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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 1 / February 2007
REVIEWED BY: LEO ABRAHAMS Scene Memory (Bip-Hop) • In 1978 Fred Frith gave us an album released on Virgin’s budget label Caroline called Guitar Solos. Essentially a Cageian exercise that did for the guitar what the “prepared piano” did for piano, the album was comprised of 13 pieces set firmly in a landscape built for unconstrained exploration. Its overriding aesthetic was an utter lack of preconception about both what constitutes music and what characterizes an instrument, an aesthetic that seems all too rare, despite all the attention today’s music lavishes on the electric guitar. Leo Abrahams’ Scene Memory goes a very long way to restoring that sense of exploration and curiosity and surprise. Decidedly more musical than Frith’s pioneering work, Abrahams does a remarkable job of integrating initial impulses with their processed and modified consequences—essentially making music out of music. The scope of his innovation is more profoundly drawn simply because he respects a certain level of restraint—the solo guitar—putting into sharp relief the seemingly limitless opportunities for the resultant sounds and forms. This economy of scale serves as a signpost for some of the more interesting trends emerging today, specifically music of a more intimate and spontaneous nature, less reliant on the availability of a practically infinite number of tracks and voices and completely reliant on the skill of the composer/performer. Unlike his preceding Honeytrap which presented a highly diverse range of pieces, the music of Scene Memory is a still fluid yet more consistent work. The changes in character, from languorous, dense and lush to angular and spare, from unexpected rhythmic passages folding into dense and shimmering clouds all originate from Abrahams’ ability to make the transitions and transformations seem wholly natural. There are no contortions, nothing feels forced. The distinction is simple but profound; these are not expertly programmed crossfades from one source to another, but expert musical transformations. More concise, recognizeable, less vertical and shorter in duration, the calibre of these pieces place Abrahams’ music at the elevation where much of Fripp’s better soundscapes occur. (KL) • www.bip-hop.com Back To Top ARTIST UNKNOWN Present (Datapunk) • Clemens Kahlcke and Mike Vamp swap their above-ground artist denotation, The Martini Bros, for their undercover stocking-masked alter IDs, to present, er, Present. 2000’s debut Future seems somewhat remote, the twosome having lain fairly low with only 2002’s Errorist single between that and this, their second full-length. New to Anthony Rother’s Datapunk imprint, the move to a stable that hosts a roster including such low-life luminaries of out-electro as Sven Vath, Hell and Johannes Heil seems entirely appropriate. With the ambit of Rother’s operation snaking multi-directionally around electro’s micro-galaxy, Artist Unknown could almost become a house band, one whose body is programmed by the past, whose soul by the future and whose mind pivoting in the in-between, drawing all strands together and checking it in to the present. This Present model has a referential palette that establishes its lineage most recognizably with the seminal, elegantly frigid Conny Plank blueprint of Kraftwerk and Systems of Romance-period Ultravox, and rather less with those neo-brutalist EBM/bodyrock purveyors DAF and Nitzer Ebb. Laced with a hint of the arch-dark camp-narrative stylings of Green Velvet (see “Automat”), and a touch of noir cine-sleaze, this is a confident-sounding album of refined dissolution that will entice lovers of synth-pop and electro-goth alike, freeze-dried heart and steely soul icily preserved from the blandishments of Deutsche Bank economics. Songs adhere to conventional structures but are ever-open to being led astray on some insalubrious sidetrack. Sure, it’s a new take on an old take on an even older take on The Modern Dance, but if there’s still some spring in those electroclash dance steps after 2004’s fetish party, then let Artist Unknown mark your dirty dance card. (AL) • www.psi49net.de/datapunk Back To Top DWIGHT ASHLEY Ataxia (Nepenthe) • Much modern-day music makes a virtue of its flimsiness, of its disposability, happily bearing/baring its lightness, its play-status. Dwight Ashley’s Ataxia does the opposite. Situating itself in polar opposition to frivolity and frippery, Ashley’s heartfelt liner notes to this his third solo release contain ponderings as to whether it’s feasible to sit through this sort of material without breaking something. Yes, Ataxia is that heavy, not just in the by now de rigueur dark and droney way that some ambient has about it; no, it’s chewy and indigestible at times, and occasionally bordering on a relative of structured noise, but nevertheless still possessed of sufficient harmonic material not to frighten off the more adventurous of non-experimental listeners (though not, incidentally, extending to the vacuous becalmed shores of the “new age” that the Gracenote database would assign it as ill-fitting “genre” categorization). Ashley has in the past indicated the spirit of his musical style by the tag “neo-expressionism.” For the uninitiated, this refers to an approach in which the artist handles the materials in a rough and raw way, typically expressing violent emotion, developing in the late 1970s as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic art of the 1970s. Ataxia’s status as a work within the ambit covered by the above definition is indeed clear. Though it starts out with the relatively harmonious drift of “Impervious,” Ataxia then wades into deeper murkier waters with “When The Waters Came,” a thick and threatening undertow above which a bank of dissonant chords keeningly swells and eventually hangs, almost engulfing the listener. The watery sea-inclined metaphors are particularly apt here since the recording of part of Ataxia was attended by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. “Black Swamp, Bright Sun” is a decidedly uneasy calm after the storm—stentorian smears of a string-like synth treatment elaborate a meandering almost-melody that hovers between plangency and resignation. “Circus of Sharp Toys” hosts a background environmental hubbub before eventually presenting a melodramatic passage redolent of stern neo-Russian accompaniments to brutalist state solemnities. “Dance of the Wobbler” relents, offering soft and wibbling melodics, as if Ashley were allowing us a breath of air before launching us back into submariner mode on “As We Became Complacent,” whose title hints at possible polemics underlying this work, its initial formlessness metastasizing into a form of dense industrial-orchestral drift. Darkish-hued ambient meets virtual-orchestral post-industriality is, then, the signature sound of this searching, sometimes harrowing, collection. (AL) • www.nepenthemusic.com Back To Top M. BENTLEY This World (The Foundry) VARIOUS ARTISTS Thing Asunder (The Foundry) • Michael Bentley is the man behind The Foundry, now fairly established as a music imprint since the mid 90s, though initially a mixed-mode personal receptacle for esoteric pursuits such as cultivating “chapbooks.” To these ears, The Foundry’s in-house aesthetic, as evidenced on Thing Asunder and This World alike, is one imbued with the same spirit of neo-formalistic conceptualism as certain types of “academic” electronic music. The label seems to tap into cerebral rather than sensual aspects stimulated by sound, playing to homo cogitans rather than sentiens—the musical material being part of a configuration of design devices oriented towards elevation of thought. What this means is that the bulk of This World and Thing Asunder exists as a somewhat inert art-e-fact, almost dessicated in the airlessness within the curator’s glass display cabinet. And in this respect perhaps it may be hazarded that Bentley’s sensibility and trade is more that of a pomo-backwoods da Vinci—or at least someone for whom musical expression is but one string to an intellectual artisan’s bow. This World is Bentley’s first solo release in over four years, and is composed of two long-format conceptual pieces: the first, “Chronos & Kairos,” is an exploration (or perhaps a “study,” given its relative musical parsimony) of the passage and impact of time upon our bodies and rhythmic cores. The second, “Import,” was originally released on the limited run Fällt sublabel project invalidObject, and is re-presented here as a companion piece, a series of fragments, of 15 one-minute sonic vignettes. Bentley’s approach is one that combines elements of ambient, environmental, and microsound, even musique concréte, or audio-narrative, situating itself towards the more abstract end of the musical continuum—one intersecting with sound design/sonic installation art. “Chronos & Kairos” is divided into six sections, opening with “Time (fabricated)” wherein the ticking of a clock is attended by sparse tonalities and micro-sonic doodle and patter. “Time (retrograde)” picks up echoes, hiccup-clicks, and arcane etherea that percolate across the soundfield. “Sine (of the Times)” slipslides into a world of undulations, respirating sinewaves marking time, while on “Parvane” Bentley choreographs formalistic ambient tone-clusters in occasional motifs of minimal musicality together with field recordings of jet engines and other elements. “Kairos (storm)” sees the temporal semiotic return with light metronomics, and the sound of rain and thunder as the somnific flux continues onto “Chronos (night),” glitching with rhythmicized DSP-ed crickets. “Import,” by comaprison, is a less cohesive affair, though beginning again with field recordings that dissolve into ambient sonorities, it morphs into abrasive texture maps and dissonant digi-diagrams, errant loops dissipating into granular chaos. This World is diverting enough in its way, but its strange sense of removal, of something being absent, makes it difficult to feel anything more committed in response. Thing Asunder is another kindred spirit Bentley project, one on which he enlists the services of other sound artists and musicians as conceptual contributors, or rather, as actual contributors, to his concept/conceit. In this case, the inspiration came in the form of a chapbook created by Bentley using the cut-up text assemblage technique beloved of boho ne’er-do-wells since time immemorial (or at least the 50s and the drug-haze days of early Bill Burroughs). So here Bentley (two tracks) conspires with fellow audio-collagists Earwicker, Ben Swire, and Steve Brand (one track each) to fashion a collection of medium-length pieces grouped under the programmatic heading, “a sonic soliloquy on the arbitrary nature of meaning and the mutability of form.” The different artists (though each mediates their interpretations with differing degrees of compositional and timbral engagement) share a Bentleyan unity of sonic vision. (AL) • www.foundrysite.com Back To Top BLAMSTRAIN Disfold (Sending Orbs) • It’s taken Helsinki-based Juho Hietala fully three and a half years to produce this follow-up to the precociously confident, if somewhat brash and clattering debut Ensi (Merck, 2003). Notably more expansive than the debut, Disfold is quite a trip. Referring to it as a “trip” is not indicative of a regression into drug-addled hippy mode, but seeks to point to a listening experience which induces immersion and motion through the medium of sound. But on top of this, it is a trip which is explicitly documented on Disfold, signalled as such right down to the detailed artwork of Jeroen Advocaat that complements the music with a hybrid of fantasy and realism that has become Sending Orbs’ visual signature style. It lays out the sonic journey within as a series of stops on a subway map, public transport, incidentally, offering a suggestive design paradigm—conceptual, visual and musical—for a musician looking for a way-out from the Circle Line of IDM orthodoxy to a further-out destination. The front cover is adorned with a shot of a metro train on a platform, to a backdrop of tenebrous night skies and steepling cityscape. The back represents the tracks as stations en route, from embarcation and departure at “Diacedita,” to journey’s end at “A Song for Jonas.” Now, the Blamstrain of Ensi could essentially be reduced to an above-par synth + beats + DSP plug-in merchant, so the extent to which Disfold branches