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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 5 / April 2007
REVIEWED BY: CHARTIER/DEUPREE Specification.Fifteen (12k) • Installation music for the Hiroshi Sugimoto photography retrospective at the HIrshhorn Museum, principally engaged in pelagic concerns and how to suspend those concerns them between sea and sky, the open and closed spaces of light and dark. While there remains some debate about the wisdom of releasing music developed specifically for installations as music for CD, the single, slowing evolving piece that is the totality of Specification.Fifteen stands up well enough on its own. Gratefully, the artists resist metaphor in this work—we listeners are freed from any concrete intimation of sea or sky and deposited safely in the secure folds of abstraction and meditation on the not so strictly visual formalities inherent in perceiving the intricacies and subtle presence of the everyday surround. Following a plane inclined from low to higher frequencies, stillness to some activity, the transformations occur slowly, without demarcation and without an referent to actual instrumentation. In short, non-dramatic, non-narrative, self-organizing and, consequently, successful in every way. The envelopes are all soft, eroded by contemplation and a longing for the stillness that rests somewhere within any and every defined event. Legato in nature—there are no gaps—the only apparent seam might occur as the end loops back to the beginning, but that is a question best answered by the actual installation, not the recorded artifact. (KL) • www.12k.com Back To Top MARK DWANE 2012 (Trondant) • Mark Dwane is a guitarist, yes, but he’s as iconoclastic in his approach to the instrument as “guitarists” like Robert Fripp, Steve Hillage, Phil Manzanera, etc. A big proponent of MIDI and its varied interfaces, Dwane’s finger-plucked chords are dominant in the mix, right as rain, and shine like the crown jewels, though cocooned within the symphonic glaze of numerous synths and other devices he not only expands his instrument’s vocabulary but invents an entirely new syntax for its use. Calling out his favorite (and oft-used) pseudo-‘prog’ tropes offset by dungeons ‘n’ dragons sci-fi imagery, Dwane negates the faint whiff of cheese that tainted some of his recent ventures thanks to his dexterity, chops and compositional prowess. The widescreen production values don’t hurt, either. The record sounds absolutely gorgeous, a touch no doubt sustained over many years behind the console jockeying sounds into just the right positions. Wander across “Codex,” for example, Dwane orchestrating limpid pools of interweaving stringthings into which a summer shower pours out of the horizon, electronic gas bubbles softly rise, the atmosphere changes color, then out of nowhere drums beat out a chorus for the enveloping storm. All is not sturm und drang; both the title track and the closing “Ascension” convey arch, sweeping Vangelis-like majesty in the brashest sense, but it’s important to note that 2012’s tone alternates between the triumphant and the tender, emotional states juggled with the utmost cunning. Even when Dwane’s prog tendencies burst forth (obviously so on the Andy Pickford-esque space rock of “Skywatchers’), he keeps things lively enough that only the most chastising of listeners would turn a deaf ear—probably those listeners in a mad Rush wasting the years on their way to misguided 2112 nirvana. (DB) • www.markdwane.com Back To Top LAWRENCE ENGLISH For Varying Degrees of Winter (Baskaru) • Room40 curator Lawrence English must have had a premonition of this winter, a season so undone by unseasonality as to be virtually un-wintered. For as digital particle showers go, this set avoids the frosty demeanor and polar bite purveyed by sound artists of his stripe. English has shown himself a kindred spirit to the likes of Chartier and Gunter, Schaefer and Deupree, some of whom have also flirted with the wintry theme, with greater austerity and lesser musicality. FVDoW is immediately a more consonant and conventionally pitched collection than Günter’s Un Peu De Neige Salie and more varied than Deupree’s Northern. Winter is really a shoo-in as Muse/concept for these digital tone poets, the pristine absoluteness of snow and ice finding an obvious analog in their trademark static smears and miniscule timbre-granules, both revealing their essential complexity and allure under micro-examination. The Baskaru blurb has it that "each one of the six pieces is a monochrome composition ranging from the blinding whites of the snow to the blue-grays of cloudy days.” Leave aside quibbles as to how far blue-grays might qualify for monochrome status, and indeed disputes as to how monochrome these pieces really are (they aren’t). Be drawn instead into the artful electroacoustic tableaux of English, and their varying degrees of faraway-closeup organic-digital chill-warmth. It's not all lullaby drone-wash, for a track such as “Fleck” works up a flurry of high-pitched tones that incite like Ikeda-esque micro-piercings. It occurs while listening that perhaps the closest sonic reference point for FVDoW would be Keiichi Sugimoto's Fourcolor output (albeit less organic) or certain recent Kranky expeditions (by, say, Kowalsky, Herbert, Bissonette). It has that same static yet gradually evolving feeling, a shared humanity of drones and resonances, of ambient washes of notes (provenance unknown) and viscous sonorities, finding movement through inference rather than explicit statements. There are indeed degrees to explore within this English winter, from “End Game,” approaching freezing, stark yet alluding increasingly less obliquely to harmony, to “Desert Road,” finding a darker yet warmer shade oozing from somewhere across the digi-swamp. In between there’s the Köner-esque “Swan,” which tests upper and lower frequency ranges with dense nebulae of crackle’n’drone. Enveloping, swelling, quietly fizzing with transluscence, the air grainily alive around it, a fascinatingly varying English winter awaits those who would enter. (AL) • www.baskaru.com Back To Top MICHAEL FAHRES