Three items from Bryan Day in California, all arrived 21 April 2023.
American experimenter Charles LaReau is also called Das Torpedoes and Voost Viszt, plus he’s part of an improvising group called Naturaliste. He’s currently a resident of China where he runs his own cassette label Bluescreen, but today’s item Stasis (EH? AURAL REPOSITORY EH? 121) was released on the Eh? Aural Repository. This one scored an instant hit with me, for reasons I don’t understand. Really great set of odd and strangely compelling sounds – an inscrutable mix of recordings, music, found sounds, process noise, electronic racket, and any other intangible flots our man can pick out of the ocean depths, using his gigantic submersible tongs. When this kind of work succeeds, it’s not really about the source materials that are being used, and maybe not even about the methods (recording, editing, processing), so much as the forces that drive an artist such as Charles LaReau in the first place. The “inner artistic demon” as I sometimes like to call it, rehashing a phrase I once read in a review of Ornette Coleman’s records, can sometimes be a benign force; I suggest LaReau is compelled to explore and find out new facts about the airwaves and the atmosphere around us, reporting back to HQ with all the exacting dedication of a man on a mission for the USAF who’s just returned to earth after a flight in the XRT. What I especially like is that he seems genuinely amazed by it all – and that’s a healthy attitude right there, far preferable to that of a so-called experimenter bringing in the exact same predictable results with each new episode. As such, there’s a real delicacy to his touch which is very evident on these dream-like recordings, and he behaves as one so respectful to the spider’s web and its tracery that he dare not disturb it, even as he makes his observations. A tiny gem right here.
Quite nice record of double-bass improvisations by Evan Lipson on Echo Chamber (PUBLIC EYESORE PE152), marking his solo debut release. He did it inside a Corbetta magazine in Tennessee, a disused storage bunker where munitions and explosives were kept by the military since the time of WWII. Naturally enough, Lipson makes the most of the resonant environment, allowing the stone walls (and hopefully some cast-iron doors) to throw back reverbed ghosts of his plucking, stabbing, and sawing actions; there’s even an evocative photo of him at work, where it’s so dark that only his hand is illuminated, and a portion of his bass’s neck (plus there’s a glimpse of the star of David shirt he’s wearing). If it was indeed performed in near-total darkness, those circumstances may well account for the way he starts freaking out at certain points during this 43-minute performance, writhing like a stir-crazy prisoner of war clapped into solitary by the enemy. In what I regard as a rather typically American fashion, printed here are tables of historical facts and figures about the location, the activities of various military agencies, and statistics about the production of TNT, none of which information actually does very much to enhance our listening experience. But it resembles research, so adds a veneer of gravitas to the record. It’s also doubtful if you need to hear an entire album of this music, whose message could easily have been delivered in a fraction of the playing time. Even so, there’s an earthiness and urgency to Lipson’s playing which is useful, and anyone who has a connection to Revd Fred Lane, however tenuous, can’t be all bad in my book.
The acoustic bass continues to features on the self-titled item (PUBLIC EYESORE PE151) by Guro Skumsnes Moe & Philippe Petit, which features two long pieces by this great Norwegian bass player – who we have heard previously with her duo The Touchables (with Ole-Henrik Moe) and the noise-rock band MoE, where she also shrieks out punkified vocals. On this record, she does play electric bass but also wields the mighty octabass, a 12-foot monster that you have to play with pedals and levers. While it’s possible to say this record also suffers from the “over-long” syndrome mentioned above, it’s made much more tolerable by the powerful vortex effects generated by Moe’s bass. These vibrations pretty much pull us in like a gigantic whirlpool of molten steel, and the journey is made even more intriguing by her occasional vocal interjections, simultaneously eccentric and rather alien. Where Evan Lipson above is struggling in the dark against his bonds and shackles, Guro Skumsnes Moe is happily rewriting the story of “A descent into the maelstrom” by Edgar Allen Poe, and what’s more she’s coming out a winner. Philippe Petit’s additions (EMS Synthi A, turntables, voices) are decorative and all, but I’m gonna have to award the championship belt to the Norwegian, for the sheer effort and imaginative force of her playing. The first track showcases the acoustic versatility, but you unreconstructed rock fans may wanna click onto the third track for long-form electric fuzz bass emanations, purrs and growls.