out sure-footedly into the larger environment, both literally and metaphorically, is a genuine surprise. It would be fairly accurate to characterize the contents of Disfold as a series of drawn-out muffled passages, copiously treated with delay and reverb, consisting of sparse electronically-generated harmonic tones fused with a profusion of field recording harvestings from Hietala’s DAT-player, attended by occasional muted pounding and repetitive thumps. No reductionism intended, though, for it should be stressed that the contribution of this “environmental” stratum is galvanic, providing the album with a flow motion that fuels its momentum, so that it progresses train-like, thrumming with the externalia of public spaces. The sounds contained seem to include “real” samples virtualized into replications of the likes of singing wheels, buzzing electricity morphing with the surface noise generated by an old groove-entrenched needle, the ambient urban soundscape, voices variously articulated, and any amount of wind-like timbres from soft (breathing) to loud (whooshing). When articulated through an architecture of reverb and delay, and combined with minimal musical material, the end result is endowed with a hyper- dreamlike quality. In Disfold, Hietala has wrought an impressively detailed work that combines a feel for suggestive environmental ambient with some of the methodology of dub, infused with a post-techno sensibility (Chain Reaction is one of the guardian angels overseeing this subway). A piece such as “Revelation 21:1” illustrates Disfold’s atmospheric zenith, wherein we reach the vanishing point of rhythmic and harmonic material, and are immersed in the teeming clattering billowing heart of the city. This is a seething, literally transportive album that situates the listener deep in some future-based Blade Runner-esque metropolis channeled as sprawling and overwhelming, yet simultaneously intoxicating, even exhilarating. (AL) • www.sendingorbs.com Back To Top BOLA Shapes (Skam) • An unprolific artist who tends to squeeze out a new set of recordings from the lowest of low profile positions less than once every two years becoming progressively fussier and more meticulous by the release, and not long ago professing to enjoy no music but classical, Darrell Fitton’s muse is clearly erratic, and this release smacks slightly of a gap-filling exercise. Whether spite or opportunism on Skam’s part, or indeed the desire to plug a gap in Fitton’s sluggish release trajectory, this early Bola fruit (get it?) gathered here is not fresh by any means but better than none, and, re-mastered, a reminder of his considerable powers. Originally released on three vinyl 12”s in 2000 with no indication of label or artist, just geometric shapes (hence the title), this CD release likewise has only shapes in place of the album and track titles (track title information emerging only via Skam’s website). Fitton’s work gains some of its resonance from his couplings of genres that would seem uneasy bedfellows, a sleight of hand whereby sci-fi vs. funk, classical vs. hip-hop, easy listening vs. industrial are all accomodated. The sound of Shapes is very much a remaster of an early 90s sound design, premised on a forward-driven template from the early Warp Artificial Intelligence compilation. The time of its genesis (“written, recorded and marmalised by the Bolaman circa 1996”) means the material here comes across somewhat like an impressionist revisiting his primitivist painter period. Yet it’s all there in pre-developmental glory, just all a little bit more clunky: the signature sustains and pads are marshalled, along with those often melodramatic stringbanks that stretch out, in some hyperreal melancholia, offset by tense clattering, percussively complex rhythmic programming. In fact, this latter component is pronounced enough to remind sometimes of Fitton’s role in the more experimentally-inclined electro-industrial Gescom project with Booth/Brown (Autechre). Those with a predilection for slightly offbeat time signatures will be well served here: an initially hard-to-get 6/4 on both “Ballast (Triangle)” and “Serge2 (Octagon),”, which fall into place felicitously once the ear gets the kinetic intelligence. “Zephyr (Pentagon)”, on the other hand, rejoices in a nicely off-kilter 7/4. In considering the album’s place in the Bola oeuvre, it may seen by some as a slightly pointless exercise, since subsequent albums extended the Bola sound into a more sophisticated sonic edifice with a peerless level of sheen (such as Gnayse). However, serious Bola aficionados should be advised that three “new” bonus tracks are included: “Fonk (Flower)” in fact originally appearance on an obscure compilation A Murder In The Company Of The Vespertine, but “Cobalt (Scope),” and “Squib (Nuclear)” are both previously unreleased. Newcomers may find this less refined Bola model, for all its retro-sounding properties, somehow strangely more “happening and now” precisely because of its lack of polish and rougher-edged appeal, in this new age of deliberately abraded surfaces and the studiedly lo-fied. (AL) • www.skam.co.uk Back To Top COIL The Ape of Naples (Threshold House) • Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson forced himself to stare into the abyss left by the November 2004 death of his Coil partner Jhonn Balance. The results on The Ape of Naples—pieced together from material ranging from the group’s mid-1990s sessions at Nothing Studios to recordings made just weeks before Balance’s fatal accident—comprise not just an excellent Coil album but a phenomenal homage to Coil’s legacy. The duo’s sonic trademarks are still here: synthesized horn blasts and tape loops aplenty, Balance’s vocal melodrama in full force on songs such as “It’s In My Blood” and “I Don’t Get It,” seemingly pleading for mercy from inanimate tangibles and absolutes like death, prison, the sun. Yet Sleazy and a few select friends, among them Thighpaulsandra and Ossian Brown, also subvert the immediacy of explosions of industrial and martial sound à la Horse Rotorvator with marimba and hurdy-gurdy and sweetly naïve melody. The Ape of Naples most often feels like a jazz funeral for a disaffected local celebrity, a melodic tribute that is equal parts French Quarter and French Riviera. From “The Last Amethyst Deceiver” to “Heaven’s Blade” and “Tattooed Man,” there’s a concerted effort on this album to clearly delineate Balance’s messages among the yelps and disquieting sounds that enhanced past Coil atmospheres but not comprehension. It’s as if Sleazy wanted to make sure the fatality-obsessed (now consumed) Balance could be directed to the idea that death is the best way to find out what it means to be alive. Make no mistake, Coil’s music remains incendiary to this bitter end—the fire is just a little dimmer and calmer now, an eternal flame lit by Sleazy to be maintained by Coil fans as a memorial to a man who harvested and ate the fruit of the poisonous musical tree. (AB) • www.thresholdhouse.com Back To Top COLLEEN Mort Aux Vaches (Staalplaat) FM3 Mort Aux Vaches (Staalplaat) • Two recent entries in Staalplaat’s longtime, ongoing Mort Aux Vaches series, each recorded especially for VPRO Radio in Amsterdam, highlight more than ever the continuing diversity of each volume. Earlier editions tend to fetch big coin on eBay, though the quality level does in fact vary from artist to artist; subjectivity is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? (That’s a rhetorical question.) Colleen’s effort won’t come as a bolt out of the blue to anyone familiar with his various Leaf recordings, an unfortunate thing perhaps as the Mort Aux Vaches milieu has tended to out its participants’ more gregarious leanings. In reality one Berry Kamer, Colleen’s modus operandi is clear enough: tracks are titled after their instrument’s raison d’etre (“A Little Mechanical Waltz,” “The Thumb Piano Song,” etc.), which is in turn embellished by the odd parameter tweak or two. Fundamentally however, the whole recording is what it is, and those fundamentals reek of simplicity, indifference and what appears to be a lack of total inspiration, reductionist “post-classical” emblematic of Eno’s remark about classical music being a dead fish. More invigorating to the ear is the Beijing-based duo known as FM3, whose mutated AM loop box called the Buddha Machine sent many ears agog when it hit the shops last year. Their session is one-long, forty-plus-minute symphony of undulating drones, tautly-stretched atmospheres, and gentle sinewaves that subtly alter in pitch and do the loop-de-loop thing very nicely. At around the nine-minute mark, all that is left is background detritus from the exiting sinewaves, which reveals all sorts of chattering electronic gremlins jostling for attention and a seemingly incongruous plucked string that leaps out unnervingly from the magnetic flow. Thing is, it works. Excellent. (DB) • www.staalplaat.com Back To Top TAYLOR DEUPREE Northern (12k) • After everything is over, there might still be something left. Northern, a title that might sum up a big chunk of culture and cultural dysfunction. constructs a fairly dispassionate and detailed look at what can be made of the remains. The imperatives of deconstructed music are unrelentingly observed in Northern and its seeming contradictions. The pieces exhibit a high level of organization; they intimate structure, they impel attention, cross over to embrace either active or passive listening, all the while remaining resolutely in pieces. Seemingly subsumed by any number of steps away from the instrument and the score, the audio is neither disparate nor disjointed nor capable of yielding to the purely intuited yammering of collage, assemblage or traditional lures of the concréte. While being pulled together by a deft touch for voicing and processing of the instrumental and found sources, we are persistently denied any access to the usual and recognizable forms. Instead, we hear a music built almost completely on and by association, proximity and juxtaposition. The traits that enforce a sense of inter-relatedness are defined by substituting typical organizational principles for a more personal and organically built toolkit comprised of sonic characteristics, durations, envelopes and the spatial characteristics of the soundstage. Deupree lends us access to a genuine alternative: music that is different not due to merely assuming a posture while remaining the same in every other measure, but different due to its organizing principles. (KL) • www.12k.com Back To Top TOD DOCKSTADER/DAVID LEE MYERS Bijou (ReR) Pond (ReR) • Organized sound is a category that sits snuggly between phonography and music, taking what it wants from both in any and all proportions, though justifiably not satisfied to simply let lovely sounds speak for themselves. And while much of the work here continues to rely on a retinue of juxtaposition, transposition, inversion and subversion, Dockstader and Myers have moved on to the more profound, subtle, distinct and beguiling demands of their own imprimatur. On both Bijou and Pond, the sonic transformations occur through sort of “ding an sich” manipulations, extracting a new sound out of an existing sound in ways that relate to more fundamentally shared attributes than the more typical and less demanding cross-fades so prevalent in many musics today. This technique results in the sly reveal of a previously imperceptible quality of the original sound, which has a living presence in the mix and mastering, exuding staggeringly detailed presence and specificity. At times these transformations occur in frankly narrative settings: conversational voices, weeping, breathing. Sometimes humorous, sometimes frightening, the index of sources embrace both the concrete and the instrumental, displaying no preference for attention of effort to one over the other. The contrasts, shaded by a perpetual sleight-of-hand and set in the most credible of soundstages, are expert throughout, elevating this work to a profoundly high level of finish. In structure, Bijou tends to favor short vignettes (27 to be exact) that interrelate through titling and shared sources, stitching together an imagined narrative of sorts. Pond seems more concerned with establishing and then manipulating a listeners’ sense of place, playfully engaging in the cognizance and subversion of pure sound and its damp intimacies with meaning. The use of identifiers such as “Slow Marsh,” “Twango” or “Swarm” simply set you up so that, upon arriving, you’re still