|
|
 |
 |
|||
|
AUDIO VERITE / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 3 / March 2007
REVIEWED BY: THE ALPS Jewelt Galaxies/Spirit Shambles (Spekk) • Jewelt Galaxies evokes the calamity of Apollo and Dionysus, their balanced yet frenetic music rising like smoke over a burning battlefield. The tracks are culled from two CDR releases, yet the flowing interplay, virtuosity, speed of response, and tightly knit nature of the pieces suggests years of communication. The trio of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Alexis Georgopoulos and Scott Hewicker displays a command over a variety of instruments in largely open-ended settings—from wooden flute, to violin, clarinet, electric guitar and sleigh bells—weaving these disparate strands into works which, despite their calamitous nature, unfurl in continuous, slowly evolving layers of sound. The opening track crawls from a primordial swamp, slowly mushrooming out of the speakers into a swirling convection of gyrating shadow-pulses, alienated high notes and miscellaneous wood noises. Successive tracks further this cohesive kind of disjointed dynamism. “The River Lies With The Lillies,” for one, has a pensive, brisk pointillism brewing underneath its veneer of percolating tape hiss and slurred, guttural bursts of blowing and bowing. At the same time, although a heady tension and friction spills into the otherwise steady bloodstream of this album, the work nevertheless might have been tightened up a tad more in the editing process, as the odd false start or ill-defined opening movement mars the electricity which shortly ensues. For all that, the physicality and bewitching mysticism of later compositions is not to be overlooked. Indeed, on “Bird With The Crystal Plumage,” a husky flute and dithering violin perform a delirious dance around a dizzying rhythm to the din of crashing cymbals. On the other hand, “Autumn Rhythm” reduces time to a mere optical illusion, as puddles of wistful melody glisten underneath the sweet metallic ring of static and dying electronics. The album as a whole could certainly stand to see some cleaning up in places, but the group’s ability to conjure a seductive sense of otherness is most impressive. (MS) • www.spekk.net Back To Top ALVA NOTO Xerrox Volume 1 (Raster-Noton) • Those who saw Carsten Nicolai’s live performances of Xerrox in London will know what manner of minimal giant lies slumbering behind the by now de rigueur ascetic exterior of this latest Alva Noto recording. Those whose last encounter with Nicolai’s work was 2005’s Transall cycle, perhaps expecting another dose of the digi-musical equivalent of dry stone wall (de)construction, will be surprised to find the textural paradigm has shifted, and we have another sculpture from a different studio. Ja. What is this for a minimal sound experience? Highly detailed noise strata bled onto simple sonorous musical motifs (chimes, piano), in minimal application but massively present. Alva Noto now turns from glitch-worship to drone-devotional, and his hymnals fizz like a digitized monsoon with an audible charge and textural sweep like an electric air curtain being slowly drawn, as if a concert hall’s ambient largesse were compressed into a laptop or a laptop’s compacted micro opened out into a concert hall. Phew. So: reference points? Think Henke’s recent Layerings of Buddha machinery. Think Chain Reaction without pulse but with atmo jacked up. Think some of Kranky’s latter-day Mezzotint abstractions. Then factor in the Raster aesthetic and bingo: Xerrox Vol One. Of course, with Raster, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that Overarching Conceptual Swing, so what’s it all about? Well, Xerrox “explores themes of dissolution and atomization, the separation of matter into component parts”—pop, kids. You might not know it without the textual prompt, but once you do, it makes for an extremely suggestive program spin. It’s that old Xerox machine that copies graphic matter by the action of light on an electrically charged surface that’s the Muse behind this Werk. Keep that in mind as vision for sound. Then, the product of the Xerox machine “is born out of a point of process‚ in which the ground material undergoes a series of shifts‚ stretches‚ zooms and ratio adjustments.” So think of the compressions‚ expansions‚ and resolution shifts involved and then think of that procedure transposed to the mode of music. Xerrox offers a kind of symmetrical fusing of audio-visual and process-content. Concept aside, Herr Nicolai has here extended his sound sources and moved out of the internalities of his hard drive into the external world, from which he has appropriated for his lap-palette some more conventional than customary musical material. A strangely seductive cloak of kuhl-warm envelops the listener, and ending comes too soon. Do we hear a Volume Two? (AL) • www.raster-noton.de Back To Top BINAR Spindragons (Ricochet Dream) STEVE JOLLIFFE Poland (Ricochet Dream) SUNYA BEAT Comin’ Soon—The Jelenia Gora Sessions (Ricochet Dream) • How ironic that the legacy of Tangerine Dream has metamorphosed over the years to such a degree that the band’s very precept, its oblique strategies and sonic allure, itself is the stuff of legend, myth, genre, caché. In effect, the entity—its musical sobriquet—that is “Tangerine Dream” has transcended the magisterial output of the group and its literal self. Whole legions of fanatical worshippers, imitators, and ripoff artists have emerged since TD’s 70s heyday, spawning its very own cottage industry, the flag hoisted by dedicated concerns operating out of the Netherlands, England, Germany, and, via proprietor Vic Rek and his Ricochet Dream label, now out of the U.S. as well. Unlike his Euro cousins, who are content to disturb little of TD’s dependable m.o., Rek’s done hit the motherlode with his imprint, capturing the group’s pioneer spirit but using it to map differing terrain. Take Binar for example. According to the manifesto on their website, the duo of Andy Pickford and Paul Nagle are quite adamant in their disdain about being branded TD/Kraftwerk/krautrock clones. Their animus is understandable, but tough to entirely shrug off—Spindragons does dip its dorsal spines in similar wells, infatuated by, obsessed with and deeply in thrall to le sequencer. Which makes the fact that the album is so remarkably fresh and original that much more gratifying. Pickford and Nagle are seasoned vets of the British trad-electronic scene, yet they’ve reined in (for the most part) those bombastic B-movie prog tendencies that have tarnished folks like Mark Shreeve or John Dyson. No better evidence exists than in Spindragon’s witty, leftfield track titles: “Bride of Spankenstein,” “Ultrasound Dudes,” “Frog Orgy Afternoon” surely aren’t the hallmarks of burnouts