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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 2 / March 2007
REVIEWED BY: ALVA NOTO For (Line) • Embracing a broad range of ideas, styles and techniques, For spans four years of Alva Noto work and, sadly, the CD suffers from this catch-all brand of eclecticism. Seemingly unable to settle into not so much a style—for why would that matter—but a uniform level of finish, it proves perhaps to be not ecelectic enough. Still, taken separately, some of the pieces are very impressive. Deft handling of manipulated source materials result in oddly compelling soundstage scenarios, such as “Wall Anfang” and its use of voice and location sound as a basis for some expert waveweft and weave. Yet even here, we may be asked to hear too much—to quote the liner notes “the track presents a purity of thought, that spirals inside and out, the voice of Wall (a photographer who is the subject of a documentary for which this piece was created) breaking only impartially this conjecture of sound, while adding an atmosphere of introspection...” Really? One is reminded of the surrealist Paul Eluard’s famous jab: “I believe everything. I tell myself everything.” Grafting a narrative meaning onto the work is unnecessary and oddly both romantic and sentimental, especially in the context of the otherwise post-modern frankness of the music itself. The other end of the range represented here is “Jr,” a deliberately lackadaisical but grating rhythmic piece that sounds like an outtake of early Cluster jams, and “Odradek,” the monotonous pulses of which favor simple, relentless tedium. But all is not lost. Perhaps the best piece is that which opens For: “Counter” is that rare sort of music that manages to be simultaneously stately, seductive and clinical. Within the folds of its impossible to identify drones appear what might be described as test signals for some pyschoacoustic experiments, with carefully matched frequencies that produce the illusion of a remarkably three-dimensional space. In addition to that illusion they even create some real discomfort that, unlike other moments herein, proves welcome. (KL) • www.12k.com Back To Top JONATHAN BADGER Metasonic (High Horse) • Annapolis resident Jonathan Badger found musical inspiration in the Guitar Craft of Robert Fripp during and after proper formal training at Duke and North Carolina State universities. With the world and a seven-piece layering rig of his own design at his feet, Jonathan Badger took to a stage for one-take recording sessions in April and September 2004, labelling his debut collection of results Metasonic. Looking at the parts of this false word we can loosely translate it to “of later sound,” “of sound that has changed,” “of sound within sound,” “of sound referring to itself.” Badger’s equipment setup does Frippertronics (and these definitions) proud, wherein his guitar is a guitar as well as a synthesizer, loop generator, and sample trigger. His music openly adopts an “ambient” tag although there’s definitely more rhythmic structure here. Badger frequently composes pieces—“Code,” “Vault,” “Egret”—that are beeping, rotating, floating rock’n’roll satellites, merging the tapped notes and chords of the late Michael Hedges with the technical arsenal behind Vernon Reid’s six-string screams and whispers. More interesting, especially knowing one set of hands generated this work spontaneously, are the noises and notes that move beyond the guitar realm. The arrangements and tweaking of “Beat On” and “Magnetism” create a virtual string section; “Tremble” adds illusory hurdy-gurdy and muted horns while “Flame” evokes a field of nighttime crickets. The interlude “Old Spiders” may be Badger’s technological zenith, an angular piece that evokes a large modern orchestra. At just under thirty minutes Metasonic is maybe a tad too shallow and short to make a significant first impression, but Badger’s work is too pleasing and—despite the absence of any overdubs—polished to ignore. (AB) • www.jonathanbadger.com Back To Top FRANZISKA BAUMANN Eternal Ice Melts (Soleilmoon) • Ashes to ashes, ice to ice. Where Michael Keaton’s 2005 bomb of a psychological horror film White Noise explored electronic voice phenomena, flautist/vocalist Franziska Baumann finds her ghosts—and her fabricated string sections, and her imagined vehicles screaming through tunnels—in the wholly tangible environment of mountain ice. Her 2002 Voice Sphere album sprang from her voice and chilly surroundings (recorded