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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 4 / April 2007
REVIEWED BY: IAN BODDY Elemental (DiN) PARALLEL WORLDS Obsessive Surrealism (DiN) RADIO MASSACRE INTERNATIONAL Septentrional (DiN) SURFACE 10 Surface Tensions (DiN) • In a perfect world, Ian Boddy’s DiN label would be the toast of the electronic town, or at the very least be granted keys to the municipality. Too many enthusiasts, fans, critics, trainspotters, et al, seem to only go where trends (or dubious cyberspace “journalists”) take them, latching on to some publicist’s wet-dream-of-the-moment; these fly-by-night japesters are often mislabelled “critical darlings.” Regardless of what sets apart the men from the boys (even well-taught boys with all the shiny new toys—and technology—insatiable credit-card agencies afford them), the fact remains that squeaky wheels continue to get the proverbial grease, much to the detriment of us all, which means the dozens of randy electronica labels springing up like crabgrass across the CD and CDR landscape, often by sheer bravura output, dilute the precious bodily fluids of their more prodigious elders. The bottom line is that DiN is every bit as vital as anything thrown at the unenlightened consumer, post-electronica, post-TD/Schulze, post-office…or well, whatever. Old dogs can, in fact, learn new tricks—and bite back with a vengeance. Take British synthesist Boddy. An extremely talented chap, toiling away since way back in the early 80s, the subsequent decade has found him seemingly miraculously—via the auspices of his remarkable DiN label—reinvented from his former crusty old TDreaming prog-guise into that of a sharply delineated musical chameleon who has since worked with esteemable mates old (Mark Shreeve) and new (Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter, Bernhard Wöstheinrich, Robert Rich). Coincidentally, Boddy’s radar is right on the mark: he still sports a streak of Teutonic affectation (albeit one that’s sharp enough to not trot out the same exhausted sequencer bricolages), yet he’s chosen to release work by artists notoriously difficult to categorize (Tetsu Inoue, dbkaos, Centrozoon). Boddy’s numerous DiN releases, in collab or solo, have become just as uncategorizable—he’s shed the skin of his influences, and recent records have indicated the new boss sure as hell ain’t like the old boss. Elemental is far from elementary, far from simple: its title reflects more the morphing state of its musical chemistry than anything easily decipherable. The opening “Never Forever,” is three of the most patently gorgeous minutes Boddy’s ever committed to disc: spider-webbed string synths paint a horizon of yearning against which twinkle moogs made up of stardust and snowdrops. From there, the album blossoms between elegaic and, dare I say, romantic (“Stormfront,” riding those sumptuous waves on a percussive bed of climatic windgusts), to environs hostile, inimical, probing, and wonderful (the rusty, creaking sequences of “Foundry,” the birthpang percolations of stinging coral on “Flux”). It’s so easy for those of us on the sidelines to simply remark how a recording moves us, to gaze on in curiousity how it came to be, to consider whether or not it comes easy to the artist who may or may not be able to churn out record after record in his sleep. Consistently realizing music that teases, tweaks and twirls our lobes more than a notch or two, music extraordinarily well-organized and contemplated, Boddy remains one of our consummate treasures, mostly by DiNt of the powersurge of records like this one. Drama, melodrama, psychodrama. Those states imbue the syllabus Greek electronician Bakis Sirros, operating under the nom de disque Parallel Worlds, has chosen as his dictum for Obsessive Surrealism, instructing us from out of the darker amphitheaters of the Berlin school, window blinds drawn tight. Well, perhaps “Berlin school” isn’t the best appellation to use here. Sirros makes sounds that seem perfectly happy at play in the fields of the lords synth and sequencer, but what actually grunts and growls its way across the battered landscape reveals something of a distinctly modern Modular mind. Titles such as “Beneath Fear,” “Empty Human Cells,” and “Into the Caves of the Mind” connote a far more Freudian preoccupation with altered consciousness than the average dessicated Krautrock hippy. Fixating on feral pinging resonances, moody nomenclature, and the noises emitted by scuttling tiny electronic beasties going bump in the night, Obsessive Surrealism acts like the monkey wrench thrown in the machinery of B.S. (double entendré intentional, folks). To wit: “Increasing Complexity” is all prescience and poise, muddied pulses wafting in a nocturnal thrush of chimes and argumentative insect chatter, something of a respite from the terminator synth-tug that envelopes “Empty Human Cells,” which is about as exhilaratingly scary as the descriptor suggests. Sirros is no doubt attuned to the fact that space is indeed the place. But it’s inner space, though, those strange little areas in the ducts of the mind that fascinates him most, that lead directly to the malevolent monoliths of buzz, gurgle and drift set into motion on “Reflective.” Yes, there’s some abject dread here in these synthetic surrealities, as if Sirros OD’ed on a surfeit of Philip K. Dick and 70s Harlan Ellison spec-fiction; “Pale Yellow Sky” is a compelling enough experience in and of itself, curling noises eddying in and out of shimmering black vacuums that have no mouth yet must scream. The tension here is palpable, the music’s edges serrated, pitted. This