unable to let go of their dog-eared copies of Rubycon or Stratosfear. Minor guffaws abound, yes, but the music itself is aurally sensate. Sequences are set up with customary vigor, over which gyrate shifting magnetic fields that energize the intertwining snakes of rhythmic pulse. The mosaic of patterns fluctuates in vivid contrails, fluctuating in speed and tempo, anchored by quite a decorous fabric of electronics and jumpy effects. A major criticism that dogs so many of the TD copyists is that in paying sycophantic homage to their heroes, they unimaginatively construct percussive regimens of the same ‘ol same ‘ol. Alive with original thoughts means Binar take chances, shaking up the status quo to illustrate they’re just as smitten by all things Teutonic as by all things post-techno (FSOL, Orbital, etc.). Running against the norm, working an elaborate style bereft of the usual time/space clichés, Spindragons’ electrifying mojo raises the hopes of pundits everywhere. Let those freak flags fly. Steve Jolliffe’s certainly gotten around since he contributed to TD’s distant 1977 opus Cyclone, building quite a hefty back catalog in his own right, not to mention attaining some nice working cred sharing recording space with the likes of Eat Static and half its coterie Merv Pepler (in the duo Hi-Fi Companions). Jolliffe’s career his been spotty at best; he’s often lazily assumed the hippy-cloak of new-agedom when he should instead be throwing caution to the wind. On Poland, recorded live at the Ricochet Gathering held there in 2004, Jolliffe at least gives his constructions the necessary time to take root and grow, accomplished via two tracks pushing past the twenty-minute mark. What possessed him to include samples of Edgar Froese’s 1967 guitar-psychout on “Spring ‘67” is anyone’s guess, it’s meshing into the markedly pleasant refrains of piano and flute incongruous at best. In fact, Jolliffe’s propensities tend towards those two instruments to some exclusion of the electronics; he’s seems to be having more fun portraying the Berlin School’s Pied Piper rather than its ideological headmaster. Actually, “Spring ‘67” does go through some nicely-wrought programmatical events, as Jolliffe enmeshes clockwork chimes like a field of dense thicket in between his classical grand, soft atmospheric washes and gelatinous squeals. But the artist’s true colors come to the fore on the shorter “Meadow Run,” thirteen minutes of which looks to give Vangelis a run for his money; nevertheless, lush string arias, faux-orchestral embellishments and tickled ivories do not a Brahms’ symphony make. The closing epic “Kormano” bids return Jolliffe’s nimble way with sprite and sequencer, its chorus of trilling synths competing with the light raindrop flow of piano, yet the track’s pixie-faced transcendental meditations are sanitized so brightly you might feel compelled to don shades. Jolliffe’s electronics exert just enough pull to steer the music away from its naggingly new-agey inertia, but the outcome might have proved more everlasting had he pushed the envelope beyond its flap and glue. Sunya Beat—comprised of Axel Manrico Heilhecker on guitar & loops, percussionist Harald Grosskopf, and keyboardist Steve Baltes—zap back into krautrock’s psychedelic history (Guru Guru, Can, Amon Düül), inject it with staunch modernity, and basically just tear the roof off the sucker. Don’t know any other electronic band who’d dare to rattle off Monty Norman’s James Bond theme over a tribalistic spunkfest of twitchy timbres and pingpong synthies (“Bond’s Off”), but Sunya Beat is up to the task, pulling off a multiple hat-trick with enough zest to out-perform ten times their comrades. Helihecker is equal parts Gottsching and Genrich, though he’s brave enough to trade fusiony licks with nascent metal at a moment’s notice, sometimes during the course of a single piece (“Lys Trois”). Keyboardist Baltes, who’s worked with Grosskopf singly on many occasions, adds some spicy effects to the culinary aural stew, his synths replicating birds in flight (“Sierra Nostra”), the curling of solar winds (“Skies Unlimited”), or the fauna of cybernetic rainforests (“Gamma Weg”). Grosskopf, meanwhile, keeps pace via a melange of fourth-world beats and various rhythmic exotica; he is the group’s lynchpin, both figuratively and literally, commanding a percussive arsenal that is as adept at maintaining a balletic poise as much as a full-frontal bombast, effortlessly weaving a polyrhythmic fabric of squawk and squelch from a well-whacked drumkit. Previous Sunya Beat discs have been wildly obstreperous, worldwind affairs, but recording Comin’ Soon in front of a robust audience surely got the trio’s ya-yas out. (DB) • www.ricochetdream.com Back To Top MIRA CALIX Eyes Set…Against the Sun (Warp) • As recording technologies have expanded, so have the conceit and capacity of the "double album" from, say, an hour across two slabs o’ wax to upwards of two-and-a-half hours on two compact discs. With these wide open spaces comes the attendant problem, rarely solved in the digital music age, of filling them with quality content. It has been suggested that many contemporary double LPs are really two good separate albums combined and resequenced into less than the sum of their parts, or the wheat of one excellent album nestled among a second album’s worth of chaff. South African-born Mira Calix seems to offer another option. She folds two LPs of material in on themselves, playing crash and clatter off against symphonics and organics to form her third album, the single 62-minute collection Eyes Set…Against the Sun. There’s a three-beat space in the title implying separate parts that could make a whole, given the chance. Album opener "Because to Why" is an example of this, the pivot point of this folded plane. A musical theme appears in fractured and futile strings, is repeated in a children’s choir and Calix’ treated vocals ("Whenever it rains I hear your voice"), and is then matched to the intensities of field recordings of both light rain and downpour. This quiet cyclical overlapping intrigues more than most anything else on the album, even if it is just a successful sonic experiment instead of experimental song. "The Stockholm Syndrome" follows with the album’s lone consistent rhythm track, a formidable backdrop of laser-beam squelch, ghostly machinery, and detuned concertina. This diptych of songs gives listeners the hope that Calix’ main ingredients—her electronics, her atmospherics—could each stand on their own. Yet these layers have no real adhesive to consistently keep them together; no one musical "side" has velcro eyes onto which opposing hooks might latch. Both "The Way You Are When" and "Belonging" feel like forced three-part suites, the former unsure whether it wants to evoke a haunted field or a