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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 8 / June 2007
REVIEWED BY: ANGEL & HILDUR GUDNADOTTIR In Transmediale (Oral) JOE COLLEY Waste of Songs (Oral) CM VON HAUSSWOLFF The Wonderful World of Male Intuition (Oral) • Eric Mattson’s ties to new and interactive media stretch back almost two decades, but for pretty much the entire 21st century so far he has focused on promoting music that’s new, now, and mostly digital. He’s held leadership posts at bleeding edge labels like Raster-Noton and Minute, and curates just about any hyper- and cyber-literate festival that will have him, most notably Mutek and its associated label Mutek_Recs. One of his longer-term projects has been Oral, the Montreal-based label he cofounded in 1998 and directs to this day. Its goal is simply stated, deceptively modest, ultimately broad: “present sound art and works focused on sound exploration.” Mattson’s contributions to electronic and experimental music suggest this particular label’s “sound” is not just a modifier based on content but on quality—solid, firm, strong. Mattson has also curated performances at Club Transmediale in Berlin, thus providing a symbiotic relationship for an Oral live recording featuring Angel, a duo consisting of Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) and Ilpo Väisänen (from Pan Sonic). On 6 February 2005 they were joined onstage by Icelandic cellist Hildur Gudnadottir; the trio’s 70-minute drone noise excusion In Transmediale resulted. With the Angel boys passing loops and effects between each other and Gudnadottir’s creaking pulls hopping back and forth in their mix, the troupe was fortunate enough to happen upon a key and a delivery that approximated—even at times paid homage to—the didgeridoo. For a performance held during a festival that concerned itself at the time with the theme of “splendid isolation,” a Nordic artist helping fete Aussie aboriginal instrumentation couldn’t be more apropos, even when unintentional. Filters transform the playing into sci-fi rocket swoops (fifteen minutes in), a field of furry static (eighteen), and climactic arena-rock bombast and feedback (thirty-seven through forty) before a long denouement to the cheers of a small but rapt crowd. Speaking of captive audiences: The setting of noise and music at unbearable levels, causing physical discomfort and mental anguish, is a method of persuasion used by striking union members, kidnappers, and military interrogators alike. On his latest full-length CD, Waste of Songs, Joe Colley seeks strength in the fear and foreboding induced by the overloading of the senses in order to deprive them. About four minutes into “(Jaw Tension) No Thought Left Alive” we hit the song’s coda of silence and ghostly roars, the start of a rogues’ gallery of ugly imagery: office machinery screaming to (or for) life, the buzz of failing generators or working stun guns, nauseating treble frequencies. Grounded as they are in his fascination with stressful and negative situations, Colley’s sonic scare tactics easily recall tales of modern horror like Saw and 28 Days Later, or possibly Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. The entire hour here is uneasy listening; maybe a quarter of that—“Lung Crack and Tuning Sickness,” the signs of humanity at the end of “Bruise Voltage and Field Error”—only barely escapes being downright uneasy living. In contrast, the first half of CM von Hausswolff’s two-part study on intuition is positively uplifting, portraying him as both a faithful student and an accessible teacher. The Wonderful World of Male Intuition strings together disparate source recordings and von Hausswolff’s own constructions in much the same way that streetwise hip-hop DJs make mixtape compilations to build buzz for specific artists (if not themselves). One might not expect a smooth transition from a heavily distorted clip of a 1968 Gregory Bateson speech to a five-plus-minute treatise on Erkki Kurenniemi’s digital controller, but smooth it is. Indeed, follow along with the tracklist-cum-bibliography as it describes the music embedded in deep-space signal interpretations, throbs dedicated to J.G. Thirwell, and the cries of confused hawks. Von Hausswolff’s mix becomes more than a short course in the power of positive thinking—it’s a savvy exercise in found-sound and sine-wave tastemaking. (AB) • www.oral.qc.ca Back To Top ATOMINE ELEKTRINE Nebulous (Essence Music) • Swede Peter Andersson normally hangs out in the darkened corners of the Cold Meat Industry label, playing mechanized ambience as Raison D’être. His first release in three years as Atomine Elektrine, however, shows one should never settle for the music of just one wide dangerous space. Nebulous is set squarely in the realm of the galactic but also acknowledges the more terrestrial extremes of the stratospheric and oceanic. For the most part we find Andersson slowing to a lazy crawl Detroit-inspired blips—much in the same way that rap gets chopped and screwed by some in the Dirty South—and intertwining them with microbeats and orchestral drones. It’s not an entirely unprecedented departure nor is it unwelcome—in fact it’s quite a stunning set—yet CMI-leaning listeners may at least initially be thrown off by the level of playfulness and positivity it inspires. The slowly expanding noise foregrounds of “Deep Sky Twilight” and two interludes apply true Raison D’être color to Andersson’s sci-fi fascination. Album midpoint “The Eye of the Nebula” also starts with the darkest moments here, implying the formed formlessness of fiery explosions, before toning itself down to a squeaking shuffle—altogether a space shuttle of song, a muted meditation on liftoff, mission, re-entry. Beyond that, static appropriate for video transmissions from light years away turns into pad pulses on “In-Between Spaces,” and said spaces are where we find our drama in the song; uncharacteristically simple for Andersson, it works in the Atomine paradigm. What works even better are the gorgeous moments of “Veiled Clouds,” a 747 flight made manifest, and the deep-water trek of “Transforming Space”: the first is impossibly jazzy, with beaten clanging metal backed by thick synthesized wind, while the beats of the second start small, expand, break