by traditional and specially designed microphones, manipulated by high-end computers) as she climbed on and through glaciers. The following year she performed, no, exhibited, her sound paintings in Germany and distributed to her audience 125 CDs with remixes of the original work. That collector’s item, Eternal Ice Melts, now sees wider release in a slightly expanded edition. Two versions of “Where All the Frozen Things Went” form the majority of this album; the “Drone Mix” by Lull (neé Mick Harris of Napalm Death and Scorn) anchors both. Unadorned, the aural illusion of concurrent treble-heavy and bassy tracks makes for a fascinating sonic study of exposure to and protection from the cold. With Baumann’s overdubs, we are pelted with wind, snow, and the odd explorer, her voice a wailing tribute to the elements, air and water, forming this land, this studio, this resting place. “Voicesphere Icehooked v.03” sees Clemens Presser and Seetyca focusing on percussive qualities in Baumann’s source material. The noises making up the majority of their mix barely qualify as drumming; minimalist and wet, they instead recall the drippy tips of stalactites, nature’s take on the metronome. Baumann also presents the original version of her track “Eternal Ice,” her avant-garde vocal and electronic stylings conjuring images of two separate Ice Ages in the realm of communication, interpersonal (gasps and shrieks) and technological (Morse code). The new “Core Anomaly Mix” from Submerged (a.k.a. Ohm Resistance labelhead Kurt Gluck) rounds out Eternal Ice Melts; borrowing elements from the “Where All the Frozen Things Went” overdub mix, this dark slice of drum’n’bass is by default the hottest thing on an album that is, on purpose, no chill-out. (AB) • www.soleilmoon.com Back To Top BUZZLE Buzzle (Barking Green / Nepenthe) • There’s something always alluring and compelling about music that is at once recognizable and at the same time spurns typical forms. Buzzle, a Tim Story project, offers a glimpse at just such unself-conscious and highly self-confident hybridization. Beautifully languorous, moody, smoky and lush instrumental musics here slip into the ambient, then away to moments of jazzy-bluesy stretches that recall The Cinematic Orchestra and then off again to those oddly assembled then disassembled little settling spots of the fully formed and formless so expertly teased into existence by Brian Eno—once and only once—on the first installment of his Music for Films. These 14 pieces all possess that combination of gleaming surface, a physically convincing soundstage and the most lovely inner detail. As only one instance, a cello passage played by Martha Reikow draws your attention to exactly where it seems it should be when still another (what? string trio?) plays in and out of the gaps, remote and rightly suggesting that other stuff, important stuff, is happening too. Just elsewhere. This roving but still sharp focus is accomplished by Story’s compositional skill, one that must be shaped by a frank and open interest in much more than any one aspect of expression. Aided by the percussion work of Louie Simon and Scott Wilkinson—here recalling the remarkably live sound and fluid style of Luke Flowers—and Tom Caulfield’s orchestra, Anna and Cara Story’s vox and, to top out the ensemble, Hans-Joachim Roedelius’ piano contribution on “Something Happened Here (Remix)”. Buzzle is a perfect and intriguing union of the electronic and acoustic. Without close study it would be difficult to even vaguely determine just how a particular shimmer of decay came into being: some treated ’cello tails or some virtual synth, or some DAW-originated cross-pollinated jitter. After all, it’s a CD of music that lives in the details. And there are at least 100,000 or so to consider. (KL) • www.nepenthemusic.com Back To Top DANI JOSS Shaper of Form (Poeta Negra) NEON Au Theatre des Sons Imaginaires (Poeta Negra) SPYWEIRDOS Wetsound Orchestra (Poeta Negra) PEEKAY TAYLOH Centrifugal (Poeta Negra) • In a drama by Italian playwright Pirandello, the audience is confronted by six characters looking for an author who had created them but not finished their story, leaving them as unrealized persona. The manager of the theatre in the scenario tries to throw them out, but then becomes more intrigued when they start describing their story. There are parallels between Pirandello’s characters and Poeta Negra’s artists here represented: it’s mainly that they seem, initially, to varying degrees, like characters in