Four more oddities arrived from the American label No Part Of It. We first heard from these outliers in Sept 2022 and were duly unsettled. Little relief for the troubled mind in today’s batch. From 6th Feb 2024.
Arvo Zylo has updated his 333 release, an intense bizarro-fest which has in fact gone through several releases in CDR and cassette form in its uneven history. We noted a version in 2011, reeling from the “quite overwhelming mix of chaotic elements”. It’s been good to revisit this monstrous freakster in 2025 and attempt to come to terms with it, and learn from the creator’s notes what he was intending to do.
Some of it is technical, having to do with a Yamaha sequencer; he hacked into it, tried to dismantle settings, and overworked it – “trying to force too many automated events to happen at once”, a phrase which in the current climate will probably resonate with anyone au fait with the horrors of cloud computing. When he’d worn out one machine, he simply found another one and carried on generating further extreme glitches, aligning these with the earlier abominations which he’d saved to his hard drive. Not content with that, he even took 333 into performance venues, playing back the audio chaos on stage, sometimes adding perplexing “actions” which had nothing to do with conventional entertainment, and were closer to absurdist / nihilist gestures, not too far from Dada or Fluxus, or (to use his own example) the performance art of Chris Burden, the American who was notorious for his confrontational and violent actions in the 1970s, some involving severe self-harm.
Well, listening back to this delirious mess today does have a very purgative effect on the listener, and even if what we’re hearing isn’t much more than a malfunctioning machine, it’s the obsessive determination with which Zylo ploughs this narrow furrow which pushes it into a higher realm. If we can believe his story, the art was produced as some sort of personal therapy for his own insomnia (a hideous six-year bout of same) and the fact that he kept on seeing the sequence of numbers “333” everywhere he looked, in one of those odd coincidences that also led to the cult of the number “23” (starting with William Burroughs, I think, and then picked up by Psychic TV). One can only hope this music helped Arvo Zylo attain some inner peace, but I doubt if it was a permanent fix. Six-panel digipak has instances of his collage art, conveying various expressions of desolation and alienation.
Leslie Keffer presents Veiled Matter, a solo release of simple keyboards and programmed beats with vocals. On it, she describes a very personal and near-metaphysical experience, claiming to enter another world through her meditational exercises…and meeting another person in this alternative plane, who evidently has a very beneficent effect on Keffer, through use of minerals, crystals, and plants, thereby conveying something about “energetic code”. This being is attired in a “royal blue veil”, and to make sure we get the point there are several photographs of Keffer dressed in similar fashion on the digipak panels here.
Leslie Keffer has spent years on her musical journey, evolving as she goes, and not every step has been easy for her (at some point there seems to have been an injury that worsened her medical condition); she’s a rare instance of a creator whose modes of expression have been hard-won, and she never produces anything less than deeply personal, unique work. Veiled Matter is more approachable than the very visceral Reverie (which we heard last time), but has the same kind of hypnotic determination informing every sound; it’s hard to turn away from these eerie echoed vocals and sinister drones, their delicacy slightly confounded by the insistent processed drumbeats that won’t go away. Soon, you too will feel sure you have encountered the “being” in the royal blue veil.