dying spaceship, the latter stuck in a rut as warped carnival music. Booming percussive waves also ruin the chilly jazz of "Eelio" and "Tilsammans." Atmospherics dominate just one other song, "One Line Behind," and what could be a fine orchestral drone must not only support Calix’ strained vocals but the fuzzy sample washes of which she is so fond. That kind of buzzing defines Eyes Set…Against the Sun; it’s brittle and unstable, one set of sounds uncomfortably bumping into rather than wholly integrating with the other. (AB) • www.warprecords.com Back To Top JEFRE CANTU-LEDESMA The Garden Of Forking Paths (Spekk) • Quite opposed to his work in The Alps, this solo set of pieces from Jefre-Cantu Ledesma establishes a rigorous focus on moment and a highly refined compositional awareness. Ledesma erects a vast field where complimentary colors from singing bowls, harmonium, and gongs are hemmed by rumbling electric guitar and the vapor of electronics. For most pieces, Ledesma dwells on a certain phrase from the dry, lysergic echoes of his guitar, repeating it incessantly, on each occasion exploring, augmenting and altering a particular nuance or color. For all its contemplative elements, then, a great deal is nevertheless happening within these yawning drone-works. A composition such as “Phases Of The Moon” seems to occur within a three-dimensional space—its pitches hang suspended, traversed by a dense sonic fog whose curling body reflects a broad spectrum of tones from resonating gongs and pealing bells. Owing to a deft sense of timing and restraint, meanwhile, “Our Way Was Lit By Moonlight” follows in the wake of the dovetailing passages of upper-register frequencies and granular detail of the preceding track, channeling its energy into a sublime meditative hum. At times, the piece sounds nearly nonexistent, as though straddling the line between consciousness and unconsciousness, yet with each beating of each wings, a profound sense of fragility and impermanence is conveyed. The rest of the album may be seen as giving this basic shape new layers, accents and shades. “Feast Of The Pentecost” and earlier compositions such as “Birds Of Paradise” affords these themes a stronger bite, as astringent drones, far from summoning wispy ghosts, betoken a cascading tension, which is segregated and consumed by mangled strings and blistering overtones. While the album brims with such knotty assemblages of sound, it closes with a straightforward, singular statement. A piquant acoustic guitar melody revives a sense of the everyday, and leaves one startled, much as a mystic upon rediscovering a body which has forgotten itself. (MS) • www.spekk.net Back To Top DEEWORK Under Dev (In Vitro) FAZ-L 1.0 (In Vitro) SUBJEX Supersonic Mezze (In Vitro) • In Vitro is a fledgling label harboring various flavors of gnarly beat-oriented sound design, spanning trip hop to breakcore to decon/recon electronica. Based in Lille, France, it comes on a bit like a Gallic Schematic or Planet Mu, though having said that, these representatives could be Siberian for all they manifest of any local hue. Take Deework, for example, whose Under Dev- is the longest-in-the-tooth of these releases. He’s clearly in thrall to the compositional charms of the more adventurous end of mid-to-late period Warp, say, Prefuse 73 through to Chris Clark. The album has a deconstructed hip hop-oriented sound, downtempo but spliced full of vocal cut-ups (bonjour, Machine Drum) and occasional more abrasive sonorities which seem to recall the likes of Frenchy distorto-kin Dat Politics and dDamage. Though Under Dev-’s sonic multiplicity delivers an impression of fullness, its diffuseness and scatter-gun tactics eventually detract somewhat from full effect. The fragments pile up leaving little breathing space, and the listener unaccustomed to this hyper-wired event-heavy style might feel somewhat stifled at times. Faz-l, on the other hand, is a cooler dude, in mood, that is, not in zeitgeist-surf quotient, for which he is roughly 10 years too late. An evident admirer of the Bristol trip-hop elders (especially Mezzanine-period Massive Attack) and infected with something of an Illbient virus, Faz-l aligns himself with the bricoleurs of deconstructed sound among whom are notably numbered Tob-n, Aph-x, and Krus-h. So this release will no doubt beguile those suffering from a deficiency of darkside-wallowing abstract trip-hop and breakcore-lite, but, frankly, not a great deal of Faz-l’s rent will be paid hereby. Yes, based on research into those primary sources, he pulls out a slew of samples and sub-orchestrations, endowing his compositions with a fabricated technoid edge, notably marked by a somber tenor, flecked with melancholia and unease at the edges and in the inbetween. It might even hold some appeal to uncomfier Ninja Tuners or a darker shade of Merckist (maybe those with Hymen intact), but despite these remote chilly appeals, overall the murky alienated contours of 1.0 are hard to warm to. Subjex may be a youngster, but he’s something of a veteran in this company, having already released a single on Planet Mu. Supersonic Mezze is a mini-album presenting in four episodes a version of a gospel of delirious dementia handed down by Mike Paradinas and his mates. It’s a field full of audio-mines going off disjunctively, sometime redolent of that whole Jason Forrest, Otto Von Schirach and Jake Mandell school of fuck-off sonics, where hardcore electro vies with skewed breakbeat mentalisms, acidic dub and a headbang 8-bit battery. Far from the sick downbeat of his labelmates, he proposes an affair of ludic freeplay and almost festive release. “Electrofunkytechnodrill’n’bass,” his website proposes, and there seems no compelling reason to naysay. So, yes, In Vitro deliver grubby goods with some appeal. Their maxed-out and maladjusted attitude skulks knowingly at the ill and bad-mannered end of IDM that refuses to be blithely appeasing yet still checks itself out in the mirror to see how elegantly trashed it appears. (AL) • www.invitrorecords.com Back To Top dreamSTATE Passage (E-space) VARIOUS ARTISTS Ping Ambience 3—String Things (The Ambient Ping) • Toronto’s long unsung underground ambient collective, The Ambient Ping has for some time singlehandedly championed the ambient/electronic contingent of artists indigenous and foreign alike. Their regular live events are fast becoming the pinnacle for such musics in North America (no such analogue remotely exists in the U.S., shamefully); nicely enough, for those of us who can’t make the trip in any kind of feasible sense, T.A.M.’s got a nifty in-house label (and mailorder service, coined Ping Things) to remedy such matters. Though not directly on T.A.M.’s imprint, Scott M2 and Jamie Todd, aka dreamSTATE, idiomatically serve as something like house organ for