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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 6 / May 2007
REVIEWED BY: AXOLOTL Way Blank (Psych-o-Path) DAN DEACON Acorn Master (Psych-o-Path) • Not nearly so malicious but about as erratic as its name implies, the Psych-o-Path label sends out from its New York home the occasional burst of creativity, grenades of sound to frag ears and convention alike. A good portion of the roster includes side projects and collaborators of Animal Collective, whose attempts to map the topography of experimentation onto the landscape of indie-rock have finally started to win them widespread acclaim (not to mention airplay beyond your typical college-radio freakouts). It's really the infrequency of the label's releases—folk in neo-, anti-, and acid- flavors, shifting electric and electronic noisescapes—that captures attention above and beyond any musical fearlessness. Sometimes less attention should be paid, as during Dan Deacon's thankfully brief application of reductio ad absurdum to, of all things, absurdist music on Acorn Master. With few flashes of seriousness or even serious musicianship, Deacon selects inspiration in the immature rather than the childlike—from cartoon images peppering the album art (classic Mickey and Spiderman, a self-portrait in the style of Tom Goes to the Mayor) to the fuzzy sample that slowly reveals itself as the signature giggles of Beavis and Butthead. His Alvin the Chipmunk vocal processing in an otherwise close-to-the-vest reading of 1960s novelty hit “Splish Splash” lowers the already questionable status of the original. “Big Big Big Big Big,” meanwhile, would be something of a standout had we not already seen disturbing lyric repetition and God-fearing overtones in They Might Be Giants' far superior “Particle Man.” Deacon classifes this as “fun time” music, but maybe the joy for listeners of the avant-garde is to find it on their own; Acorn Master may intend to be entertaining but being so up front about it makes this nineteen minutes of embarrassment, better spent elsewhere. Despite the presence of pieces that display little melody or, barring that, basic accessibility for even casual listeners, Axolotl's latest release Way Blank is in a different class, not just genre. It is serious drone, taken seriously by Karl Bauer. He crumbles his guitar and violin finer than My Bloody Valentine, often merging them with treated voice so all are camouflaged and indistinguishable within the framework of his interpretations of melody. “Pneuma (The Linking of the Unitary and the Discreet)” is a wailing siren song, about as close to a hit as experimentalism will allow. “Uroboros” updates Native American tribal dance with deep, scratchy pieces of rhythm before the actual sonic prayer (for rain, for battle) is recited in the song's back half. It doesn't always work—”Utriusque Capax” and its ilk more closely resemble some Dance of the Sugar-Plum Vacuum Cleaners—but then there are pieces like the title track, where a revelatory order creeps out of this chaos of stretched, strained, and looped feedback. (AB) • www.psych-o-path.com Back To Top BEAUTUMN Northing (Infraction) • Straddling the wall between ambient and melodic, Northing displays greater variety in approach and result than most “ambient” records. The overall feeling is prettily unsettled. There are few if any moments of extremes on display. No rush to either the disrupted sharp edges of contrast or to quicksandy strandings, waist deep, in sugary bowls of oatmeal. Beginning with a fairly formal dirge, “Steps” is both sombre and stately, as its sheer tonal exhalations drift across a deep, unpitched and widely gapped pulse. It’s the sort of piece that casts tendrils back to earlier electronic funeral musics, like Wendy Carlos’ “Time Steps” or the much poppier Kraftwerk classik, “Kometenmelodie”– intentionally or not. (“Kometenmelodie” is mentioned not just for its mood, but for the penchant so obvious then, of the use of reverb as a principle processing tool here.) In line with the idea of a more broadly contrasting collection, the following piece, “Feather Curler,” offers up a scratchy and crackling beat loop that throbs along without any specific or overt interaction with its own set of passing and harmonic clouds. So, the stage is set between these two poles of pure vertical and pure horizontal music and the various stages of combination and separateness and transition between them to be played out for the remainder of the disc, which is a convoluted way of saying that later there is specific interaction between beats and notes, and later still transitions that assemble and then discard such relationships. Most of the successes still occur in the vertical format. “October Café” is a good example of an ambience that is only deceptively reassuring and calm. And the transition from drifting from the steady state into more melodic tropes displayed by “Garlic Serendipity” seems to address the quintessential issue posed by Northing: that is the reconciliation of two such extremes and their resultant and varied hybrization. At times, the pieces become nearly too horizontal, with the melodic—almost tune-like—”Tebe” featuring a rather shuffling and standard use of percussion along with some simple phrasing on a bell-like voice which proves to be too plain, too naked