delighted to be unsure about exactly where it is you’ve been. (KL) • www.rermegacorp.com Back To Top DUB TRACTOR Hideout (City Centre Offices) • Expansive, willfully insubstantial, plodding, submersive. An odd collection of verbals to apply to a recording. But they all come to mind during the first few tracks of Hideout. The “dub” bit aside, didn’t they once call this “indietronica”? Inelegant, but it’ll due in order to provide you with a handle on this tractor’s sphere of operation. Hideout is already Anders Remmer’s fifth Dub Tractor full-length. To be honest, he seems to be pushing it a bit. There’s very little of anything musically remarkable here. The galvanic capacity of a particular recording technique is just about everything. The snooze-pop guitar-bass-drums-vocal raw material would be fluff indeed, untreated. But with the partial etiolation, crepitation, and depth effected by a recording technique that employs ancient microphones and wisps of tape fuzz, something far more alluring emerges. Remmer drenches the surface of his shoegazing plods and indie strumalongs with sprinklings of post-dubby driftwood. On the centerpiece tracks (#s 4 and 5), cascades of guitar-chord shards stumble over each other, and everything fizzles jauntily with a little echo effect-halo. Witness opener “Much Better Than This,” with its shuddering guitars echoing through textured atmospheres amidst which Remmer’s voice sleepwalks intoning a fragment, mantra-like, over the top. No one’s enthusiasm would need curbing, however, in the case of “I Forgot,” a slice of electroacoustic pop which is so flimsy you’d have to attach sandbags to it to keep it from sinking. The grandstanding (almost cathedral) chimes of “Droplets” aside, prevailing impressions are of a hypnagogue post-rock blur: Manual with a hint of a Limp, a bit of Bark (Psychosis) without much bite. That Mogwai/Cocteau Twins bass-plucked-as-lead sound. Trails of rippling synthetics and lightly tripping clickery in an idle Morr-ish daydream. Weedy reedy vocals. A “wet” album, drippy even, all dub and no tractor. (AL) • www.city-centre-offices.de Back To Top ELVE Infinite Garden (Virtual World) • Virtual World is an apt name for Matt Hillier’s label, for his creations seem to inhabit their own intelligently-designed almost-Earth. Elve is the latest of Hillier’s protean incarnations, sitting at the end of a continuum which starts with Ishq at the other end, passing through his other project Ishvara halfway. If one were forced into a genre appellation statement, it would roughly locate Elve at a point of intersection between “ethno”-ambient stylings and a more experimental cousin of the psychedelic chill-out fraternity. Much ambient (or, more widely, contemplative) music looks to musical templates from the Indian tradition, and particularly the drone, as core. Infinite Garden, however, is only minimally premised on drone as staple. Much of the space here is left relatively open and what does come trickling in resonates with an almost Polynesian, gamelan-like character, as scaled-down soft virtual metallophones meander exploratorily. “Tinkling” would spring first to the tongue for the overall sound of Elve (though the wordier might venture “lambent”). At first listen the disc seems so dissipated and unstructured as to sound drawn from life, as if through an open window the sound of the garden were coming in, mysteriously musicized. That this “naturalism” is highly mediated is irrelevant. Infinite Garden is a thing of drifting peripherality, in tune with the purist ethos of ambient that sees an environment configured for other activity while providing a concurrent aural space to dip in and out of, to navigate by colors which are gauzy and luminous. Hillier’s Elve has the merit of sounding like a completely new musical current. It is also decidedly not easy listening “chill,” making the listener work actively for its considerable rewards. (AL) • www.v-i-r-t-u-a-l-w-o-r-l-d.com Back To Top ENT Fuck Work (Baskaru) • After five years of compilation tracks and homespun CDRs, the first proper release from Italian duo Ent, Fuck Work, is a dichotomy formed from dichotomies, a collection that’s pleasantly engaging and intriguing enough despite some contrived and uncomfortable moments. Multi-instrumentalists Michele Scariot and Emanuele Bortoluzzi can concoct substance from undercurrents and open aural spaces—there are intervals where Ent builds some measure of drama upon the long silences between the lightest of plucked strings and struck chords. The times when notes are sewn together with gossamer, forming music that almost isn’t there, comprise Ent’s greatest successes—the lonesome guitar at the end of “Beating Cherry Nipples,” for example, the Bill Frisell destination after passing through the holy lands of Sonic Youth and Tangerine Dream. Still, there’s this insidious feeling that they’re trying too hard to live up to someone’s applied “experimental” adjective. They are thoroughly enamored of the click as arrhythmic rhythm, a randomized sum total of turntable pops, radio static, and other recording imperfections that almost grows tiresome over four of the album’s five tracks. “Beating Cherry Nipples” and “Milk Oblò” seem almost too calculated, as if their titles were written to explicitly match the songs or, worse, vice versa—the former alternately sweet and disturbing, the latter lighthearted, creamy and enveloping. The biggest disappointment on Fuck Work is closing track “Nothing for Money,” where Ent traverses a series of out-of-sync mechanics and dissonant drones before awkwardly dropping listeners into an essentially untouched excerpt from “Neck and Neck,” a hokey folk number penned by Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler (Ent’s song title being an oblique reference to Knopfler’s band Dire Straits). It’s counterfeit found sound, a sonic practical joke gone awry, and it’s the worst undercut to Ent’s otherwise solid effort of sculptured ambience. (AB) • www.baskaru.com Back To Top FORREST FANG & CARL WEINGARTEN Invisibility (The Foundry) • Carl Weingarten and Forrest Fang have been around the block a few times, releasing their own solo work for nigh on two decades. Of the two, Fang’s work is better known in most ambient circles, from a decent Projekt release, Gongland, in 2000, as well as guest spot on a piece from Robert Rich’s Propagation album (Rich mastered Invisibility). With the epithet “rootless cosmopolitan” applied to himself on his website, Fang has drawn on both Western and non-Western influences, especially Chinese classical music, however the palette here is not notably Eastern-tinged. Invisibility, their first collaboration, is undeniably an assemblage of pleasant and refined atmospheres evidencing proficient soundcraft. Weingarten’s chord clouds and light-fingered figures are coaxed by Fang’s crystalline synthetic manipulations into vapor trails and sonorous swirls that frequently belie their guitar-driven origins. Fang shows skill in achieving a sense of spatiality simultaneously with a rich fullness of field. “Freezing Days” opens the disc with reverb ‘n’ delay guitar looping into elegiac phrases tastefully set within Fang’s shimmering and sensuous textures. “Hidden Cove” grazes, by way of On Land, along a half-remembered shoreline, with agreeably mellifuous results. As these first few tableaux waft by exuding a vaguely exotic perfume, one is lightly lulled into a blithe reverie; that is, until a creeping feeling starts to nag at the edges of paradise—one of a certain satiation, a jadedness, a comfort bordering on the uncomfortable, as if a babe happily pampered for a while by warm blankets now sensed the onset of a slow smothering. On “The Land of Invisibility,” where a rather too resolved mix gives us the ambient version of the air-guitar/grimacing axe-noodler, Weingarten picking out lead lines and blues-bordering Floyd-esque sustains, near nausea is reached. Two further tracks pass by in unhappy semi-paralysis, “Moon & Dome” doling out texturally flimsy Rich-lite float-sam and “Solar Rain” an over-egged version of a pudding recipe from Eno’s ambient cookbook before the situation is thankfully retrieved by the two final tracks, on which the palette is tinted with more incisive tonalities (the almost sequencer-driven “Last Run”) or taps into more crepuscular zones, as in the closing “Euphonia.” Here, vast amorphous swathes of grainy fibrillation cross the soundfield, freed from the shackles of “instrument.” These free-floating timbres of diaphanous layers, stretching and reverberating into endlessnessism, beautifully capture some of the reverberant spatial drift – suspended somewhere between the haunted and the mystical—that is the preserve of space elders Rich and Roach, and take it somewhere else. (AL) • www.foundrysite.com Back To Top FOURCOLOR Letter of Sounds (12k) • There’s a downward slope implied on Letter of Sounds making it a music ideally suited to the demands implicit in following after any literal or imagined denouement. So, beginning after the event with a somewhat more structured piece that relies on recognizable pacing, contrast and the entrance and exit of various fields gated against the muted pulse of an electric piano-like voice, the deconstructed rhythmic gestures of Letter of Sounds wastes no time in choosing the entropic path. From that first—called “02”—the trajectory tails into a shimmering and vocally-induced piece that plays with resonance, extending and sharing frequencies between sources as it hovers between the intelligible inflections of song and a kind of early 21st century melisma, all beauty and decay. The rest follows a trajectory of thinning and clotting. Fourcolor traces an arc of accumulating abstraction, where traditional scales gradually yield their adherence to tonality and the silences become dominant over the sounds which at one point cease any and every intimation of motion. The overall effect is one of persistent, subtle and hushed airiness, opening and closing with and against every occurrence. Ultimately, Letter of Sounds arrives in terra cognito, a post-ambient harbor that finds the right mark between minimalism and extravagance, attention and inattention, gesture and stillness and the wholly impartial surround. (KL) www.12k.com Back To Top FUNCKARMA Elaztiq Bourbon 5 (Sending Orbs) Refurbished One (N5MD) • Don & Roel Funcken have swiftly gone from being promising newcomers to a status as veterans of beat-driven ambient-electronica. Mainly under the Funckarma brand name (though Quench has done good service too) they’ve had a string of 12”s and remixes, now assembled, respectively, to form two collections. Surprising to realize these are the first Funckarma full-lengths since Solid State (2001), if you ignore their co-productions with hip-hop trio Shadow Huntaz (which you shouldn’t, but understandably might). The Funckens have pledged allegiance to dub and hip-hop nations, and though those elements may work at a deeper level, the surface of their work is more overtly shaped by 90s ambient, techno, d ‘n’ b, acid and electro. A typical Funckarma track challenges the listener to follow a rhythmically complex breakbeat assemblage as it is constructed and de-constructed, through digital hi-hat fizz, thudding kicks, snare-clone crunch, and acid squelch. This is invariably offset by elegant motifs and smooth synthetic chord progressions on an A-cline (AFX-AE-Arovane) of neo-classical melodicity. On the Sending Orbs collection, which assembles tracks from several 12” releases, the four tracks from 2002’s Bourbon Sounds represent the most immaculate conception of this heady blend of intricate digital beats with micro-symphonic analog keyboard drift. “Noir” has morphing fragments cohering into a glitch-ridden funk-fest, gatecrashed by a somber welter of tenebrous cinematic chords; a smooth dark body with gritty undertones. “Sphere” provides a psychoactive zone-out space for those who seek steelier stuff than the flat insipidity of commodified “chill.” Uncoiling crunch ‘n’ crackly rhythmic fists are enfolded in the gorgeous gloves of “Velvet,” with its swelling plangent keyboards. Twin-tempo beats ignite “Sparkzz” while languid bass and keyboard sustains administer cool. Tracks from two other similarly-inclined EPs, the same year’s Elaztiq and the later Parts 5, make this into a sort of Best Of Funckarma, but that Bourbon intoxication remains unmatched. Refurbished One however, which resides on the sharp-edged punchy side of the IDM camp, largely avoids soft-centered patter, but is more than a