ain’t your usual pixie grinnin’ to the cosmos kind of thing, which is why time might paint Obsessive Surrealism as a minor masterpiece of the (anti)genre. The British trio that is Radio Massacre International (affectionately dubbed RMI) has more recordings out than god, which can be either a good or a bad thing depending on what axis you occupy on the prolificness graph. Self-released and officially-sanctioned discs notwithstanding, these guys are the monsters of the synth midway, yet, unfortunately, their rep carries little value beyond the Euro S/S (synth/sequencer) brigade and that small contingent of TD anglophiles who consistently make their presence known at RMI’s numerous gigs. Here in the US, the trio remain obscure (a condition desperately needing rebalance), although the release in 2005 of the double-disc set Emissaries by the Cuneiform label tilted the scales in their favor a bit. Regardless, wading through their immense discography can be a tough nut to crack (in addition to an expensive one); what better time then for the intrepid Boddy to release Septentrional, thereby proving all the world needn’t be a stage when the home-player will do just as nicely, thank you. There’s a small codicil attached however. According to the album’s page on the DiN website, “RMI recorded a series of three hour long improvisations which they handed over to Ian Boddy in multitrack form. These were then sifted through, extensively edited, often in a non-linear fashion, re-mixed with the addition of synthetic percussion layers on three of the five tracks and finally reassembled by Boddy into five new pieces.” So is Septentrional real or Memorex? RMI or Boddy? The answer is both, and as amalgamations go, a better co-mingling of sensibilities might prove difficult to unearth. RMI’s template prevails, in spades—the rigorous sequencer weaving, fiery mutant guitar stridencies, soaring jetblast atmospherics—though Boddy’s tutorial mien is writ large over the proceedings, irising from a cornucopia of effects and discretely targeted events, but mostly played out in those well-worn regions called arrangements. Boddy has reined in RMI’s propensity for overindulgence, elongated the core ideas, and in so doing tensed the wires to snap into action for what amounts to the trio’s best work yet. From the offworld ringing sonics of “Trident” to the forbidden planet atmospherics of “Searching Septentrional Skies,” RMI has effectively “matured” into a forced to be reckoned with. Wringing a spry sense of technological humor from the buzzing electrical arcs of the final track “…The Last Laugh” merely serves to justify that this “collaboration” was a match made in Teutonic heaven. Surface Tensions, the title of Surface 10’s (in real life: Dean De Benedictis) sophomore issue on Boddy’s imprint, accurately sums up the entirety of this collection of DiNdiscs, another wholly engaging, mysterious, smart-sounding, ear-massaging document of extraterrestrial aural stress. De Benedictis has been nurturing his own cadre of digital lifeforms on the West Coast for some time now, having previously released on Hypnotic in the late 90s, where he seemed content to labor in the caverns of the underground, occasionally poking his head out to quietly imbibe on the latest noisemakers before retreating back into the cosy confines of the studio for further r&d. The outcome is blistering enough. Seething like water getting ready to boil over (referencing the sea of viral bubbles gestating on the cover), the eleven tracks herein span nearly ten years of existence, reading like nothing less than a grand compendium of electronica’s many-splendored tours across the 90s zeitgeist. “Dawn/Bleep/Dusk” could be a lost track off of virtually any early Warp/Merck/Neo Ouija release, stitching together plangent pieces of sampled guitars, beats the consistency of mushy potatoes, and coughing pulses in a mad quiltwork IDM pastiche of Autechre frenzy and Metamatics whimsy. “847 Chain Reactors” is clicks’n’cuts as autopsied off the original lathe by a master, clipped pitter-patter surrounded by fluorescent-bulb hum and the choir exhalations of many mensche-machines. De Benedictis crams more original thought into each track than most keypunchers could only dream of in their bandwidth-challenged philosophies: a piece such as “The Dream Shelter,” nine minutes of incoming micaschistic debris ricocheting off rising spatial tangs, is a reminder why one falls in love with electronic music in the first place—what attacks the speaker fabric and decays outside it, simply put, sounds like nothing on earth. (DB) • www.din.org.uk Back To Top GRAHAM BOWERS Of Mary's Blood (Red Wharf) Transgression (Red Wharf) Eternal Ghosts (Red Wharf) Pilgrim (Red Wharf) • As a point of orientation, the cover art employs the faceless mannequin forms sometimes represented in works by de Chirico, later Dali and even the inferred human forms populating the landscapes of Yves Tanguy, here arrayed in their own Bosch-like hells while apparently enacting some Modern-era struggle between faith and self. This is further indicated by the section titles (“Always Is,” “Always Was,” “By Thought,” “By Word,” etc). Yet the music itself seems most akin to that of John Tavener's pre-sacred period, specifically the uncompromising modernism of The Whale. Still, the intersection of faith and modernism can be nowhere convincingly articulated since the delusions spun out by faith always demur any particular outfit you may wish it wear. So, no further speculation on the underlying narratives of these inter-related works. Let's just take it as that already impossibly elusive thing