and too familiar to generate the same level of interest and depth created by the more traditionally vertical pieces. Still, this alternation between the steady state and the more typically composed forms is an interesting and promising juxtaposition. As the term ambient becomes less and less meaningful, it will be recordings like Northing that begin to show an expansion in the breadth of the form. (KL) • www.infractionrecords.com Back To Top CIARAN BYRNE Galtrim (Psychonavigation) • When artists like Autechre emerge with a singular style, they leave a horde of clones in their wake (read: Arovane, Phonem, etc.), the latter, through diligence and creativity use preceding styles to develop their own distinct sound while not abandoning their influences. Dublin, Ireland based Byrne is easily a Boards of Canada fan; so much so that one might consider Galtrim a feat of reverse engineering.. Imitation is not necessarily a bad thing, as BoC has won over a following with their spooked-out melodies and haunting nostalgic samples. Where Byrne and BoC differ is that Byrne is a more accomplished keyboardist, hence more willing to go on melodic tangents that at times border on synth-pop. BoC on the other hand trumps him in the realm of beats though the latter does possess good rhythm structures, simply not as exceptional. If the listener is a BoC fan, particularly from the Music Has The Right to Children era, consider Galtrim a lost album. Differences between artists are hopefully indicators of stylistic independence instead of distinguishing characteristics where the copy is not like the original. Here’s hoping that Byrne’s future albums emphasize what makes the artist unique while leaving influences behind. (IK) • www.psychonavigation.com Back To Top TOD DOCKSTADER Aerial 3 (Sub Rosa) • The frankness of the 23 pieces assembled here, making up the final chapter of Dockstader’s Aerial trilogy, and the commitment to allowing the transformations which essentially comprise each of these titles to occur in plain sight, is encouragingly unsentimental. The pieces all exude a nearly manic focus on the surface, characteristics of the sound which then shifts to what can best be described as the constituent elements and aftereffects—literal “repercussions”—which comprise that sound. Rather than feature an ensemble or multi-voiced structure, virtually all the most successful music here is accompanied only by a shift in emphasis to its own intimations, inflections, implications and timbres. The parameters are set from the start: “Mutter” seems to be comprised of little more than some vast kettle drum, being struck at a very fast pace with a uniform attack. What fills in, creeps and seeps through and eventually dominates the soundfield is easily and convincingly defined as the various decays, resonances, secondary and tertiary timbres that comprise the starting sound, now transformed by nothing more affected that a shift in attention. This discipline guides the way through the pieces with an unwavering sang-froid. It’s easy to think that the lengths are determined precisely by the time it takes to let the transformations occur. The manner in which these transformations, or shifts, engage the listener is perhaps the most “musical” aspect of the whole exercise, because it is during those moments when the sense of a solo voice begins to interact with its own components that the illusions and reality of uncovering what we could call in any set of definitions, a structure—invented or self-deterministic—hints at being perceived. That this pared-down approach offers such intriguing and simultaneously comprehensible results is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Aerial 3. (KL) • www.subrosa.net Back To Top ELECTRIC WEST Drawing Plans for Delicate Evasion (Boltfish) • Idaho-based Pat Benolkin, with this Boltfish debut as Electric West, shows himself to be one of the more promising additions to the label’s lately expanding ambient-electronica roster. In fact, it’s a more downtempo, one might even venture “chilled” (though not, heaven forbid, “chillout”) release, than other recent Boltfish output, with a nice line in crepuscular atmospheres and slightly tenebrous (though never gloomy) textures. Benolkin’s previous work has been under the alias Eluder, with a low-profile release, Warm Warning, traces of whose appealingly narcotized ambience, bespeckled and veiled, is also in evidence here. Those seeking sonic reference points will reach to hang out the customary facile “Boards,” but to be fair that tag has been lazily stuck on many others seeking to operate in this populous area where psychedelic atmospheres and “weathered” textures are combined with carefully sculpted beats and driven towards the melancholy and the reflective. Some have been around longer and made a bigger name, but no one has a monopoly. One might more accurately relate Benolkin’s sensibility to that of a nearer peer, Milieu, another musician who switches with equal facility between IDM and beatless ambient modes. Both evidently share a liking for hitching scuffed environmentally-infused ambience to low-key broken-beat drum-derivations. Electric West as a sonic concept does not vary greatly in tonal spirit throughout, tending to work with understated low-attack pads, gauzy or occluded, often underpinned by pronounced dub-infused bass