bit of a curator’s egg. Remix collections tend that way, often more a snapshot of the musical state of the electronic art than a coherent body of work. The best tracks here, remixes of the known (Speedy J, Plaid) and the unknown (Koolfonk, Heavenly Social), are in the solid ruff-meets-refined Funckarma tradition mapped out on Elaztiq Bourbon 5. The worst are over-glitched stop-start software workouts, fragmented and melodically dissipated, that might have been noodled out on a distracted day in Rotterdam to keep the brothers’ mouse-fingers in trim. It’s troubling to find evidence of slippage towards an onanistic pseudo-experimentalism. Data-power corrupts; absolute data-power corrupts absolutely. (AL) • www.sendingorbs.com Back To Top ROBERT HENKE Layering Buddha (Imbalance Computer Music) • On which everyone’s favourite egghead techno don, Robert Henke, moonlighting from his Monolake day-job, drops a “re-fied” lo-fi minimalist dronebomb. With no knowledge of its provenance, the listener could imagine Layering Buddha as a most reduced and compressed, possibly time-stretched, form of classical symphony. A kind of quiet storm of the Ubermensch, it could’ve been a Wagner orchestral work boiled down to the barest of essences, piped into a machine, then pumped out again, fattened up by Henke’s FX-processor. In fact this isn’t a million miles from the truth. The FM3 Buddha Machine, source of the raw material for Layering Buddha, looks like a cheap plastic radio and is even less complex: volume dial, toggle switch, headphone jack, DC line in, and coin-size speaker, tinnily churning out its three-minute cache of nine limited-edition loops. The appeal to the ambiently-inclined travelling music consumer with a fancy for autonomous musicizing is obvious. With scant and determinate material it will set up an aleatory soundtrack to accompany one’s daily existential trajectory. With its notion of an infinite zero-composer self-determining music, it brings to mind both Cage’s anti-musician conceptualising of half a century or more ago, as well as Eno’s proselytizing over the Koan computer application around a decade ago. The salience of these ideas, however, seem threatened on closer examination of Henke’s process, for he has merely made use of the Buddha Machine, rather than say a Yamaha DX-7 or General Midi or Ableton Live, to generate source sounds, which he then transforms with his bank of effectors and processors. The Buddha Machine gets its name from its context of inspiration, based as it is on devices found in Buddhist temples which serially loop ur-drones and monotonal chants. Its five-to-forty-second loops are downloaded from a website, slivers of tone and half-melodies, snatches of traditional instrument samples: Mongolian fiddle, koto, Chinese mouth organ; all sonic skeleta, deliberately under-dressed, they become transformed into more than their parts by virtue of their lo-tech packing into this machine. Now, there is clearly a “point” to the Buddha Machine in a different sense than that in which there is a point to an iPod. It is pointed ideologico-philosophically, in that its raison d’etre has to do with the nature and value of sound and listening, and the liberation of music, its authorship/ownership, as well as its means of generation, all that Cagean jazz. So, isn’t the point undermined by taking this as merely a sound source rather than an end in itself and putting it through high-spec processing equipment (the “layering” part), carefully tailoring the output? The fact is that the driving concept of the Buddha Machine is not betrayed by its re-routing through channels of technological sophistication. In fact, the disc’s very sonorous intensity dispels reservations about its conceptual confusion, and illuminates another aspect which is foregrounded in its re-contextualisation. The concept underlying Layering Buddha becomes something individualized, unique. It becomes an examination of the revelation through “amplification” of the textural complexity at the heart (and the periphery) of minimal material. It’s a form of celebration of “slow music”—the “layers” build into a subtle and increasingly dense tract on the joys of the apparently simple sustained—and on the nature of what lies over and above and beyond the note itself. In order to achieve this, then, a simple lo-fi source material and a sophisticated array of processing equipment are entirely apt as sources/tools. The message: from less comes more. The ten tracks arc and drift, sometimes surge and swirl, usually over five or six minutes. Henke’s re-sampling and re-presenting allows frequencies and resonances undetectable from listening to the “naked” machine to be captured, writ large. Manipulation of the loops results in longer waveforms and enhanced granularization; in effect, what this results in is an opening out of the sound field to create deep, rumbling low-end sustains and higher-end particulate information: fibrillation, murmuration, susurration. Sensational. (AL) • www.monolake.de Back To Top CHRIS HERBERT Mezzotint (Kranky) • Music-making Briton Chris Herbert calls himself a “non-musician.” No qualms. Odd? In fact, you can see why. For a start, “musician” fits better on your passport than, say, “engineer of tuned air.” But the real virtue made of necessity here is that such a deficit can hone a strength; in Herbert’s case an ear for found sounds, more directly tuned in to sonority itself. Fretless, keyless, reedless, sources suggest themselves through their yield in terms of atmospheric tint or tone color. Mention of tone ties in with title. Mezzotint. Significant in ways titles usually aren’t—mostly empty signifiers, pointing dully at a same-named keynote track. Here title has a larger ambit; it functions as a visual index to Herbert’s sound design, doing service as a metaphor, for mezzotint refers primarily to printmaking, specifically the first tonal method used, one enabling finer gradations in tone by roughening the plate with myriad dots made by a toothed metal tool. Mezzotint is, then, known for the luxurious quality of its tones, achieved through deployment of an evenly finely roughened surface. The parallels between this and the sensation of Herbert’s tone on Mezzotint are vivid. First glance from a distance of the digipak itself is deceptive, for on careful examination what seems like some plain cardboard offers up a teeming brownian motion of subdued color. So title and sleeve artfully complement the sound of the tracks contained, superficially plain spaces which, once the ear quests further, immediately resonate with fascinating fizz-haloes, fibrous timbres and subtle tinctures—like on opener “Stab City,” belying its denotation of dull violence, which hosts instead a miasma of murmurs and soft crackle with the vaguest hint of neighborhood threat. And Herbert doesn’t just mix a few field recordings into a synthwash and call it “ambient,” but utilizes processing in effect to play the environment. In addition to this musicized role, source sounds are also allowed spectral walk-on parts as themselves. Enter helicopter blades, watery slushings, engines, random empty space sounds. The coda to “Cassino” though, is a real cameo: a breathtaking moment when processing is rolled back to leave the raw material, the electronically treated product turned inside out to reveal its innards. Unbeknownst to the listener, the track is just an old Victorian musicbox sample, slowed down and draped in shadows and fog. The fog is lifted, and the metallic clinking of the springs and hammers is left exposed in minute delicate and poignant close-up. An exquisite moment, and many more such subtle pleasures are enfolded herein. (AL) • www.kranky.net Back To Top HUMCRUSH Hornswoggle (Rune Grammofon) • Like Svalastog’s Woodwork, Hornswoggle exhibits a spare and unadorned aesthetic that seems right at home with the Rune brand. Beginning with “Cyborg II” and ending with “Cyborg I” a sort of loop is implied, and the record functions quite well as a half-day long installation, assuming your CD player is set on “shuffle.” Generally and deliberately rough sounding, there’s an urban tribalism/primitivism on exhibit here that proves to be both affecting and interesting. Fostered mostly by some insistent percussion that is sometimes processed, sometimes acoustic and sometimes just a little too repetitive, the percussive zeal now and again begins to creep towards the overtly organized, industrialized and heavily filtered audio chunks first favored by This Heat and their ilk. But mostly, it just grinds forward. And even though there’s this persistent but unproven sense that rhythm can and will and must cover any number of compositional or conceptual weaknesses, Hornswoggle edges us to another conclusion. There can be little argument that by removing the drumming component from any number of discs their appeal can drop suddenly, dramatically and permanently. Humcrush hangs its entire premise on this single sonic component and as a result Hornswoggle—which may simply and endearingly be living up to its name—reaches a point fairly early on which inspires a longing for a little less focus on the beats and a little more effort on the pitched information. With that single weakness firmly in mind, shuffling remains advised. (KL) • www.runegrammofon.com Back To Top TETSU INOUE World Receiver (Infraction) • So, World Receiver is now ten-years-old, so as a birthday/anniversary present it is given a re-release in recognition of its abiding timeless, ambient appeal. Originally issued by Instinct and long out of print, World Receiver is held in high esteem by ambient purists (though not, paradoxically, in view of its travelogue overtones, by ambient tourists) who find easier listening in the fluffier flotations of the more feted pair, Inoue’s older Ambient Otaku and Organic Cloud. Though cited by many connoisseurs as his best work ever, World Receiver is in some ways a forgotten star, being a more “difficult” work than Otaku/Cloud by virtue both of its more fragmented quality, its dissipatory environmentalism, and a sound palette that crept closer in timbre towards, though without crossing into, the realms of post-analog pop and digital crackle. What distinguished World Receiver from much of mid-90s ambient was in fact this “progressive” aspect, its hybridization and blending tendency. The resulting collage is alive with detail and solicitous soundcraft, though compositional and production expertise is skillfully suppressed in the service of spontaneity, in congruence with its concept/conceit: that of a kind of radio-bound “text,” or musically-enhanced audio-documentary, existing at a point of intersection between various channels receiving signals from across the globe, with Inoue in the role of conduit. Boundaries between music and sound collage have often been blurred since, but this was one of the first “accessible” (i.e., not located within the sphere of the avant-garde) works to do so. Taking its cue from the location-music linkages Eno “popularized” with On Land, Inoue pushes the synthetic timbral envelope beyond, with a more melodious and architecturally sophisticated realization than his predecessor, still sounding fresh and ever-ready to provide a platform for the non-moving traveller ten years on. (AL) • www.infractionrecords.com Back To Top LARRY KUCHARZ Ambient Green Washes (International Audiochrome) • On Kucharz’ latest, the prime color of symphony is refracted through the prism of post-millennial software. Culled together from pieces scattered amidst the 90s and put into appropriate “context” in 2005, it’s been some time since “classical” ambient music has had such a dramatic effect on my bewitched, bothered and bewildered psyche. Kucharz gets an awful lot of mileage out of his monohued palette: strings ache, coalesce, are stretched taut, shimmer in your speaker domain like an aurora borealis and, if anything, have me reaching immediately for the repeat button. Kucharz renders ambient cliché-free, and all without summoning up any ghosts of Enos past—tough to do in this era of marginalized composition and drone overdose. (DB) • hometown.aol.com/audiochrom/ Back To Top ELIO MARTUSCIELLO Unoccupied Areas (ReR) • It will require resources greater than those of this publication to sort out the millions of strands which comprise the fine weave of Unoccupied Areas. An excursion in organized sound that is in many ways overwhelming in its detail, variety and intimations of structure and mood, Elio Martusciello has managed to articulate some remarkably broad