down, recombine. Raison D’être’s aged and broken machinery may have the longer, better reputation, but with the Nebulous album Atomine Elektrine makes the case for functioning (or at worst malfunctioning) high tech. (AB) • www.essence-music.com Back To Top RICHARD BONE Experiments ’80-’82 (Quirkworks) RICHARD BONE Vesperia (Quirkworks) • Come to Experiments ’80-’82 equipped only with a knowledge of Richard Bone’s 90s and 00s recordings and you’re in for a shock. The spirit here is more Barron than Budd, an original copy of his (Bebe & Louis Barron’s) Forbidden Planet soundtrack apparently presiding over the original sessions. The Experiments material is excerpted from two rare cassette-only releases, Quiz Party and Life in Video City, and other tracks from The American Music Compilation LP, available through Eurock Magazine in the early 80s. The influence of Morton Subotnick, Tod Dockstader, Charles Dodge, and other concrete-inspired electronic pioneers on these works is clear and acknowledged. Beyond this documentary value, its status as compelling listening material seems frankly limited to those who pursue an interest in the aforementioned more avant and concrete-influenced E-pioneers. But in the absence of any particular new angle from Bone, the appeal of this largely mimetic collection is probably limited to its status as an early years document for Bone People. The concept album Vesperia shows a different facet of Bone’s work, one which adepts will be more familiar with. Commissioned for a church Vespers service, it might be said to be entirely fit for purpose: soft and sacral Eno/Budd-style cadences, regrettably, though, with the more interesting treatments absent, played more or less “straight” on a variety of unremarkable keyboard tones. With the best will in the world, it would be hard to negotiate a descriptive appraisal without invoking the “new age” tag. Parse that how you will. A soundtrack for “the journey inward and the power of thought,” the album is possessed of a certain grace and serenity, handmade for contemplation, but frankly it’s all a bit bloodlessly inert, at least in a non-devotional setting; the more church-friendly listener may wish to take it for an ecclesiastical test drive. The four movements include a couple of standard static droning pieces, and another with that faux-classical carousel lilt of Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent).” When there is so much more resonant, though still quiet, music with greater reward than this lullaby languor, Vesperia’s appeal is distinctly limited, since an environment might be easily configured for reflection with a less anodyne ambience; something more engaging than this affect-lite, vaguely retro-futurist intermission music from an idle Bone sleepwalking through a demo-tute of the “ambient” presets on a home-ready synthesizer module. The final track on which a poem is recited reverentially over an ethereal wash may be heaven to some, while others will reflect, following Sartre (loosely), that Hell is Other People’s poetry. (AL) • www.mkmk.com/bone Back To Top BOOKMOBILE + ZAPAN Boopanschwing (Woodson Lateral) SPLINTERS The Watchmaker (Woodson Lateral) VARIOUS ARTISTS Cumulous (Clickpop/Memex) • Oregon’s Woodson Lateral Records began in earnest in early 2002 with a mission statement committed to releasing “music that moves us, done by hard-working, kind musicians, regardless of genre confines or profitability, especially drawn to artists that draw influence from many styles of music, and don’t limit themselves to emulation of existing bands and genres.” While this somewhat ambitious mission may not have been completely accomplished on the evidence of these releases, it does at least exhibit a fertile environment. Output has centered around two individuals, Victor Couto and labelhead Ben Torrence, Bookmobile being the duo and Splinters Torrence’s solo project. Boopanschwing is Bookmobile collaborating with one Zach Huntting, aka Zapan. Couto and Torrence began playing music together in the improvisational post-everything band Recidivist, later turning into Lamplighter, embarking onto computer-based composition and sound design experiments. Evidence is soon apparent of indie and post-rock practitioners dabbling in electronics to create something like a Northwest/U.S. Morr analog. Their roots combine here with dance and experimental elements in a hodgepodge, sometimes indie-inflected (“Upbeat”), but more often than not a more playful queasy IDM strain (“Locomotion,” “BooBoo”) that’s lo-er fi and lounge-side of the likes of, say, Merck and n5md, Oregon’s other purveyors of downhome post-indie electronica. Overall impression of Boopanschwing is one of dissipation, however, and a slight reek of a stale rehearsal tape-trawl compendium. Last.FM-y notes: Bookmobile’s appeal derives from solid real drumkit-based beats, a smorgasbord of tones and samples, and a deliberately live-sounding immediacy, so if that chimes with you, Boopanschwing may. More entertaining to these ears, but no less genetically transparent, is Splinters, following up the electronica vignettes of 2005’s debut, Metal Petals, with an expansion on its basic tonal vocabulary. The Watchmaker is more rhythmically and texturally inquisitive, as on the oddly spasmodic “Carwarsh” and “Rumspringa” plus the odd fibrillations and engine-revs of “Eszence.” “Rasterized” is a Raster-Noton homage, knowingly deploying trademark molecular tone-drone and click shtick, hitched up to some Riley-esque modal recursions. Solo, Torrence takes his cue more from laptop, and the microsound-flecked IDM of 12k, Raster-Noton, and Mille Plateaux. The latter’s clicks’n’cuts bespeckle this recording’s expanses, the title thematically primed, as well as signalling the meticulous precision with which these tracks are trickily techie-tooled, manifesting almost Aspberger-like self-absorption with tick-tock tics. Torrence tries not to overlook musicality and invariably seeks to hang some form of melodic decoration on these rhythmic skeleta. Splinters’ blend of minimal techno gesture and lo-fi indie charm ends up residing close to the miniatures of Ezekiel Honig and the similarly spirited intricate small-screen of Opiate. Both Splinters and Bookmobile also have entries on Cumulous, a compilation