Quite a well-known name on these pages both solo and as a percussionist in Hati, Rafał Kołacki arrives here with solo album Mowa Tworzenia (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 318-1), 10 pieces which may or may not have been derived from field recordings and subjected to a certain amount of reprocessing. His method here seems to be to layer two or three unrelated materials together until he finds something he likes. This simple approach has paid off, to the extent that a certain amount of air and light still resides in each track, rather than being overburdened and pressed into the ground by too many overdubs. The Polish title translates as ‘Speech of Creation’, a highly resonant phrase if you subscribe to the Old Testament proposition that God created the world by speaking it into existence (“Let There Be Light”). Kołacki’s sonic utterances might not be quite as ambitious as that, but there’s a certain fascination to this album’s non-specific churning, erratic repetitions, and dogged persistence. Vinyl pressing.
Tunnels Of Ah is another great noise project from the UK, but after reviewing numerous intense CDs of theirs on Cold Spring, I no longer have anything original to say about their music. This release (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 319-2) offers the first CD issue of The Charnel Working (presumably it was just a download before) along with six bonus cuts, arranged under the aegis of The Klesha File. “Ritual music”, we’re informed, while the promotional spiel of creator Stephen Ah Burroughs is a bloodthirsty fantasy involving skulls and ancient non-Western religions. It’s like he’s describing an album cover by Skullflower.
More 1990s material is rescued on Before And After Silence (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 317-2), by the Italian creator Giuseppe Verticchio appearing here as NIMH. This is a follow-up to the Caustic / Composite set which was released in 2022 – Jen’s review reminding us that this fellow was a friend of and collaborator with Maurizio Bianchi, among others. Today’s album isn’t a reissue as far as I can make out, but if these dates are accurate it precedes the time when he became Nimh in 2001. The label are hoping to issue a curated set of waifs and strays to form a “specific, complete, coherent publishing concept”. Such a claim may lead one to expect something more concrete and tangible than these droney episodes, some of which are wispy and pale, and even the more shrill and insistent pieces have a rather sketchy, unfinished feeling. Fans of sequencers, synths, and use of tape recorders will find much to enjoy, however, and the title is an oblique reference to Brian Eno’s fifth solo album from 1977, even though the music has virtually nothing in common with it.
All the above from 10/06/2024.