The Tubes (Cold Blue) DANIEL LENTZ On the Leopard Altar (Cold Blue) CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE A Sweet Quasimodo Between Black Vampire Butterflies for Maybeck (Cold Blue) CHAS SMITH Descent (Cold Blue) • Redefining the ambient/neo-classical landscape for decades now, California’s Cold Blue Music, steered to its privileged status by owner/musician Jim Fox, is virtually alone amongst the aforementioned genres. Sure, a lineage exists between the label and kindred outfits (New Albion springs to mind), but the artistic bar set by Cold Blue, in rendering a worldwide schemata of 21st century “new Californian classicism,” is perched awfully high, out of reach and envied by its peers. Fahres’s The Tubes is a tremendously dense listening experience. The ear tends to become so fused to the environmental ambience created that only further listens can attempt to unravel the enormous nuance layered beneath the obvious sonic discourse. Unlike bedroom ambient dronecrones who must fictionalize their tableaux, Fahres draws his sounds from direct interaction between his chosen ‘scapes and their indigenous fauna. Sacred tones all, these recordings are poster children for how to design beauteous sonics that reflect the proper amount of stylized classical sheen without becoming blinded by the light. Both “Sevan” and “Coimbra 4, Mundi Theatre” juxtapose voices stretched tautly across timbral planes by gossamer-like strands of tube-blown wind and hushed magisterial cadences. But it is the mammoth, 30-minute title track that comprises the recording’s centerpiece. Awesome in its scope yet minimal in its undertaking, “The Tubes” reverberates along breathtaking gulfs of oceanic drift, augmented by trumpeter Jon Hassell’s singularities and Mark Atkin’s psychedelic didg palpitations. As an exercise in maintaining a lively, lovely, pristine soundspace that literally congeals and ovulates during its lifespan, this half-hour magnum opus has few parallels; for full-on, enveloping atmospherica, it’s positively riveting. Lentz’s engages in a wide-eyed synthesis of Steve Reichian minimalism and a holy avant choral music throughout On the Leopard Altar. Baroque in flavor, arranged similarly to that style but entrenched firmly in the present thanks to his keyboards and Moog programming, Lentz is obviously a hopeless romantic—or perhaps hopelessly ecstatic. His music attains flight very quickly, and with little excess baggage (aside from the strident keyboards, the multi-tracked vocals are augmented by tuned wineglasses), yet it’s possessed of such joyful abandon that despite the paucity of sonic events at play (the drone canopies of “Lascaux”) the whole enterprise comes off as one elegaic noise. I prefer the more austere phrases Lentz culls from his works; too much of anything, no matter how lustrous it sounds—particularly the massed angelic vocals adorning the regal refrains of the title piece—doesn’t necessarily connote an aural corpus delecti. Nevertheless, the labyrinthine twinklestars of “Wolf Is Dead” give some of Reich’s trucks in such manners a good run for their money, nearly displacing the master’s original conceptualizations by dirth of sheer frenzied energy. Frugal, footloose and fancy-free. Pianist and multi-instrumentalist Palestine is one of the denizens of the new classicism, cutting his teeth on the Cage of the 60s avant-garde. Part and parcel of academia’s electronic aestheticism, for the longest time he’s been sand rather than oil in the great musical mechanizations of decades come and gone. Love him or leave him, his works can paradoxically dazzle or frustrate, both elements pivoting on the mood expressed by performer and observer. Recorded in front of a live audience, this 40-minute work features Palestine clanging away simultaneously on two Yamaha grand pianos, erecting competing note clusters the fraying edges of which teetering at the precipice of dissonance. Spread out across its immense length, the lugubriously titled piece fairly epitomizes one of art’s mandates: confrontationalism, at any cost. The tones here spiral out of control to cacophonous ends, ends that fail to justify the means. Eventually the attack becomes so overwhelming that decay isn’t just welcomed it’s practically begged for—enduring the totality of the session’s marathon is enough to set your teeth on edge. Surely Palestine’s point entirely. The Cold Blue axiom reorients itself thanks to the Death Valley desert ambience of Chas Smith’s quite listenable sojourns. Using found objects and noisemakers in the spirit of Eno’s finest tradition—jet plane, copper box, Pez eater, stainless steel sheet—marrying them to some smartly played steel guitars and then electronically manipulating the hell out of the whole assemblage, Smith concocts some fiery, ripping-good drone-o-spheres. “Descent” literally takes you down to the seventh level of Hell, the walls painted dripping-red, where stark resonances echo off the strata where they are gradually sucked into depths of abyssal dimensions. “Endless Mardi Gras” is like being caught in the eye of a tornado, eyes transfixed on the detritus whirling about; and when the storm dies down, what’s left is the sound of liquified earth decomposing. Then the sunshine returns on “Lost Clarity” to provide some measure of guidance through the fogbank, timbers of dawn sluicing through the darkness. What a gargantuan chamber hall to get lost in, a sense of largesse that razes the senses. Cold and Blue, being lowered into this maelstrom is one trip worth taking. (DB) • www.coldbluemusic.com Back To Top FLANGER Nuclear Jazz (Nonplace) • Minimalism begets minimalism: Detroit devotee Richie Hawtin commands the movements of hundreds of small samples as honey would help herd ants. Bombast begets bombast: Girl Talk currently fashions bravado out of impossibly big, cheesy pop and rap riffs, at last making mashups and their hip-hop roots cool for Indie Kid Nation. Reconstitution of the funk in all its forms neither begins nor ends here, but it may indeed do both thanks to Flanger. Formed in Santiago, Chile studios in 1997 by Uwe Schmidt (of Atom Heart among others) and Burnt Friedman, the