lines. A bleary-eyed “all passion spent” sound predominates, though it’s somehow not weary or wearisome. The presence of carefully assembled beat structures helps to lift and carry proceedings when they risk encroaching on the over-solemn (“Visiting Hour”), assisted elsewhere by sparing infusions of shimmering and glimmering timbres. At best, on “The North End,” Benolkin shows himself capable of rivalling the delicately orchestrated pastoral balladic beauty of er... those Scots blokes. “Pull The Drapes,” another highlight, draws you into a downcast dub daze that remains strangely diverting where in the hands of others it would be dispiriting. Overall, Drawing Plans For Delicate Evasion achieves the considerable feat of putting the outside world on hold for its 48-minute duration, lulling the listener into a sense of stunned security. It’s a tribute to Benolkin’s meticulous production that this deliberately undynamic, slight material can be as seductive and enfolding as it turns out to be. A case of the whole transcending its parts to become something far more. (AL) • www.boltfish.co.uk Back To Top LUCKY & EASY Hookahs (Ampoule) • first heard Lucky & Easy on Delsin Records, a label with a roster of artists that pays homage to early Detroit techno while emulating said style in a distinct way, being of an influence but not in it. Accordingly, tracks on Hookahs could pass for lost Model 500 or early Derrick May tracks, albeit on the more atmospheric side of the oeuvre. Amidst sometimes restrained though more often exuberant rhythms are washes of slow, bliss-filled techno melodies heated in dub chambers of echo and delay, the end result not unlike visitations from ghosts of techno past. These melodic ghosts have come to admonish with positivity instead of haunt, utilizing a palette of bright, shimmering notes and glowing sweeps. Rather than the darkness of Detroit urban environs and/or the futurist escapism inherent in the genre, Lucky & Easy suggest laid-back, sunny Sunday afternoons and walks through blossoming green parks. Hookahs may even be considered the destination of Detroit refugees who made it to happier lands, away from the crumbling Motor City. (IK) • www.ampoule.com Back To Top DANIEL MENCHE Animality (emd.pl) • You have to admire the premise of Animality, and its single-mindedness. While many are making music out of sound, Mr. Menche has decided to make sound out of music. The single, extended piece begins with a drumbeat that refuses pattern. As it layers over itself at different intervals of delay, the resulting moirés resist offering any sense of organization and begin to spin out several derivative harmonics which never manage to coalesce into a single pitch. This yields a sort of densely banged-up noise that bristles and softens without ever losing touch with its origin. A cycle of initiation and reaction results as newly introduced figures and the manipulation of their resultant decays/deformities shuffle through the numerous possible combinations, recombinations and juxtapositions. Between what the processing allows and what the math provides, a self-delimiting structure emerges that remains agitated throughout. Short of one pause near the center—a pause which indulges in some pitched information that stands out all the more startlingly due to the massive percussion-induced bookends that surround it—Animality continues without respite or compromise, impressive in the range of timbres and textures that are extracted from such severe constraints. The combination of these confines with their unrelenting insistence makes for the sort of listening best done standing up, eyes open. Breathlessly severe, the music lacks any of the kindnesses that round the edges of some of the more extreme reaches of experimentation, despite the predominance of the very human trait of hitting things, repeatedly. Whether or not this test of endurance has any chance of enduring remains to be seen. But in terms of theory and practice, Animality is flawless. (KL) • www.emd.pl Back To Top MONOTON Blau (Oral) • Blau is a timely re-release of an album first out in 1980, and now, over a quarter of a century later, this excellent work by Konrad Becker is no less relevant. Most material on Blau tends toward longish textural modulations culled from electronics as well as sax, violin, steel drum and early drum machines, forming minimalist shifts in sound with melodic overtones. Like a traditional techno track these pieces are repetitive but not unpleasantly so, hence trance-inducing Escher-esque patterns and drones emerge while off/on German vocals intone like some monastic devotee. Think what Underworld or Richie Hawtin might sound like if they were composing in the dawn of the 80s instead of over the past decade and a half. That said, tracks like “Minibeat” transcends timegaps and could just as easily belong on a Plastikman album with it’s timeless undulating electronic pulse. The deeply musical “Ein Wort” is the standout piece here, its catchy basslines and keyboard melodies coupled with a vocal refrain that in tandem slowly unfurls like smoke rings and lingers like incense, a true lost 80s classic. Blau is a piece of electronic music history filled with the prototypes of musical ideas still relevant, and continuing to progress forward, today. (IK) • www.oral.ca Back To Top MOUNTAINS Sewn (Apestaartje) • Pastoral and quiescent music of neatly perfect proportion, the Mountains assembled by Brendan Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp is the sort of work that gently but insistently pushes the doors open to a new vocabulary for an entire genre, and a more contemporized definition of beauty eschewing the clammy embrace of simplistic prettiness. The eight pieces on this concisely assembled album take on something of song form, though songs without words of course. The intermingling of acoustic, electronic and field sources is remarkably unaffected and unhindered by the more typical, and, to the right audience, familiar voicings from field/found/synthesized sound sorts and out-of-sorts. Pieces neither solemn nor playful alternate between the more recognizable softnesses of acoustic guitar arpeggios, electric guitar, piano, accordion, synth, harmonica, bell and other sources touched or untouched by the DAW. In turn, these inflections are smartly juxtaposed by still fitting, still unexpected sounds. As the sounds live their lives, a kind of breathing results, deep and sonorous, filled to the edges by what proves to be a comparatively small ensemble of voices allied in their clarity, their insistent on remaining separate yet still being such a willing part of the whole. This lack of clutter allows the pieces to feel and even act like a metaphor for the best aspects of chamber music. Relationships shift purposefully as the subsumed aspect of a guitar, once holding the foreground, later becomes the supporting surround for some further extrapolated suspension. These exchanges between familiar and unfamiliar sounds, in settings that so disarmingly casual are in fact the outcroppings of lots and lots of well-wrought ideas taking hold in utterly unobtrusive, highly refined and balanced yet still surprising ways. Everywhere the sound is lush in its presence, everywhere proportion feels ideally struck as delicacy in places made solid and still more fragile by the sheer acumen shown in combining voices or sounds provide contrast. And divergence in character also manages to display an equal and mysterious kinship to all the elements in near and far proximty. What Eno did for songs with Another Green World, Mountains has done for the instrumental exhortations of the still experimenting music of Sewn. Inside outness, forward and backward, soft and hard envelopes of instruments and the sounds around us, now made something other, seem settled within the summery shade of some great reassurance, and there exhales a generous air. (KL) • www.staartje.com Back To Top MUSLIMGAUZE Ingaza (Staaplaat) MUSLIMGAUZE Hafaz Al Assad (Staalplaat) • Bryn Jones, aka Muslimgauze, suffered from a malady called musical diarrhea and the multitude of labels he was on often had to struggle with ways to address the deluge of DATs flowing their way. Staalplaat elected at one point to release Box of Silk and Dogs, a nine-disc box set from which Ingaza and Hafaz Al Assad (now repackaged in splendid black paper triangles) are extracted. However ill-advised it is to individually re-release previously boxed material, for Muslimgauze fans with a limited budget here is another chance to obtain the back catalog on an installment plan. As previously mentioned, the box set was made to clear out a backlog and it shows, including spillover from earlier albums like Red Madrassa, Zuriff Moussa and Izlamophobia, versions that never made it to the full-length. Most Muslimgauze albums are musical variations on a theme, tracks that share stylistic commonalities, but many themes undulate on these two discs that in the end they feel juxtaposed, collage-like. Ingaza and HAA are thematically and stylistically all over the place, sporting atmospheric instrumental loops one moment and jarring, heavily barbed and distorted beats the next. Differences between tracks, not unlike changing channels on TV or switching between net browsers, predominate, imagery conjuring Middle Eastern travel and tourism on one screen plays against grisly proxy war footage on the next. The only threads linking these tracks were made during Jones’ grittier production-cum-dub days during the last years of his life. These releases may not be for the new listener so much as for the seasoned vet enthralled with Muslimgauze production, one who passionately and obsessively seeks rare versions of everything ‘Gauze past. (IK) • www.staalplaat.com Back To Top NUMINA Shift to the Ghost (Hypnos) • Interesting what a bit of non-musical research can do to maximize interpretivity of musical meaning and “explain” an artist’s sound. Basic etymological digging to illumine Numina as plural of the Latin numen meaning “divine majesty.” Further archaeology to reveal the “numinous,” coined by German theologian Rudolf Otto, as that which is “wholly other,” leading variously to belief in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the holy, and the transcendent. Numina’s conceptual universe thus mapped, Hypnos’ blurb handily trails the title’s ambit as “the life and death of the physical self.” Quick switch in research strategy: the general info section on a musician’s MySpace page is an interesting gauge, especially where “influences” are concerned. Some opt for reticence, as if putting their music above possible connection with anyone else. Others, though, will