Electronica hi-jinks from Icarus on their album An Ever-Growing Meridional Entertainment Transgression At The Edge of the Multiverse (NOT APPLICABLE NOT076). Icarus is a duo of Ollie Bown and Sam Britton who may be based in London and/or Sydney, and make plain their aesthetic debt to The Orb, Aphex Twin, and Peter Rehberg. The album title in particular apparently pays homage to an Orb record about which I remain in ignorance. Jolly samples and jolly beats create a mildly zany atmosphere; we’d be inclined to regard it all as a lark, except it took them 10 years of doodling to arrive at this point. Icarus fail to live up to their boastful claims of “delinquent chemistry students” or “creative mischief”; zero danger or risk-taking, or indeed any original ideas to be found on these tepid and pointless forays. (30/09/2024)
Swiss-Italian trio Niton here with their 11 album (PULVER & ASCHE / SHAMELESS RECORDS), so called because on this occasion the group have opted to work with 11 collaborators, respected international musicians drawn from many quarters – including free improvisation and avant-rock music, and that’s just the ones I’ve heard of. The trio themselves play electric cello, analogue synths, and amplified objects – and, as we recall from their previously-heard outing Cemento, they also like to edit, remix, and refashion the recorded sounds. A curiously unengaging collection; there’s not a single moment when the record sparks into life, and despite the input from all these other talents, Niton have not capitalised on their unique abilities nor done them any favours with their unwelcome reprocessing. Instead, all musical identities and personalities have been effaced into a boring morass. A useless record. (12/08/2024)
Paula Rae Gibson has made The Roles We Play To Disappear (33 XTREME 024) with the help of instrumentalists Alex Bonney, Kit Downes, Rob Luft, and UK jazzer Matthew Bourne; they provide sensitive backdrops for her wispy and emotive vocalising, on these 13 post-modern love songs. I’m looking for the promised “terror and turbulence” in these ambient-ballad-reverso-torch-songs, but Gibson prefers to remain elliptical and rather distant, gently teasing out her responses rather than declaiming with the force of a Ma Rainey. Look elsewhere if you want tunes or melodies; rather, Gibson is aiming to creative an intimate and very ambiguous mood, and the ripples of her troubled soul tend to manifest as whispers and murmurs. The title suggests she sees all human relationships as a game-playing masquerade, nobody what they appear to be, where we’re all in danger of losing sight of each other, and ourselves. (30/09/2024)
Latest from UK ambient-oarsman and relaxo-instrumentalist Keith Berry is Tropical Modernism (VSM THEORY VSM 012CD), where the 17 tracks all refer to travelogue themes in holiday-brochure locations, each title an update and a commentary on the 1950s Exotica LPs of Les Baxter and Arthur Lyman. Indeed some of them – ‘Tiki God’ or ‘Taboo and Exile’ – could almost be lost titles from either of those two maestros. The vector-art cover also joins in on this kitschy game. Despite all these outward-looking signs and signifiers, Berry’s music is as hermetically sealed as a bug in amber; not a single one of these languid tunes has a life outside of the studio hothouse where, like some mutant orchid, it was cultivated. Les Baxter at least managed to generate a deal of excitement about the prospect of visiting unknown eastern locales, albeit in a Hollywood Technicolor Doris-Day manner; Keith Berry conveys no such excitement, or even a simple sense of wonder about a trip to foreign climes, and it seems he’d rather be at home in bed. Inside the digipak you’ll find troubling images of syringes and tablets, perhaps suggesting that the darker side of this project is that the music be used as a form of mind-numbing tranquiliser. (30/09/2024)