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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 10 / August 2007
REVIEWED BY: AMONGST MYSELVES Auburn Silhouette (Amongst Projects) • Unusually poetic ambience in nine flavors. At times a simple playfulness spreads out between the speakers via carefully calibrated transitions like the unclocked chatter of birdsong finding itself subtly modified and organized across the span of one piece. This opening track, “Greybox Shadow,” is sweetness and lightness, an air permeating the soundstage in much the way light descends through forest canopy. It is also a feint. Gratefully, the balance of Auburn Silhouette demonstrates the ability to move the aural information into less glittering inclines and more complicated declines. This is an important point since much in the ambient/drone/space category, while being immensely adventurous in voicing, structure, processing and concept has become nearly rigidly unadventurous in the intrinsically more difficult area delineated by the most fundamental musical material: pitch. Auburn Silhouette at least tacks into the sometimes unsettled waters of decidedly minor clusters, managing to adroitly shift the seemingly self-deterministic forms into at least simulacra of key changes. Adding harmonic depth and mood without resorting to the now nearly formulaic solution of merely layering phonography or other non-specific pitched information onto glossy and major planes is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of these sometimes spacey suspensions. Beyond that important difference the work is largely familiar stuff, albeit more poetic than most. Poetic because there is a sort of untethered sensibility at work, no doubt in pursuit of the “ever changing moods” concept offered by the collection’s title, resulting in evidence of an acutely associative ear. For moments that make literal references (lets say familiar sounds) are often juxtaposed with the less expected, at times finding a new relationship among familiar elements, and binding them closely together. Auburn Silhouette still has some distance to travel in refining its ideas, and in dropping off the generic attributes of the genre to push the work into a more distinct and particular shape. (KL) • www.amongstmyselves.com Back To Top ANTIGUO AUTOMATA MEXICANO Kraut Slut (Static Discos) • AAM man Angel Sánchez Borges here takes tech to the Mex, obliqueness spinning in some nicely meddled-with motoriks. His previous, Microhate, wafted lo-fi organic aromatics around some minimal grooves, across which particulate sound formations and rough texturalizations were layered. Kraut Slut proceeds to shift these elements around into other coordinates. More direct structures, more insistent beats, clearer atmospherics, and a swathe of gaze, it’s vaguely MP/Force-d, yet maintaining some of the debut’s jagged angularity. Informed by Germanic 70s out-rock pioneers of kraut’n’space (Borges is himself presumably the eponymous slut, as in overzealous seeker-lover of things kraut), as well as minimal techno and DSP-funkery, Kraut Slut is something of an untidily seeded hybrid that nevertheless bears febrile fruit. In the crackle and pulse of openers “Rother, Dinger, You and Me” and “Mitte” we have a strong opening gambit for attention. The former openly alludes to Neu!, an obvious inspiration, whilst the latter goes further to find the missing link between Seefeel, To Rococo Rot, Farben/Jelinek, Luciano, and Statics Discos companeros Microesfera and Fax, to name but several. Borges has intimated somewhere that the “secret” to his sound is his love for MBV. Hard to claim this as a secret, what with the plethora of new-gen electronica artists already avowedly worshipping at the altar of (not to mention pillaging from) St Kevin of the Shields’ Temple of Gaze. Apparently the album aims at “a concrete account of the sound that travels through the Mitte district of Berlin,” though certain tracks channel it more successfully than others. “Malandro de Culto” and “Reflect Ella” are somewhat nervy affairs whose ADHD fidgeting and pummeling surfs the borders between engagement in intricacy and downright annoyance. The lo-fi tech-house propulsion at the heart of “Ill Stijl” teems with a similarly brittle and detritus-strewn motion somewhere between jouissance and mood disorder, only with greater appeal. “Extirpe” holds the beats in order to draw breath and mine some grainy dronebience, before “Harm and Jazz” kicks up a digital duststorm, moving whirring and fizzing machinery in the wings and discreet below-stage beat-maraudings. Of the two closing remix contenders, Kampion reshapes “Mitte” into