we know as music. And as music, the cut and thrust across the trilogy—Of Mary's Blood, Transgression, Eternal Ghosts—and into Pilgrim generously draws from most established and fringe compositional techniques that flourished in the mature decades of the 20th century through to these, the potty-training days of the early 21st. To again allude to surrealists, not so much "decalcomania without preconceived object" as an aural "exquisite corpse." There is a generous ear turned to everything from the disquieting tranquility realized by Ligeti to the sharp toys of Stockhausen and Varese all the way down to the popularized simplifications of musique concréte in something as mass market ready as was "Revolution No. 9.” The trilogy itself is concise—the pieces are long and singular, but not too long and too singular—and express an emotional universe of dislocation and longing that, while not entirely free of sentimental inflections, does its best to stay within the now familiar and well-defined bounds of the art music tradition. To that end, Bowers employs a technique he calls Sound Theatre—again implying an overall narrative preoccupation—in which the music/organized sound is somehow meant to convey the outlines of some literal comprehension, open-ended as that must be. The work is described as that which encourages "associative listening," acknowledging and even forcing the listener to play a deterministic role in sorting and codifying the densely packed elements. How much of the compositional decisions are based on the subjective and free association of Bowers himself is hard to tell, but the language at work here is a highly personal one that can be categorized alongside systems such as those devised by Jon Rose, Elio Martusciello, and others. But where these composers sound postmodern or contemporary, Bowers sounds comparatively modest and completely modern. In all these works there is a predilection for the primacy of sound and the accompanying metaphor of the sound stage. While much is instrumentally derived, there is little mistaking the occasional frankness of found sound elements—even something very akin to the singing of whales—and the extensive manipulation of what used to be called mouth music. The work does not seek the solid-mass statement of creating a perfect amalgam of disparate elements, now made indistinguishable within the whole. Instead, the components remain in view, interacting at times the way a conventional grouping of instruments might interact, but here between the interstices of a larger, more subtle and pliant grid, organically shaped and emotively charged and waiting for the listener to play his part in determining just how ethereal or enigmatic or leaden its shape. (KL) • www.red-wharf.com Back To Top FAX Primario (Static Discos) MICROESFERA Negative (Static Discos) • “The electric guitar is central to Primario,” which pronouncement from Fax honcho Ruben A. Tamayo should alert us that all is not well in the house of Fax. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with electric guitar, just that this wielding of it as some kind of significative totem bodes ill. And, as it turns out, ill-suspicions are confirmed as he strays, previously minimal-tech and microhouse-trained, into unsalubrious downtempo waters on this his third album. Tamayo is decidedly under the doc’s chill-pill prescription on this slow’n’low sortie into jazz ambient (jambient?) and postrock dream dub (er... porkdrub?). Some of his homies evidently hung with him under pretty mellow vibe-manners to create this collection of faux-live sounding hyper-jams; dudes Corona (Murcof), Chavez (Kobol), and Simko (Detalles), and, ill-advisedly, Ayuli, of quirky 80s/90s dreampopsters A.R. Kane, who essays some sub-scat croonage that’s woefully off-key. These linkages could have resulted in far happier outcomes, but instead comes on like a session band assembled by a reformed techno DJ to play loose-limbed chillout versions of Friedman/Liebezeit covers of Bark Psychosis (not good). Trouble starts on “Soul Song,” whose drug-hazed minimal lope and lulling guitar loopism is disturbed when the listener is importuned by Ayuli’s ill-tuned dope-casualty vox enquiring, “Does anybody choose to keep their soul asleep?” By the twentieth time of interrogation, the will-to-live may well have been lost, but hope springs eternal. And yes, the ride on “Luza” is less bumpy, the snooze-bliss campaign offset by Corona's percussion embellishments, but it still feels like limp muso-muzak. “Porcelana,” for example, sleepwalks through a sunstruck four minutes of sub-dub plod before half-waking up to proffer a watery fragment of tune. On “Tunel (Para F),” slinky slide sneaks across its contours, enhanced by an effective drum loop incursion. Better, but it’s all relative—in sum, it’s like an afterthought tidy-up of some spliffed-out rehearsal room antics, of half-baked space-jazz and addled dub-funk jams. Oye, Ruben, donde es el carne, hombré? Negative, the debut by Tamayo's labelmates Alejandro Amo and Ramiro Larraín, is, by contrast, a sharp little micro-cookie. Microesfera, for it is they, veterans of Buenos Aires’ techno scene (ooh!), attempt “to rewrite conventional electronic dance aesthetics by disrupting the music's linearity with backward and ‘bisexual’ (positive and negative) sounds that simultaneously reference the past while gazing towards the future.” Which half-baked conceptual nugget of promo-spin smacks somewhat of trying to retro-fit a Big Idea to small potatoes to add beef. In fact, the concept sounds a good deal cleverer than its realization. The uninformed listener will hear in this nothing