emotional and mental states with a palette that seems big enough to cover one of the smaller continents. At turns threatening and humorous, all the while shading an agitated state into perhaps a hundred distinct degrees, the sounds and their juxtaposition exhibit found and created earmarks, as well as actual instruments, voice, field recordings and intriguingly processed wavematter summing at times to orchestral levels of voicing, density and cohesion. As non-traditional music there is still a high dependence on the usual contrasts: hi/lo, fast/slow, smooth/rough and so on, all assembled in the least usual ways possible. And even within this flowing/jagged terrain there stills seems to be even a sort of leitmotif at work as well—a singular sound that might be imaged as a blade, dropping very fast, with an enormous amount of low end, all contained in the smallest possible envelope and playing the clarion role of demarcation that offers some entry-point and orientation within these complexly structured audiofiles. (KL) • www.rermegacorp.com Back To Top MASH-UP SOUNDSYSTEM A Great Escape from Lunacy (Hive) • Mash-Up Soundsystem prove they are willing and able to perpetuate the legacy of—and ultimately some of the problems with—the likes of Atari Teenage Riot and the short-lived digital hardcore movement. These Southern California noise addicts, some of whom have budding careers outside this agreed-upon collective, choose to hop aboard a few songs each on A Great Escape from Lunacy, their contributions tracked by a map-like legend. Although Concrete Cookie and the Dog provide the clearest echo from the past in “Plastic Bag,” it is Depth Error who most consistently and accurately mimics the high points of the genre in tracks using familiar drum breaks (“Pablo Steals”) and well-orchestrated breakdowns (“Seeker”). Beyond that, A Great Escape from Lunacy is a pastiche of technological waste that strives to rise above its origins. There are occasional flashes of entertaining power: “The World Pt. 2” simulates both planes coming in low and failing hard drives, comparing and contrasting machineries of war; “Mete Bronca No Couro Do Cabrito” is Latin-flavored glitch; the dull roar of “Inpatients” transitions to “Sourpuss Suicide” and its crisp monologue on decay. Ultimately, like digital hardcore itself, Mash-Up Soundsystem trades in these fleeting moments for unfulfilling sound and fury overall. Too often, the album’s progressions into drill ‘n’ bass and beyond are short, underdeveloped, more incomplete thoughts than vignettes. “Promenade” is 27 seconds of rhythmic squeaking, for example, and it takes two tracks (“Cocaine” and “The Fast Lane”) for the group to paint one picture of the seedy, smarmy side of success. Those latter tracks in particular pinpoint Mash-Up Soundsystem’s biggest weakness: the presence of Incredibad, whose white-boy rap excesses can’t match the satire of Anthrax’ “I’m the Man” let alone the actual modicum of skill employed by even the most formulaic of aggro electronic musicians. (AB) • www.hiverecords.com Back To Top DANIEL MENCHE Scattered Remains (Soleilmoon) • There never seemed any real justification—let alone an actual basis—for the hideously ignorant bromide that “music is a universal language.” This is especially true since language itself is often incapable of articulating either the emotional or intellectual recognition of any number of the horrors we as a species visit upon our many-tongued selves, or the inability of language to cope with our consciousness of death. This seems factual of any and every human language with the possible exception of phonosemantics and pure onomatopoeia, where we set aside the encoded abstractions of accepted vocabulary in favor of those words whose sounds are in fact the sum total of their meaning. Because sound does equal meaning, Daniel Menche’s principle accomplishment may well be his creation of an onomatopoeic vocabulary that operates in a purely musical context. By equating the familiar voices of instruments with an abstracted spoken vocabulary—that part of vocabulary emphatically removed from direct experience—and then leaving it all behind and for a lexicon and grammar of pure sound, Scattered Remains is articulated in a deft and moving language of anguish and revulsion that surpasses the spoken word as well as traditional musical techniques in articulating the more horrific aspects of the human condition. Even the titles of this two-disc set imply a primacy of phonetic relationships (the echolalic “Chrome Homicide,” a Beefheartian “Acetate Lick Screamer,” the dead-end rhyme of “Hand Against Her Sand,” etc.). Like many artists that have created their own grammar, Menche can prove to be as oblique as Joyce’s codes, as alluring as Tolkien’s Sindarin, as obstinate as Partch’s personal scales and as witty as Duchamp’s closed system. Though not yet the same calibre as these artists, the importance of what’s going on here should not be underestimated in its ability to shape still another extra-musical reality. (KL) • www.soleilmoon.com Back To Top MOOV The Arrivant Volume 1 & 2 (Kitchen Sink) • Here’s an annoying feeling: when everything on a recording sounds contrived, as if there’s no presentation, only representation, or not even that—more like virtual representation. Like there’s nothing remotely “natural” going on. Not to elevate the “natural” to false god status. By all means, feed us weird technological things. But artifice can fast become anodyne when left this disengaged. The sounds here seem almost willfully detached from a feeling of something recognizably human. Possibly intended, but the ensuing soullessness makes for a depressing listening experience, a devoided danse macabre of machinery. We even get a Derrida quote on the liner notes as a reference for the album title, so we know this must all mean something of Large Import. Or point to Something Big beyond the trifles of mere meaning. Moov knows his deconstructive onions, though. On Volume 1, track 4 cites the first appearance of knowing synthpop frippery. Track 5 sees nasty synth presets blare out some sort of hyperreal lounge dub cha-cha-cha with the “bonus” of a bilious trumpet loop. Cheers for that. Volume 2 is rather more expansive and experimental. But here’s another annoying feeling, like there’s something going on that you can’t get in on. Stop. What’s going on in there? Alas, there ain’t no love in the heart of this circuitry. (AL) • www.kitchensinkrecords.com Back To Top MUSIC A.M. Unwound from the Woods (Quatermass) • Further cosying up between indie pop froth and laptop fizz, Music A.M. negotiates this once fertile, now rapidly approaching nutrient-depleted ground on this, their second album. Present are Luke Sutherland (guitar/vocals, ex-Long Fin Killie and Bows), Stefan Schneider (bass/synthesizers, also of To Rococo Rot), and Volker Bertelmann (keyboards, also of Tontraeger). The references to their other ventures are not just idle background notes; you could almost piece together the sound of Music A.M. from projecting a combined aural collage of these on your inner ear screen. But in case you’re not clued up source-wise, they’re a reined-in but playful ensemble that fuses vaguely post-rock instrumental interplay and glitch-lite electronics into pop-esque songs with some smart lyrical inclination and coy sensuality. And Unwound from the Woods is refined and smart-cute enough, but all a bit just so. Sutherland’s vocals are almost proudly effete, a fey breathiness which frolics in a playground of prettily turned-out sub-pop post-rock of Rhodesian curlicues, plucky bass fussiness, and neat guitar flourishes. That’s the sound of opener, “Always,” while “Say It” and “I Was Born to Make You Happy” happily marry multi-tracked plasma-soul hooks to digital strings and guitar shudder. There are a number of instrumentals, of which “Miercoles” perhaps stands out: soft horns floating over a placid base of handclaps and guitar. Still, it’s the vocal tracks that register the strongest, for better or worse, depending on your taste for Sutherland’s up-close-and-personal featherlight delivery. Music A.M. includes some gurgly circuitry, and some tinkling noodle-doodle reminding occasionally of Tortoise minus the stretching-out. Alas, an un-ambient, up-front, in-the-room production reinforces undertones of false intimacy. Harder work is needed to get even remotely close. (AL) • www.quatermass.net Back To Top NARCOTIC DREAMS Shattered (804Noise) • Let’s state it from the outset. Shattered is unpleasant. Most of its 50-odd minutes are torture, or at least allude to a certain pain-wracked experience. But one can have too much of musical pleasantry. And, akin to the genre of horror movie, that of dark ambient noise-mongering has its appeal, so on its merits within its ambit of uncomfy intention should Shattered be judged. Narcotic Dreams is Richmond-based James McCrea, who works with processed electric guitar, bass and organ to create electro-acoustic dark ambient, sometimes bordering on power electronics and noise. In fact, it spans a quite narrow range of articulation, main sonorities being (i) the moan-wail, (ii) the creak-clang, and (iii) various species of amusical background drone somewhere between radiator-hum and eardrum-buzz. What results is nine tracks of dissonant drift occasionally animated by howling feedback irruptions, which is effective in creating an atmosphere somewhere between the alienated, the distressed and the agonized. The processing is decidedly lo-fi and limited in sonic scope, though—over-reliant on use of a certain slapback echo effect whose returns are overdriven just short of feedback level. It produces a mood you’d characterize as “scary,” but the effect is to make everything sound like a corny bad-trip sequence in a low-grade B-movie. Predominant impression: barely audible drone-hums, as if whispered through a glass darkly (“Tempest”), giving way to intense ear canal-threatening moments of ascending and plummeting shriekback (“Stillness Shattered” and “Vertigo”). Noisy then, but there’s nowhere near enough bad racket going on to please the serious Merzbow-wielding cacophanophile. Quiet, too, but not sufficiently reticent for the López-loving clan. Doomy, sure, but lacking that hi-tech spaciness or truly subterranean hyper-gloom that might draw in the Lustmord/Rich Stalker-types. Shattered’s relatively minimal noisescapes seem like a case of not enough, too much, not far enough out-there or down-there. (AL) • www.804noise.org Back To Top OÖPHOI Hymns to A Silent Sky (Nextera) Signals from the Great Beyond (Gears of Sand) OÖPHOI & TAU CETI Subterranea (Nextera) • With well over 20 releases in 10 years, Gianluigi Gasparetti makes many others in the prolific class look like they’re backsliding. Gasparetti has envisioned similar psycho-topologies to Steve Roach or Robert Rich, but ultimately leans more towards the musicologically simpler hyper-naturalism of Matthias Grassow or Alio Die. Draw a line on the musical map from the sub(f)low of Thomas Köner’s no-God Nordic darkdrift to the singing-bowl drone-devotionalism of Klaus Wiese’s Orientalist overtones, and you’ll traverse Oöphoi land. None of these recordings are about to convert you if you’re an unbeliever; if you’re passing by from the psy-ambient/chill camp, thinking to gatecrash some grand neo-spiritual bliss-out to see what’s happening, just walk on by. Oöphoi is more of a deep listening equivalent to the Gentleman’s Club than a post-rave chill-out space. There is something both ascetic and luxuriant about a music that contents itself with such minimal resources yet sprawls so infinitely within them. A case in point would be “Lightwaves” on Signals…, wherein a more dynamic than customary Gasparetti raises unearthly spirits with leviathan upheavings of processed soundcloudbanks. His resources are not especially various: simple synth tones, rarely chords, usually single note drones, Tibetan bowls, gongs, the odd flute-y loop, a skin occasionally banged. Much is in the processing of these source sounds into a kind of minimal vastness. With little (complex) harmonic matter, no overt rhythms, only tone-drone-drift and choreography of the void, it is as if boundaries between solid, liquid and vapor are transgressed, dissolving time and space. The maximally spacious sonic environments on these recordings are characterized by elaborate, long-lapse reverberation and echo. The itemizing of individual tracks on these collections would be otiose, since each feels like an opus conducted over several