of various artists from Memex Records, a new Seattle-based sub-label of Clickpop Records. Splinters offers the doleful stick-figure funk construct of “Dust Collector”, standing in contrast to tracks such as Daniel Anderson’s “Scarlet,” which flaunts a “live” sound to its rather ingratiatingly pleasant post-indie post-rock structured jam. Bookmobile’s waking dream-scape “Kingsley” is a genuinely beguiling crossover of both styles. A synopsis of the more questing of the area’s coding, Cumulous exhibits other local producers over a range of electronic stylings, from piano-led politesse (MoRI’s reflective “Stairwell”) to spikier electro-specimens (Hakea’s “Mim”). Tracks like Son of Rose’s “Crossings” are beatific, hosting overlapping layers of gaseous drone-glitchscape redolent of Kompakt meeting a Kranky body comin’ through the rye. The middle sections offer one or two more mood-challenging items, such as Seiche’s ambivalent “Chevalines” with its beatbox-fuelled wibbles and Seefeel-esque snatches. Skik’s “Nivvia” too slaloms through a skittery quirkwork that peculiarly evokes a kind of psych-d’n’b with both the “d” and the “b” jettisoned. Overall Memex’s collection is situated in a land of post- (post-IDM post-ambient post-indie), but pleasingly and not unduly derivatively so. Most pindownable is the precisely fractured funk and diaphanous organ-like smears of rRine’s “Fied Mood,” which comes, via Arovane, out of Autechre’s classic ’94-’95 model, but this only serves to remind of the continued resonance of that lineage when nobly upheld. (AL) • www.woodsonlateral.com • www.clickpoprecords.com Back To Top CIRCLE Tower (Last Visible Dog) • A dreamy, suspended and deconstructed interval of jazz-inflected diffraction, Tower is reminiscent in its warmer moments to the pre-ambient, pre-poetry Harold Budd circa The Pavilion of Dreams: electric piano and its echopreplextion, bass, drums and the well-matched humming and buzzing of the other instruments coalesce in the pre- and post- organized moments of the typical to reside exclusively in a glimmering and gleaming suspension of time, free of the encumbering baggage of what comes next since nothing else comes before. This emulsive and immersive approach to the music is strikingly lush, with a richness derived from a near stillness that encourages the meditative shifting of your attention from element to element, voice to voice, absent of the fear of missing something. The instruments engage with one another continuously, but never in simply harmonic or rhythmic terms. The knitting occurs through well-wrought timbral associations, explorations of non-synchronous durations that yield extremely detailed textures set within rhythmically disarming fields that carefully articulate a number of states. The arc stretches from one of hand-finished repose to less comfortable and disconcerting emanations, all accomplished without resorting to any form of drama or excursions from the nearly uniform density and intensity set forth by the musicians. Things do not thin and thicken, separate and congeal. Instead, the near-steady state atmospheres are accomplished in the absence of any legato voicing and exercise a built-in feature unreliant upon internal contrast. Imagine The Necks, warming up and conjuring the effect of being on a treadmill that also happens to be positioned on the open-air platform of a moving truck. Do enjoy your walk. (KL) • www.lastvisibledog.com Back To Top FENNESZ/SAKAMOTO Cendre (Touch) • The information superhighway, its myriad exits and transportation forms, bring together experimental titans of the East and West for the second time in as many years. Christian Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto first formed their Vienna/Tokyo axis on Sala Santa Cecilia, a single 19-minute live recording released as a 2005 EP. Since then the duo have traded ideas and sounds in person, via the mail, and online, finally honing the results down to an album called Cendre that is nothing if not a study in seamless execution. Both artists earn performance credit on “laptop,” making it difficult to tell just who meddled with what. Both otherwise handle the workload about evenly: Ryuichi seems to lead six of the eleven tracks, Fennesz plays the closest thing to a solo piece (the title track). Both flip a musical script: Ryuichi’s piano melodies and abstractions doggedly work to attach a “neo” to European classicist ideals, while Fennesz’ guitar manipulations form walls (floors?) of subtle sound punctuated as needed, the well-groomed sonic Zen garden. Ryuichi is at his best on the album’s truest instance of duet and interplay “Glow,” and especially on “Trace”—misdirecting listeners with pleasantries that fight against Fennesz’ hissing steam, static, and creaking gears before deconstructing his part into base random elements, allowing a glimpse at Fennesz’ own buried melody. Apart from his shambling playing in the transformed guitar-and-clicks piece “Kokoro” Ryuichi offers much sparer support when Fennesz actually takes the lead. The synthesized serpents’ tails of “Aware” slide over broken low keys; Ryuichi is almost reduced to bystander status as Fennesz has “Kuni” lift off and fly away while “Amorph” buzzes and hovers just overhead. This could almost be ignored; what can’t be are the times where this album aches to be Thomas Newman’s American Beauty soundtrack. It makes Fennesz the more important half here, as his contributions sometimes fail (on “Mono”) but at least aim (on the cavernous “Oto”) to elevate Sakamoto’s above the territory of dread, despair, and faint hope traversed by Newman’s piano score. Everything about Cendre is so crisp, and lit so brightly by the glow of the musicians’ respective reputations, that it all comes off almost too polished—a collaboration seemingly resting on laurels only just planted. (AB) • www.touchmusic.org.uk Back To Top THE FIELD From Here We Go Sublime (Kompakt) • Two minutes into The Field’s debut and you’re concerned: the Return of Trance? A couple more tracks go by, and you realize: it’s safe. It’s only trance’s re-sanitization as a compositional resource. Phew. Close shave. What’s up with trance? What’s going down in The Field? A retrospective glance shows trance to have been tarnished by association with the ultimately toxic