search of being fully inhabited; one might say that the worst of them (Centrifugal) feels totally depleted of identity. In the other cases, however, the listener, like the manager of the theatre, will continue, gripped by the tension, and in the best case (Neon’s Au Theatre des Sons Imaginaires) is likely to find substantial plot and resolution. Poeta Negra is a label based in Greece (Thessaloniki) that “aims to detect the latest trends of musical evolution in terms of form and function within the boundaries of electronic [...] music,” which piece of PR-speak the cynical might construe as naked opportunism to jump on whatever electronic sub-genre bandwagon happens by. And indeed a cursory listen to these four does display a certain willingness to spread its net wide in terms of style templates. The label’s keynote address further states that their enquiry is situated “where sound and form accompany the new realities of a continually evolving urban environment.” This smacks somewhat of an exercise in retrospective meaning-making, seeking to endow the onanism of bedroom fiddling with some tenuous connectivity to, uh, urban realities. But be that as it may, the generosity of spirit might just observe that the label is “eclectic” in orientation. Shaper of Form, we are told, is “as much about language, concept and storytelling as it is about form, music and image evocation.” What emerges in actuality is a somewhat fraught musically-mediated tour of the psychic topography of its ideator, Dani Joss. This is where Poeta Negra gravitates towards the conceptual avant-garde, as Shaper of Form ultimately resembles more a cross between electroacoustic and music concrète than its initial impression of a dark ambient hybrid. Post-classical touches too; Messiaen-ic, one might say, seeking greater precision as to the exact provenance of its moments of experimental classical/avant colorings. Compositionally, minimalistic passages yield to periodic thematics, crepuscular quietscapes to occasional melodramatic interludes and crescendos. Some passing influences from the likes of Coil, Murcof, and Shinjuku Thief are trailed along the way, but Joss’s work is largely uncompromisingly idiosyncratic; to be admired for this, perhaps, but likely to be largely unloved. You’ll hear gloom-infused atmospheres, the twitchings of strings, rustlings and tappings, fragmentary orchestral tuning and the like; you’d have said we’re more in the area of atmosphere, of sound design, of a claustrophobic soundtrack to a psychodrama, than simple electronica. At a certain point in the midst of a more abstract harmonically-challenged section of Shaper of Form, the less than adventurous listener may risk being pronounced clinically dead by a passing medic. Overall it has the queasy feel of something designed more for arty conceptual types than authentic music-lovers, though those who seek strange refuge in the tropes of Uneasy Listening should check in. Wetsound Orchestra is the work of one Spyros Polychronopoulos under the moniker Spyweirdos, who presents a form of IDM-electronica that floats between the likes of Hymen/Ant-Zen (yep, bring out the old favorites “dark” and “post-industrial” again to do descriptive service) and Mille Plateaux/Raster (yeah, the clicks shtick). The album’s opener, “Cellar,” has synth-drones floating amidst drips’n’clicks, and precise beats that strangely anachronistically recall the old Bristol trip-hop sound, this further reinforced by intermittent moody piano chords (think Protection-period Massive Attack). The fluidity of textures and drones is regularly deliberately derailed by knowing error-choreography of the type now conventionally described by the shorthand “glitch.” There’s a mastering credit to Murcof, and there are audible traces of his hand, such as the dense panoply of strings that falls over “Already Happened Tomorrow” with Muscovite solemnity, and the subtly spooked ambience of the haunted clicktechno-like “3.5 ec.” There are peaks and troughs within Spyweirdos’ work, and when synth or string colorings go AWOL, the album can sound a bit senseless, lights on but no one home, though there is invariably some programming sleight of hand to keep the nerve endings stimulated. The second disc featuring remixes by electronica luminaries Alva Noto, Traject, B.Fleischmann, Funckarma, and Octex, is, for the most part, a more sprightly re-think of tracks from disc one, though predictably, somewhat lacking in internal cohesion. Overall, close but no cigar from this judge. In