so much as a bunch of chug-pump and dub-thump floor-fodder over whose generic minimal techno and microhouse undercarriage the hombrés range freely with an attention-deficit barrage of glitch squiggles and stutter-vox edits. Negative is propped up but not lifted by a trio of so-so to decent remixes from further north: Mexicans’ Latinsizer (offering dub-strut) and our old friend Fax (clip-hop house), plus a third by Chile’s Receptor (techno minimalism). All in all, undistinguished fare from a label that has yet to deliver on early promise. (AL) • www.staticdiscos.com Back To Top ANDERS ILAR Nightwidth (Narita) • The 12”s have veritably poured out of Anders Ilar since his last CD release Enkel, itself, like Nightwidth, an assemblage of tracks harvested from 12”s with a few dangled bonus tracks. This release is a cohesive one, though, incidentally presenting compelling evidence that Ilar has finally effected a successful fusion between his Jekyll and Hyde “halves.” The former, oneiromancer of 2003’s Everdom, constructing steepling driftscapes, tapping into a moody brooding ambience; the latter, dictator of Enkel’s fundamentalist 4/4 regime, allowing only a thin-lipped isolationist presence to add the thinnest of dark tone-veils to its austere bass-bin thump manifesto. Nightwidth, gratifyingly, proves to be more atmospherically expansive, and harmonically inclined, wafting banks of synth-fog mile-high over click’n’blip striated tech-house tramlines. Ilar’s beatsmithery ranges imaginatively across various tweakings of a paradigm chiefly adumbrating dub-techno and noir-ish tech-house; his pebbledashing with etiolated microsonic matter and muffled acid-squelch transforms what would otherwise be bald thud’n’pump recursions. Ilar’s main “trick,” though, which he turns variously, involves juxtaposing almost dark ambient atmospherics with positively dancefloor-beckoning beatwork. It’s jack-matter, Jim, but not as we know it. “Sand (In Your Eyes)” and “Rourei,” for example, drape their exultant kick-throbs and thick bass stabs with a fuliginous canopy, a suggestive soundtrack to the postmodern dance. Best of all is “A Day Ago,” which slowly unravels a serpentine motif, all aglow with flow and staccato, unfolding spirals shooting out soundsparks reverberating into the ether. Yes, it’s that good. And good, too, to report a healthy specimen in the creaky minimal techno ward. Reminder that it was Enkel’s willful textural parsimony and not its techno floor-thralldom that made it a less than beguiling proposition to this listener, but with the suggestive dark-breadth of Nightwidth the heart has something with more sustenance on which to hang its throb. (AL) • www.naritarecords.com Back To Top KENNETH KIRSCHNER Three Compositions (Sirr) • Terms such as timorousness and hesitancy rarely bring the blood to a bubble. More often than not, emphasis is placed squarely on the confession, on coughing up truths from the unconscious, spilling your guts. Although the microtonal piano and percussion pieces of composer Kenneth Kirschner are pared back and often recede into a charged silence, they don’t exist at the limit of such discourses. Rather, they act as elements which function alongside these more overt declarations. In many ways, Kirschner’s pools of silence act as internal exclusions, integrated absences in and through which Kirschner builds a series of complex, shifting structures, textural and tonal possibilities, moods, and themes. The opening piece, “July 17, 2006,” has a certain way of not-saying things, of using overdubbed sinewaves, panning in and out of the stereofield like a searchlight seeking out an unseen figure, to suggest but not so much distinctly convey a quality of late-night languor and mystery. This piece gives onto the starkly inflected rhythmic weave of “April 27, 2004.” Slowly, and indeed hesitantly, Kirschner builds up lines of electronic sound sprinkled with low impact fluttering events and a coating of flickering DSP effects. Though consisting of some bleak tonal drifts, its shifting, continuous nature, paired with some understated dramatics, makes the work seem vividly alive; what is more, though hesitant, it is not music which implies a lack of confidence, not by any means. Instead, Kirschner carefully controls the duration of each movement—sometimes this becomes a bit apparent, elsewhere Kirschner’s hand is hardly seen—assessing the field, affording compositions more room to breathe or providing some punctuation in the form of digital fragments or stately piano chords. Ergo, these works have a certain lysergic effect: piano notes dwell within a pall of reverb and float like halos while electronic tones leave trails as time slows, the blood smolders, and the real recedes. (MS) • www.sirr-ecords.com Back To Top ERIC LA CASA Air.Ratio (Sirr) • When frequenting a bathroom in the year of ‘94, the attention of sound-artist Eric La Casa was ensnared by an air vent settled just over the bathtub and he has been smitten ever since. Air.Ratio is the ensuing document which speaks of ventilation systems and their relations not only with sound, but also with the body, its processes, regulation and subsequent management. As Casa notes, these ventilation systems, these artificial respirators, as he calls them, speak to the mechanization, standardization and (over)rationalization of living conditions and events. Systems such as that of ventilation behave only according to our dictates, yet we only put into execution what the machine is programmed to do, and thus an involution of each into the other. Elements of one’s behavior, of one’s environment and their intricate web of