late-90s club culture. So micro (-house) and minimal (-techno) can be seen as having been the lean remedy for the poison of excess. But now the patient’s healed, the Big Rush can come back, in smaller doses. Kompakt in fact. The synth-motifs are scaled down to more “removed” loops of “found music.” It works. Evidence being Axel Willner’s Euro-hit with “Over The Ice,” one of the more unreconstructed of constructed of his Field works. So this Swedish chef chops popsongs into sample slivers (occasionally glimpsed when he playfully “flashes”), loops them and then bolts them onto beats to create post-tech dream-froth. It’s simple but frighteningly efficient. For a while. The pristine production and self-assembly arrangements are both strength and weakness, depending on your disposition of the day: functional or aesthetic. “Over the Ice” starts off, all pumpy-thumpy with synth-slivers sneaking in, suppressed, a stuttered loop-clip of femme-vox serially reeled out: behold, RoboDiva, and the song builds, adding more repeating layers of keyboard and vocal and percussive matter till we’ve got virtual hands-in-the-air club anthemics. It’s a perfectly designed track in many ways. Gebrauchsmusik for the distracted dancer-oneiromancer. The flaw? There’s sonic lineage to Kompakt head Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project, sure, but next to Voigt’s more mysterious alchemy, Willner’s assembly line feels mechanical, drip-dry. In fact, it’s better when he Gasses up. Like on “Good Things End,” where he takes the moves of the first two songs, but runs the timbres through a combo of smoke machine and ventilator. Then, again, on the dreampop-tech crossover of “The Deal,” which has a few willowy wisps of that old MBV droneblur threaded in and spun vaporously into a hypno-mist you can’t resist. Somehow, though, with its infinite other-referencing and external premissing, there’s something of a void at the heart of The Field. And while Voigt’s 4-on-the-floor recursions tend to a remote “given,” in effect ambiently ignorable, Willner has them full-on, like some big doofus in a smilie T-shirt banging vacuously on a kickdrum ad infinitum. And when the freshness and fun of this loop-de-looping lap-leaping face-licking puppy dog of a disc palls, it’s still all over you, but you’re over it. Your left, over-looped, overlapped, over-licked. Overfaced. (AL) • www.kompakt-net.de Back To Top GINTAS K Lengvai / 60 x One Minute Audio Colors of 2kHz Sound (Cronica) • For this effort, a pure sound at the frequency of 2kHz forms a malleable network which is lubricated by steady rhythmic formulations. Accordingly, the concerns of these compositions, specifically those featured on the second disc, are technical, not musical. Cold, clinical and transfixing in its sparse, endless motion, these works slowly suss out infinitesimal combinations, seeking their optimal modulation and technical sophistication. Even when certain pieces seem but an unending stretch of tonal stasis, a gritty glow or subtly shifting set of tones will fizzle to the surface, reminding one that, like a gambler who tries to exhaust all of the permutations in a game of chance, Gintas K is trying to explore all of the possibilities of his program. With each study set at just over a minute ‘s length, Gintas K ventures through a spectrum which ranges from alienated high notes, frenetically vibrating shards of sound and malevolent streams of white noise which speak of chaotic disintegration. Despite the fact that certain moments are clotted by intense pressure, the mathematical precision of the movements means that they don’t cast a shadow on matters of a sublunary nature. Instead, this is a universe of calm indifference, unmarked by memory or a clear sense of time. The first album strikes a markedly different poise, though one which is nevertheless staid and aseptic. Individual compositions resurrect a post-techno formula, but in its overly strict adherence to the model, it endows them with a certain aping quality. This approach opens up a sort of ironical distance in the heart of the works, just enough for a bit of play and interaction to begin again. On “Koto,” the electricity from the brisk pointillism of the electronics introduce a certain physicality, but is then camouflaged by a monotone drone. Similarly, numerous other tracks direct the rarefied minutiae of the high frequency tones into a relation of structural tension against the relentless flux of the rhythmic movements. The sudden appearance and disappearance of gaps in these works thereby permits one to pass from a somnambular absence in the simple decoding of the tightly sealed segments, while the airier compositions call for reception and a certain pleasure in their subsequent interpretation. (MS) • www.cronicaelectronica.org Back To Top GREATER THAN ONE Kill the Pedagogue (Brainwashed) THIGHPAULSANDRA The Lepore Extrusion (Brainwashed) • Music websites and blogs trade in the currency of the ethereal, and given the presentation technology’s inherent limitations and stabs at flexibility that’s unavoidable. One can lament that the delivery of packets of zeroes and ones through wires and via light, however, has a chilling effect on just how visceral music can be. “Pages” don’t wear or turn under your touch, song downloads all look the same, YouTube keeps you in front of one screen that much longer. It takes a brave site to successfully address the paradigm. The ubiquitous Pitchfork, for one, curates a live music festival heavy on hipster credibility—naturally a field day for the senses but also ultimately a temporary one. Brainwashed seems to want to take a different path, throwing its weight behind the promotion and release of actual compact discs—tangible examples of art and craft, and theoretically available to more people than just those making a trek to watch bands play in Chicago. The Brainwashed reissue of Greater Than One’s 1985 cassette Kill the Pedagogue is a conundrum. It’s something less than the original in that the CD format eliminates all of the tactile subversion Lee Newman and Michael Wells packed into their plastic bags of yore, yet it’s something more in its inclusion of early demos, radio sessions, and music from the Lay Your Penis Down cassette attached in MP3 format. At the heart of