the case of the Peekay Tayloh (Pantelis Kakaroglou) album Centrifugal, we are told that “his material is inspired by urban routine, with neurotic peaks and sensational extensions.” One can only assume the last two mentioned entities refer to Tayloh’s hairstyling, for little else is extended here apart from the disc’s interminable duration. On his first album “Sofa O.D.,” he’d purveyed a few (un)savory slices of decomposed Beefcake, but did little to embellish it with any special seasoning. And, compounding the debut’s dull dancing in the dark, the majority of this disc deals in murky hauntological spaces and a grandstanding display of programmed percussion and breakbeat battery á la Amon Tobin, though stopping short of later mentalist updates of the last couple of years. One is reminded here that “plagiarism” comes from Greek etymology, as does “mimesis.” In general, as indicated, we're in territory already well covered by labels like Hymen and the softer end of Ad Noiseam, with names like Beefcake (yep, again, the main primary source from which Kakaroglou appropriates), Mothboy, Somatic Responses—that second or third division electro-manipulative IDM meets soundtrackism meets breakbeat-cum-softhardcore, with a dash of ambient soundwash (now with new added shoe-glaze). The presence of Darrell Fitton (aka Bola) in a mastering role may have served to inject some life, but alas little light, into this dispiriting collection. Of all these artists, however, Neon most fully and satisfyingly fleshes out its character, albeit one that draws recognizably on a number of others’ better known past performances. Suspended in the inbetweens twixt guitar-based ambient, post rock (drumless, mind you), and glitchtronica are Byron and Chris Setel, the twosome that is Neon. Au Theatre des Sons Imaginaires is their first venture into the recording light, with a sound evoking a fragile, occasionally squally, often befogged landscape which references the sound palette of (here goes) Tim Hecker, Fennesz, Eluvium, Manual (ah, the ubiquitous MBV connection), and possibly a European take on Labradfordian chamber pluckings. Their theatre of imaginary sounds tends to deploy minimal means through use of melancholic guitar figures, sometimes glitched into steelier shards, but always cleaving to a coherent sense of space and place, and capable, as on the compelling fuzzdrone mini-epic balladry of “Je T’oublierai Tous Les Jours,” of moments of exquisite resonance. Neon’s compositions are in fact the simplest and most uncluttered of this whole Poeta Negra collection, but they succeed in telling by far the most involving story. (AL) • www.poetanegra.com Back To Top MUSLIMGAUZE Speaker of Turkish (Soleilmoon) • Even after his 1999 death, interested music communities still wonder why middle-class Mancunian Bryn Jones grew to obsess as he did over longstanding Arab-Israeli conflicts, how he aligned himself so closely with the Middle East and Islam despite never visiting the former nor practicing the latter; if his politics helped or harmed his career and the social situations he addressed therein. Were we able to completely separate the man from his surroundings, the music from whatever his message was at the time, the hope is that Speaker of Turkish—a new collection of tracks first recorded in 1997—would serve as something of a starting point for newcomers to Jones’ world as Muslimgauze. His formula of abrasive, distorted percussion loops and eternal drones bordering on the intolerable may be diehard fans’ lifeblood, but Speaker of Turkish is the best proof yet that Muslimgauze can indeed be toned down so other sonic trademarks—especially wind and string instruments indigenous to the Arab world—are more easily accessed by the uninitiated. “Turkish Speaker,” for example, lays down a solid 16-minute ambient dub groove the way the Orb used to do in the early 1990s. The far more abstract “Bedouin Tablet” echoes that same outfit’s random access memory—latch on to a beat, let it go, come back and latch on again three minutes later. Speaker of Turkish even opens with “The Good Muslim,” quite possibly the closest we’ve ever heard Muslimgauze get to a pop song construct: four-plus minutes of loud-soft-loud dynamics echoing grunge rock (of all things), its primary sequence of vocal and street-scene samples repeated to mimic an actual verse with actual lyrics. (Much truer to form, the song is exploded for a 10-minute reprise later in the album.) And yet, and yet…Jones’ beliefs are his distinctive