Spontaneous Dimensions (SUBLIME RETREAT SR020) is an album by Taras Opanasiuk, under the guise Innovative Landscapes Laboratory. As the world knows Taras is the owner of this excellent Polish label in Wroclaw. Here he demonstrates his gifts for very imaginative electro-acoustic composition, exhibiting a real skill in arranging and contrasting some pretty wild timbral shifts, unexpected layers, and uncanny other-worldly sounds. He immerses the listener instantly in his surreal, colourful environment, as surely as if he’d invented a chamber of living dreams. The artworks by Evan Crankshaw assist our entry into this alien library. I especially enjoyed ‘Unstable Limbo’, which creates a threatening storm of ambiguous tension in the brain, and ‘Maze of Distorted Dimensions’, for its successful re-creation of illusions and impossible spaces. Very intellectually stimulating and a satisfying listen. (12/08/2024)
KBD are musicians possibly from Ohio, who we did hear briefly in 2012 when they recorded as a duo. Today on III (PUBLIC EYESORE EH?126) there are three musicians – Michael Kimaid, Gabriel Beam and Ryan Dohm – performing their own take on the electro-acoustic improvisation genre on these 2023 dates captured in Michigan and Ohio. Made with synths, samplers, trumpet and percussion. Seems that one side sees them locked in their recording studio – a “closed session” as they call it – while the other one was recorded live before an audience. The players take a while to warm up, but eventually their inchoate playing does accumulate enough layers of detritus to simulate a sense of excitement. I find their non-specific noise about as soothing as a ride in a bumpy bus, with a washing machine entering its final cycle on the seat behind me. (15/07/2024)
Italian player Luca Perciballi proposes his Sacred Habits (KOHLHAAS KHS 034) – solo album with cover art of a strange seaside outcrop (photo by Fabio Barile) such that I thought it might be a sonic exploration of a particular magical location that appeals to our gifted creator. Turns out to be a solo guitar record where Perciballi intends to explore every thread and box corner of his “augmented” setup, to wit liberal use of electronics, preparing the instrument in some way, and his foot-operated percussion boxes. Normal guitar sound is thus heavily disrupted, and each track will splinter your cranium in a different way – hammering wedges into the bone, smoothing off unpleasant lumps with a belt sander, or dissolving brain tissue in a bath of salts and acids. Thankfully, it amounts to more than a process-art demonstration record, and Luca manages to ask some deep questions and open some painful wounds as he wrings his own neck. Apparently he appeared on Bosetti’s Didone record from 2021. (12/08/2024)
Treated percussion by Vasco Trilla on his The Bell Slept Long In Its Tower (THANATOSIS PRODUKTION THT34). This Spanish-born fellow failed to uncoil much passion on his Acoustic Masks project from 2022, but today’s offering is slightly more engaging. The creator is musing about the cultural and historical significance of “the bell” in human society, surveying many different regions in his quest for an underlying spiritual truth. I suppose church bells may be one aspect influencing his plan, but it’s hard to tell from the finished results, which dive headlong into abstract territory in short order. I like the suggestion of an ‘Aural Eclipse’ reflected in one title, likewise the proposal that he will ‘Awaken nature from her dream’. Besides playing bells, he did it with timpani, drums, percussion, sometimes in conjunction with transducer speakers, as often done by Ignaz Schick. (12/08/2024)