the label. Their music acts as conduit linking the interspatial sinks of Steve Roach and Robert Rich to their numerous contemporaries along the ambient axis, their sound a breezy, sumptuous wash of stratospheric incline and glacial drift. Passage at core is inspired by a series of poems telling the story of an 1840s pioneer woman who endures numerous physical and mental travails on her trek from Ireland to Ontario’s District of Huron. dreamSTATE’s music, highly impressionistic, doesn’t attempt to make real the literary metaphors upon which they base this recording, but instead opt for “tone poems” reflecting/refracting distance, longing, tribulation. The results mirror unease (caterwauling “voices” merging into a blanket of erupptive synths on “Captive”) with that of earthen discovery (check the piping elves and dark electronic caverns they inhabit on “Gyre”) to yield some fairly potent offspring. Often in direct contradiction to the accepted wisdom of what “ambient” represents, Passage doesn’t proffer the elegaic light at the end of the tunnel, but instead conjures primal fears, the closing in of night and what may well teem in the blackness. Patently well-done, particularly in the origination of sound structures that are intentionally minimal when necessary, the drones indeed becoming imagistic phenomena, Passage’s sound fairly congeals the oxygen around you into shadows and fog. Perhaps the emphatic spelling of dreamSTATE belies an understood mantra: this ain’t no chill room, this ain’t no foolin’ around. dreamSTATE also figure on the latest in the occasional series, the third go-’round of Ping Ambience, hitting the Canadian zeitgeist right in the solar plexus (with more than a little help from a cadre of American colleagues). Subtitled String Things, this edition goes some way to properly orienting the cadences of the trusty guitar in the broad expanse of post-Eno “new ambient.” The model itself, ripe for experimentation and re-think, all too often winds up in a cul-de-sac of bad manners riddled by cliché (although such crippling blows to the genre are as easily struck using pre-fab software); yet, as something of a “definitive” statement of intent (or as close to definitive as such a recording might become), Ping Ambience 3 stands head-and-shoulders above the competition. Many of the participants contained herein—Phil Ogison, Michael Diamond, Mark Mahoney, Aidan Baker, Sylken—hardly embody the phrase “guitar god” (and they’re not aspiring to), but what sets them apart from others of their persuasion is that, dammit, these blokes can play. Whether it’s a unique turn of phrase, a molten hot chord spun adrift into the distance or the sting of a nylon thread bent toward infinity, the works present bespeak high craft. dreamSTATE’s “Clearing” has as its antecedent nothing less than the Roach/Shrieve classic “The Leaving Time,” its strident riffs a hearty follow-up, addenda to the parent work realized from the siren-sounds of birds and guitar marshalled together in an triumphant whole. Diatonis works in dribbles of incandescent silver on the beguiling “Currents,” while Paul E. Royes, whose salutation connotes him Cyberguitarist, explores a warbly subatomic space where his guitar gels, bubbles and curdles rather than gently weeping on “The Universe Within” (something that is more attributable to Matt Borghi’s solemn “Sailing Into Calm Remembrance”). Quite choice right across the board, this bevy of String Things makes you believe in the guitar’s recuperative powers all over again, shucked of ego, immersed in contexts emotive and ameliorating. Ambience for “the masses” doesn’t come much more amassed than this. (DB) • www.dreamstate.to / www.theambientping.com Back To Top FALCONE & PALMER Gothic Ships (Noh Poetry) • Except to a very few, Don Falcone and Stephen Palmer aren’t exactly household names in the gentrified electronic neighborhood…and why in hell not? Falcone’s been milling about under a variety of guises since the post-techno days of the chill-out room, making some tentative, low-key gestures first under the auspices of Kim Cascone’s former ambient brand Silent, trading as half of Spice Barons, then later under the cheesier nom de disque Spaceship Eyes. Palmer’s persona has achieved higher visibility sloughing it out under his usual Mooch alias, a moniker that’s emitted five slabs of primo British synth-dub-prog gooeyness on an irregular basis throughout the 90s, all hopelessly obscure, all jim-dandy records that should be hugged tightly to chest lest they vanish. Gothic Ships is of a similar stripe to its predecessors, except in this case the parts are often greater than the sum, which itself is nothing to sneeze at. One uses “atmosphere” a lot in the average musique critique, but Falcone and Palmer paint their surroundings in big bold super-expansive swatches that reek so strongly of far-flung alien utopias the average olfactory sense needs the frontal lobes of Jeff Morrow’s Metaluna scientist from This Island Earth to process it fully. No wonder Mooch’s alter-ego’s penned works of science fiction in his spare time; such sounds are integral to the phantasmic minutiae populating their Aldebaran studio, subsequently transferred to disc. A splendid time is guaranteed for all present. Gesticulating Moogs, rocket booster synth surges, robot-army percussion marches, shimmering acid rains whipped by tornadic electronics, all makes book there’ll be many tooling up Gothic Ships quicker than Palmer and Falcone’s other cold-cranked hallucination engines. (DB) • www.nohpoetryrecords.com Back To Top EZEKIEL HONIG Scattered Practices (Microcosm) • Ezekiel Honig’s work is a strange combination of sedative and stimulant, all lulling low-impact loops and self-effacing homespun beats, along with a constant ears-pricked soundtracking of everyday periphera. The sound suggests he has a mission to enact a proper post-millenial form of ambient techno, one truer to a more literal-minded adherence to the philosophical principles of ambient—the ambi-valence of ambient as both that-insertable-into-environment and that-enfolding-environment-into-it. On Scattered Practices he finds a suggestive conceptual eye in de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life” to hook his music on to. The book looks at how individuals transform and thereby personalize elements of mass culture—rituals, functional objects, language, street plans, etc. Honig’s work might be seen as operating in an analogous way: he populates his pieces with found sounds harvested from everyday life, but manipulates them so that their generic character is altered in the act of recontextualization within musical settings. His compositions achieve a kind of small-scale transcendence through drawing on this transformative element. Most are lightly pulsing soundscapes—sparse