concentration on a repetitive task, while still creating maximum reverberation in the string area. Remember, like the harpsichord, its basic deal is that the strings are plucked rather than hammered (as in the piano), producing that oddly brittle effect that can rattle the teeth of the unwary. I’m on Team Léo…Parisian composer Dupleix is a firm favourite with me, so I’d like to think he’s bringing some of his ultra-minimal rigour to today’s picnic. If Kauma is Terry Riley on a postage stamp, this one is Charlemagne Palestine added as a secret session player to Nico’s Chelsea Girl LP.
All three above from 9th September 2022.