Directives
Glimmer
USA AUBJECTS CD
We received a number of items from this label-stroke-project between 2012 and 2016, all of them curious and imaginative approaches to music-making…names I associate with it are Amalgamated, Homogenized Terrestrials, and Dog Hallucination, which may or may not have involved contributions from Phil Klampe, Bob Newell, Cory Bengsten, Mike Richards and D. Petri, and others. So today’s item is a welcome return for these broadcasts from the margins of American research, formerly based in Illinois I think but now coming at us from Denver Colorado.
D. Petri now claims ownership of the label and stewardship of the recordings, and even has a Bandcamp page now rather than put his messages in a bottle in the form of oddly-packaged cassette tapes. Even so, the package on today’s CDR is not one of your standard brands, what with the unusual folds and hand-made charm, plus thew added insert – “Booklet encloses a small slip of blank notebook paper of specific significant origin, given randomized coverage of transparent shimmer. The recipient is invited to utilize this paper in a personally meaningful fashion…” Directives may be a solo turn by Petri, and evidently Glimmer represents a lot of labour-intensive effort on his part, recording multiple parts solo and grafting them all together. He’s proud of his lo-fi stance and where possible will try and use recordings made at home on cassette recorders, or even on his iPhone; there’s very little if any use of computers and software, and he likes to go for a “live” feel, hopefully not too many takes or retakes, perhaps in pursuit of a spontaneous result. It’s the collaging and assemblage of his source materials that seem to give him the most pleasure, and when things spark into flame and the ratchets fall into position he arrives at some genuinely original moments of music and sonic amazement here, doing things that could not possibly be played in real time – not even by a small chamber orchestra of seasoned rock veterans.
I’m sure we’ve used Krautrock predecessors as a reference point before, not least because of the steady clonking rhythms which resemble a warped version of Can, but the studio technique here is almost on a par with what Kurt Graupner did with Faust in the recording room. All the more poignant that Petri did it all on such modest set-up and (presumably) a limited budget, but the drivers are his own musical vision and imagination, for which you don’t need a hundred digital levers, workstations or Ableton licenses. Petri claims influences from all over – psychedelic rock, Cologne glitch, Japanese electronics and industrial music, and anything from the self-produced heaven of DIY cassette culture, but still emerges with a very distinctive and personal musical voice. Even his “beats”, when they appear, aren’t those faceless digital whacks and thumps that most program-happy gonks settle for with their $2000 boxes, and they trundle forth with a rustic hand-knitted charm. In the UK, one who operates in more or less the same space is Andy Rowe (Slate Pipe Banjo Draggers), and although Petri doesn’t use any voice elements or samples, I think these two luminaries could bond over a shared approach to extended instrumentals, efficient use of tape loops, and squeezing all the goodness out of a one-man band set-up. While D. Petri might not be aiming for the accolade of most original guitar-player in the Western hemisphere, his style of playing is just perfect for the kind of rich, strange, and layered music he makes. Very good. (SEP 2023)