and subtly glitch-flecked—in a vein that reminds of a less groovy, more lo-fi electroacoustic, version of Jan Jelinek’s Farben. Honig’s is a house that gets to be deep through staying shallow, sound-wise. His debut, 2004’s People Places & Things, scratched around similar surface localities, but Scattered Practices essays a deeper connection with the intimate. It works particularly well on tracks like the nine-minute centerpiece “Homemade Debris,” on which muffled Rhodes motifs seep through delicate layers of digital filtering with shuffling pointilist micro-rhythms an almost subliminal presence. Ultimately, it’s a sound that, despite its four-on-the-floor microhouse beat traces, has detached itself completely from the dancefloor and, rhythms reduced to the virtually gestural, retreated into the head. (AL) • www.microcosm-music.com Back To Top JAZZKAMMER Panic (Bottrop-boy) • Jazzkammer, the Norwegian duo of John Hegre and Lasse Marhaug, make noise. A pithy statement to be sure, and simplistically inaccurate, although it’s a widely-held belief in many circles. Merzbow makes noise, too, but many regard his obese career on a level of something approaching deification, an idea as overblown as it is ridiculous. Hegre and Marhaug are world-class noiseniks, but unlike the Michael Myers character in Halloween, they’re not content with just bludgeoning you over the head repeatedly until all movement ceases. Better yet, one would be hard-pressed to resort to such a pat categorization as “noise” when describing Jazzkammer’s work: pick a word starting with “n” and a more informed choice would be “nuance.” It’s certainly a more site-specific word when describing the single 35-minute track that is the bedrock of Panic, a record that harvests noisy elements in a manner more deliberate and considered than the average underground nightcrawler might utilize. And the word “panic” aside, most of the record is —surprise—quiet. A paean to a much-beloved instrument of theirs—the electric guitar—Hegre and Marhaug trip you up right from the very first opening bars. Subtly panned guitar skronk, unfolding much like a turtle rising out of its shell into the humid dawn, amps up in relative fits and starts, buffetted by weirdly aromatic electronic winds. Shortly thereafter, up until roughly seventeen minutes in, gentle wisps of static and white noise echo amongst empty skies, the only other sound a lone chord processed, bowed, split into elongated shards of reverb, flanging, lightly screeching, into the pallid darkness. It’s a ruminative hush before the storm, before the revitalized skronk opens up into the very maw of aural cacophony. Jazzkammer don’t rest on their laurels, however, not by any measure: carefully sculpted, textured sounds inform the crackling environments so discriminately rendered. Maybe the non-cognoscenti deign this “noise” because of its lack of pronounced form? Let them run for their lives—the rest of us will Panic not, because we know that in this case, Jazzkammer, heaviousity acknowledged, know full well which “n” word they prefer. (DB) • www.bottrop-boy.com Back To Top KING NEVER Lullabies & Sleepless Nights: Ambient Guitar Noise Volume Two (Marathon) • One man, a guitar, and a signal processor. Judging by what’s on display here, Matt McCabe is an ardent disciple of the Frippertronics school, a self-made string-stylist whose compact instrument rack belies a measure of cool guitar craft that is, surprisingly enough, little seen in this optimizing age of the laptop. Lullabies & Sleepless Nights repudiates the software varnishing of chaps such as Fennesz or Orem Ambarchi, guitarists who prefer their axes bleed into amorphous drones that actively sap the essence of their origins. Shifting motifs and moods often within the same piece, exercising a measure of compositional restraint even when he strikes out with playfully anarchic phrases, McCabe is more fearless than his colleagues, judiciously experimenting with tonal color but unafraid to let his guitar be guitar. His mimesis is somewhat obvious—Fripp & Eno, Andy Summers’ first album on Private Music—yet Lullabies’ influences hardly diminish its resultant brio. “First Light” is one of the charmers, a distant cousin to F&E’s “Evening Star,” McCabe draping a loop of fading luminescence behind a moaning chord bending to and fro in the breeze of twilight. “Beautifully Broken” and “The Quiet Hour” use ascending/descending electronic figures that make for some sad but lovely time passages, elegant preludes so inviting that the stunted bulldozer lurches of “Interrupted” seem uncharacteristically jarring but are well in form within the music’s context. It is at this point that McCabe splits the disc in two: hereafter, he repeats the odd cacophonic bleat (“The End of Never,” “Almost Asleep”) amidst loopscapes that soar between contemplation (“Chaos of Day Fades to Night) and geographic isolation (“Night of a Thousand Worries”). Small discography notwithstanding, McCabe’s minimalist glossalalia impresses enough to nearly eclipse that of his spiritual forebears. (DB) • www.kingnever.com Back To Top MILLER + FLAM Modern Romance (Expanding) MODERN INSTITUTE Excellent Swimmer (Expanding) OBLONG Indicator (Expanding) ORLA WREN Butterfly Wings Make (Expanding) VARIOUS The Condition of Muzak 2 (Expanding) • Staying true to its name, one of the classiest electronica labels in the U.K. broadens things considerably across the span of these five releases. Credit labelheads Ben Edwards (aka Benge and one-third of Oblong) and Paul Merritt (who operates as half of Stendec with compadre Edwards) for maintaining a unified identity, one that is true to form both musically and visually—each digipak hosts the label’s recognizable lowercase brand stamped across still-lifes that broach the remit between organic purity and post-modern architectural symbolism. All four of these discs share one thing in common: disregarding the sharper contours of machine-made waveforms to embrace the acoustic, the hands-on, neé the human. Miller + Flam work this maxim to the hilt; Modern Romance conjures up the afterhours milieu of emptying downtown jazz haunts, the smells of a city deep in its nocturnal reverie, “chillout” shorn of that term’s attendant banality. “Edge of Midnight,” “Complex Kisses,” “Slowing to a Stop”—these are track titles conjuring lambent flame rather than machine age voodoo. By no means the most original concept to come down the pike—Jan Jelinek, Mas, Triosk, and David Moufang have been and continue to ply similar trades—and the overt serenity that buttresses the disc’s “grooves” sags over the course of its running time, but it would take those very old at heart to turn a deaf ear to such sublime arrangements and delicately-nuanced constructions. Miller + Flam certainly do little to hide their influences: