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LABEL PROFILE RX:TX After jumping over one’s own shadow, and thus becoming a shadow of oneself, so many activities may seem like a variation on the phrase “here lies.” Even when the imaginary can no longer be pulled out of a hat, however, space still remains to hallucinate the past, to reinvent the real as fiction, to color it down to its most disconcertingly unusual details. With roots in the psychological swamp of some few Slovenian sound artists/computer engineers who took it upon themselves to open up a channel for the virgin sounds of artists from post-communist Eastern European countries to swim through, Slovenian label Rx:Tx does not bemoan the loss of referential principles so much as they embrace its advantages, among them, endless forms of cross-pollination and communication. In pitting players of markedly different backgrounds together, the label makes it plain that theirs is a music of duels, challenges, ploys, the strategy of appearances. Groove-based assemblages of jazz and abstract electronica is the end product, a rather spirited and aptly composed product of a manifold vital presence at that. Case and point, see Drosophiles And Doryphores, a collaboration between French electronica-connossieur Laurent Pernice and science fiction writer/jazz musician Jacques Barbri. The music retains a more traditional musical feeling of vigor and weight, yet indeterminacy also stands as an integral part of its identity. As such, a track like “Waterbed” is a struggle between abstracted intellectualism and simple, tonal expressivity. “Au Bord Du Centre,” in particular, sees Pernice work with fragments of mobile form, strafed with fussy serial counterpoints, but gentle with tonal cadences. Against the squeals and gentle runs of soprano saxophone, the pealing synths sometimes settle too easily into squelchy 70s cheesiness, but a dull uniformity of sound never has time to entirely settle in. Building patterns that repeat with constantly fluctuating, minor variation, Volokno—a joint project between Riga based sound artists Evgeniy Droomoff and Rostislav Rekuta (aka Sound Meccano) and visual artist Matthew Biederman (aka Delray)—builds a surface on which every particle of sound is carefully enunciated and differentiated. With time, these elements evolve and shift their ground while still pointing to and acting as signs of their past incarnations, all the time building a hypnotic, unstoppable momentum. The visuals of Blederman mirror this process, creating a heightened level of connection to the proceedings while also drawing attention to and exploiting certain aspects of the music’s visual and meditative potential. Scanner has been broadcasting himself for years now, and though not one of his more experimental works, Double Fold is an auspicious recording which attempts to put in place certain decentered events. The work may be seen as an intellectual response to issues of complexity but existing as one supple track that focuses on a single pulse, the root of the music and technique is elemental, and the music is thereby imbued with a primordial, spiritual quality. Scanner begins with spiraling surfaces of granular noise, against which arpeggiated blips and smoldering beats push and, after a while, seem to levitate in midair. It makes for a seductive release which oftentimes seems to exist on many planes at once. Octex’ Variations also makes use of models from techno and dub. Slovenian sound Jernej Marusic places them in a single nebula though, so that they gradually take leave of any terrestrial coordinates and no longer obey laws of gravity. What one finds is a proliferation of subtly processed, truncated beats, staccato laser synths and fragile rhythmic structures which forms a labyrinth of many sharp twists and turns. Although attempting to capture the “richness and diversity of life” with its nuances and variety in texture, the album maintains an easy flow that is offset time and again by idiosyncratic moments of inspired whimsy. Rather than erecting a perfect copy of nature’s muddled majesty, Belgrade Improv guitarist WoO is content to simply amplify the air which eddies around us. To this end, he forgoes editing procedures and records his tracks live at a home studio. Two electric guitars, a heap of delay pedals and everyday household objects—mobile phones, remote controllers and the like—are the weapons of choice. Amplified, these frenetic signals blow breath into the multidimensional and inert drones like a mother’s cord pulsing life into the womb. That so many frequencies are displayed is impressive to say the least; at times, compositions glisten with variegated sonorities, at others the guitar becomes more of a focus, adopting numerous guises: at one moment an echoic soundbox, at another a writhing mass riven with pressure vectors and toothed fronts, at yet others its resilient strings are hammered, rubbed, and made to slither like an underwater viol consort. Many pieces are also driven by a propulsive rhythmic drive, which is but one element out of many that attest to the unique brand of stereo dynamics on exhibit here. Underpinning such individual achievements are Belgrade’s Dis-patch festivals, which have been unfolding for some five years now, and which continue to bring together a welter of restless musicians and visual artists and house them in concert-like venues quite removed from the drudgery of seedy bars and clubs. First dipping its toes into pools of electronica, the festival has now ballooned to cover wide-ranges of music, from noise to post-rock, jazz and even punk. Workshops, lectures and other special events have also found a way into the festivals of late, enabling Dis-patch to mirror the quiescent dynamism of the movements housed by the Rx:Tx label itself. The subsequent audio recording cobbles together live tracks from 21 different artists, veering from the hypnotic ambiences and expressive motifs of Tujiko Noriko to the lesser known oscillating space-rock sounds of P.O.S. or the stirring acoustic ruminations of Davide Balula. Along these lines, the Trieste-Vladivostok CTM.03 compilation culls tracks from artists of various Eastern European countries, hoping to illuminate the panorama of obscure and half-submerged gestures which are taking place in these areas and, in so doing, open up networks in which these perspectives might be acknowledged and exchanged. To be sure, with the mandate so given over to capturing the diversity of these scenes, the album itself is nigh on impossible to swallow. A composition which focuses on the low end sublimities of the piano is rudely greeted by a fetid swamp of hip-hop breakbeats which itself gives onto some circus-style electronica. Indeed, the whole recording brims with buzzes and croaks of malfunction and sweaty throbs that long for the lance. A compilation bequeathed Progress would also seem to acknowledge that our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we fail to stockpile the past in plain view, as it goes to some lengths to document the effects which the clear European ideological divide had on Eastern and Western European spheres of music before the year 1989. The album once again portrays disparate styles—from minimal techno to house, glitch and ambient—that forms a dense mosaic which is at once overflowing, hellish and liberating. Rx:Tx therefore present a catalogue in which a variety of voices ebb and flow, washing over each other while almost bursting with unresolved tension. It’s this personal sense of history which ensures that these documents, rather than harboring skeletons of moments past, communicate a critical and very real sense of time and place. MAX SCHAEFER • www.rx-tx.org |
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