duo speak loudly and grandly on behalf of the pixellation of jazz. Nuclear Jazz is itself a reconstitution of the Flanger catalog that started on Ntone and Ninja Tune, compiling and editing 1999's Templates and 2000's Midnight Sound into a mesmerizing hybrid of the organic and the synthetic that simultaneously connects to and pushes away from jazz and the flora where it forms the root (funk, acid jazz, jungle, trip-hop). Flanger guides electronic manipulations and their own studio recordings down a path to avoid repetition at most if not all costs. The opening glitches and New Wave pads of "Music to Begin With 1" may suggest that the album's about to go electro all the way, but the music suddenly expands to recall the vibraphone of Ayers and Hampton, the keys of DeFrancesco and Jimmy Smith. Much as one might try, any attempt to point to specific influences on Flanger's lively drum and bass parts would be fruitless as both are overtaken by clicks and cuts and, well, drum'n'bass, especially in the front portion of Nuclear Jazz featuring the Templates recordings. Witness "Short Note with a Few," which in the real world might be a six-minute high-hat solo, or the dub transformation of "Full On Scientist;" you're never quite sure what's been lifted, filtered, or played straight through. That camouflage is best worn on the second, Midnight Sound half. Flanger's recording setting truly takes hold of them on the Latin stylings of "Bosco's Disposable Driver" and "Midnight Sound" before they devolve into digital noise and ambient improv, respectively, while "Nightbeat" and "Human Race Race" are their takes on the spy-music exotic. The one questionable abridgement: The duo's version of Miles Davis' "So What" has been excised from this collection in favor of a solid but ultimately tangential remix of Gak Sata's "Tangram." We can only deduce the absence of the jazz standard is meant to confirm that Flanger stands on their own and not on the shoulders of giants. Not "nuclear" so much as "radioactive," Flanger's beginnings may not have been explosive but their legacy should be a long, lingering one. (AB) • www.nonplace.de Back To Top MATTHEW FLORIANZ Niemandsland (H/S Recordings) • Matthew Florianz's eleventh release sees him in somber world-weary mood, that’s if we go by his identification of “what has been going on in the Netherlands and the larger world surrounding it” as being behind the initial ideas inspiring Niemandsland. And well might he entitle this collection “No Man's Land,” for these articulations of wild and windswept wastes inhabit a space actively prohibitive of feelings of home or belonging, like the Hic Sunt Leones of the old cartographers. The signature sound of this region is one of billowing smear-drones ranging across the soundstage, enshrouding the listener in a foggy blur, driving inward to isolationist-inclined questing or outward to frown-on-the-void dystopia. The accompanying visuals reinforce atmospherics and issue pointers to a specific affective place—monochromatic, austere neo-expressionist rather than minimalist, at times almost like a forlorn ceremonial. An air of something like desolation imbues the proceedings, at times seemingly portending some barely-envisioned eclipse of humanity, at others, with its elemental sounds of wind and naturalia providing an extra timbral element to pitched material, seemingly expressive of environmental ferment. “Herfst” hoists up a shifting and shimmering curtain of sound with sustains whose textures are strangely both delicate and gritty, simultaneously pristine and grubby. Continuing thematic flow is “Spiegel” with its ominous low drone that slowly streams into upper-end radiance, edges roughened and tainted with echo-feedback. The materiality of Florianz’s work on Niemandsland is one of meshed layers, some dissonant but staying on the side of the grainy and glurpy, others more conventionally musical, but with consonant harmonic material distinctly more reticent than on best-known work, Grijsgebied. The extensive field recordings here, such as deployed on the cavernous void-outfolding of “Verdwaald” and “Niemandsland” itself, signal a departure from the mainly synthetic drone-based work of recent years. The latter, an 18-minute brooder, too epic to be merely ambient, subtly mutates and evolves into a massive cloud of tuned air mixed with chord-rush to occupy a space not far removed from Roach’s Magnificent Void. Having quietened to a virtual lull, it regroups its forces, sonorously rising in a fabulous upsurge to close in what feels like a lightening of the skies after a laregly tenebrous voyage. It shows how versatile an orchestrator of flow and drift Florianz is, capable of hymning the heavens, should he choose, but on Niemandsland it’s predominantly a willful, almost portentous, bleakness and an earthly disquiet that seems the obscure object of his muse’s desire. (AL) • www.matthewflorianz.com Back To Top FREIBAND Leise (Cronica) • Much music prods at the spirit of the child, that fatuous pendant, which has since been mired in so many petty proclivities. Taking root in young Elise’s pussyfooting around with sheets of metal, paper, sticks, plastic and other musical and nonmusical instruments, one might be quick to lump this work in with all the others who profess a penchant for all matters Arcadian and puerile. Frans de Waard employs a quietly skewed approach to his daughter’s raw source sounds, though. The ensuing works do not deal in binaries, they are not charted against a child/adult axis. In rather subtle fashion, they spin delicate webs of glissandi, shadowy half-melodies, and doodling percussion. A music of different connections, of polyvalent elements, then. And not a moment too soon—Leise charms for its consistent ability to allow a digital glint to penetrate and shiver through Elise’s warm, clattery textures like a brisk wind through the trees. The euphoria of children at play is her, but focused, done up by Waard’s make-up kit, rendered scarcely recognizable and, at times, something else altogether. Only when the so-called real childishness shows through does the album stumble, but these moments are few and