a radical bassdrum heavy post-trip hop re-tooling that stays faithful to the collagism of its creator despite slowing down the motion. But moody Hispanic minimalist I.A. Bericochea wins, cutting back on distractive clutter, while allowing his monochrome to be unwontedly colored, glazed by diaphanous swathes cut from Sánchez’s cloth. There’s a glut of current fave flavor minimal techno at the moment, but amid a promiscuous sub-genre, AAM, for all his kraut sluttery, achieves an air of self-possession. (AL) • www.staticdiscos.com Back To Top ANDREAS BERTILSSON Paramount (Komplott) • That today’s music continues to be yoked by narrative associations is a lingering deformity. As Bertilsson writes, “I began outlining (Paramount) in the fall of 2005 with the objective of describing society and the present while still trying to anchor it to something timeless and continuous that could be linked to any one period in time.” Well, okay, but wouldn’t the ideal form for fulfilling this brief be the personal or expert essay, heavily researched and footnoted? Exactly how or why instrumental music, which in this case includes extensive and manipulated field recordings, is objectively expected to articulate such a concept (without resorting to operatic bombast or the strict development and distribution of a supplied guidebook outlining the interior ordering of referents and associative encoding, all supported by constant trips out back to pull open the unlatched door of metaphor) seems incomprehensible. So, setting aside the goal and its implications, the attention here rests on the music. Paramount divides into three nearly equal parts and then totals 30 minutes. The precision and concision are admirable, as is the deftness of touch. In its dimensional character and precisely defined soundstage, the illusion created by "Movement I, Plains of the Buffalo," behaves like the installation score for a diorama. Frozen in its detail, the piece offers elements sewn together, juxtaposed and clattering in unrest. A submerged voice shades the piece further with the dark and often indecipherable intonation of a bitter monologue, yielding to the fragmented series of clusters—tonal and atonal—comprising "Movement II, Riding the Beast," with its abruptly terminated envelopes that eschew any hint of decay, in turn yielding to a chaos of closely matched and chaotic acoustic and electronic percussive voices, truncating to abrupt silence, or diffuse stillness. An industrial endgame of drones and subsumed vari-speed grinding snap the taught strings of some immense instrument to congeal around "Movement III, A Moth to the Flame." Rarely has the juxtaposition of smooth and rough been so convincingly deployed. The intensity of the sound here does send one scrambling for metaphors, its dense ferocity amplified by the preceding, now mild by comparison, agonies. Bertilsson resists all temptation to ornament or flourish, and unspools a vertical music that is, inside and out, profoundly disturbed and disturbing. There is no question, narrative inflections aide, that purpose is everywhere. The world as we experience it today seems to beg for nothing but Grabmusik. If you have not yet been cauterized by markets and commerce, you must walk the early days of the 21st century covered by open wounds. Composers continue to innovate and invent with a purity of sound the need to contextualize the results far beyond the audience’s already battered awareness, which will not always be enhanced by pouring on the narrative dressing. As such, the compulsion for doing so must surely continue to diminish. Lacking as it is in any blush of sentimentality, Paramount in effect makes that case by offering the listener witness to an unflinching dedication to the evocative, rational and irrational power of sound to redirect our attention and explode our comprehension. (KL) • www.komplott.com Back To Top DAVID BICKLEY Still Rivers at Night (Psychonavigation) • Even with electronic masters at work—including, literally, Masters at Work—do you wonder if they know when they're a little too calculated? Listeners can easily tell there's just a bit too much new age/world music polish on "The Leap," the halfway mark of David Bickley's Still Rivers at Night. With two decades of work ranging from TV soundtracks to Orb collaborations to his old band Hyper[borea] one should expect better of him; even his reference points on this album (among them Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd) occasionally seemed to not know where they were headed and wanted it that way, letting the muse of the moment guide them. On either side of the speed bump that is "The Leap," however, we