relations are dyed in different colors when rummaging through these recordings. Much which was taken for granted, as given, as natural, appears created by and subject to a history which is saturated by shifting technologies, modes of regulation, norms and the like. Armed with a pair of condenser microphones, Casa captures the operations of an array of ventilation systems, mostly those dwelling within bathrooms in buildings of various dimension and age dotted throughout Paris. Not entirely a theoretical work, the thirty short drone-pieces on display here may be appreciated for their textural richness and surprising harmonic complexity. Owing to their varying ages and quality of the air vents, each piece has a certain personality, a certain voice. Those sullied with dust and perhaps in need of a new filter spew out more turbulent sounds, more muffled, sinusoidal hums while others are quick, clean, clinical mosaics of fluctuating electricity. It’s the ideas and questions that these pieces stir up which truly fascinate though. Suddenly the bubble boy takes on a new meaning—a symbol of the future or a reality already present? Somewhere a postmodernist is sitting on a toilet in a local pub, listening to the thrum of a ventilator, and crying softly. (MS) • www.sirr-ecords.com Back To Top JEAN-FRANCOIS LAPORTE Soundmatters (23five) • Sufi mystics tend to exclaim that vibration acts as the key to the order of the universe. Every entity vibrates at a certain frequency and human beings possess the unusual capacity to tune themselves up or down. That said, the medium is all but invisible to the subject submerged in it, the water is unknown to the fish until it tastes the air, and so Jean-Francois Laporte aims to provide a tonic for this delirium, pulling one out of this bee’s nest of sounds and placing one into a controlled yet spontaneous environment in which one may identify and “tune-in” to these vibrations, to these mantras which are mouthed by commonplace objects everyday. The first composition focuses on a house perched in Montreal which was haunted by a succession of ice storms during the winter of ‘98. One hears wind whistling through creaky doors creating a palpable hum of tension, rattling windowpanes emitting tones which are layered and slither wormlike, gliding over one another as they thicken and thin the music. Without any processing or effects, “Dans Le Ventre Du Dragon” was conducted inside an empty cargo hull stuck in the belly of a pensioned-off ship. The hull takes the dimly glowing tones from the Quasar Saxophone Quartet into its maw and emits a pall of reverberating, nocturnal timbres. As homage to the “simple” and the near-nothing, “Plenitude Du Vide” shows a fine ear for pitch and continuity, building from the most miniscule of rustles, chirrups, and flutters from the bowls of a saxophone and the beating of aluminum tubes to develop naturally into a glowering, low rumbling drone, pregnant with unexpected, long resonant spans of harmony, which overflow and animate the once barren womb of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste church in Montreal. Moksha might not lie in wait, yet these recordings possess the curious ability to rearrange the fields of self. (MS) • www.helenscarsdale.com Back To Top MINISYSTEM Madingley (Noise Factory) NEON TETRA Home (Noise Factory) • Noise Factory is a Canadian label run by several English people (Joe English, Sean English, and Zenia English). The music that defines Noise Factory’s sound is, to use their own words, “beautiful music.” They declare: “We have a particular ear for experimental electronic, post-rock, ambient, blissful, mindblowing, gut-wrenching, emotional rock, loud, soft and minimal noise. We like these words, but words can't capture the music we seek.” True enough, though not perhaps the truth they intended, for the words they use arouse expectations which these two recordings signally fail to meet. And as for the insufficiency of words to capture the music herein, the Englishes are just not rummaging around hard enough in the lexicon of the humdrum and the ho-hum and the uniform. Closer examination follows, but laboring detail is unnecessary in light of the general point. Passing reference is made by the promo-spinners to “fans of artists on Skam, City Centre Offices, Warp” as potential audience for Noise Factory output. However, this attempt to hitch a proxy ride in someone else’s used vehicle risks backfire, for Minisystem’s Jeff Lee, far from seeking the synergy of cerebral-itch and dance-twitch of those by now august institutions, contents himself with an extended exercise in surface-skating analogue gear-fetishism. The same twiddly-twee melodies are doodled across just about every one of the New Casiotone tech-pop jingles that fill Madingley. To be more accurate, it would be the more electronic releases on Morr and Suction of the early 00s that both of these artists’ work most resembles. Slightly less lightweight is Neon Tetra's debut full-length Home, which certainly has a feeling of warm familiarity to it. It’s basically retro-fit space age easy listening music with winsomeness writ over it. Were it personified, the dominant facial expression on its face would be a sort of zoned-out upbeat smile, and Liam Brennand isn’t professing rocket scientist status here. His compositions are cosy lyric-less synthpop confections that slide down easy leaving little aftertaste. Seeking referents, you wouldn’t go too wrong with Casino vs Japan and Solvent, but, truth be told, for the inveterate scholar of popular electronics to itemize just how many like-sounding acts might be ID-ed during the course of