movements. Subterranea, most of all, oozes a long dark thick smear of chthonic reverberating drone through its entirety that seems intent on dragging the listener into a spiritual abyss. Now for those wary of embarking on musical trips so manifestly resonating with quasi-new age spiritual overtones, it’s interesting to muse on how amenable this Oöphoi vehicle is to variable voyages. The burning of incense and the adopting of the lotus position may seem obligatory, especially when backed up by the accompanying visual semiotics. But the destination of the Oöphoi trip is less clearly pre-determined than its new age (the customary charge for such artists) trappings would signal. David Toop observes in his book Ocean of Sound that musical exploitation of “cavernous resonance” is “perhaps as ancient as any other form of sonic experimentation.” Toop sees massive reverberation as invoking “the sacred.” But the Oöphoi concept is not so much one of “sacredness,” more something like “elsewhereness,” a wide-open imaginary space other than or beyond conventionally experienced external reality. These recordings evoke the world as individuals do not “normally” experience it, be it the subterranean, the submersed, the cosmic aether, or a familiar world unfamiliarly perceived—like it were heard and sensed for the first time, untrammelled by the sanitizing perceptual slant of any domestic or institutional lens. Thus it can sound somewhat ominous, threatening, even fearsome in its unalloyed primevality. Ultimately such recordings can be seen as quietly radical, in that they issue a directive to sensory subversion that takes our constructions outside from the mealy mouth of the mundane, the dormant daze of day-to-day, bidding us storm the doors of perception. Quietly. (AL) • www.nextera.cz / www.gearsofsand.net Back To Top O YUKI CONJUGATE The Euphoria of Disobedience (OYC Limited) • It’s nearly a quarter of a century (shiver) since 1984’s Scene in Mirage signalled the start of O Yuki Conjugate’s forays into shadowy territories that were to see them rise to semi-cult status as a collective. The decade between the breaking of the first wave of (Eno-led) ambient and the upsurge of the second (post-rave) saw them develop as a kind of “soft industrial” ethno-inflected experimental project. They were lumped in by the taxonomically obtuse with the sub-goth trappings of “darkwave,” more by dint of 1991’s Peyote being released on that most wavy of dark labels, Projekt, than through any subscription to any wave. Preferring schism to -ism, their music has always been sui generis, though not so hermetic as some (cf. :zoviet*france:, who might be seen as spiritual fellow-travellers). They in fact had more in common with Eno/Hassell’s Fourth World hybridizations than anything else around at the time, and would later find themselves situated, like it or not, under the spuriously homogenous “tribal” or “ritual” ambient banner in the early-mid 90s. Despite the group’s longevity, The Euphoria Of Disobedience is only their fifth album, and constitutes a kind of Third Coming (one per decade) for this collective whose personnel has varied over time but now seemingly reduced to just founding members Andrew Hulme and Roger Horberry, augmented by Rob Jenkins (of Redshift), last sighted on 1994’s Equator. Ten years have elapsed since the last release as OYC, Sunchemical, itself largely a collection of retoolings of that single track from 1994’s Equator (properly considered, their last bona fide album). Euphoria… is presented as a limited edition of 1000 hand-numbered copies housed in a digipak with a typically idiosyncratic design: a hand cast resin “ice tile” being affixed to the front, through which a flower can be glimpsed as if through frosted glass. The recording itself, started in 2002 and completed in late 2005, manifests both continuity and change in the OYC soundfield: the customary bongos, tablas and other ethnic sonorities cede here to a less percussively populated and discreetly more electronically processed tableau, but nevertheless the same overall signature organic ambient shadowlands are invoked. OYC have characterized this work as “dirty ambient” (or rather the press release author does). The term is not the most apt, though it does call attention to the importance of texture and layers in their music; for what OYC are about more than anything is the play of timbres—the instrumental analog to what Barthes has characterized as the “grain” of the voice (as opposed to the actual notes and melodies sung). No, it is not especially “dirty,” truth be told, since the recording is scrupulously produced so as to bring out the all-important textural resonances. That said, the lilt and drift of classic ambience is little in evidence among these sketches. OYC artistry, were it painterly, would be of the type that would be painstakingly eked out with studiedly chewed-up brushes, on artfully abraded surfaces. This “dirty ambient” is not to be envisioned as being of the same sensibility as that embodied in the weatherings of the post-Boards of Canada kindergarten copyists, nor in the lo-fi erasive etiolation of the post-Basinski disintegrationists. “In Dreams, Perhaps,” aptly titled, hosts treated guitar tones—dusty, fetid—over a background haunted by sparse mallet percussion. Close your eyes and you’re almost there. But not until the fourth track “Binaryglow” do we get anything resembling l’ancien regime of tribal skinslap, and even then just one vignette, “Incomplete” (featuring a dilruba), has proper claims to “ethnic” status. Things start to get spooked on “Slither” with its rumbling bass and noir Rhodes chords, sounding even more like haunted film soundtrack material. The likes of “Out Through The Skin,” with its hovering steel guitars, and “Estuary,” with its slippery slide, revisit the queasy hallucinogenic desert Western simulacra of Hulme’s A Small Good Thing side-project. But this is decidedly not a retread of old boards, with pieces like “Where She Goes At Night” breaking new ground, straying at the outskirts of nightmare, with a treated vocal hybridized into a virtual instrument of remarkable resonance that defies description. The Euphoria of Disobedience is a deep and intriguing recording that lies low on first encounter only to leak out, slow-release, into the imagination over successive listens. (AL) • www.oyukiconjugate.com Back To Top NICK PARKIN Refract (Soleilmoon) • Progress seems to be made by gradually accepting, integrating, imitating, repeating and eventually subsuming The New into The Familiar as a part of the culture’s seemingly tireless need for change, the illusion of change, or just the illusion of progress. In 1982 Brian Eno’s On Land showed us something you could call The New with what at the time seemed a slightly divisive record. Less recognizable than the virtuosic flourishes of his collaborations with Fripp; instrumentally unrecognizable when set beside Music for Airports or Discreet Music. But as was just pointed out, once validated by repetition and imitation, such advances find themselves just another strand in the daily fabric, their tensile strength being determined in direct relation to the strength of their varied and various ideas. The question in evaluating the quality of resultant offspring is not unlike judging livestock: we know it’s a critter of some particular type, but how well does this critter conform to the breed standard? Nick Parkin’s Refract may not medal, but it certainly places. If Eno was on land, Parkin is at sea with a clearly pelagic yearning. The sounds—while avoiding cliché—are liquid enough, flowing back and forth into one another between points becalmed or agitated, low, mid or high and all the while wondrously preoccupied with establishing their own sense of place. There is very careful attention given to the way in which frequencies are combined and positioned, creating a soundstage that is sharply sensate and highly detailed. And, though it was not mentioned above, a truly worthwhile aspect of that process of subsuming The New into The Familiar includes the burnishing of and contributions to pure craft. In the case of Refract, more of the improvement of craft is on display than is the obviously imitative or the simply familiar. (KL) • www.soleilmoon.com Back To Top PIXEL Set Your Center Between Your Parts In Order To (Raster-Noton) • The quality of a raster image is determined by the total number of pixels (resolution), and the amount of information in each pixel (color depth). Set Your Center… is only the second Pixel on this raster. Having drawn a blank with the semantic detective work, let’s forego further pursuit of conceptual linkages in favor of musical examination. It emerges there is a human entity denoted by Pixel, one Jon Egeskov, a “professionally trained jazz musician” with “academic credentials.” But though Set Your Center… is tooled up to the lobes with version 06-07 of the labcoat-meets-chinstroke design-house aesthetic, it’s not quite so clinically dessicated by hoch-brow uber-kuhl as you might expect. Sure, what you have here is further Raster-man cyber-ations: audio-spatial research by any other name, but you do feel/viel mo fun(k). The CAD-ed groove is one that makes with the minimal conceptual means but drives them to maximal body-coded ends. Pared back to the digi-bone, with just a hint of pixellated flesh to re-animate the simulacrum of hip-twitch and booty-shake, Egeskov melds digitized found sound, elliptical sub-bass, and the technoid skeleto-descendants of tribal polyrhythms and hi-res stick-figure glitch-kinetics. Due props offered to this deft digi-operator then, but would it be unfair to suggest that the name-token “Pixel” could be rendered “Alva Noto” or “Komet” or “Kangding Ray” without much of an identity crisis? Carsten Nicolai would doubtless get one of his backroom sidekicks versed in poststructural poesis to respond with some nifty discourse about the construct of “authorship” having been laid to rest decades ago, so why the fuss. Yes, it’s all in the text (and the intertext, and the hintertext), so content yourselves with a re-context of the off-the-shelf Raster-Noton sonic lexis configured into a distinctly more dynamic realization. And if you need the illusion of The Author, then you can take refuge in the knowledge that those percussive bursts of static and punctuative shards of structured crackle ‘n’ hiss are subtly different from their precursors, being generated largely from the music of chance found in dot matrix printers. Note for trainspotters: Set Your Center… is mastered by Stefan Betke, which may account for the disc’s minimally greater heft. Sharp packaging also. (AL) • www.raster-noton.de Back To Top PNEUMATIC DETACH Re-viscera (Hive) • Lowell, Massachusetts resident Justin Brink (performing as Pneumatic Detach) seems intent on redefining the town’s status as the de facto birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, reclaiming “industrial” in the name of the musical form and splitting hairs on “revolt” as a term of both conflict and disgust. The full frontal assault of Viscera was something of a landmark for Pneumatic Detach, Hive Records, and the powernoise subgenre in general. With the generally agreed-upon exception of “Mindless Brutal Apparatus,” a graphic spoken track that along with the bloody artwork still certainly addressed the revolting side of the revolt, Viscera was one of the best-reviewed industrial albums of 2005. Being the consistently aggressive album it is, its’ commissioned remix collection Re-viscera can’t break a lot of new ground only because Viscera has already worn away much of said ground to yawning canyons and jagged cliffs. Re-viscera nevertheless forges alliances with, pays homage to, and casts different shadows on Brink’s material. “Sona” and “Moment of Comprehension” are left hanging by threads courtesy of Vers’ wailing guitars and Manufactura’s scraping static and angry, moaning synths, respectively. Even kinder, gentler remixes sting like scorpions: Censor introduces melodic breakcore into “Embers”; Scrape.dx focuses on treble-heavy percussion in a take on “Holowh”; Liar’s Rosebush gives tuned drum samples room to roam in “Mindless Logic Swallower.” Continuously mixed, Re-viscera presents a path from point A to point B that is certainly different from that traveled by Viscera yet is just as relentless, exhausting, and rewarding. Taken together, they are Pneumatic Detach’s audio blitzkrieg. (AB) • www.hiverecords.com Back To Top JON ROSE The Fence (ReR) • Serious in tone and