with its rubbery stripes of bass, purple-pastel guitar pickings, woeful accordions, and staggering backbeats, a track named “Martino’s” strenuously bids the spirit of Pat M. return to this mortal coil. Bluntly put, the genuflecting of Modern Romance, despite its’ indiscrete underpinning of caressed software, in effect negates the electronica in this particular chamber-jazz matrix; the conductors that Miller + Flam look to channel are far from semi, the moods they establish sultry, wistful, but when the end result works as well as this, to hell with the devil in the details. The opening track on Modern Institute’s Excellent Swimmer is called “ECM Haircuts.” Italians Teho Teardo (guitar, Rhodes, synth, programming) and Martina Bertoni (cello) don’t exactly give the impression they’ve OD’ed on David Darling records, or that their record collections consist solely of Manfred Eicher productions, but the atmosphere is nevertheless thick as pea soup; would it surprise you to know the rest of the disc follows suit? The duo work hard to ensure Bertoni’s cello keeps intact all its rich, mellifluous sonorities, and although its piquant voice is ultimately subsumed in the textural melee, the very fact it has to jostle for position amongst the pernicious electronics makes for some nourishing results. As adept a programmer as he is an arranger, Teardo manages to curl some fertile, elastic sweeps out of his dusty Rhodes, and the odd Mellotron-esque fogbanks that embellish many of the short tracks resurrects all sorts of experimento-prog mindsets from the dark corners of the 70s. Parsing the big-sky Norwegian climes of “International Rustic,” where Bertoni’s cello assumes the role of tugger-on-heartstrings to Teardo’s pitter-patter, onward towards the creaking baroque flubdub of “Two Hours Without Ego,” were the scales indeed balanced, Modern Institute would soon be soundtracking the next great modern dance, slo-mo, po-mo or otherwise. Both of the above are but prelude to Oblong, who might well be Expanding’s first electronic chamber ensemble, and, on Indicator, hope to bridge the divide between orchestra pit and tabletop boss. Not sure if it’s an entirely successful undertaking. Ben Edwards is the guiding light behind this new project, although interestingly enough it appears his contributions act more as flourishes, or, at best, infrastructure, to his two other mates’ contributions (on various guitars, bass, field recordings, etc.). Much of Indicator is flawlessly executed, attractive enough, and, on a track called “A303,” the trio mix the formula just right: the softly buzzing percussions, weepy synths, strolling guitars and odd filips convene into a benevolent, mournful broth. Therein lies the problem. It’s becoming cause for concern, this seeming desire (maybe even need) to “break away” from the inherent artificiality of electronic music’s nature by introducing (heaven forbid) the “indie shtick”, e.g., the folksy thrum of guitars and sundry other acoustic instrumentation. Is the reasoning a feigning of purity of essence, of wanting to pollute the precious bodily fluids of electronica so we all understand there are indeed humans behind the controls? Perhaps current societal modes of behavior are mandating such approaches, and their adoption isn’t something necessarily wrong-headed, but it feels like an approach dictated by demographic rather than artistic impulses. In other words, is a record like Indicator marginalized by such a maxim? Is it a recording that is calloused, diminished, compromised? Tough to find fault here in an polished, unabashedly lovely recording that seeks to define a 21st-century electronic “roots” music, mostly because Edwards’ careful hand steers the disc around any obvious sentimental trapdoors, but there remains a nagging sense of folk-for-folk’s sake, of a misplaced melancholy, of trying too hard to make due with a currently in-vogue style, that broaches disingenuousness in an otherwise laudable concept. Let’s not get too oblivious to the space between our ears. Orla Wren is actually one Tui, a nomad travelling the British isles who spends his free time selling photos from his van, and, yes, producing music in his other off-hours. Butterfly Wings Make is a frankly beautiful piece of work, the yin to Minamo’s yang, realizing singular aural haikus devised (like the above-noted releases) during the intercourse between organic and electric instrumentation. Thankfully, the alliance here is anything but unnatural—stitched from the innate carpet fibres of who knows how many software programs, Orla Wren tends to wrap his Budd-ing piano clusters and intertwining acoustic guitars in a sheen of prototypical laptop gauze that ushers in herds of timid fauna cautiously poking around decaying, brittle, synthetic landscape. “Between the Rain and My Skin” somehow manages to encapsulate Orla Wren’s working methods in a scant near-four minutes, tiptoeing piano notes around the cooing of just a few baby synthesizers, their bleats the primal screams issued deep from their newborn throats. The diaphonous yet astringent electronic larvae that become “Moth” take this a step further, bursting from their sonic cocoons in a shower of incandescent sparks, their emergence settling into a veritable forest of rhythmic moiré. Music from the spheres, redefined—ODM, organic “dance” music, if you’ll excuse the clumsy oxymoron. Shame on those who ignored Expanding’s last round of 7-inchers, nine candy-colored singles pressed on heavy duty vinyl and encased in pvc-type sleeves. Hosting names both recognized (Benge, Bauri, Maps + Diagrams) and up-and-coming (Monoceros, Myrakaru, Flotel, Praveen and others), the series was limited to 400 copies per title, and have already made the rounds of auction sites the world over. Fortunately for those who missed them, The Condition of Muzak 2 reigns in the cream of the series’ crop on CD, and mixes so many disparate tastes and motifs that its appeal splits the difference between die-hard trainspotters and curious investigators. Choosing standouts amongst the thirteen tracks is a fool’s gesture, but notables truly sparkle: the heavenly choirs of beats and glowsticks that inform Benge’s “Bambie”; Praveen’s “Circle Song” making a longform symphony out of pinprick stings that pop like axel grease on a hot sidewalk; Holkham’s “Samphire,” which revisits some old Cabaret Voltaire synthevil, coarse, squeaking electronics lost in moist thickets of click-pop. Each collected piece superbly passes genre muster, however, the AM/PM remix of the entire series, “The Ends,” created solely from run-out groove sounds and myriad detritus ripped from the bandwidth of the entire vinyl series, is worth the price of admission alone: six minutes of sublime, lobe-engaging sampledelica, a rosetta stone for up-and-comers who