these ten bedroom bashouts would induce brainblur. Brennard darts around brightly, like the eponymous jumped-up minnow, between IDM and synth-pop, and Home purveys the standard issue bouncy playful beats pasted with the usual indie-tronica trappings, with little ambition. But of course ambition is not what it’s about so much as a my-turn-now funfair ride in what has become a communal amusement park for today’s geekboy egalitarians. These Noise Factory releases may be encouraging testimony that the DIY aesthetic spawned by the late 70s independent pioneer spirit is alive, but, unhappily, all too often channeled into conditioned musical behavior. In the end, though, it’s not the feeling that it’s all been heard before that bothers, it’s that no new resonances emerge from these flair-free recombinations of pre-set panda-eyed pandering. (AL) • www.noisefactoryrecords.com Back To Top MIRROR Still Valley (Die Stadt) MONOS Generators (Die Stadt) • To describe something as “drone music” has become an increasingly vague designation. It’s an indicator of the extent to which drone deployment has been expanding and diversifying in Western contemporary music in recent decades. It’s illustrated here with these two recordings by two sets of practitioners belonging to the same inner sanctum of post-industrial UK drone-masons, ostensibly with similar sensibilities, producing differing outcomes in terms of tone quality, sound architecture, and atmospheric tenor. First up, late-period reflections from the now sadly put down Mirror, Andrew Chalk and Christopher Heeman’s collab, in the form of Still Valley, first published on limited-edition vinyl, here re-released on CD with bonus track. Supplemented by ubiquitous experimental journeyman Jim O'Rourke, they cultivate a quiet, almost pastoral affair—as befits the title, more subdued than their best-known Die Spiegelmanufaktur. But quiet does not equal quietude. The serenity of its slow-shifting drones belies a palpable undertow of something that denies surface appearance; this valley may be still but it’s not pacific. Essentially one long piece divided in three, it centers upon ebb and flow of gliding glassine sustains (O’Rourke?), lightly overtoning guitar motifs (Chalk?), with high frequency oscillator glissandos (Heeman?) tracing peripheral spirals arcing through the audio-spectrum. No low-end theory is tested, the sonic keynote being a mid-frequency gauzy shimmer. The work of Andrew Chalk in general works as immersive ambience, his signature style, most manifest as he is of the Mirror men, involving much recursion with micro-variation. It’s a slow-mo tonefloat for a still-shot movie, one imbued with a certain gravitas not unlike holy minimalism, eschewing the gloom of their kindred post-industrialites. Similar in this respect to Chalk’s later The River That Flows Into The Sand and Goldfall, it is, however, more attenuated texturally than both these, the source sounds seemingly left deliberately under-adorned by processing treatments or reverb technologies. It’s WYSWIWYGT (what you start with is what you get throughout), making Still Valley, aptly, immobile and low-lying, so resolutely non-narrative, its motion so minimal and structure so invariate, as to seem a frozen landscape. Already parsimonious to a point, Still Valley is even further reined in, its regimen of verticality simulating chronostasis. Monos’ Darren Tate must have had a good grin crediting himself here on “water heater”; that or he’s in earnest—and he certainly sounds stern in tandem with Colin Potter on the pair’s Generators. A double-album, the first featuring 3 tracks in Monos’ signature style, that dogged insistence on spartan sustain and totalitarian timbre. The duo certainly live up to their mono-tonal (though not monotonous) name in that they tend to focus attention on the single-ness of a texture, but only in order to slide it up against other similar sound planes and orchestrate a kind of crepuscular cloudwatch of toneshape. “The Black Sea,” filling the whole of disc two, is the most meshed of these pieces. A progressively thickening expanse of murky undulations, simultaneously forbidding and inviting, it gradually enfolds you in its inky deep and holds you transfixed. Not for Tate and Potter the facile bruit-ism of power-electronics battery to achieve the severity of effect, at once stultifying and incantatory. Disc one’s finale “Slowly Fading” is an isolationist processional weighed down with something deeper than melancholy, the eponymous generators emitting a congealed pulse through its eldritch crawl. The sounds here are like decrepit old pipe organs, with what may well be the thrum of that water heater taking on a functional harmonic quality. And printed inside the gatefold case the legend “still”—which brings us full circle back to Mirror. Generators is likewise possessed of stillness, but unlike the reflective Mirror’s airiness, it’s one of dead air and slowly smothering density. Dark materials indeed. (AL) • www.diestadtmusik.de Back To Top ANGINA P 8 Rooms (Notochord) • These grime-laden days we find a slew of current post-jungle producers having cravenly taken the devil’s dubstep shilling, remaking, and remodelling versions of the same half-step skank-plod. At the other end of the speed-scale, contemporary d’n’b has tended to ratchet up the BPMs to a point where the real soma-felt thrill has gone, replaced by what is essentially hyper-real psyche-frottage. In short, the thing don’t swing like it used to. Vienna’s Angina P is a rare naysayer. Unashamedly thrown back to the 90s d’n’b templates of the likes of Photek and Source Direct, fused with a dash