intention, The Fence includes two long (but segmented) compositions—“The Fence” and “Bagni di Dolabella”—which continue the effort of diminishing our prejudices about what constitutes an instrument and what constitutes music, an already settled argument. Displaying kinship to aspects of Pauline Oliveros’ oeuvre as well as the more literal nodules of 20th century Art Music, specifically, the spoken word components of The Fence recall any number of orientation techniques relied upon by composers, businesses, governments and public institutions. Formal and somewhat formulaic, fences in this case act as both the animating metaphor (subsets are titled “Iron Curtain,” “The Green Line,” “Our Police,” etc.) and a principal instrument in a back-and-forth exchange of two forms of articulated speech: linguistic (hoch Deutsch) and instrumental. “Bagni di Dolabella” is described as “a violinist’s guide to the treatments and political intrigues of an ancient roman bath.” The connecting network imagined, sketched, reviewed, revised and finally constructed to connect these two poles must easily be as interesting as the resulting music. Products of these once popular meta-scripts can veer the listener towards a heightened sense of bewilderment or complete artificiality to the uninitiated, but gratefully the music that results more than settles such issues. Still, music derives from many sources—from ideas about culture to specific events both significant and insignificant, but nowhere is it stressed more openly than when it is bent to such clearly non-musical environments. Asking much of the listener and the medium, Rose continues the case for compositional ideas derived from the literal and literate and their sometimes convincing, sometimes impenetrably codified interactions with sound. Take some time to prepare prior to listening. (KL) • www.rermegacorp.com Back To Top SEBASTIAN ROUX Songs (12k) • The prepared instrument conjures intricacies that may seem somewhat off the point of altering an instrument to begin with. The lengths to which John Cage strove to notate the type, weight and position of every nut, bolt or shim he stuck into a piano demonstrates little more than an ultra-conventional obsession at the repertory’s Most Hallowed Altar of Repeatability, a notion then not yet retired by the profusion of recording devices available to pretty well anyone and everyone. Where Mr. Roux stands on this point—of the arbitrary as opposed to the overly documented random—is difficult to know. Lacking the at times overbearing formality and durations of some of Cage’s work, Roux tunes the pieces to a still more contemporary ear by favoring the steady state and keeping things short. In fact, the whole CD is really of EP length with seven pieces amounting to a little over 30 minutes. Usually restricted to solo instruments, these pieces all meditate on the unintended sounds of their instruments (The Guitar Song; The Prepared Piano Song; The Cello Song, and so on). The respect for silence and for the fundamental notion that the sounds an instrument is capable of are not wholly determined by the designer of that instrument reaches back to the obvious reference to Cage and all the way forward to the ears-wide-open catalog that comprised Fred Frith’s Guitar Solos. The music here is a wonderful reminder of that simple, wide-eyed love of surprise and discovery. (KL) • www.12k.com Back To Top CONRAD SCHNITZLER Conviction (Ricochet Dream) CONRAD SCHNITZLER AND MICHAEL THOMAS ROE MiT. (Con 04) Aquatic Vine Music (Con 05) • A limited edition CD (in the big picture, isn’t everything?) which offers a bit more conventionally structured pieces than the recent Con releases, Conviction is comprised of 18 tracks which tend to come across somewhat like studies. Still spontaneous, still lacking the affectations of overly produced electronic music, still naked sounding, the convictions held here must be to improvisation and to the synthesizer, as originally conceived. Given the constraints so evident in the finished work, the artist’s abilities are all there is left to fall back on. And for sheer range of sounds, Conviction is in terrific shape. Picking up the original assumption that the synthesizer was designed to create sounds you haven’t yet heard, instead of the contemporary notion that synthesizers have been reduced principally to recreating sounds you have already heard, this is the sort of record that would gladden the hearts of people like Buchla and Moog. Patch it, process it and…Bob’s your uncle! In terms of other musical considerations there is less to work with. The pieces tend to be fairly uniform: an often single and chattering line of pulsed and filtered oscillators sending out some agitated staccato which is now and again supplemented by sticks beating on things, rising up to noise, falling down to pitch. These arrhythmias are then dressed with some drones, or some legato doodling, or some not-so-legato doodling that might suddenly gliss up or down. Several pieces flush out with a few basslines, but it’s clear Schnitzler’s interests lie beyond the fields of structure, melody or arranging. Free of inhibition and phobic of the effects of too much planning, Conviction displays no remorse. Like the convictions of every zealot, it oozes confidence in every sample. What we get here is again an unadulterated exposition of in-the-moment music. But after an hour or so, it wouldn’t hurt to jump off into some other moment now and again. Having gratefully set aside the notion of titles, Mit. offers eight pieces of varying length and at times unsurprising consistency. Sounding pretty much wholly improvised, the interplay between these two musicians remains on a fairly two dimensional level, engaged most often in two separate monologues which only approach dialog now and again. Pitched information blankets the unpitched. Pulses grapple with establishing a rhythm while life goes on pretty much as it always has. The results are fairly raw and highly—even overly—dependent on an echo unit and a Sample + Hold filter which for all the world sounds a lot like the old S+H circuits on Micromoogs. This is the result of a casual approach to synthesis and an equally casual approach to music, making no efforts to embellish or curtail the ultrafrank squawks, twangs, doinks and clanks typical of unapologetic and recalcitrant oscillators. Or should one say “causal”? In any case, good ol’ knob-twirlin’ music that would have seemed revolutionary in 1972 and which seems now almost completely nostalgic in both its aspirations and its outcomes. Aquatic Vine Music is a comfortable companion to the above. Even divided by seven this still comes across as a single, organically built exercise in free association that meanders across some fluid modulations (aquatic?) with interconnected interludes (vine?) all built on a fairly analog synth-sounding basis (music?). Again, we hear one thing placed on top of another thing and these things remain fairly discrete and fairly unrelated most of the time. That the work aspires to collage or concréte effects is hard to determine since there are rarely more than two voices accompanied by their associated processing. And there seems to be little evidence of editing: one passage becomes another on the fly. Again, many of the pieces are often too reliant on an echo/delay that becomes too naked and too predictable too often. The formula seems built upon a dictum which, simply put, insists one artist confine his efforts to pitched information, another to non-pitched information. A dash of experimentation would exist if, perhaps, one musician was unable to hear the other during the sessions. Unlikely as that may be, the work exhibits an admirable resistance to second-guessing and remains single-minded in its uniformly uptempo pacing. Staunchly averse to all intimations of languor, Schnitlzer and Roe forge forward and back without apology or regret. Aquatic Vine Music displays a nervous and clattering abandonment of form and contrast, with formal construction now thrown overboard along with all other musical conceits. (KL) • www.ricochetdreams.com / mit-conmusic.com Back To Top SEAWORTHY Map in Hand (12k) • Presented as a segmented, single work in seven parts arranged as nine tracks—and bracketed by snippets of field recordings at start and stop—Seaworthy quietly deploys the guitar between the poles of zero-attack/sustain/long decay cloud reductions and more literal strummed and plectrum passages. Within these opposites Map in Hand reveals itself as a paean to consistency. The pieces explore limits and restatement—part one is presented as a prologue, as itself and as a reprise—and favor short durations. Their progress is fairly and attractively homogenous, never reaching outside a central longing for stillness and shimmer expressed as either an active event or its slow decay. This single-mindedness is a strength, making the 40 or so minutes of Map in Hand a pleasant suspension of any number of more conscious preoccupations. The guitar’s voicings are all fairly familiar and this recognition aids in elevating the liminal quality of the music to the forefront of our perception. Any number of things come to mind as referential: the sedate moments of some Fripp soundscapes, the glassy trills of Leo Abraham’s recent Scene Memory, which displays similar levels of restraint. But Seaworthy keeps all matters even more compact and confined. Here, the contrasts occur between rather than within the pieces, creating a methodical sense of alternating between search and rest, compression and distention all the while remaining thoroughly reflective. (KL) • www.12k.com Back To Top SVALASTOG Woodwork (Rune Grammofon) • Just for the exercise, let’s see if we can get through this one without using the word “like”. There are ten pieces on Woodwork and each seems intent on allowing—even encouraging—the listener to witness all the moving parts, their individual value and the influence they exert through interaction with their surrounding kin. Perceiving this sense of separateness is as important to the work as the more typical perception of summing the parts into a whole. Minimalist in its leaning and unguarded in its forthrightness, each piece instead exhibits a fascination with what happens when we consider the constituent parts to be in fact no greater or less in significance than the whole. The resulting clarity has a presence and sense of purpose that is simultaneously inviting and charming, as is most of the work produced by artists who at some point determine that they will adhere to a set of clearly delineated limitations. Here, interlocking elements, often derived from a very unaffected and inobtrusive sounding collection of sources, come across as the deliberate and thoughtful work of craft left all the stronger for not heeding the grander and often suspect machinations of art. Instead, what we hear has all the beauty of work being honed and honed again to the lustre of an absolute and daily utility. (KL) • www.runegrammofon.com Back To Top TEAM DOYOBI The Kphanapic Fragments (Skam) • On their third album in a little over a decade, Alex Peverett and Chris Gladwin have clearly done something to Team Doyobi’s sound. It’s not been “honed,” for this would imply it being tidied up and reined in and buttoned up even, which it is decidedly not. Nor has it been “fleshed out,” for it was quite ample before and needed no particular beef injection, thank you. Perhaps it would be most apt to characterize Doyobi’s doings as “liberating” their sound, in the sense of all the elements of their music being given their head to engage in a form of controlled anarchy that nevertheless has its own logic and perfect sense of internal governance. A brownian motion of Max/MSP indulgence, throwback hardware sonics, and beat phrenetics, The Kphanapic Fragments pushes the envelope of the patented TD sound into prog-tech overdrive. What do you get? Look no further than the recording’s opening 15-minute excursion “Hipatropic Doyobi Drive in Freefall” for an installment of contemporary “popular” electronic music that could serve as an exhibit in the section of an illustrated guide to “postmodernism” entitled “The Polymorphous Aural” or some such. For here the signifiers of electro, modern concrète, prog, hip-hop, sci-fi filmics, free jazz, 8-bit playsounds, and post-industrial ambience find themselves engaged in intoxicated free play under a banner prosaically scrawled with a hopelessly insufficient “IDM.” Open TD’s Pandora’s box, and the listener will be assailed, with a knowing