far between. “Paarden” is a chorus of shimmering electrons that are simultaneously elegant and studious while the sonorous frequencies of “Vuur” dwell within a tangled network of hissing and undergo a series of undulating phase shifts. Other tracks nurse granular drones and distant metallic clangs; while yet others border on being downright flinty. Composed of a fractured loop and thumbnail digital scratches, “Daisee” opens up into a dense wall of vapor that is decidedly neutral and calming. Singing “toot toot” on the final track of this work, Elise’s voice bookends an album which is many things in-between. (MS) • www.cronicaelectronica.org Back To Top HEAVY LIDS Things Are Happening At the Same Time (Dragon’s Eye) YANN NOVAK Decibel 06 (Dragon’s Eye) Meadowsweet (Dragon’s Eye) Intermission (Dragon’s Eye) YANN NOVAK / GRETCHEN BENNETT The East River Project Vol. 1 (Dragon’s Eye) NOVAK / DROUIN Auditorium (Dragon’s Eye) SON OF ROSE Top Flight (Dragon’s Eye) VARIOUS ARTISTS Paper (Dragon’s Eye) • Sound artisan Novak’s been making quite a splash this past year or two in and about the Seattle vacuum. In fact, the Pacific Northwest’s been gesticulating so vibrantly, theirs is installation art with a vengeance: we’re not talking ear canal assault per se, but Novak, his label and their roster of artists are, if anything, shaking the foundations. Quietly so, though; a good portion of the music released across the Dragon’s Eye bandwidth investigates the microplasma of sound, the ensuing “melee” echoes of determined folks proceeding apace in the urban moderne surrounding the Space Needle. Someone’s been whispering in the ear of Marc Manning, he of the moniker Heavy Lids, and that someone must be Phill Niblock, because Manning loves making the same kind of jet-engine rush showers as the illustrious Mr. N. Debate might reign about whether or not Things Are Happening At the Same Time indeed during the disc’s galvanic 36+ minutes. Manning starts off quiet enough, but the atmosphere grows toxic and spreads its fallout quickly, great guitar drone monsters gnashing their teeth at the sheets of acid rain pouring out of the sky. Cacophonic is a woefully inadequate adjective here; hard to imagine what types of objets d’art (photographs, actually) this installation music accompanied, but those in the vicinity surely exited black, battered and blue. Manning’s influence supersedes in time to prevent the abrasive respirations from descending into sinusoidal chaos, though, like Niblock’s example, this kind of stuff rattles the mercury out of your incisors just as efficiently. Layers abound, texture is mapped and expurgated, repeated listenings reveal multitudes—fair enough, but one can’t escape the reality that there’s plenty of this sort of thing being ground out, drilled down and given over to shelf space already selling at a premium. Labelmeister Novak is something of an enigma; he plopped into the “scene” out of nowhere, keeping the underground DIY ethic alive via the label’s post-generational heritage. Mystery or no mystery, the man’s contributions to our little-ceded corner of the electronic playroom is notable for its versatility and idea-ological actualization; treading beyond the installation or the studio, he’s become a fulcrum for his metropolis’ avant-garde. Working the room achieves a plethora of meanings during his 40-minute set culled from last year’s Decibel festival. Lost in euphoric reverie, the artist becomes signifier and signifiee—what begins as regenerative torrents of white noise intrudes upon the space, shifting time, toying with what is imagined and truly heard. A drone, yes, but when the halfway point hits, the phasic pulses that arise out of the murk joins the pieces of the puzzle together in a brilliant display of improvisatory mixing. Eliminating audience ambience hardly diminishes the effect of Meadowsweet, where Novaks tugs and pulls on the elasticity of the music at his leisure. Piggybacking the haunted audio that can only be found deep in the chassis of an RCA radio to a series of cautious atmospheres, Novak teases out faint “rhythmic” ephemera that waft onto the soundstage like escaping argon gas. Serene except for the nagging sense of tension limning the curtains of chiming software feedback, “Before the Storm” and both parts of “A Long Goodbye” paint images of machines purging their angst in solitary, their weeping the stuff of soaring electrostatic and defibrillated fuzz—superb. Considered away from the physical space they were originally designed to accompany, both the Intermission and Auditorium discs are two parts of the same parcel, Eno’s On Land stripped of the land, music for empty airports. Intermission’s 60 (minute) cycle hum epitomizes both Brian E’s definition and Satie’s precepts regarding “furniture music.” The drones here simulate the respiration of a giant’s lungs, pensive movements of clammy air that assume fictional shapes, suggestive of things heard but unseen, tangible and palpable to the touch. Registers set at the intended low volume, this symphony of minimalist existentialism wreaks a subtly hypnotic havoc on the inner ear, and is totally immersive sans its tactile raison d’etre. Auditorium’s soundwaves ripple more malevolently—this invert “maximalist” music is the cochlea of that giant’s ear vibrating like an earthquake’s aftershocks. I can imagine that the fluttering bass frequencies grounding this recording made for uneasy listening in the art-space. At home, the surrounding affectations don’t get in the way of the speaker cones, which tremble under the weight of the steam blasts and disintegrating hisses that emerge from Novak and Droun’s hiccuping harddrives. The collaboration with Bennett, the 27-minute “Brooklyn in Seattle (altered),” continues Novak’s obsession with bringing cityscapes to febrile life. Using Bennett’s recordings of Brooklyn’s traffic noise, street tonalities and random urban didactics, Novak’s resultant sonic canvas transmutes the brick and mortar landscape into something alien and exotic yet puzzlingly familiar, Brooklyn as viewed through the tattered celluloid of Blade Runner, tics, wisps and clicks simulating a Gotham