quite happily reel off a long-as-your-arm list. Numina cites Steve Roach, vidnaObmana, Robert Rich, Lycia, Raison d'etre, Michael Brook, Delerium, Enigma, Dead Can Dance, The Unquiet Void, Cocteau Twins, The Orb, and This Mortal Coil. Revealing, as well as being refreshingly honest, it suggests Jesse Sola wouldn’t mind admitting that Numina bears imprints of the signature sounds of others. And indeed, were you to extrapolate from this list (factoring in beatlessness), you’d likely arrive at the sound of Shift to the Ghost. Essentially a long-form continuous piece, it bears seven track markers enabling perception of stages of navigation through the work and the distinct moods cycled through. Numina music is a blend of synthesized ambient and classic spacemusic, its drones river-deep rather than abyssal, at times somber and mournful (“Spiral Reminders”), even Goth-like (“Light Travelling”), at others majestic and seeking to surge towards the light (the finale “The Hostless Ghost”). The whole is imbued with a palpable caché of those earlier mentioned mystical metaphysical elements. The prevailing sonic dynamic of breathing, oozing, slow flow adumbrates a drift-zone familiar to ambient-space aficionados from mid-period vidnaObmana. Synthetic architectures, for example, have resonances of that artist’s ’90s Extreme (Echoing Delight) and Projekt (Crossing the Trail) releases. Magisterial opener “Secret Souls” also bears more than passing resemblance to Roach’s “Begin Where I End” (the final track on Artifacts). While Ghost is not sufficiently distinguished for that elevated company, and signals no great development from previous releases Eye of the Nautilus and Sanctuary of Dreams, it is decidely the most eloquent statement of Numina’s spiritual space manifesto yet. (AL) • www.hypnos.com Back To Top NUNC STANS Night Vision (Dataobscura) • The music of Night Vision glides between two extremes, both fairly familiar. On one end, there is the sorrowful suspension accomplished by something akin to Eno’s “Dover Beach.” At moments, Nunc Stans comes in contact with that same languid and perfect intermingling of sources: the shimmering drone, the presence of human voices and field recordings, perhaps at the wrong speed, perhaps distant, perhaps not voices at all but some illusion of recognition that suspends our sense of time and slowly inserts a motionless impression of place. This balance between the subjective and objective character of music is well wrought on a few of the pieces, notably “Infinity Plus One,” which sets up the possibility of taking Eno’s basic collage-shaped idea of some 25 years ago and breathing some new complexity and meaning into it. Night Vision does its best work in this context. The elements that comprise the accompaniment of the drone shift in and out in impressive numbers and divergent voices without ever disturbing the surface tension. We are even allowed a shuttered awareness of the slightly slowed-down voices of “Dover Beach.” But on the other end there is the too concrete, too literal melodic phrasing and voicing that belongs to the, uh, Vangelis side of town, that Blade Runner big ol’ robot longing for space. The titles “Locust Nebula,” “Navigation Beta,” and “Parallel Universe” imply a literal kind of narrative mood, Nunc Stans introducing within them their melodic strands. That’s where a smarting, flinching sensation of the preset past lurches into earshot as the naked drones decide that life is gonna be so much better as a pad. While the keystrokes break into quite literal phrasing the passages prove to be frankly unable to support the desired weightlessness of a six or eight minute long piece. To be fair, there is an concerted effort here to guide melodic components and the drones into a hybrid state, one that is not so concerned with concealing all its component parts or finding itself as the summation of some many-stepped entropical degradation. If these melodic components were further subsumed, or if they somehow were the byproduct, foreproduct or afterproduct of the drones so that the relationships ran deeper, Nunc Stans would be on to something that seems to be evolving as a key aesthetic turning point in drone and minimalist musics. On Night Vision at least, those melodies remain at the doodle level. (KL) • www.databloem.com Back To Top OFF THE SKY The Geist Cycles (Databloem) • Amiable and rhythmically driven pieces, The Geist Cycles are supposedly about “artists interacting to interpret an idea of life in transit to afterlife...” So, prior to any debate about whether or not there is an “afterlife” let’s just say that Off The Sky seems set on promising listeners a sunny, pleasant and painless transition. The music is uniformly charming, easy to listen closely to or simply assign to ambience. There’s a tendency towards relying on urban/tribal percussion—non-kit style, non-beat style, but sources sounding more found and ethnic and woodily organic. The patterns match up and moiré their way along without any alarms or drama, providing a textural foundation that is rich and interesting, though not very varied. Dressing the patterns are treated and processed clouds, and ghosts of piano, guitar, voices, ’cello and violin, which complement and smooth down the already eroded edges into sometimes shimmering hazes of mostly major timbre. This points to an