smile, by a hybrid sound with its roots in a heritage derived from a decade on from Boards of Canada and 80s electronic culture: video games, VHS, DIY sound modules, and toddler TV fed through an artschool blender. Doyobi’s science is weird but compelling, all vari-speed bitstreams, microsonic flotsam, analog jetsam, hyper-rhythms and cyber-tunes, fragments barely cohering into intricate compositions that elude the standard genre ambit. Itemization must now cede to a statement of substance in conclusion: Team Doyobi have delivered something of a contemporary electronica magnum opus in The Kphanapic Fragments, providing a timbral tonic for the aurally jaded and event-thirsty. (AL) • www.skam.co.uk Back To Top VARIOUS ARTISTS Pop Ambient 2007 (Kompakt) • Back for a seventh installment, and rubbing up against legs purringly like a familiar feline friend, this year’s edition of Kompakt’s now venerable Pop Ambient series is immediately friendly yet possessed of enough stand-offish mystery to enchant. Along for this magically carpeted ride are some of the stalwarts and founding-fathers of Germanic ambience (Markus Guentner, Gas, Thomas Fehlmann, Ulf Lohmann), along with more recent boarders (Andrew Thomas, Triola, Klimek), and a pair of greenhorns—Popnoname and The Field. So, a good serving of old and new, creating a good balance of compositions which shift seamlessly between the two ends of the Kompakt spectrum from the harmonic beat-driven (more a silencer-muffled pulsing) to the diaphanously drifting. Pop Ambient 2007 is assembled by an intelligence which, like a band that knows how to put together a set-list to achieve maximal effect from a performance, grasps the importance of programming slight shifts in kinesis to prevent the reclining from turning to the comatose, whilst allowing for some degree of flow between kindred soundfields. Thus we get the rumbling droney vaporous opener, Popnoname’s “Hafen,” dovetailing with the frosty shimmer of Markus Guentner’s “Altocomulus Opacus,” after which Gas glides in with a half-lost piece, “Nach 1912,” whose signature textured kickdrum, spectrally padding beneath a befogged loop orchestra, indicates that it could have been swept up off the Königsforst floor (were it not so essential). The kickdrum is echoed and sharpened on the following “Kappsta,” where The Field spin a femme-vox clip into a tight loop, creating a trance-lite mantra that’s the nearest to genuine pop Kompakt ambient gets (pace Superpitcher and Kaito). Overall then this is, unlike many compilations, a consistent and coherent collection, though a slight dip occurs between middle and end which prevents it from being truly outstanding. Marsen Jules, who has done stronger work elsewhere, lets the side down on “Ou La Nostalgie Habite,” emitting a chiming, major-7th loop on autopilot without much else apart from a sickly-pretty swirl to dress it up. This then segues weakly into one of Klimek’s treated guitar explorations, somewhat jarring in their insistence on a tremolo flicker effect based on serially glitching motifs, the worst moments of which sound akin to a pop idol contestant’s heavy-handed rendition of Fennesz, though “Ruined in a Day (Buenos Aires),” admittedly, is less enervating than past Klimeks. A weaker moment, but, in view of two following solidly crafted tracks by Ulf Lohmann and Andrew Thomas in customary bliss-out modes, swiftly glossed over. Nothing new under the Kompakt sun then, but there’s something in the comforting reliability of Pop Ambient series’ sweet stasis, and its synchronicity with the unfolding to the light of spring, that gives the renewed year a rosier hue. (AL) • www.kompakt-net.de Back To Top MICHAEL VOGT Argonautika (ReR) • If the structural limits of music have been removed, if the definition of instruments has been exploded, then the genuine innovations of our day will have to address developing a new context for interpreting our access to such out-scaled freedom of action. Michael Vogt is clearly on that road. Argonautika is a work that belongs in the company of those musics which not only re-evaluate sound, but also re-evaluate instruments and along the way still provide a narrative, mostly postmodern in sentiment. Argonautika has decidedly less to do with improvisation and more to do with composition and an organizing subtext that is narrative. The music is ensemble in nature, based on the interaction of multiple and moving parts, a broader range of instrumental sources and the efficacy of pre- and post-production hindsight thanks to tape manipulation. Based on the recognition that no matter what the origin of an instrument, any instrument is capable of far more sounds than originally intended, the principal sources here being electrified tuba and saxetuba, meant to draw no comparison to the dada-inspired solo work of another tuba pioneer, Roger Ruskin Spear and his Electric Shirt Collar solos. But still, Vogt offers us another affirmation of the primacy of sound over the more traditional manipulation of music. The results are far-ranging and beguiling. Like the slow-rolling cylinders of Stuart Dempster’s Deep Listening, we are given access to a soundstage that is at once recognizable and still impossible to define. There are solemn and somnolent moments that yield to a nearly tribal chaos of voices, all the more compelling because the sources themselves remain still unfamiliar, but clearly imbued with meaning. If the title is to be trusted, Argonautika renders the details of a nearly subliminal search for the golden fleece—or at least for a dangerous and rewarding prize. Which in this case may be the music itself. (KL) • www.rermegacorp.com Back To Top YAGYA Will I Dream During the Process? (Sending Orbs) • Icelander Aõalsteinn Guõmundsson is one of several early ‘00s artists who seemed to have gone off the radar with the demise of the Mille Plateaux/Force Inc axis. His Yagya project made a small but quite distinctive mark towards the end of the MP/FI enterprise in 2002 with Rhythm Of Snow, a recording that contrived to hitch suggestive referencing of the Nordic polar effusions of a Biosphere to the minimal pulsations of Berlin dub-post-techno (see esp. von Oswald, M. (BC/CR, Maurizio) and Voigt, W. (Gas)). Second or third generation it might have been, but it was done with craft and an ear for sounds that departed from the prevailing preset-patch-plugin rife in digital music-making. But then it all seemed to go quiet. However, this quiet was deceptive, for it was not that composition and recording had ceased. Far from it. Subsequent plans to release a follow-up album had been stymied by label trouble (lasting for much of late 05 well into 06), but fortunately the Yagya distress signal was eventually picked up by Sending Orbs, the lately launched Dutch label hosting Kettel, Funckarma, Secede (and Nordic fellow-traveller, Blamstrain, too). Now it’s well over ten years of course since those initial post-techno channelings and reactions, basic and chainwise, yet the extent to which this Berlin-borne legacy continues to exercise a powerful pull on a new generation of post-techno electronic musicians is both evident and freely acknowledged by them. And Yagya is one of the most adept of its disciples in re-asserting and recontextualizing this shared resource of minimal dub techno and Teutonic deep house engineering, (not to mention a powerful injection of gauzy resonance that might as well be termed “the Gas Effect,” since it is sprung from that grainy veil trailed most notably on Königsforst/Zauberberg). This vein had already been well mined in the late 90s-early ‘00s period, as mentioned earlier, by the Force Inc roster, and Guõmundsson’s new magnum opus (and “magnum” it is, in scope, despite the “minimal” tag) will not interest those who flit ficklely from flavor to flavor in transient taste testing of new forced hybrid electronic strains (be it “doom-house,” “freak-folk forest-tronica” or “enviro-ambient”). No, it is very much still Class of 2001—ambient, minimal, dub, and techno felicitously fused, but this year’s Yagya model pushes further into other areas in and around the template that are not “techno” (and “minimal,” about which more later). Kick drums, for example, no longer seem content to kow-tow to the four-on-the-floor imperative, but strain towards breaking patterns or falling on off or in-between beats to create subtle rhythmic axis-shifts. Guõmundsson in fact displays a desire to dig deeper on Will I Dream... than in Rhythm of Snow, setting the sonic scene with “Wind and Thunder,” a long fade-in two-chord mantra of background-brooding syn-tone-drone and occluded throb that builds and builds imperceptibly but, teasingly, never reaches crescendo. Then, as all-stops-out as the opener was reined in, “Choose” goes for the jugular with a space-hopping thump-athon of grandstanding abandon, all sky-high and wide keyboard wash and a nagging lockstep basspulse. On “As It Is” a quite different accommodation is reached between the jack and the dive, with all bottom-end rug being pulled out from under but a fully loaded topsoil of densely mulched chords being sprung, and beatbox-styled underpinnings being allowed to range free, flanged and filtered. “We Lose Ourselves” sees serially looped layers of drone and chord-pass shift and re-shift to a depth-sounding bass figure resounding in hypno-bliss. And so it goes until the seemingly endless loops spool out and fade. As the recording progresses, the thought occurs that Will I Dream... is the nearest anyone has got to an ambient-dub-techno epic (not that anyone has attempted such before). In fact it might be observed in minor criticism of what is an otherwise enjoyable work that there is something of a battle (though since it’s doesn’t prove to be serious, let’s call it a tussle) between the element of widescreen drama and that of spatial minimalism, evidenced in a distinctly maximal production style which tends to want to squeeze sound into every free bit of space - space that strains to remain uncluttered. A touch more variation and frugality here would have lent greater light and shade, and with it greater effect (and affect). And a final note of caution: don’t rush to judge the musical content of Will I Dream... by its sleeve, which resides (probably knowingly) somewhere between twee fairy tale illustration and 70s/80s fantasy art-cheese (almost a Roger Dean update) (Yeah, but it’s still cool as all get out!—Ed.), a semiotic which evokes, for this listener at least, an infelicitously skewed melange of prog throwback, new age dippiness and drug-addled trance fodder, none of which do justice to the spirit of this album. (AL) • www.sendingorbs.com Back To Top ZZZZZZ Holeigans (Blue Lemon International) • Sadly, low-rent Kraftwerk tributes for the masses did not start and stop when Coldplay received permission to lift parts of “Computer Love” for use in their mainstream rock smash “Talk.” If anything, ZZZZZZ (nom de disc of Swede Tomas Johansson, not to be confused with defunct American avant-rock band ZZZZ) and the Holeigans album beat Chris Martin and X&Y to the punch and grind the great Germans’ synth legacy into dust. While ZZZZZZ’s music is original—tied into what Johansson calls “clinical” paintings of alien figures, the “holeigans” pictured in the album artwork—the stamp of Kraftwerk’s electro epics, particularly “Autobahn,” covers just about every song on the album. Lyrics are delivered not with Ralf Hütter’s gravitas but instead with Johansson’s laughable reediness that echoes the most repetitive moments of both Devo and Talking Heads, except when they’re hidden beneath Macintosh-generated voices, a conceit best left to the likes of Air and Benny Benassi. Lines like “She has a warm heart/And her vagina is nice” (from “Love”) are light on the irony and heavy on the inanity, making even “Fun, fun, fun on the autobahn” sound like Pulitzer material. The best moments on Holeigans come near the end, with Johansson keeping his mouth shut as he disembarks from his own private trans-Europe express. A bonus remix of “ZZZZZZ” adds more bass and flanged loops for the dancefloor, while “Another Mind” prefaces a New Wave back end with an eerie, fuzzy front end that seems to acknowledge Johansson’s background in black metal. Otherwise, ZZZZZZ seems content to skip right over Kraftwerk’s minimalist music directly addressing technology, instead making thin, slight songs about nebulous topics like love and bumps on the head. (AB) • www.zzzzzz.nu Back To Top |
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