of that post-Autechrean skitter, 8 Rooms yields some refreshing results, even with its now-familiar infusion of mid-90s Warp-wibble and Skam-squiggle. Angina P gets her name from a throat affliction that’s plagued her (the thought occurring that, career-wise, it’s as well it wasn’t, say, irritable bowel syndrome). The liner has her musing on her music’s being “too loud for ambient, too tidy for breakcore, too slow for drum & bass, too mainstream for experimental, and too dance-oriented for IDM,” and it’s an on-the-mark observation. Angina P seduces with the lushness of her synth-phonics, offset by clean-edged abrasive beatwork, with echoes of Phonem’s similarly-oriented Hydro Electric. And yes, 8 Rooms has a certain delicacy, a certain elegance (listen especially to “Known Issues”) that somehow suggests a female sensibility, something distinctly perceptible but not easily pindownable, shared with gender-kin such as Quantazelle, Neotropic, and Bllix. Yes, the ladies pack a punch but they know how to effectively pull it off to leave the listener wanting, in a good way. The drum battery of “No Time To Bleed,” hits with that reverb-on-stun Photek-style viscerality, but the overlay cosies up close to sweetness-and-light alluring melodicity. Five main compositions are supplemented by a trio of remixes. Edgey drags “No Time to Bleed” down an ill-lit alley and beats it up good and proper—bad boy mentalist stuff. Ad Noiseam resident sound-sculptors Larvae eat half the beats and render “Placemat Club” a dark-hop location, all stretched textures and ill bent. It’s the tug of Angina, though, that you’re left with. (AL) • www.notochord-recordings.com Back To Top RICHARD PINHAS Metatron (Cuneiform) • Let's see. Meta, meaning self-referential and Tron, to become inaccessible except via electronic means. Fair enough. Pinhas has traditionally remained attached to the surface formalities of rock‘n'roll, and has been typically frank about his sources, “In the Wake of King Fripp” as but one, rather early example. Like that solo Les Paul fuzzed and tucked into an open loop, Pinhas here again offers up that most fatalistic and self-deterministic of musical forms; in this case, specifically the stunningly dense and monumental pile-ups that define Tikkun, a four-parter spread across both discs of this two-CD set—one being a video track for those of you who like to “watch music.” As a whole, Metatron stands on two legs of unequal length. The predominant is loop-shaped music, infused with rock inflections that emerge from seemingly diaphanous nothing into glitchy, twitching rhythmic patterns and smears which in turn yield to the introduction of additional voices. And additional is key here: the arcs are pretty much all accretive, and monumentally so. To even imagine the density accomplished here in a pre-digital environment would only and always collapse into a well of undifferentiated noise. Technical issues aside, the skill required to pull off these monumental slabs of interacting sounds is in itself hard to comprehend. Perhaps they are the result of multiple trial and error outings, but whatever the context of their origin any listener will have to be impressed with the sheer physical presence of these orchestrally-deep episodes. They begin with simple scratches across the strings, bowed intonations or stroked bass coils and become continental landmass-big in scale. And again, like “In the Wake of King Fripp,” the form seems intent on foreground and background fixturing. In this case, the featured instrument, left free for the repercussions of the repeat, are drums, played with an unflinching ear to an overflow of oddly metered and unrepentant fills by Antoine Paganotti. The speed and insistence of the drumming moirés across the supporting instruments exhibit a variety of synchronous and asynchronous behavior, creating the illusion of being quite literally suspended in the folds of some infinite and inexhaustible jam. The foreground drumming, as eager and zealous as it seems to be, stands nearly still against the shifting decay and renewal of the pitched information and the occasional darkening incursions of spoken-word nightmares. The second leg is a bit withered, comprised of some rather weak melodic posturing, chord patterns and song-like structures that never demonstrate the strength of the more experimental stretches. By now this seems de rigueur for Pinhas, whose more overt rock’n' roll pieces are always more derivative of the thing than the thing itself. A sort of(wait for it) meta-rock, if you will. But this trouble is not enough to make Metatron any the less intensely worthwhile for its adherence to extending an existing form and its lovely addiction to sheer gigantism. (KL) • www.cuneiformrecords.com Back To Top ROBERT RICH Electric Ladder (Soundscape) • “I've always been very attracted to the role of the mystic in society, but I'm searching for a language that makes sense to a contemporary world...” Thus spake Robert Rich, and Electric Ladder finds him, years later, still searching for, if not a new language, for he has already evolved a sophisticated code over a stream of releases spanning 25 years, then new inflections, in particular new combinations for the hermetic post-minimalist motifs that characterize his works like Numena and Geometry. The blend of analog modular synthesizers and electronically-enhanced acoustica that provides the sound matter of Electric Ladder is familiar, though Rich seeks to reconfigure it. Following Echo of Small Things and Lithosphere (with Ian Boddy), Electric Ladder adopts a more active mien. Textual soundclips: a familiar low-droning presence