Kill the Pedagogue are five unnamed tracks that both predate and presage their heyday on Wax Trax! Records, as well as the heyday of industrialists of a similar mind: Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Laibach. GTO’s neotribal polyrhythms and steely atmospheres possess maybe a bit too much forced repetition and tongue-in-cheek bravado, as if they were trying to use the same pickup lines with different cyberpunk girls. The drum machines travel near-identical trajectories in the first two tracks, as does the contextual irony: Detuned druid voices in track one intone an unintelligible word only to proclaim it “means the truth, don’t you get it?” while kung fu film audio transforms drama into slapstick in track two. (Part of that dialogue also opens track three.) Tracks four and five are clearly games of Fun With Tape Loops although the former is epic and sad, an audio tour through limbo with ghosts represented by a cacophony of murky vocals from lectures, movies, rap vinyl, and synthesized pads. Kill the Pedagogue is no successful replication of the mercenary gallows humor of Revolting Cocks or the tortured dread of Skinny Puppy, yet there are enough pummeled guitars, echo-chamber drums, and computer-generated ill winds to indicate that GTO at least possessed the DNA. The work of Brainwashed as a record label actually began with new releases, and Thighpaulsandra makes his first appearance on the roster with The Lepore Extrusion. A departure from his musical collaborations with the likes of Julian Cope and Coil as well as his own full-length recordings, this is Thighpaulsandra gathering and continuously mixing the score he developed for Daniel McKernan’s multimedia installation Is Evolution Evil? The Lepore in question here is New York’s Amanda Lepore, the self-proclaimed number one transsexual in the world and the focus for McKernan’s imagery. It’s easy to see why the perv in Thighpaulsandra may have been drawn to the project: Lepore is runway fierce, visually striking, photo shoot-ready and an aspiring musician—the yin to RuPaul’s yang, having given herself completely to her kink and transforming it to lifestyle. Thighpaulsandra’s wavering, chiming, high-frequency bell tones, faint woodwind touches, and sci-fi synths portray just about none of that. These soundscapes are engaging enough on their own, and at forty-five minutes that’s always worth acknowledging, yet the interplay of the pleasant and the disturbing seems anathema to the subject at hand or at least her current place in divadom. Acknowledging their presence in McKernan’s exhibit, Thighpaulsandra’s psychoacoustics fail to make sense as part of that whole. Maybe, however, that concern is the point—Lepore and her extrusions (the penis she once had, the breasts that helped replace it) are all about what makes sense to whom, in particular what made sense to her when she was still physically a he. Maybe the pleasant and the disturbing are what Lepore needs to recapture; in that case, Thighpaulsandra’s soundtrack is more than appropriate. (AB) • www.brainwashed.com Back To Top KLAUS HOFFMANN-HOOCK & BERNHARD WÖSTHEINRICH Conundrum (DiN) PETER MERGENER & KLAUS HOFFMANN-HOOCK Visions of Asia (Prudence) • Conundrum: spacey, jammy doodling that joins the legion of such work while failing to distinguish itself as anything in particular within that genre. The overall sound here is glass-smooth, showing no hints of ever having existed acoustically. The electronic voices are showroom fresh and often give the impression of running product demos. This feeling of default taints everything, from the heavy reliance on fairly familiar sequenced patterns to the sugary frostings of electric guitar. Your humble reviewer is, of course, revealing some prejudice and preferences here, specifically for some tooth to the sound and some life outside the preset panel. Preferences as well for form over formlessness and for some harmonic complexity that can supersede the mostly major and bathwater-warm ruminations of pretty much everything encased within the “Bowed Visions,” “Phased Realities,” and happily groomed borders of “Flavia’s Paradise” herein. By the way, these are all interchangeable tracks, which may in fact be the particular conundrum of the title. One must question Visions of Asia where “sound” is concerned—maybe “impressions” or “soundings” or some other sensory allusion is equally lame. Just a nit, but when imitating rather than working within ethnic musics, the small errors and misconceptions have a tendency to multiply and eventually overrun the whole enterprise. Needless then to say that such musics should be given a great deal of study and respect. There are many excellent examples of contemporary works informed by a study of—let’s use a popular example—Javanese gamelan, which manage to display an understanding of the traditions that, in fact, define gamelan, whereas electronic artists, selecting a bell voice, are typically unable to evince much beyond the faintest imprimatur. And that is the case for most of the inflections found on Visions of Asia—the pieces come across with the gloss of soundtrack slickness as if Michael Douglas were still running in front of that tricked-out Class 8 truck during the thriller that is Black Rain. Such Visions aside, we have absolutely nothing to watch as these fake kotos echoplex their way into standing waves, now heard as nothing more than the watered-down Western impression of an Asian music. Rather than the deeper interpretation authenticity demands, Mergener and Hoffmann-Hoock seem completely satisfied to pass this stuff off as accompaniment for the worst sort of guided tours. To further the neutering of these many and varied cultures, the production maintains that lovely, lush, undisturbed and utterly sterile quality that only direct-out digital synthesis can provide—along with some ululations aimed at further occluding the already heavily faux atmosphere. (KL) • www.bscmusic.com • www.din.org.uk Back To Top LENA Alchemy of Fingers and Dark (Hypnos Secret Sounds) RIGEL ORIONIS Night Heat (Hypnos Secret Sounds) VIRIDIAN SUN Live, Paris Theater (Hypnos Secret Sounds) PAUL VNUK JR. + OOPHOI Distance to Zero (Hypnos) VIDNA OBMANA An Opera for Four Fusion Works (Hypnos) • One of the key representatives of the 90s