obvious lack or fear of much in the way of harmonic contrast, which keeps pulling things to the aforementioned sunny side of death and dying. Given this is a fairly two-tiered sandwich of clacking sticks dressed with a mayonnaise of pitch, greater harmonic complexity would move things a long, long way towards adding more shaded points of interest and some genuine sense of depth. The tendency to keep it simple could be conscious avoidance of the typical minor-keyed associations with getting to the afterlife (travel light!) or a disposition that favors the new age, nuage or more bluntly the too well-worn and untroubled paths of expression. For those who like to rinse after consuming sweets, may we suggest Paul Hillier’s Goostly Psalmes. (KL) • www.databloem.com Back To Top CLAUDIO PARODI Horizontal Mover (Extreme) • If setting a clear goal and meeting it is of any value in determining the success of an artistic endeavor, Horizontal Mover has accomplished what it sets out to do. This hommage to Alvin Lucier is, as shown on the back cover, approved of by Alvin Lucier. That approval centers on a single 59-minute piece performed direct to disk by the composer. Horizontal Mover is a compelling example of listening into—not at—music. The opening shuffles, snarks, thwangs, dimpled emissions and groaning strife seem set to lead us through yet another clattering and dimly lit alleyway off the main streets of of later-day musiqué concréte, an unguided excursion that might easily dead-end in a cul de sac slowly filling with dazed listeners picking through the trash cans in an egg-hunt for some further interpretations of sound. Instead, it gratefully settles down quickly to slowly stretch across the longish remains of the hour in a langourous and deftly evolving, tapering, thinning, rising, falling tail that gleams and twitters and becalms across the frequencies as only hand-manipulated decay can. Parodi manages to sustain this not-only-steady state for most of the piece’s duration without entraining foreign elements. This singularity invites participation in the earlier allusion of listening into the music, since this music does not spring from the interaction of multiple and discreet elements, but instead hovers within the internal actions of the components comprising the sound—we hear the quavers of quarks and gluons, not the clarion call of molecules and chunks. Eventually though, that moment comes and a new injection supplants the beautiful decay. But it does not arrive as a jarring or alien incursion, instead managing to seem and sound native to the preceding conditions. And perhaps that is another accomplishment here, subsuming all the events that comprise Horizontal Mover into seamless vertical music. (KL) • www.xtr.com Back To Top PHOTOPHOB Still Warm (Hive) • Dotted throughout Nine Inch Nails' über-political Year Zero album and backstory are references to an otherworldly capital-P Presence that makes time stop and seemingly trades the lives of some for moments of frightening clarity in others. If Trent Reznor has indeed written music and mythologies with elements not of this earth, Hive Records presents new work from Photophob wholly focused on being themes for those impending abductions. Austrian Herwig Holzmann can claim until the cows come home that he's moving from sounds of the scientific to naturally inspired ones on Still Warm, his second proper Photophob release apart from a sea of CD-Rs and MP3 downloads. It doesn't make the collection feel any less like a stirring interpretation of the seven stages of grief on either side of a close encounter of the third kind. Despite the Spielberg connection to that particular phrase, more morose sci-fi images come to mind, specifically those of The Forgotten and Dark City—Holzmann instills in this Photophob set an overriding sense that the aliens and their machines are ultimately in control. That informs all, from the dark ambience and muted beats throughout to the samples, song titles, and what obvious naturalistic references one finds here. “Fairy Fails” and “Bad Habits No. 1 to No. 7” suggest fantastic creatures who have fallen from grace and ascended to power, respectively. Other songs address storm cells without weather fronts, the mind misinforming the body, and an eerie call-and-response: “All of them?” “All of them.” With the possible exception of “Bad Habits,” Still Warm lacks a standout track, but in this case that represents a significantly high plateau of quality. Holzmann's fully-formed hybrid of IDM, ambient, and drum'n'bass so subtly makes the case for impending cosmic doom as to be subversively entertaining. “I don’t want to make you dance,” he writes of his music on the Photophob website, “I want to make you dream.” Thank you, kind sir; welcome to our nightmare. (AB) • www.hiverecords.com Back To Top PATRICK PULSINGER Dogmatic Sequences (The Series 1994-2006) (Disko B) • Powerful, muscular techno—Pulsinger flexes serious production skills with chunky, defined beats and lush synth lines, skirting classic techno, electro, and even Amon Tobin-esque jazzy beat sequences. “Agom Drag” and “Babylon 17, 15” are electric eels oozing serious voltage from the pre-laptop days of the TB-303, 808 and 909, emphasizing the basic building blocks of techno without re-treading well-worn paths. An aggressive, dark futurism informs these tracks