announces its creator, before an arpeggiating sequenced motif (out of Terry Riley via The Orb?) and gloopy bass provide propulsion, Rich’s trademark stratospheric steel guitar arcing steepling glissandi stretched across its sky. That’s the title track opener. Next up is “Shadowline,” self-referencing, specifically Geometry, the rhythm more percussive. “Poppy Fields” introduces new organic life (bassoon, soprano sax), and old (bamboo flute). “Aquifer” sees Rich back in signature trance/drone-land, as does “Never Alone,” though with more steel guitar reflections. An organic glurp bubbles under, a thick presence in viscous coalescence, signifying growth and vibrancy. The unity of nature and technology, a Californian version of the Man-machine, part of Rich's creed, palpable as ever. So much for descriptive sketchwork. Appraisal comes tougher. It must be said that though the vocabulary of gruzz, shimmer, and glurp developed by Rich in relation to the timbres and sonorities of his work is suggestive, it has been more eloquently realized than on Electric Ladder. Rich talks a good game, and cognoscenti will know of his fascination with the trance states provoked by extreme sound experiments. However, truth be told it seems to substantively inform this decidedly un-extreme work only minimally. Rich’s trademark Just Intonation tuning system and its microtonal harmonies of course lend the proceedings a kind of default tint of exotica, but some of these latest imaginings have the air of the already heard, sounds once resonant grown faded and gestural. (AL) • www.robertrich.com Back To Top MATT SHOEMAKER Spots In The Sun (Helen Scarsdale) • Spots In The Sun is a work of abreaction, allergy, and rejection more than it is one of will or desire. In the manner of natural disasters, a contagious virulence, a gruff sign of violence rises like a shadow over a landscape which has become too well managed. For the first half of the album, tracks themselves begin as a synergy of monochrome drones, busy sonar activity and rolling waves of static and machine noise. Pieces lead a vacuum-sealed existence and are carefully calibrated so as to allow metallic, higher frequency tones to dance around the stereo spectrum. Enclosed within this electronic bubble, however, once these dimly glowing tones and soft strikes achieve a certain mechanical rigor, that is to say, a certain performativity, these very elements turn in on themselves and, in an act of perverse self-destruction, grow teeth and blare into layers of pure electronic malevolence. Becalmed sonic vistas are slowly and meticulously contorted in vivid detail; sub-bass drones grow bloated and pop into so many needles of feedback; functional metallic clangs are torn asunder by sharp sonic flurries; while vaguely narcotic atmospheres are dyed in new colors, pushed into overdrive, and looped and contorted like an acid trip gone awry. Although unremittingly gray and austere, the album is well judged in its attack and retreat, never lapsing into a lazy molten noisescape. After a moment of tumultuous discord, though, even the steady pulsations of electronic tones and cyclical patterns of seasick chirps and squawking seem to breathe tension into the air. Gradually, more and more of the album seems marred by this erratic quality, and so the album engages in an increasingly inward gnawing, as though it were a hypochondriac devouring its own organs. With scrupulous craft, the album ends with a suicidal glint in its eye, as a tormented, gravely undulation ebbs into the ether, asserting itself in its own demise. (MS) • www.helenscarsdale.com Back To Top SKOLTZ_KOLGEN Postpiano (12k) • Here assembled are 11 variations, selected from a suite of 20, all based on 11.11.03 by Kenneth Kirschner. That such a concise and purposeful collection of pieces emerge from the parent already dry, fully-formed and talking, is compelling in the same way as identifying the likenesses and differences between the adult and its fully-grown progeny—just see William Wegman’s early and disturbingly comic family portraits. As such, Skoltz-Kolgen implement an important set of ideas about music origination while exhaling a uniquely breathable, rich, and unified atmosphere. The pieces range from the calm and nearly motionless capture of decays stretched nearly to the steady state to the reorganized emergence of once covert, odd and—no offense—charming, even playful, rhythmic patterns encased by clipped envelopes, chattering left and right, forward and backwards across acoustically lush yet relatively neutral pads, beds, clouds and ghosts. But unlike drone music, the work on Postpiano exhibits a sometimes strict, sometimes submerged preoccupation with structure and with duration. Decidedly not a collection of sustained fragments, relayered into a lasagna d’ambience, the music here is always animate and engaged with form and proportion. New and more familiar forms of distortion play an occasional and contrasting role, as the subsumed waveforms retreat and emerge from the afterglow of their own processes. Importantly, these generally indefinable sounds only now and again reveal their origin to be the result of sometimes typical, sometimes atypical physical contact with a piano, casting a context for the music which allows the listener to apprehend that these sounds are not artificial constructs, but that they originate from the place to which they return: as vibration in air. Ideal work for those who have a proclivity for music actually made out of music, it’s too bad there are only 500 copies available. KL • www.12k.com Back To Top |
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