recrescence of Ambient married to the US tradition of Space Music, Hypnos rather went into its shell as the millenium moved on. But it seems that Hypnos head honcho Mike Griffin has chosen 06-07 for re-animation after a period of quietude, as a trickle late last year is slowly taking on stream-like dimensions. So, time for a pulse check. The Hypnos Secret Sounds sub-label (of handmade limited-edition CD-Rs) has seen several additions already this year, two here fitting the relative newbie bill of original conception. First up is Griffin’s partner, Lena, whose ruminative cello sketches are smeared through treatments into something in a post-goth gloom-romantic zone not far from some of Type’s Nu-soundtrackist melodrama. The sinewy scraping resonances of her slow-bowed strings get a hefty FX dose to charge them with Nouveau Noir, but her two basic tracks suffer from a dissipated unfocused air. Two “remixes” by Griffin do little more than distress the source sounds further, rendering them even less easily ingestible, one an interminable 24 minutes of what sounds like the cello’s wheezing death-throes. Two “demixes” follow, one from Austere, a more timbrally adventurous spooked rework, the other from half-Austere, The Mystifying Oracle, whose “Mermers” demix scrapes up a source sliver, combines it with some Indic vocal and spoken word samples into a deranged glitch-collage that eventually half-coheres into a sub-techno pummel before fatigue sets in and deconstruction recurs. Some sounds are better kept secret. Rigel Orionis is Jim Brenholts, inveterate review scribbler to the ambient stars, shifting note form. Having dabbled under Orion’s star with Stephen Philips and Darren Rogers, as well as with Ben Fleury-Steiner (as Tin Moth’s Breath), Night Heat is his first solo outing. Described as “desert ambience,” it does tap into a certain atmospheric caché reminiscent of a musically depleted Steve Roach, though crossed with a spectral queasiness suggesting a browse in the more vaporous corners of the Rapoon loop library. Opener “The Damp Desert” has a slightly fetid tribal tremor to its alienated nightsweat ambience, as if of a dank memory of Fever Dreams it had sampled. On “Drastic Eventuality” vaguely Rich-sounding skin-slapping consorts with some offcuts of TUU, garbled sci-fi “voices off,” and virtual Polynesian colourings. “Arctic Sunstroke,” at a forbidding 26 minutes, along with two other 20+ minute tracks, challenge listener engagement, the loop-bound sound design betraying compositional strategies over-reliant on repetition of the same timbral material. Unlike more experienced long-form traffickers, Brenholts generates little hypnotic momentum nor resonant stasis from his material’s recursivity, as 25 minutes of moderately evocative atmospherics are spread wafer-thin over 80 minutes of exploring the thin line between Ambient Expanse and self-indulgent soundtool fiddle. The HSS imprint was in fact launched in 2005 with the release of Griffin’s Sounds Are Hidden Inside Objects, closely followed by Live, Paris Theater from Viridian Sun, his collaborative project with guitar-alchemist David Tollefson. Their live performance here sounds not a million galaxies away from previous studio album, 1999’s Perihelion, unsurprisingly as it too was recorded as in-studio improvization. Integrating hypnotic, repetitious patterns with deep drones and off-world melodics, blissed-out synth-bound meditative passages ceding to rawer organic grindings, VS occupy the more experimental end of the Hypnos space music spectrum, where it starts to stray into the atonal peripheries of the industrial estate. Drones’n’drift, yes, but little in the way of pretty Pearce-ing fripperies from Tollefson, whose guitar largely wears a heavy processing disguise. VS’s abstract improvisations here trawl the less structured edges of space music, close to Lustmordian Dark Ambient, in a brooding voyage into synaptic space, conjuring inordinate degrees of resonance from veiled yet not totally acousmatic instruments. Unlike the preceding sketchy offerings of newer artists, VS’s is a secret sound worthy of Hypnos revelation. It remains to be seen if the sub-label will seek to strengthen its status with this kind of more exploratory release by established artists or pursue the try-out hit-and-miss policy exemplified by the other two. Turning to the main label, a recording that might well be described as more exploratory work by established artists is Distance to Zero, a collab between old hands Paul Vnuk Jr. + Oöphoi that crept out late in ‘06. And crept is an apt word, for this is a surprisingly creepy set. They operate in similar slow drone territory to their last solo Hypnos releases, Silence Speaks in Shadows and Athlit, respectively. Yet their communion results in a work with a quite esoteric sonic character. More arcane and less harmonically resolved than anything Vnuk has done, and near the netherworld lights at the end of Oöphoi’s world, it definitely has a spooky eldritch undertow to it, especially on the unsettling opener, “Distance to Zero I.” “Distance to Zero II” contains recognizable elements of their individual work, notably Gasparetti’s palaeontology with Tau Ceti on Subterranea, evidenced in some trademark suspended bowl-sounds and steepling toneclouds, atavistic rumblings and abyss-hinting upsurges. This is well augmented by Vnuk’s orchestrations of the peripheral familiar from Silence Speaks, dwelling at the threshhold of static sub-vocal drone-float while channelling some eerie chthonics. The sound architecture is certainly denser and chewier than most of Oöphoi’s recent discs, and more timbrally varied, with Vnuk’s influence also apparent in the static grain that occasionally creeps in at the outer limits. Smooth but smudged, with hints of a processed distillate of metal machine music, Distance to Zero evolves weightily but actively, offering a sustaining richness of texture. Do not think of filing anywhere near “new age,” or even “ethereal.” Maybe under “atmospheric electronic” with a touch of “earthen” edge. Vidna Obmana, don of the harmonic arcing loop, has moved around variously over the years, building up a largely coherent oeuvre between harsher post-industrial electronics, isolationist ambient drone, tribal minimalist and post-classical