acid rain. Housed in an ultra-white digipak embossed in a bas relief of the lower borough, only 25 of these spectral jewels were minted—well worthy of acquisition. Unlike Novak’s subversive atmospherica, Son of Rose (aka Kamran Sadeghi) tickles the auditory senses much in the same way as Carsten Nicolai and the whole Raster-Noton crew. Waves of hyperactive pinprick dances, interruptive dialtones, and banks of computerized stratocumulus clouds inform the nine ‘ware-housed tone poems comprising Top Flight. Adapting the meaning of his artistic guise, Rose’s tracks are thorny bits of agitated flotsam, the types of clean yet visceral noises Ryoji Ikeda, PanSonic and Alva Noto bathe in on a regular basis. Unlike those chaps, Rose’s tracks eschew rhythm and opt for a more sedentary posture; his thick drones, when not disinterred by walls of digital brillo, scatter laterally across the spectrum in carefully sculpted wedges of triumphant noise. A Rose by any other name surely won’t sound as sweet, evidenced further by Sadeghi’s atomizing contribution to the label’s Paper comp, “Reunion,” which finds the composer’s strangulated noise loops spiralling ever upward in angelic, concentric circles. He’s in fine form here, as are fellow label entrees Wyndel Hunt (EKG beeps lost in bell trills), Yann Novak (low-key hushush ancient ambience), Tyler Potts (superstring loops cascading over Photoshopped waterfalls), Heavy Lids (crippled bloops dripping amongst Minamo-esque un-guitars) and Ear Venom, who finish the collection off with “Smasher & the Harar Horse,” forcefeeding enough “medieval” scrim and forestral ambulatory distortion to soundtrack an old Sam Raimi zombie pic. Soft (and stealthly) come the Dragons, indeed. (DB) • www.dragonseyerecordings.com Back To Top KAPOTTE MUZIEK & LETHE Tsurumai (Intransitive) • The muse behind Kapotte Muziek—another long-standing project of the many-faced Frans De Waard—is the fractal, the fragment, the sliver which subverts the whole. The music is one which has been diffracted into a multitude of atoms, bits of sound, pure information, which seeps out from silence and seeks to bedhop and reproduce itself to infinity. The work begins with expansive fields of silence. The close editing and sharp clipped lines from Kuwayama Kiyoharu, aka Lethe, are judiciously brought to bear upon this space, bringing out its mass, its tension, and its obscenity. The confines of this space is worked out by an appropriately restrictive sound palette, consisting of unconventional percussion instruments, modulated white noise, and high-pitched scrapes and screeches. The second track in particular utilizes minimal yet overwrought tape manipulation and echo to fashion a fittingly desolate and oppressive interiority. De Waard meanwhile stands on the outside looking in, deploying abrasive textures which haunt and toy with the internal stresses and slants of Kiyoharu. As the album ages, an increasing mobility shrinks this lethargic silence, and pieces take on a heated orbital velocity. Other boundary lines blur in the process: foreground and background all but evaporate, micro and macro forms find a certain reversibility, and the abstract and the figurative are entwined. Similarly, whereas Waard initially acted by providing a fascinating and complex backdrop to the narration sketched by Kiyoharu, he too is now incorporated, brought down on to the stage, and made to act. No longer about interaction and leering objectification, a pure concern for tones and cadence remains, tones which are sibilant, metallic and, in a word, gruesome. This latter chapter in the album is confrontational, though measured and sophisticated all the same. As the dive-bombing squeals and volcanic rumblings begin to escape from gravity, they pass beyond a certain threshold and implode, leaving only a residue of silence and hostility in their wake. (MS) • www.intransitiverecordings.com Back To Top JEFFREY KOEPPER Momentium (Air Space) • The sequencer. For many a synthesist worldwide, the ideal tool of choice whether in modes of composition, improvisation, or simply the right thing to strike up when the iron’s hot. Streams of repetitive, pre-programmed notes, endlessly undulating, seething, tumbling; 30 years ago, an entire reference point and “movement” within electronic music’s mainframe was built on the dull-black fascia of this piece of hardware, making instant percussionists and futuristic synth warriors out of way too large a segment of the population to be counted here. Post-70s, “traditional sequencer-based” music (that is, of the Schulze/Tangerine Dream argot) became cliché real fast—in lesser hands, the sequencer has been singlehandedly responsible for some of the most dreadfully mindless lathes ever cut. Relatively effortless programmability being the machine’s stock-in-trade has often run counter to the resultant sonic input; the casual knob twiddler sitting astride the module has tarnished so much of the sequencer’s reputation that what’s left of its value has been essentially rendered moot in many quarters. So the question is begged: what of Jeffrey Koepper, who splashes his equipment inventory across Momentium’s digipak backside loudly and proudly, working a tech-geek’s ardent fetish objects into maximum overdrive, the seqs enthusiastically sharing living space with a whole herd of Oberheims, Rolands, Arps, etc.? Koepper’s new on the scene, record-wise—Momentium is only his second release, but it’s a whopper. Koepper wears his admiration (and obvious musicianly skill) for his sundry devices like a badge of honor. Unlike his European contemporaries, he’s neck-deep in love with his electronics, wants to take them places they’ve never gone before, using the principles of the past to catapult what the machines can do to shock the new. In other words, this is unabashed synth-sequencer music pure and simple, created without pretension yet keenly aware of history—and don’t forget the old maxim that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Koepper’s keen to foment what his analogue wizards are capable of. You might very well recognize motifs and languages spat out from a dozen nameless albums across