Curious and wonderful drones from Belgian player Jef Mertens on his No Mathematics (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR708 / K118) LP…this fellow has been highly active in film-making and running the Dadaist Tapes label, and seems to have been essential in documenting underground music in his neck of the spoon. This beguiling droner LP was made with guitars and shruti boxes, with some help from Nickolas Mohanna and his electronics and treated zithers on a couple of tracks.
What I’m digging here is the “odd” sounds Mertens makes and unexpected shifts in textures, quite subtle shifts too, plus the strange dynamics such as shutting off the flow from the main outlet when you least expect it, then running it back on again in a different power mode. Unlike many lazy droners who have fallen back on the form when they run out of ideas, or simply let their machines run to infinity with a mind of their own, Mertens appears genuinely curious and surprised about where his experiments are going to lead him, paying close attention to the discourse with a watchful ear. Talk of “ragas” and “trances” if you must, but those are the buzzwords of pseudo-spiritual types borrowing some half-remembered ideas they once read about in a book on Terry Riley. Mertens’ music has a knife inside it; it has a nice alien, metallic edge which almost adds a post-punk veneer to his excursions; I’m unsurprised to learn he’s documented the music of Borbetomagus, and Sonic Youth.
We’re told he plugs into a tradition known in Belgian as “dronevolk”, an informal term which – along with the title of this LP – may indicate he adopts a rough, untutored approach to his music, eschewing the elaborate mathematical number systems used by Tony Conrad, favouring the intuition that has informed folk music through the ages. If so, it’s working out very well indeed. A joint release with KRAAK in Belgium. (04/02/2023)