markings, his qualifiers, his inner strength and critical weakness. The spare rhythms of Muslimgauze’s second track here recall Bill Laswell’s Axiom period, its drama generated by the push of peaceful flutes, drums, and finger cymbals against the pull of usurping static, but its title—“Exit Afghanistan”—and its main sample seem to foreshadow Osama bin Laden’s escape route following the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks. “Shah of Persia,” meanwhile, turns the levels way down on a fractured string melody run backwards and forwards only to make it briefly (frighteningly) deafening on a whim. The only appropriate analogy: stray bullets in the night; the music of warfare, the music as warfare, the music we hate to love plays on. And so the Muslimgauze legacy continues; to what end remains to be seen. (AB) • www.soleilmoon.com Back To Top TOMAS PHILLIPS Intermission | Six Feuilles (12k) • For those who continue to extend the range of instruments—not simply mangle the sounds they make—Phillips’ Intermission | Six Feuilles stands as an object lesson in the richness of latency (that is to say the interval between stimulus and reaction). Open and cloud-chamber-like in structure, between the collisions that comprise the body of this work there occur pauses that in turn harbor such profoundly beautiful extensions of the sound just heard prior, in such seamless and natural-seeming ways, that it would be easy to assume Mr. Phillips had invented some device capable of allowing him to grab a sound still living in the air, reel it into his grasp and then slowly, deliberately extend that sound into one immediately new and still recognizable, still a piano, still related, still different and still. There are many examples of this level of waveform manipulation making the rounds these days, but few approach the utter purposeful naturalness of what happens here, their subtly and perfection yielding a pointed contrast and offering a focal point to the sometimes jagged procession of surrounding events and silences. By establishing this technique to offer a more active place of rest than those specific forebears, Intermission | Six Feuilles extends not only the range of instruments, but the reach of a well-defined, even well-worn aesthetic. This “more than an homage” to Morton Feldman and his own “Intermissions” displays many of the hallmarks of that work, and the work of John Cage as well. But more importantly, the techniques of manipulation and transformation bring the compositional techniques and overall aesthetic of those two men in contact with possibilities that remained unimaginable in the mid-20th century. Fortunately, Phillips maintains an excellent sense of proportion throughout, never yielding that which is affecting to that which can be little more than effects. (KL) • www.12k.com Back To Top STEVE ROACH Immersion One (Projekt) Immersion Two (Projekt) Kairos (Timeroom Visions) Proof Positive (Timeroom Editions) Storm Surge—Live At Nearfest (Nearfest) STEVE ROACH & LOREN NERELL Terraform (Soleilmoon) • Was 2006 yet another milestone year for Mr. Roach and his art? You betcha. Wrenched from twelve months of undoubtedly ceaseless activity, the high ambient priest of the Sonoran desert shows not the slightest hint of slowing down. Into his now 25th year of recording, this clutch of discs (and one DVD) demonstrates a body of work that seems to grow in richness and vitality release to release. It’s safe to say that this remarkable sextet is some of his best work to date—and that’s taking into account a formidable back catalog of roundly acknowledged classics, music whose striations continue to inform lesser lights who couldn’t carry Roach’s didjeridoo. The Immersion series of single-track works is now two volumes in (part three is due this year), and, if history can assume the visage of a kind and benevolent arbiter, many well-versed in Roach’s creations will hold these new chapters of blossoming, respiratory ambient right up there with Structures From Silence or Quiet Music (the contemporary digital mosaics of their digipak covers notwithstanding). There are marked differences in presentation, however, lest anyone think these new recordings are just S.f.S. redux. Immersion One, unlike its more earthbound predecessors, is quite simply the sound of galaxies expanding, the residue of noble gases stretched apart by extrasolar gravitational forces, sounds that seem to arise out of sources imperceptible to the naked eye. Over seventy-three minutes, ghostly