the decades, but if a grindhouse guitar band can work the same tired riff ad infinitum, why can’t the able-bodied synthesist? Koepper does one better: he frees his mind so his ass can follow. The rhythmic thwack and pull of his duelling waveforms (cutting like scythes right from the opening “Byzantine Machine”) stimulate the pelvic as much as the parietal. Abetted both literally and philisophically by Steve Roach (who mastered the final product and provides some discrete textures and enhancements), Koepper knows how to make his machines rock: “Sequential Meditation,” all eleven minutes of it, is pure synthcore, the tense, slowly perambulating metallic patterns achieving an Escher-like fluidity that deftly mimics old-world fundamentalist trance music with equally hypnotic gravitas. Lock, load, and blast off. (DB) • www.jeffreykoepper.com Back To Top FRANCISCO LOPEZ Untitled (2004) (M-oso) • Relentless, unsentimental, unsettled and unsullied by the affectations of musical form, Untitled gathers nine pieces derived from raw audio files and remakes/remodels them as some nearly perfect needle-drop/foley resource for the industrial settings of early period Lynch films. Industrial to a fault and resisting the urge to name anything—and by naming imply any meaning beyond the here and present audio—these pieces reach a level of the quite nearly unbearable within the boundaries of their frankly constructed and arranged soundstages. Lopez does not blink in the face of playing with a growing, even grinding sense of irritation that can only match the experience of working in some sweat shop that ceaselessly cranks out ridiculous refrigerator magnets for the idiot massmarkets of the Ascendant West. First stop: the strip mall. Second: Mom’s kitchen. Third: the landfill. There are no indications of any instrumental presence here, no softening of the edges or reducing the found sounds to some supporting or decorative role. The technique is invisible. The praxis is admirable. And depending on where you live, this music may be already within earshot. Day and night, like it or not. (KL) • www.m-oso.net Back To Top MAJU Maju-4 (Extreme) TERMINAL SOUND SYSTEM Compressor (Extreme) • For a record label with a name like Extreme Music, one might expect as much of a din made during the release and promotion process as during the production of music itself. This is far from the case. Despite trading in loudly broken ethnic, electronic, and jazz conventions, Extreme tends to sneak up on you. The present and deleted lineup quietly incorporates some titans of the industry: Fetisch Park, Shinjuku Thief, Soma, Vidna Obana, Jim O'Rourke, Nobukazu Takemura. Hold a new release in your hand and the distinctive markings will trigger the repressed memory of similarly holding Muslimgauze's United States of Islam sixteen years prior. With just over forty active titles after two decades of existence, the Melbourne outfit and its leader Roger Richards attempt to keep the focus on quality rather than quantity. The lone exception, Merzbox, blends both in an exhaustive fifty-disc collection of Merzbow's mastery of noise. Sakana Hosomi represents a form of Japanese experimentation quite different from that of Merzbow. Since 1997 his Maju outfit has toyed with the rhythmic and melodic, the results being three sequentially numbered albums of lovingly crafted hybrids that reside somewhere between Krautrock and prog-rock—without question some of the most comfortable music in the Extreme catalog. The year 2003 saw Masaki Narita join Sakana, and what has followed—Maju-4—makes sharp the musical right turn that began previously on Maju-3. The beats swiped from so many subgenres are just about gone, and the song structures are fuzzy at best. There's a point to that, though. It's not obvious from anything on or in the album, nor in anything Sakana or Extreme has discussed about it, but on many levels Maju-4 seems to represent the nautical: the creaks of ships big and small, decrepit harbors and ports, wood and metal wrapped in hazy storms and fog. Proper song titles have been obliterated, leaving behind only characters that recall codes and call signs fighting to be understood through flecked paint and rust. The dark ambient atmospheres of "HKTM" ping like sonar or bobbing buoys; those of "CLD" lap at listeners' ears as waves on hulls, or Morse code coming across a wire. Loops of interference hide dreamlike Siren songs on "#4" and "RST02." The last three tracks are strung together, the centerpiece of the sequence and the album being "OSK," recalling the buzz of a naval control room fighting with and eventually being taken over by a melodic drone—representing the antiquated foghorn, stretched to the point of distortion?—until static attempts to drown everything out. Red October, welcome to the Bermuda Triangle; more than any other Maju release, Maju-4 has a purpose and theme, following Sakana's once-stated ideal of creating "music to stimulate imagery." While Maju's most accessible period may be behind them, Terminal Sound System hopes their time is yet to come. Compressor, the first Extreme album from the project that keeps Australia's Skye Klein busy when he's not making doom metal with Halo, has a fighting shot. TSS actually fits the morose low end of drill'n'bass into the melodic structure of both "Gridlike" and "Clip Incident"—edit the ends a bit and they could reach industrial clubs or specialty radio. "722" and "Ghost Summer" show Klein attempting to reconcile downtempo sensibilities with junglist fury; "Black Note," too, although here Klein also imagines what Buddy Rich might have done if he could hit disembodied clicks with his sticks. "Mi Clatter" adds spiraling saxophone to the mix, the dark bassline talking to the listener, a ghostly jazz combo haunting its audience. Neatly constructed out of the best (or worst, depending on who's doing the telling) of Kid606, Venetian Snares, and latter-day Richard D. James, Compressor combines the uplifting and the austere with the highly abrasive. To its credit, work like that is a perfect fit for the Extreme ouevre. (AB) • www.xtr.com Back To Top OVERDOSE KUNST Non-Form Material Machine (Postmoderncore) • Weirdorama, to say the least, of this half-hour EP from mysterious Japanese sources. Like The Blair Witch Project set to music, Non-Form Material Machine is as ectoplasmic as its title. Apparently this bunch (individual?) revere ongaku as fervently as the haunted film stock hastily affixed to the dusty crevasses of this work. “Medium’s Message” does a three-sixty away from the caterwauling muted noisefeasts of the opening track, a kind of twisted blues to accompany a tokyo chainsaw massacre. “Deemployed” is a ten minute bafflement of software-stressed existential dread, powered-down powerplant dub that’s been bitch-glitched across a shortwave dial, sounds the wails of seagulls skeet-shot out of a grey sky; then auralus interruptus occurs, in the ghost of John Fahey tickling away the twilight. “464” might be the number of Overdose Kunst’ bested beast—perhaps a Gorgon? Treading too close to an industrialized ambient Yes, its Steve Howe guitars finally devolve in the closing three minutes into some ghastly assemblage of banshee yells climbing like rising thermals upwards to infinity, finally lost in a morass of electronic distortion and heavy metal guitar scree: prog’s exquisite corpse resurrected via PanSonic? The label’s called Postmoderncore; tongue stumbles over cheek, yet the moniker befits the music to a tee. Beats me what it means, though. (DB) • usyugana.hp.infoseek.co.jp/ovk.shtml Back To Top PANTHA DU PRINCE This Bliss (Dial) • The build-up of pseudo-critical flotsam ingested through daily net-grazing can be like a smokescreen, obfuscating instead of illuminating. Worse still, it spins things into weird orbits. Take Hendrik Weber (the artist presently known as du Prince). Till lately, he was no more than an interesting moderne Tanzmeister, whose Diamond Daze Dial debut had effectively trailed his talent, notwithstanding a too ardent love for another’s blueprint: that postmodern romantech mope-house patented by Lawrence, and subsequently Kompakt-ed by Superpitcher (on Today) and Mayer (on Immer). That was before. This is after, and some kind of mini-wave of Panthaism meanwhile seems to have spread web-wide. ’Zine-sters speak in tongues, in some weird pseudo-political trance. Adepts hymn Weber’s creation of a mythic “other space” (in a club), invoking Foucault’s “counter-positions or points of resistance.” Well, it’s not that politics and dance-music haven’t been similarly coupled before. It’s that this spillage of Foucault into Falco seems like the stuff of a casual drive-by Cultural Studies hit. Remember, this is Hendrik Weber, not Max (no relation), pioneer of modern sociology. No put-down, just perspective. Let’s get this straight. This young DJ-producer-composer is no Deconstructionist Dance Deity. This Bliss, a recording supposedly centring on a radical de-centring of House and Techno, is, to the agnostic, just a minimal tech-house album with a sleek sheen. What’s it all about? De rigueur sub-genre references (Parrish, Moodymann) are all present and correct; tech-house bones are fleshed with faddish fragments of dreampop-shoegaze (MBV, Slowdive, natch) and modish minimalism (Riley). Good start: off-beat percussivity and crystalline echoes enlivening a propulsive “Asha,” all glassine cascades of bell-chime and dulcimer pluck. “Saturn Strobe” is similarly inclined, the rhythmatics of delay setting off a catherine wheel of hi-hat sparks, interweaving chimes and synco-bass, over elegiac strings. These tracks do hint at shadow-worlds of intoxicated dissolution beyond the dancefloor where Soma and Psyche merge. But the vision fades. “Walden 2” and its upclose 4/4 kick and sharp-as-flick click-snare plays host to lambent bell-chimes (note: bliss = chimes) and a synth-stab ballet, the whole a doppelgänger for Absence of Blight-era Lawrence (the greatest debt among several IOUs). The minimal “Moonstruck,” homage to Terry Riley, all woodblock’n’bleep phase-shifts, eastern tongues converted to western values, lingers in limbo. “Urlichten” already flags halfway into its 12-minute longueur, ambition overreaching delivery. Hubris is evidently Weber’s deadliest sin as a modest concept is thinly over-stretched. On the final “Seeds of Sleep,” Neu!, disco, and neo-Kraftwerkian synth-pop conspire to make a well-judged pastiche in a late bid to sway doubters. Cut back to hagiographic homepage homage, and itsauthorial posturing meeting obsequiousness to sell the uber-intellectuality and diamonds-furcoat-champagne allure of this Prince of post-techno post-digital Hip. Style a-plenty—now work on substance. (AL) • www.dial-rec.de Back To Top RAN SLAVIN The Wayward Regional Transmissions (Cronica) • The Wayward Regional Transmissions, though of a fascinating genesis, might be taken as an act of cultural appropriation. Conceived as a function of its unwaning reproduction, another element—Oriental Middle Eastern Music —is exhumed and takes a whirl around the Mobieus strip. There is a certain pleasure in all this promiscuous play, though. And, as it happens, Ran Slavin does not simply embrace a soggy eclecticism, but often crafts a vibrant gestural language from these disparate musical surfaces. The medium may be the message, then, but at this point, the content still manipulates it so as to relay some subtle effects. Opener “Village” erects a malleable, unpredictable surface, stimulated by a kaleidoscope of shifting instrumental colors and the raucous yet restrained ebullience of Slavin’s digital clicks and stutters. A welter of other tracks favor slowly morphing repetitions and a faint rhythmic sensibility; others opt to juxtapose shimmering textures with the crisp virtuosic attacks of Ahuva Ozeri, who lends the voice of her three-steel string indian instrument, the Bulbul Tarang, to many of Slavin’s compositions. On “Shelters And Peace,” if only for brief moments, the Bulbul Tarang peeks through the processing and exudes a ritualistic aura, yet even then, carefully placed against the queasy loops, slowly extended harmonic explorations and placid tones, it dwells on another plane, one devoid of oxygen, where its many copies serve to render them all artificial and which