mistakenly think they have a grasp of the IDM obvious, and a standard against which most practitioners of the form should be duly measured. (DB) • www.expandingrecords.com Back To Top NINE HORSES Money For All (Samadhisound) • Nine Horses’ (David Sylvian, Burnt Friedman and Steve Jansen) previous Snow Borne Sorrow toyed with the makeup of individual and group musical creativity, skewing, rearranging and disjointing the usual relationships between the two. The sprightly solo trajectories of Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen and Swedish vocalist Stina Nordenstam were stitched together at the mixing boards and assumed an array of positions within a shifting mosaic of canny textures, spry locomotive rhythms, vocal yarps and smoky late-night jazz wanderings. This effort re-imagines three tracks from that album, and sets them alongside two new pieces and a bonus track, “Birds Sing For Their Lives,” which was previously only released in Japan. The two new works stir up predominantly melodic, groove-based arrangements, which are encrusted with spindly keyboards, swanky guitar lurches and Sylvian’s bold vocal harmonies building to a sunburst finish. Throughout, Sylvian bemoans the comedy of power, the microprocessing of desire, and the enervation of social relations in general, matters which might potentially stand out like a sore thumb but manage to settle quite well into and, indeed, feed off of the heated exchanges of snaking guitar patterns and shuddering electronic dissonances. “Get The Hell Out,” the second new piece on display here, is another swirling convection of bulbous beats, squelchy synths and edgy, antagonistic trumpet passages. The composition is kept from lapsing into garish terrain, largely owing to deft transitions which enable the trio to move convincingly from epic crescendos to luminous moments of contemplation. On the remixes by Burnt Freidman, the emphatic leitmotifs and muscular jazz meanderings are sedated so as to allow him to expose and explore certain elements in a more patient, exhaustive fashion. A swaggering energy still remains, yet it’ s now diffused over the entirety of a track, as opposed to appearing and disappearing in pockets. As a result, certain compositions such as “The Banality Of Evil” slowly bleed a pensive, nervous energy, while for others, especially “Wonderful World” at seven minutes, the distance to cover is too great, and numerous dry spots pockmark the work. This effort therefore utilizes an eclectic set so as to criticize and comment on the confusion and slackening of an epoch which itself rests on the premise “anything goes”—and in this way, the album acts as a mirror, reflecting the system’s logic while never absorbing it. (MS) • www.samadhisound.com Back To Top PUB Legless (Ampoule) • Do You Ever Regret Pantomime was one of the last 15 years’ high watermark releases of beat-tinged electronic listening music, with its heady blend of Bola meets Basic Channel on a chill pill. The following single took a deeper dive into more experimental extended ambient dub, enabling the fogbound reiterative enquiries of Gas/Yagya further below water, with hypnotic results. Legless’s consignment of mostly extended post-ambient dub soundscapes follows fairly closely on the heels of the somewhat dissipated and fragmentary Liltmor, and unfortunately seems to fiddle about with some of the same sonic vagaries, providing further testimony to the impression that Pub’s best years are behind him. This is reinforced by the fact that the stand-outs—the first two tracks, in fact—turn out to be from early 12”s (“Lick” and “Film sdmix” date back to 1999 and 2001 respectively). After track three, “Surgery”, which still manages to engage albeit with a murkier and melodically depleted ooze sloshing around way back behind some fairly rudimentary neo-house beat gestures, things sort of fall apart; the center of the album somehow seems to go AWOL. Several tracks start off with some form of intent only to meander into experimental obscurantism and liminal dead-ends. Track titles reinforce a growing air of gloom (not that Pub was ever about blithely sunny dispositions), going from “Headless” to “Screw” to “Blackout” and finally becoming “Shattered.” In short, it seems that Pub has lost interest in creating crowd-pleasing bliss-outs such as Summer, preferring to haunt more abstruse backwaters. The unversed seeking entry-level Pub are directed towards Pantomime or Summer, while those who fancy something more challenging should run, not walk, towards the prior single. Those already inducted won’t be missing much in soberly resisting Legless-ness. (AL) • www.ampoulerecords.com Back To Top RF Views of Distant Towns (Plop) • Something’s been happening to our nice oblique electronica community lately. It’s been invaded by aliens. Guitars and violins and, uh oh, trumpets, and, worse still, vocals, are getting everywhere, pods opening, Village of the Damned-style, to discharge a baleful spawn of Proper Instrumentation and Overt Emotionalism. You thought you’d found a refuge here from the usual suspect signifiers of pop and rock and (gulp) folk? Nowhere is safe anymore. Look what’s happened to Type, to 12k, threatens n5MD, and now infects Tokyo’s Plop imprint. This little Japanese backwater label had been quietly releasing quality electronica for a number of years, ranging from dub-inflected minimalism to more organic guitar-mediated sketches and on to cutesier toytown strains more in keeping with the label’s Japanese operations base. Now RF and his gang—string-slingers, brass-botherers, and refrain-wranglers—have come to poop the abstract party. So who is RF and what is his mission? It’s San Francisco-based Ryan Francesconi, and his new album Views of Distant Towns seems all very full of itself and its worthiness. The list of contributing musicians is lengthy and the credits state that the album was inspired by Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, so, with these twin totems of meaning and musicianship, there are heavy-duty signals that we’re in the presence of something weighty. However, while Views of Distant Towns plays host to some well-turned passages of playing, on the whole what’s played amounts to pretty flat and flimsy fare, a kind of base of neat’n’tidy boutique post-rock extemporizing, with some token sunny-side-up electronica filling, topped off with pretty plucks and bounteous bows, and a sickly icing of irksome computer-assisted “experimental” pop warble (courtesy of one Sonja Drakulich and RF himself). Yes, RF has musical merit, of course. He juxtaposes cello, classical guitar and other real instruments, as well as infusing all with meticulous small-scale electronics, and lacing it with the odd field recording made in Japan. There are pretty stringy-things and bold brass