in a way few present day artists can achieve despite more capable gear. “Transforming Language” and “City Lights Pt. 2” take on a nocturnal, jazzier tone, courtesy of lush rolling rhythms and acoustic basslines that display a cinematic flair, “serious” (truly “intelligent” dance music, say?) music works unto themselves rather than mere dancefloor fodder. “Numb Thrust” and “Viagem” show Pulsinger has an electro-cum-techno bent worthy of contemporaries Adult and the Hacker, though his requisite talents have long ago positioned him above such ‘clash hacks as the aforementioned. Though Dogmatic Sequences is a retrospective of masterful electronic music, it remains a cornerstone album, recorded with the kind of razor sharp audio clarity that will make any techno enthusiast’s toes curl. (IK) • www.disko-b.com Back To Top SINCERE TRADE Between You and Me (Sublight) • On his second full-length release as Sincere Trade, Toronto's Carl W. Heindl finds his secret musical superpower: using backgrounds to subvert his upbeat rhythms and melodies. As his washes constantly shift rather than focus on steady drones, the knee-jerk reaction would be to slap a “gothic” label on the contents of Between You and Me. It's an easy out to do that, but despite those atmospheres wanting so desperately to be played on violins instead of keyboards they still serve to complement the broken beats at the front of the mix. Most times here when you run into a bubbly pad (“Turn”), a chiming treble note (“Edge of Ruin”), or a static-laden vocal burst (“Forsas”) there's a concomitant and frankly dominating undercurrent of foreboding. The buzzing of “Push Pin Tactics” bumps up against a high-end percussive not unlike a breathing apparatus—with these we are reminded of the approaching sandstorm on the front cover, not just being in it but being able to survive it. The approximations of bell and organ sounds in “Extract Exume” imply an update to a hymn, although considering the context it's probably meant as a plea for forgiveness rather than a prayer of thanksgiving. The few instances where Heindl chooses to focus on particular musical styles instead of mood-setting prove just as successful. Old-school raver riffs eventually sneak into and hold their own against the rest of “Creeping Serif.” “Return to the Mean” is a bracing conclusion that abandons the album's formula in favor of a conglomeration of drum'n'bass and rhythmic noise. Sincere Trade transforms Between You and Me from merely interesting into music of impending danger, all minor keys and riptides hidden from view. (AB) • www.sublightrecords.com Back To Top STARS OF THE LID And their Refinement of the Decline (Kranky) • Repetition is the mother of entrancement and tiredness alike. In characteristically droll fashion, Stars of the Lid called their last album The Tired Sounds of. It felt like a challenge not to sleep on the job. Such heavy lids music needs a special form of attentiveness, but those private twinkling images are generated between eye and lid in closure, the concept behind the SotL name. With its uniting of the simple and the profound in one gesture, it also points to the music’s sense of open-endedness and personalized image potential. Sample “Hiberner Toujours,” a three-note cello phrase, played with vibrato and reverb, with background electronic tweakings: soundtrack to a sequence of tragic devastation or a poignant recrescence? You decide. Delimitation of the emotional ambit is errant: sadness, vaguely melancholic reverie, uplift, depending on the individual’s configuration with it. Their canvas is laid out with an uncanny union of expressivity and blankness to erase author intention and make of its semiotic opacity a heaven of meaning potential. The now cross-continentally collaborative pair (LA-Brussels) have been moving slowly towards this current Refinement since their ’90s work—its roots in raw tape-loop guitar-drone and the likes of Eno, Main, and Labradford—started to unmoor itself. The drift was towards modern classical, and the minimalism of Part and Bryars, along with the European orchestral film soundtracks of Preisner and Delerue. This gradual shift has signalled an increasing focus on melody, albeit a reined-in melodicism, and a re-positioning, with “drone” no longer genre statement but a fully integrated compositional element within a form of lyric elegiac “popular” (as opposed to “avant-garde”) classical minimalism. This has been a gradual movement, however. Six years on from Tired Sounds, the feel of their work remains recognizably in that ambiguous melancholy/uplift of sad/happy glazedness, and its choreography of slow, subtle repetition and micro-variation. But Refinement does see them buttress their orchestration and make it less of an annex; in a sense the whole orchestral armory feels like their instrument here, where previously they had seemed a space-rock guitar band, rock subtracted, playing the fancy dilettante with cellos and violas (cf. kindred Kranky forays of Labradford, Godspeed You Black Emperor!). One specimen suffices, for on “Humectez La Mouture” the listener gets a five-minute mini-presentation of the entirety of SotL’s soundworld. Opening with an underwater horn sound smearing itself into cello-drone, smudges of electronic shadings, snatches of French film dialogue, and then simple piano chord vamps, thickening