soundworlds. With the completion of this cumulative 4-CD Opera project, Dirk Serries has placed the vidnaObmana “brand” in suspension after 23 years of endeavour. An Opera for Four Fusion Works represents for his more harmonic and recycled tendencies what the parallel recently concluded Dante trilogy did for his more tribal and industrial facets. Over four “Acts”, VO “recycles” the sound sources of a different musician or group, linking them thematically. Act I: Echoes of Steel features guitar recordings by Dreams In Exile, and continues in the earlier consonant harmonic vein of Landscape in Obscurity, but with guitar-based raw material. “IV” begins with clearly finger-picked chords relatively untampered with, till about eight minutes in when a familiar “removal” takes place and a more ethereal layering of textures loops out, decays being extended and timbres stretched and outfolded into medieval-sounding cascades of rippling glissandi. The overall concept is artfully realized so as to allow the guitar to return to unaltered state by the end. A largely pastoral oneiric mood of pacific cascades ensues, marred only by “III”’s throwing up of some irksome wispy wordless vocals. “II” recovers the mood, more submerged, exploring the sound stage through judicious panning. Eventually an atmosphere of mystic glaze descends, a mood and dynamic of undulant pluck-drift recalling Alio Die’s psaltery-based contemplations with Saffron Wood on last year’s Corteggiando le Messi. On Act II: Phrasing the Air, VO’s electronics, guitars, bowed strings and infinite recycling are deployed in tandem with Bill Fox’s soprano sax, the latter being mostly stretched into a seamless smear. On “I” the sax is drawn out into a slowed-down Hassell-esque hoon, like a musicized foghorn whooping weirdly over a desolate landscape. “II” recalls VO’s early work on Revealed by Composed Nature, a simple looping melodic pattern, into which the sax slides, while Obmana’s ebow makes passing swoops above the recyclings. Overall, this Act makes for less than easy listening, but is by no means avant harsh. “VI” acts a little Riley-esque, close to classical minimalism, with low middle and high sax loops shifting and interweaving. As it progresses, further soundmulch is added, creating an ominous undertone of post-industrial neo-gothica. “V” returns to ambient semi-quietude, the sax being processed down to smoky curlicues, bendy low-end guitar accentuating the wooze, as an eerie foggy feel pervades. The dissonant drift continues on to the final “IV,” a recurring warped theme gradually bolstered by somewhat bilious drones. Peculiar, challenging, and quite far removed from lighter, airier "popular" works like River of Appearance. Morton Feldman, in a commentary on his earliest post-Cagean compositions, stated: “Only by ‘unfixing’ the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves - not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.” His stated desire was to penetrate beneath and beyond the perceived historical obstructions to hearing, arriving unencumbered at the origins of unmediated sound, into the very heart of its sonorous matter. Act III: Reflections on Scale is dedicated to Feldman’s memory, and his “proto-minimalist” spirit is palpable on this the most desolate, introspective and thematic of all these four works. VO’s admiration for Feldman is underlined by his choice of New York experimentalist Kenneth Kirschner, composer of indeterminate music in the tradition of Feldman. His “unfixed” piano patterns provide the sparest recycling matter yet, to which VO responds with the lightest of recycling touches, subtly suffusing the most minimal of piano motifs with a few crackles, a spare guitar chord, and softly droning controlled feedback. Four sombre forays into stasis, spatiality, and the sustainability of sustain are the outcome, the endlessnessism of the enterprise managing to assist in getting close to the Feldmanesque vision of being inside sonority. Act IV: The Bowing Harmony utilizes the voice of Steven Wilson (of Bass Communion and Porcupine Tree reknown). It starts off, on “II,” with Wilson singing in a Buckley-esque semi-falsetto style - very much a naked voice, slowly getting progressively more “dressed”. On “IV,” it’s still recognizablely a human voice, but progressively transformed through more and more vox-loops making similar downward swoops into a vortex, underpinned by an insistent descending three-note bass figure. Sundry reverberant drift trails circulate, the fall-out from multi-variate recyclings. A strange, almost exotic, atmosphere of soft cacophany ensues. “VI” is the shortest (3:57), most conventional, and most enjoyable track, creating a gorgeous chord progression from a compacting of the vocal into a virtual keyboard, faraway but brought so close through massive reverberation, acquiring a nice undergirding of resonant buzzdrone along the way. By final track “VI” the sound has unmoored itself completely from all association with voice, and stretches itself out into a by now familar (but no less appealing for a’ that) lilting arcing Obmana darkwave-ambient melancholia. Twenty-plus minutes of oozing almost Moorish ambiance ensue, invoking visions of Herzog’s “Aguirre”, beyond Popol Vuh, on a befogged riverdrift into elsewhere, discreet ebow guitar tendrils snaking up into a strange sibilance of wheezes and creaks. It’s an ending that is entirely consonant with an illustrious past while drawing all elements into a still resounding present, doing full justice to his status as a distinguished elder statesman of modern experimental ambient. (AL) • www.hypnos.com Back To Top MAIN Surcease (N-Rec) • Having peeled from his Main persona all of the traditional rock music structures that enveloped his work in Loop and his contributions to Godflesh, Robert Hampson is ready to remove a final vital element: himself. Surcease is Hampson’s last Main recording, although the results represent a fork in Hampson’s musical road instead of a farewell to the industry. Shards of recordings of everyday city soundscapes and maybe the crunch of newly trodden snow nestle up against frequencies, found and generated, that mostly calm; don’t be surprised, however, if an occasional passerby gets set off like a dog hearing a UHF whistle. Surcease’s