entrails swirl around a central mass of howling mists and looped digital whistles, as the whole sonic enterprise, like incumbent supernovae, glows brightly, is pulled thinner into the vacuum, collapses and slowly renews itself once again, cycles played out in a perpetual celestial dance of birth and rebirth. The sounds on Immersion Two, more “brittle,” starker, less opulent, even symphonic in approach, reflect the settling down of the arching, exploratory realms that signified volume one. Here, on the track coined “Artifact Ghost,” fragmented noises, tiny gelatinous explosions of air, pepper the melaniforous drone; more ominous in nature than its’ cousin, the trip into this particular void is one accompanied by scuttling nocturnal organisms, their gesticulations the lone movements choreographed deep in the abyss. Like the perenially aging flavor of a fine wine, the best manner with which to absorb the intricacies of these two compelling recordings is total and patient submission. At first pass, both narratives unspooled so subtly that any “resolution” hardly appeared forthcoming, dronescapes that proffered little of value save for their literal existence. After (recommended) repeated listenings, the full impact of each, particularly the exquisite “melody” that lies at the heart of volume one, finally seduces. Which—they are titled Immersion, after all—is the very idea Roach is conveying. At practically a molecular level, the embracing of the newest soundtoys, coupled with an interest in alternative medias and his use of galvanic images in performance, is an integral component of his artistic make-up, so it was only a matter of time before Roach embossed the DVD format with his own unique stamp. Beautifully packaged in a cardboard DVD digipak, the cover a morphing panoply of oil-slick iridescent ringlets, Kairos proclaims itself a “visual odyssey” married to the Roach template. Comprising a DVD and CD (which corresponds to the visual cues), the participant can embark on a multi-sensory experience that has its cake and eats it too. The montage of video photography and computer-generated imagery, courtesy of visual artists Lynn Augstein, Steve Lazur, Steven Rooke, John Vega, and John Wadsworth, flows from the thunderclap that ushers us in through to a simmering desert expanse of parched earth, sprawling flora, wind-etched rock aggregate and burnished mountain before collapsing into the kaleidoscopic DNA strands of the cover art. Those lucky folk owning a home-theater system equipped with Dolby/THX, a surround-sound speaker array and widescreen plasma television would be well-advised to take advantage of the Kairos DVD’s aural and retina-melting photophobs (hallucinogenic mushrooms not included, but imbibe at your own peril). The majority of us will just drink deep of one of Roach’s most electrifying CDs in dog years. Making full use of a studio stocked better than NASA, Roach’s arsenal of recently acquired modular synths, software and well-massaged keyboard electrics is a resolutely dazzling display for the eardrums. Though individually titled and tracked, the eight pieces of Kairos segue into one grand morphogenetic field: “Core Regeneration” a sequencer maelstrom whipped up in a convulsion of electrical current; “Resonation Portal” revealing the dim beams of quasars ekeing out the void; “Etheric Planet” a morass of latticed strings under which bubble curlicues of synthetic goo; “Biogenesis” recapturing the flaming energies first sent spinning on Roach’s unbridled sequencer classic Empetus. Let the tweeter assault commence. “Biogenesis,” in fact, is but prelude for the ticking rhythmic sensurrealities erupting out of Proof Positive, and actually is part of the disc’s opening twenty-one minute-plus workout “Westwind.” Gawk first at the CD’s interlocking cyberdelic arteries splashed across the trifold digipak exterior (one of the best covers to ever feature on a Roach recording), and you’ll find not just a “sequel” in nature to the aforementioned Empetus, but the kind of synth/sequencer distillations the average Tangerine Dream clonemeister lusts after. The twin dramas of “Westwind” and the near half-hour long title track are ripe perambulations of man and machine, man (Roach) the conduit, the programming wizard deftly navigating a forest of dials, faders and ribbed knobs to make the machines wriggle, flutter, swagger and rock. But as mesmerizing as those sequencer superhighways are, it’s actually the shorter tracks positioned between their respective bookends