find evidence that Bickley does indeed let the spirit (not the letter) still move him. The front portion of the album contains a trio of electrodub constructs: the pop-leaning "Zebo-Black" alongside the rather lush "Traction Cities" and "Babygroove," the latter of this pair full of guitar infusions, generated tabla and other wobbly, Wobble-y samples. Through the second half the compositions acquire the added element of subtlety. "Cave 9," for example, starts as throbbing dub from the Bill Laswell school, then turns that core into a double-time, vaguely drum'n'bass beat. "Of Sail," meanwhile, uses pieced-together acoustic guitar and squishy pads to slow down and soften the New French Touch. On Still Rivers at Night David Bickley for the most part skillfully transmogrifies influences and contemporaries. That submerged hand on the album's cover? Assume it is Bickley's, reaching into the mainstream in order to stay cool and refreshing. (AB) • www.psychonavigation.com Back To Top EMBRACING THE GLASS / HASLAM Split (Cohort) PBK / ADAM MOKAN Split (Cohort) KIRCHENKAMPF Island of the Dead (Cohort) • Sometimes the best things in life can be found nestled in the edges; you know, peeking out of the corners, stealing glances from under the covers. Monticello, Indiana, isn’t exactly the nexus for experimental music in the US by any stretch, but it is in fact the place Cohort Records owner John Gore calls home, and like it or not, what he issues from his diminuitive CDR label are the kind of aural objects you obtain fast and clutch tightly to chest, lest they vanish into the ether. Trucking in names either reasonably obscure or desperately unknown, the discrete charm of Gore’s imprint means those wanting to seek out the less obvious purveyors of all things weird, whacked and wonderful can shell out very little and usually receive very much. A good chunk of the Cohort catalog (CDRs pressed in notoriously limited runs of 100, housed in complimentarily reductionist DIY paper sleeves) involves a number of split artist discs, some sharing common designs, others studies in contrast. The near 30-minute piece “Dearly Departed,” by the “guitar/voice” duo Embracing the Glass, is the bastard child of ambient, true sons of the loop da loop era, taking the ancient Eno maxim and diverging from it at a 45° angle. Guitar controllers and voice (plus voice synths) are the fulcrum here, but the duo pull on all kinds of electrical levers. The opening 10 minutes or so comprises a simply lovely repeating guitar figure, one that would prove quite banal if it didn’t sound like it was recorded in an airless void, half-glimpsed particles hovering just out of reach. Eventually the listener is lifted out of this becalming state directly into the void—the sift of extrasolar winds and sustained voices are right out of the 2001 stargate, but their immense power and suggestion of terrifying awe palpable all the same. Superb. The three fairly lengthy tracks from Haslam (one Byron Paladin) explore similar terrain. From a more purely electronic origination, Paladin largely jettisons the melancholic isolationism for studies in atmosphere. His drones are actually more monolithic than EtG, and as all-consuming—echoes of Roach are evident during the shapeshifting textures of “How Many Tears,” while the more solipsistic realms of “Train of Thought” are compelling enough to give even Mick Harris the shudders. Vivid and lively, Haslam’s minimal droneambient sci-fi is primed for repeated access. PBK and Mokan’s release is an altogether different kettle of (blow)fish. Like that spiny creature, Philip B. Klinger might be the penultimate experimentalist “pariah”—he’s been dutifully pursuing his own singleminded course for the better part of 20 years, a fixture on the US 80s cassette underground and a legend of sorts in the agitprop/noise community. Far more intellectually rigorous than colleagues such as Merzbow, KK Null, or Aube, PBK ushered in the era of the glitch years before annotators ever coined it a term. Previous collaborations on both ends of the sonic spectrum (Asmus Tietchens, Artemiy Artemiev) have painted him as a very idiosyncratic sound sculptor who remains a distinctive presence on the “scene,” one whose anonymity is a puzzling phenomenon indeed—those prior teamings alone should have raised his profile amongst the literati. I’ve found some of his earlier, tentative work to be a bit too disassociative at times, his amelodic/aharmonic gesticulations erupting out of the speaker fabric ass-over-teakettle, scattering about with little obvious reason or "sense"—avantism for avantism's sake. Be this as it may, the four tracks included here are of a singular