two mammoth tracks (totaling forty-five minutes) generate an aura of curiosity—there’s the questioning tone of the buzz in “Parallax” that peaks around the seventeen-minute mark, as well as the anticipatory drone five minutes into “Moraine” seemingly patterned after Peter Gabriel’s Passion. Whether Hampson is leading chopped-up vocals into the manipulated quick clicks of the cricket/the drill or juxtaposing metallics of unknown origin with the comfortable clatter of downtown traffic, the cumulative effect is that of leaving behind an exhaustive yet productive studio session, shaking off the cobwebs and tinnitus, and looking forward to what’s next on the agenda. Good luck, Robert; we’ll be listening. (AB) • www.n-rec.com Back To Top NAW City Saturate (Noise Factory) • The felicitously dubbed “echo chamber,” and its more sophisticate successors, has surely proved electronic music’s most enduring technology. As once characterized by David Toop, it serves variously as landscape paintbox, time stretcher, resonance amplifier, and warp factor. Toronto-based Neil Wiernik has clearly spent lengthy spells of his decade in electronic music “in his chambers,” so to speak, for his NAW project is shamelessly echo-steeped ambient-dub-techno, virtually auto-referencing Basic Channel’s similarly inclined explorations, and seemingly rejoicing in its tradition. That said, City Saturate has a more reflective downtempo orientation, giving more space for articulation of Wiernik’s professed interest in sound-environment linkages. The Vorsprung Durch Techno of Von Oswald & Ernestus’s vehicle had something of the precision-tooled chug of Kraftwerk’s autobahn, but Wiernik’s customization, though similarly engineered, with those BC/CR trademark metallic recursive synth-stabs, has more the feel of an updated blues of backwoods urban postmodern; a deep-chorded minor key anhedonia, with bass bumps and kicks coming and going to spring things into languid motion. In this respect, it surpasses the more generic minimal house of 2004’s Green Nights Orange Days, being less bound by beat-template, freed for a more thorough archaeology of timbre. In mood it’s an in-between music for the ambivalent transition of dusk-night or dawn-morn. The cover art aerial photograph of a cityscape proves to be an imagist representation of NAW sound: like the BC colour-box, City Saturate has a deliberately restricted sound palette with similar sounds and themes running through a number of the tracks inter-referentially, eventually creating a koan-like almost meditative aural space. It’s mastered fully by ex-MP tweak-worker Twerk, who manages to keep the resolution of its delay-infused sonic contours free from mud and gloop. Tomas Jirku provides a 12-minute dance-spin on “5 AM West Bound,” which serves to throw the rest of the album into a twilit relief, as deeper, more delicate. (AL) • www.noisefactoryrecords.com Back To Top TOMAS PHILLIPS/DEAN KING A Travers Le Bord (NVO) • A Travers Le Bord is annihilation by longitude and latitude. Though displaying a sonic and structural economy, its coloring of rigid forms with subtly shifting light and shade erects powerful and almost unnervingly precise boundaries. Layers of drone that reflect each other like rhyming lines cut up these cavernous digital spaces, which are illuminated by evanescent skeins of sound which flicker and fade. In their positive presence, these boundaries are the symptom of the traumatic kernel - that strange element which cannot be symbolized, in this case, the pools of silence - around which they are wrapped. As though the noxious, sometimes sibilant overtones which haunt these pieces literally represented an excess of carbon dioxide released into the upper atmosphere, a certain greenhouse effect gradually takes place, whereby these forensically precise sound demarcations are overheated and all but entirely re-submerge in the silence from whence they came. The process is gradual, indeed, nearly imperceptible, and evokes a gently evolving timelessness. In this regard, musical subtlety and tact is demonstrated as instrumental identities comingle in the collective impetus of the whole. The journey never reaches its resolution, though - each moment that draws near to stillness is given a shock, be it in the form of granular chimes or a sibilant scourge of swirling static, by which the present configuration of beatless air, heavy with upper register notes and drifting harmonies, shifts about and crystalizes in forms that are similarly austere and tactile. No Messianic cessation of happening, then, each event, although balanced at first blush, is packed with tension. In its spartan approach to blotting out boundaries, A Travers Le Bord effectively reorganizes and highlights the often overlooked elements which make travel such a bewitching activity in the first place. (MS) • www.nonvisualobjects.com Back To Top SANDOZ LAB TECHNICIANS The Western Lands (Last Visible Dog) • The snap, crackle and pop of guitars, piano, violin, drums, computers, hand cymbals, bells, autoharp, a specific brand of electric pianos on out to water glasses and walkie talkies inform the three free improv pieces that constitute The Western Lands. Relying on timbral relationships and contrasts both textural and temporal this trio version of Sandoz avoids any obvious or intimated sense of structure and organized interaction, offering instead three pliant immersions in sound. The music seems to reflect some perceived and world-weary chaos without yielding completely to the purely chaotic. Treated and prepared instruments dominate as the ventures into smooth and jagged sound career from the interesting to the irritating to the simply dull. By the time we reach the third and final track, “Crocus Blossom,” our patience is rewarded with a short, neatly built dollop of faux-Asiatic tunefulness, a flowering among the stony fields, no doubt. The Western Lands is one of those records that makes fine the demarcation between performance and recording, and is probably best suited to live settings and the mutability of the moment. As a recording, the assumption is that this work is much more engaging to participate in than it is to merely witness. (KL) • www.lastvisibledog.com Back To Top |
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