that provide the disc with its molten core. “Living the Pulse” is a four-minute throbbing heartbeat of silvery beauty, easily besting anything Froese and Co. have concocted the last fifteen years, seguing uneasily into the probing depths of the faster “Essential Occurrence,” which rides aloft on crests of heavy-water as rippling tidal pools of notes arc menacingly through the undertow. This “middle passage” culminates in “Adreno Stream,” all cardiogram stress blips and seizing neurons that curdle the air around them to pulp. Gasp, shudder, tremble—repeat. Of course, as good as Roach is on anodized disc, live the guy fires on all cylinders, and few in the audience ever leave with anything less than sensory deprivation. Roach has documented shows on CD before, but Storm Surge, wrestled out in front of attendees of the 2006 Nearfest progressive rock gathering held in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, no doubt left permanent scars on sensibilities too long dulled by overexposure to Rush and Marillion wanna-bes. With his trusty didg in tow, accompanied by just a few keyboards (and a laptop controller), Roach breaks out some older chestnuts and reinterprets them into crackling new forms. The sound quality is uniformly superb, the enthusiasm of his perfomance palpable—winding his way amongst ambient labyrinths and tribal motifs he sets up an otherworldly seancé of crusty ancestral tapestries, riffing on both the fossilized remnants of shamans past and the eschetological worlds that remain unglimpsed and unknown. The very idea of Roach performing in front of crowds more attuned to J.R.R. Tolkein fantasias or bent-metal tritones seems incongruous at best, but the results are, nevertheless, stunning. Whether erecting a seemingly limitless scaffold of rhythmic textures (“Wings of Icarus”) or taking refuge in a fug of Lynchian proportions (“Void Passage—Portal”), Roach keeps both the active members of his audience (those present) and the remainder (those experiencing the event via its CD documentation) equally transfixed. On Terraform, in cahoots with fellow sonic archaeologist Loren Nerell, Roach jettisons bitmapped machine music for a wondrously alchemical foray into topographical incognita. Both artists not only demonstrate muses in alignment, they seem to intuitively expound upon, and allow to proliferate, vivid ecosystems of sound. Nerell, though not the most prolific of musicians (releasing just a handful of discs in two decades), is adept at capturing life in aural snapshot, noted most tellingly on his Lilin Dewa album and the life-in-montage found on Indonesian Soundscapes, artfully spliced together out of indigenous field recordings. It’s a sure bet Norell’s responsible for the more “corporeal” elements on Terraform, notably the cricketchurp underbelly buffering the opener “Cavity of Liquids”; however, the delineation of responsibility in such an expertly constructed album as this one is all but moot. Teeming Roachian soundworlds are steadfastedly in place, and both artists’ contributions make for a mysterious yet seamless whole, but of the many collaborations Roach has undertaken through the years this one seems the most considered—not a single sound or concept is ill-placed or haphazardly selected. The end result makes for heady listening: the trilling phrases, rubbed echoes and pre-dawn activities informing “Ecopoiesis” could well soundtrack an Aztec hoedown, while the twenty-eight minute morass of corrugated drones that is “Texture Wall” makes for nervous rappelling indeed. Curiously, there’s been some negative appraisals of Terraform in various ambient circles; amongst the flotsam of copyist redundancies and abject mimickry, it’s bewildering that such critical myopia bobs to the surface. Naysayers be damned—sitting comfortably on the drone throne, this one’s the real deal. (DB) • www.projekt.com / www.steveroach.com / www.soleilmoon.com Back To Top STEINBRÜCHEL Stage (Line) • Drone music seems both endlessly fascinating and oddly disposable. More attention seems to be given now to the way in which drones are originated than perhaps their outcomes. From the very early executions—Schulze’s Irrlicht, and sustain—to the recent open-sourced, open-ended software-driven snippets edited down to comprise Henke’s Layering Buddha, the modern day drone refuses to die. Displaying an affinity for evolution and for capturing the attention of diverse artists, all bent on impressing their own sense of complexity and detail onto the deeps and surfaces