with subtle colorings from mounting strings, to variations on a reprised theme, halting and heavy with sublimated longing. In fact, sublimation is very much the keynote, as the feeling heightens of just how much is held back behind the spare bounty of the beauties offered herein. (AL) • www.kranky.net Back To Top ASMUS TIETCHENS Teil-Menge (12k) • Four steady-state extrapolations that, deep within the minimalist envelope, act for all the world like a suite possibly entitled Duets for Drone and Something Metallic—an interesting advance on the practice of the drone, which in so many cases proves to be more focused on process than result. The two components are widely separated by their respective shapes and their interaction is purely and only juxtaposition. The drones themselves vary internally and in comparison with one another—traveling from somewhat bristling and atonal reaches that are chillingly beautiful in their remoteness to more reassuring, enfolding in warmth and even rhythmically subsumed surfaces that nearly leave the listener feeling thumb-ready and in utero. The contrasting voice is spare, aggressively forward in the mix and seemingly intent on unsettling the already settled. The character of this contrasting voice is e-metallic, occurring in tight, sharp envelopes sometimes stretched and pulled up or down or through a pitching and shifting apparatus. If played linearly these events begin as a single, repeated voice separated by large time intervals which, as the music progresses, become shorter as the voice simultaneously becomes more varied, finally succumbing to a variety of contortions which, carried out to greater extremes may in fact prove to be the source of the drones, or some aspect of them. The surface impression is, again, one of an almost oil-and-water-like juxtaposition. Yet there is a nagging clarity about the whole thing, perhaps due only to the stark lack of any interpolation. Or the deeper, no longer perceptible unity of these two very distant poles. In which case it’s interesting to think about these pieces instead as extended solos, their origin and result folded one on top of the other by simply removing the processes that separate their beginning and end. (KL) • www.12k.com Back To Top VARIOUS ARTISTS Sub Signals Volume 1 (Interchill) • Interchill is known for middling downtempo chill-out and though their tracks are not groundbreaking per se, their music does not make for unpleasant listening either. Sub Signals selector DJ Gaudi drops lukewarm roots-influenced dub with a handful of fine tracks featuring, yes, catchy vocal and instrumental hooks, illustrated by Zion Train’s “Free Heart” and Manasseh’s “I-Wah.” On the plus side, accomplished basslines that would do Bill Laswell proud thread through the set, holding Gaudi’s selections aloft and eerily grooveable. Sub Signals straddles lines between ambient/downtempo/chillout and dub, making for a polite almost background music, occasionally charged by the odd track that works to turn the listeners’ attention around. Part of what makes Sub Signals middling is the ultra-clean, computer-generated production versus the more primitive, sanctified means learned from the studios of Tubby and Scratch Perry, artists whose work is liberally coined, figuratively, throughout the mix. Another drawback remains the vocals, which do not extend beyond samples (hummable though they may be), which, interestingly enough, are practically a staple in the fabric of any worthwhile dub album. If Sub Signals’ producers were to come up with something more original that still embraced their influences, the results could have been earth-shattering as like Main Street Sessions; instead the disc does not extend much beyond a comfiting listening experience. (IK) • www.interchill.com Back To Top GEOFF WHITE Nevertheless (Background) • Detroit disciple Geoff White's spirit seems willing to follow dub icons (Sly & Robbie, The Orb) who paint their reggae echoes in broad, wild strokes. It's the flesh of his second album, Nevertheless, that's weak. White flirts with dub impressionism—attempting to reproduce the subject at hand using the media of laptop dance music. The issue: sussing out the deep bass colors he seems to want to generate from dot-sized samples instead of full-on attacks of the musical canvas. The squirrelly arrangements—soft pads and tiny chimes poking their heads out of a flat sonic field—and the continuous mix naturally give Nevertheless more of a techno feel than White probably intended. There's even some obvious chill house in here too, as organs sneak into “Opposing Platforms.” The soundsystem experiments we do find work nicely: “Duck & Cover,” the bouncy squelch of “Starstruck,” and especially the last third of the album, starting with “Drible” and featuring the extended workout “Student Teacher.” Yet for every hint, sideways glance and passing reference White offers to listeners craving digital takes on the Jamaican version recording, even songs with the word “dub” right in the title sound not so far removed from his lingua franca. Nevertheless thus becomes less of the dubbed-out shock and awe we might have expected or wanted, and merely more of the competent crystalline pop we discover on a regular basis. (AB) • www.background-records.de Back To Top |
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