parps. Passing points of reference would be the designer doodle of Swedes Tape (tidy organix plus studiedly chirping electronix), the guitar tropes of Fenton’s Pup, and the tinkle-tweeness of Piana. But, truth be told, the whole is imbued with nothing so much as tasteful anonymity, drifting in some peculiar no-man’s-land, too “busy” for peripheral ambience, yet too pacific and pussyfooting to give sustenance to those who would give full attention. These Views of Distant Towns are blighted by the ear-sore of stodgy over-arrangement and the parlor plonk pleasantries of just-so instrumentation. At an hour in length, the snooze button comes heavily recommended. (AL) • www.inpartmaint.com/plop Back To Top MARK TEMPLETON Standing On A Hummingbird (Anticipate) • With his debut full-length Standing On A Hummingbird, Alberta-based musician Mark Templeton provides further evidence to the fact that simply strophic songs can not only inhabit but also flower within heavily processed electroacoustic environments. Templeton’s compositions unfurl like a blizzard seen in slow-motion while perched behind a window caked with ice and flecks of snow. Pieces oscillate between a rich bustle and pale pastel expanses—places where stark dynamics and contrasting levels convey a lightness of touch and a sense of real possibility. Underneath such shivering electronics, sonorous acoustic guitar plucking and warm harmonium hum sound like distant, half-forgotten memories. In keeping with the understated approach of the album, Templeton’s guitar playing—whose rich nature may be likened to that of Christian Fennesz—rarely ever breaks through the crust of churning ambience and spiraling surface noise. More often than not, a dissection is performed on the instrument, extracting particular timbres and processing and looping them into a complex polyphony of sustained string resonance. On a piece such as “Amidst Things Uncontrolled,” Templeton opts for dense collages of layered sound, against which sharp, skittering electronic tones cut their teeth. The effect is also such that the contemplative aura of the watery ambience, being as it is infringed upon and haunted by chinks of digital debris and grizzled saw-toothed distortions, spawns its very opposite, its double, and so a certain ambiguity and tension takes root in these seemingly simple structures. The fallback, however, is that as Templeton’s processing and guitar-playing cover and uncover each other, all of their respective habits and hiding places gradually become transparent. As a result, the pleasure of guessing draws to a close well before the album actually reaches its own end. The album satisfies for its ability to establish a mood and permanent sense of place, but without greater depth or singularity in expression, one can only watch the snow fall for so long. (MS) • www.anticipaterecordings.com Back To Top TO ROCOCO ROT Taken from Vinyl (Staubgold) • To Rococo Rot have by now become something of an institution, so much so that they can allow themselves the luxury of a collection made up of tracks culled from the past ten years of their vinyl-specific operations. They occupy a bit of a unique position at the intersection between the first wave of post-Tortoise post-rock, the channeling of the Can-Neu! vector of organic-motorik krautrock (with maybe a stop-off chez-UK Stereolab), and the onward march of digitalia. It’s a tradition that, unfortunately, took an infelicitous detour into the indie-stream by the likes of lightweights led by Lali Puna and other Morr disciples. Though there is in a sense nothing new here, it’s refreshing to hear this tougher take reasserted through these tracks, assembled almost like a miniature overview of the group’s history. To Rococo Rot’s music has a special indefinable quality in that it manages to be simultaneously both serious and playful, po-faced yet almost self-deprecating, skipping stylistically between, say, off-kilter nu-dub on “Autonachmittag” and a more knowingly loungey feel on the almost legendary “Mit Dir in Der Gegend,” remaining an expertly semi-jammed slice of groove-enhanced post-rock. The presence of a version of “Telema” from what is viewed by many Rotties as their best album, 1999’s The Amateur View, is especially welcome, exemplifying as it does the mix of elements that fuels their enquiry, while demonstrating that post-rock need not be the glum affair of furrowed-brow minor-key chord concatenations it largely became after being hijacked by the dogmatic disciples of the GYBE-Mogwai axis. It’s also notable how a flow is achieved between tracks from various stages of their development, making it a more cohesive whole than other collections of synchronously created tracks. For the uninitiated, this assemblage would make a good primer. The Rot starts here. (AL) • www.staubgold.com Back To Top VARIOUS ARTISTS Camping 3 (Bpitch Control) • The musical query of two decades ago was "What Do You Know Deutschland?"—defiant Teutonic artists putting themselves under musical and cultural microscopes. With Bpitch Control’s third Camping compilation one senses German acts and labels are finally prepared to examine other specimens just as aggressively. What do you know, England? And what about you, Manhattan Island? Because the "BLN" (eloquently defended by Jahcoozi in this comp’s beepy hip-hop opener, turning the pop-grime axis of London, Rio, and America’s East Coast on its ear) is ready to step up, learn, even run things. BPC uses this comp to maintain their standard of excellence in German techno, seemingly running neck-and-neck with Kompakt. Zander VT’s fourth-ever track "Offroad Camping" has no right to be so minimal and yet so good; Sascha Funke’s "I Love This Tent" is deep and ethereal; label leader Ellen Allien and Apparat combine bells and bass, glitch and reverb to make "Red Planets" house-y and majestic. Intrigue and further entertainment can also be found in the artists making up a small yet representative sample of the new German pop. Feadz’ "110 Cloches" is angular EBM heavy on old-school handclaps and high hats. Modeselektor brings Ninjaman in on "Weed Wid da Macka" to split the difference between techstep and drum’n’bass. Sexy soul exists among the electronics as well: Timtim gets his Prince on in "You Sexy Beast," where even the mangled Engrish is hot, while Sylvie Marks and Hal 9000 infuse the Artificial Intelligence-style track "Strahlen" with breathy native-tongue vocals. Tomas Andersson’s "Go to Disco" is a hopelessly out-of-tune joke, and tracks by Safety Scissors and Paul Kalkbrenner don’t really progress beyond dull thudding, so Camping 3 is just this shy of divine. The collection, though, is proof beyond any doubt that BPC and German artists are searching for more than just the next perfect beat. (AB) • www.bpitchcontrol.de Back To Top |
|||
