Symbolist – trio of Stephen Flinn (percussion), Guilherme Rodrigues (cello) and Roy Caroll (electroacoustic things) turn in a 28:55 min drone on The Age Of Bronze (CREATIVE SOURCES CS814). They’d like to create “auditory hallucinations”, suggesting a very physical engagement with the instruments, but their music here lacks sufficient intensity and conviction. (15/05/24)
Spektralmaskin (SOFA MUSIC 601) is composed by the duo of Peder Simonsen and Jo David Meyer Lysne, and played by same (joined in places by Ingar Zach, Espen Reinertsen, James Patterson and others). The performances privilege the e-bow, which in the hands of Lysne and applied to his electric and acoustic guitars, provides the droning core for each piece. Other instruments – microtonal tuba, sine waves, vibrating bowls, vibrating speakers, violin, clarinet and horn, soon fall in line with the scheme, adding thin washes of tonal colour. Although La Monte Young is invoked in spirit, it’s not clear if Just Intonation was explicitly used as a compositional device, but even so odd harmonies sometimes emerge from the ether. Given the very clear resonant sound of the album, you’d hardly know that hundreds of hours of overdubs were involved. (15/05/24)
Justin Broadrick has been more violent and aggressive in his time, but here as Final on What We Don’t See (ROOM40 RM4235), his seething menace has transformed into huge clouds of black substances – possibly cosmic dust or clumps of bad weather. The sub-bass is so physical it sometimes crowds you out of the room. Referring to “dreams” and “sky” in the track titles, Final muses about the nature of the invisible world and the unseen things which, he claims, sustain him. (15/05/24)
Field recordings of frogs and their environment on Turning Porous (forms of minutiae fom11) by Pablo Diserens, made over a two-month residency in Galicia. Other wildlife is audible and there also sounds coming in from the wind and hydro-electric dams. The creator ponders ideas about the ecology and the coexistence of different species; one takeaway is that we can learn a lot from the frogs, as indicators of changes in the environment, while the idea of “permeable skin” suggests a transformation even more radical, a theme picked up in their exhibition / book On Becoming Amphibian. (15/05/24)