open the door to numerous reconfigurations. On the other hand, these elements from Oriental Middle Eastern undeniably gives Slavin much to play with—and that he does, having them snake and swirl through the seismic force of his programming, adding many shades and creating a rhapsodic aura. Slavin isn’t exactly showing disrespect to these traditions, but, much the way most everything is now commutable into computer terms, he is trying to sow them into the fabric of his own musical language. Over the course of the album, these elements enter the eternity of artificial memory—a utopia where Oriental Middle Eastern music and abstract electronica exist amiably—and they look strangely at home there. (MS) • www.cronicaelectronica.org Back To Top VARIOUS ARTISTS Defining Moments (Chillosophy) • Lately it seems difficult for Sweden to make a musical mistake; even their rock acts haven't melted under the glare of the rest of the world. Plans for global domination have their pitfalls and drawbacks, however, and a compilation heralding Stockholm's new Chillosophy Music label introduces them. Defining Moments is its name as well as its game, as label founders Sebastian Mullaert (aliases include Ooze, Son Kite, Minilogue, DJ Seb) and Daniel Skantze (Fingertwister, DJ Mason) look to snare breath-catching instants in the wide net they cast into downbeat music—wherever that is. While artists on the label might be able to point to parts of their year's worth of Chillosophy-specific catalog and claim "I am a 3:00 A.M. catalyst for emotional change!" the tastemaking that went into this particular collection does little to prove that. Dollboy and Anders Ilar provide the only revelatory tracks, their respective indie-tronica and minimal house pedigrees salvaging the tail end of the album. Other high points here need to reference other high points from music at large: Omnimotion's "Japan" remix is sweeping dub that recalls the post-rave renaissance of the early 1990s (One Dove, anybody?), while Kritical Audio's "Krupp" is destined to make a mint only because it grafts the Ed Banger sound-of-the-moment onto an arrangement dangerously similar to Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker." Beyond that, nothing here breaks new ground; some of it barely breaks a sweat. Shuffling rhythms clutter and overpower anything remotely "down" in tracks such as Icotec's "Rellik." The chiming cut keys that start Ooze's "Random Wondrous Things" eventually smooth out to the glossy sheen of violin plucks and the nasal, breathy anonymity of Tishk's vocals—a good idea gone unfulfilled. Then there are the bad ideas, plain and simple: Analogik's cover of The Beatles' "Because" is a weak, trifling merger of acid jazz and tango, while Pan Electric's low-key ethnic ambience long ago reached critical mass through the wailing vocals of Deep Forest and Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. With various flavors of Mullaert and Skantze performing a third of these songs themselves, Defining Moments also smacks of a vanity project. If vanity is indeed the devil's favorite sin, as Al Pacino once intoned on film, these two might reserve a special place in Hell for wasting an opportunity to highlight the promise and potential they claim to embrace. (AB) • www.chillosophymusic.com Back To Top ZIMIAMVIAN NIGHT Zimiamvian Night 2 (Infraction) • Another Zimiamvian Night rolls out from the gathering shadows of small-town Ohio. The story starts as one of trans-global email bonding, its protagonists, Bennett (US) and Orczy (NZ), in a communication shuttle of unknowing, moving toward a not-yet-dreamt-about dream. Christopher Orczy, unsung Harmonium Hero, cloistered in Canterbury year-long, documented the mysteries of that humblest of keyboards through a series of 12 CDs. From which small beginnings big things grow, and fast-forward now to happy ending in the form of ZN2. To cut an already stunted story short, Bennett (Mike to his Mum), got to tear out a soundpage or two from Orczy’s Harmonium Diaries for ZN’s contribution to Orczy’s remix disc, Altered Days, the resulting piece, “A Little Flower In October,” providing the prologue here. But it’s “October The First Is Too Late” that takes up the bulk of this recording. Here Bennett re-fashions Orczy’s harmonium hum, with some arcane treatments of his own, into a veritable NewDriftWorld. Now those who know of the Night’s earlier outing will recall a sepulchral work wherein liminal guitar-drone was dredged from a darkplace of malignant manipulation. It effectively located Bennett among the Stygian ranks of that post-industrial fog-bothering collective—analog artisans with deceptively ordinary names like Potter, Chalk, and Tate making faintly troubling outsider soundtracks. ZN’s debut might have frightened off more than the children and horses, but the squeamish need fear no more, for that sooty undershadow trawl is, if not a distant memory, then an effectively repressed nightmare. ZN2 is in effect the Good Twin. So we may be swathed instead by the endlessly stretched-out diaphanous textures with underlying thrum which Bennett spools out before us; initially a lustrous warm-chill is established before eliminating the upper pitches (25 minutes in) in order to summon up the previously buried. No need to fret, though, for he then calls up other mid-pitched (organ-like) material which is twisted into extended curlicues of suspended (not major or minor key) resolution. This suspension avoids the easy lapse (of dark ambient knee-jerk notoriety) into the mournful or gloomy. Instead we have a kind of mysterious resonance—channeling a sonicization of the northern lights depicted on the cover of the synaesthetic package. It radiates slowly, without fadeaway, bathing the listening space in smouldering soundglow. Equations of eternity are made, as minimal motifs shift subtly in sound perspective. Zimiamvian Night 2 ultimately offers an hour of darkly fragrant room-tint and suggestive still-voyaging whose challenging near-stasis bears substantial reward for the seriously deep listener. (AL) • www.infractionrecords.com Back To Top |
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