offering, clearly some of his best work since the aforementioned Artemiev pairing. Not that it was in any way necessary, but opening track “Through the Past Away” indicates PBK’s discovering a newly-found melodic linearity within his machines: the grinding oscillations and steam-engine coarsities remain his trademark, though rendered here with a particularly cohesive, and supple, flair. “Build Your Own Nothing” spits, clicks, shushes, shudders, and shivers in a manner that Oval probably never considered, while “The Channel that Feeds” situates the listener in a deserted governmental think tank doubling as haunted house, full of abrupt clangings, strange vibes, parched airbursts and what might be the very walls cracking. When the finality of “Event Lurking Pristine,” a cathartic passel of stretched-taut metallic drones finishes, you’re left in shock, fairly breathless. It’s simply a crime that Klinger doesn’t get the recognition he so richly deserves—help, help him, Rhonda! Conversely, newcomer Mokan is more of a strict “noiseician,” a Merzbow wanna-be, if you would. His two lengthy tracks eviscerate the guts from corroded engines, battered synthesizers, burned-out amps. I’d like to believe that “Winding Rhode” is constructed by beating the shit out of an old Fender, then sampling the detritus out of phase and flanging what’s left to death; it’s actually an 11-minute excursion into dirty, disused drone that does in fact sound like a Rhodes being manhandled, but Makon doesn’t extract much from his sound source other than onanistic distortion. Which, as PBK can tell you, isn’t the whole enchilada. Main Cohort Gore, under his nom de disque Kirchenkampf, is possessed of keen radar and deft ear, proof of that pudding being the motley crew of folks he assembles for release on his label. His own music ain’t too shabby, either. Throughout the single 42-minute piece that makes up Island of the Dead, Kirchenkampf dots his pockmarked canvas with splayed abandon and sureity of purpose both; consider a bizarre merger of Jackson Pollock and Hieronymus Bosch and you’ll get a good idea as to the emerging soundscape on hand. Shoot past the near-Grand Guignol beginning and you’re tossed into a never-never land where tones the temperature of frozen nitrogen fleck about in the air, congealing what’s breathable into whorling bubbles, while stranger noises curl and evaporate around disembodied voices that arc to the heavens like rising thermals; music as ectoplasma, fluid, frightening, fascinating. Punks had hardcore—well, meet atmocore, gratuitous Gore included. (DB) • www.cohortrecords.0catch.com Back To Top FALSE MIRROR Chronostatic Scenes (DataObscura) • False Mirror is the title of one of Magritte’s more memorable works of surrealist conceit, featuring a large eye-like shape whose sclera is, rather than plain off-white, filled with cloudy blue sky. The connection with Mirror man Tobias Hornberger’s music is tenuous, even false. The artist is perhaps referencing not Magritte specifically so much as reaching towards surrealism as an expressive mode associated with dream’s dark mysteries, obscure object of False Mirror’s desires. Chronostatic Scenes, as titularly denoted, has its moments of virtual time-freezing, exploring the vertical color of sound with a suggestive visuality. Tokens of pop-psychology and neo-expressionism commingle uneasily in Hornberger’s consciousness: “My music has always had a very personal character since it could be seen as a direct transformation of my inner self.” Authorial psychobabble apart, a pronounced sonorous depth and an isolationism sometimes verging on solipsism characterizes False Mirror music; sounds like a call for frontier psychiatrist, but it’s more fuel for today’s innerspace cadet. The style is recognizably a dark-ambient soundscapery of crepuscular hue whose not entirely serene meditative inclination will already be familiar from other Data-bloemers and obscurers, such as Danny Kreutzfeldt and Nunc Stans. “Plato’s Last Dream” starts things off serenely enough, but by track two, the drone throne has acquired a darker upholstery. The following “Beyond the White Plainscapes” finds even deeper resonances close to Rich’s Trances (cf., “Hayagriva”) . “The Tower of Deception” ratchets things up further, with various nature ephemera, thumps, creaks, and rattles, and some low-end nocturnal hum maneuvring, the whole being blown through by a wind that’s illness incarnate. Overall, Hornberger establishes an effective sonic affinity between elements of an older space music tradition and contemporary experimental ambient, while also tapping into the self-consciously spooky soundtrackism of late-period