of the seemingly simple, it has demonstrated itself to be a highly resilient and justifiably shifting form. The ten drones here assembled are for an interactive performance/dance piece entitled Hybridome. How the dancers either interact with or trigger these sounds is unclear, but most of the drones exhibit a sometimes dour aura that generally favors stillness. Now steady state, now only sparsely active, now comparatively busy, these gleaming and nearly envelop-free bell-tones simultaneously exist as themselves, their altered states and their subsequent decays in a surround that maintains a fairly constrained frequency range. Their origins are well-masked and an impression is given of being inside a single, undulating sound rather than the more typical sense of mere sustain. This effect is especially convincing in those segments where some sense of the sonic envelope is revealed, perhaps due to the processed evocations of the occasionally present but nearly imperceptible contributions from piano and guitar. Whether a clipped strike on tines, the soft pluck of an enormously long string, or the impossibly stretched sines of mallets on metal, much of the sound is infected with the slow and post-modernist admission of glitch: transient blips in the suspension or severe slowing of time. Still, whatever the source, the pitched information remains fairly conservative, harmonically warm and reassuring with only the most occasional and modest shifting of tonal clusters. Stage lives out on the edges of an almost completely internalized perception where it becomes difficult and thereby all the more rewarding to discern the most languorous shifts in tone, in pitch, in frequency, in content, in time—all highly suitable to parameters in advancing the drone into yet another delineation of the steady state. (KL) • www.12k.com Back To Top VARIOUS ARTISTS Brittle Behaviour (Cactus Island) • Cactus Island is cultivated by Tim “Maps and Diagrams” Martin and Steve “Broca” Davis, caregivers to a nursery of prime melodic electronica. Their label plays host to music with a “winsome” way rather than “difficult” demeanor, though it’s capable of releases of some depth and grit, not least of which was Broca’s own installment (Minú) in their recent string of cute’n’collectible mini CDRs. This is their second full length compilation, the last, Friends We Met Along The Way, being nearly four years ago. Brittle Behaviour features a bunch of their front-line roster men, with new tracks from the likes of Digitonal (with their “Antares” hovering appealingly somewhere between Kraftwerk and Plaid), Maps and Diagrams, Weave, and Sabi, as well as late-coming fellas like Joel Tammik (taking up Vladislav Delay’s cast-off Entain/Multila mantle with some aplomb) and Bichi (letting the side down, alas, with a Morr-kish bit of falsetto-led indie-strum). There are other invitees, like the ubiquitous Isan, pioneers of a strain of primary-colors picture-book electronica that is generally well-represented here. This Island is one whose Cactus is largely of the spikeless kind, a naturalistic habitat to an assembly of machine-mediated keyboard chime-ringers, whose electronic campanology will charm the proverbial pants off those who have happily whistled along to Toytronic, Neo Ouija, and Expanding. There’s even a nod to neo-jazzbo funk-lite chill on opener “Colpo Rovente” by Quiroga, and more challenging (almost Raster-esque) timbral explorations from Slemper and Yvat. Otherwise you’ll know what you’re getting here: melodic, analog sweetness with a soft center and discreet crunchy beat-bits, unassuming but engaging well-mannered pop-tronica of the type that has gone rapidly below ground since its 2004 heyday, its profile slowly effaced by a previously shadowy axis of evil comprised of cine-forest-folk, indie-psyche-rock , and doom-drone-sludge; these latter are the new totems waved by fickle fad-istas (shout-downs to Boomkat) who now gesture patronisingly at this kind of “IDM” fare, as if, like nose-picking or bum-scratching, it were some slightly embarrassing habit they were uncomfortably reminded they had previously indulged. How soon they forget. This variety still provides substantial sweet sustenance, but by now its appeal seems to lie largely among a limited demographic of graphic designer, easy listening consumption. If that sounds derogatory, it’s not intended as such; more as dolefully descriptive. (AL) • www.cactusisland.net Back To Top |
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