Type-geists like Deaf Center and Xela. Chronostatic Scenes evolved from images and moods of dreams collected in the artist’s dream-diary. Be grateful you aren’t the dreamer, since this collection shows that from dream to dread, as in the casual morphology of the words, is but a swift internal shift. (AL) • www.databloem.com Back To Top LUC FERRARI Didascalies (Sub Rosa) • A serene simplicity of supernaturally sustained tones drawn from Ferrari’s sojourns, and residues of subtly treated sounds irrepressibly alive and inquisitive fill out the first two editions in Luc Ferrari’s three-part series of instrumental works. This final document now captures three recent works for viola, piano and memorized sound, one of which is "Tautologos III," Ferrari’s last recorded composition before his death in August of 2005. For this piece, a piano oscillates between two simple notes woven around a viola that shifts from oceanic, often inchoate noodlings to a grinding loop that pushes self-possession to the point of mania. It is the progression towards this mania that twines the air with fascination. The rules which the players are obliged to observe state that each select an action relating to their instrument. The action may be any combination of duration, register, tone, speed, and playing mode, to the end that, through extreme concentration, each will come to create their own time, in which they will recognize the instinct of communication. In beginning with rather mechanical motions, the players stupefy themselves by repeating these meaningless gestures, gradually becoming more absolved into the trajectory of the piece itself. Aside from being compellingly cinematic and lucid in its detailed development, the composition charms for its suggestion that language and systems of law function on account of their incomprehensibility, on account of this stain which is the positive condition of belief. Along with this work, each of the other compositions is the clear outcome of radically different, contingent circumstances, a quality which Ferrari spends no small amount of time developing by plotting a labyrinthine course through a minefield of brittle, spiky solos, romantic trysts, and fortuitous gambits such as the murmurs of models changing in their dressing rooms and the rhythmical sound of an orange juicer. At the same time, a real kernel returns as the same through all of these diverse symbolizations. Informed as it is by abstract and anecdotal phases, the elements of "Rencontres Fortuites" are none the less more compatible than they are combative, with Jean-Philippe Collar-Neven (piano) and Vincent Royer (viola) maintaining a single-mindedly lyrical perspective, exploiting pitch and dynamics while never entirely losing control. Further along this path, gestures are rendered sharper, more concise, the pair's intimate moments of dialogue all but lost as the music accelerates towards gravitational escape velocity. As it does, the album as a whole stands out as a total set hell-bent on effacing the traces of its own fundamental impossibility. (MS) • www.subrosa.net Back To Top HERIBERT FRIEDL Back_Forward (NonVisualObjects) • A three-piece suite with a determined focus solely on the hackbrett and resulting digital processing. Owing far more to Subotnik than Ránki, Back_Forward reveals its source and then systematically obscures it, transforming the instrument’s acoustic emanations into highly plasticized and reshaped audiofiles. In keeping with the constraints of a solo instrument, the processing does not introduce the “impurity” of multitracking. In essence, this smartly restricts the number of events to one-at-a-time, one-after-the-other, directing attention solely to the resulting deformities and reformations without the need to ask the listener to pay any respect for or anticipation of the start or end point. That these waveforms resemble nothing more than the early voicings of analog synthesizers—Buchla in particular—makes it an exemplar of the extremities sampling has now staked out. These daisy-chained events fan out into an episodic march, overlaps occurring only when a trailing envelope lingers long enough to touch, or infer touching, the following ramp. Resisting any opportunity for an emergent prescience on the part of the listener, gaps vary, durations vary, pitches vary, processing varies, but no ordinary sense of pattern, repetition or structure emerges. Back_Forward effectively suspends pretty much every convention in favor of strict, almost dogmatic fealty to the Big Idea, creating a music of emotional neutrality and almost purely intellectual resonance. This lends a curiously traditional sense to the work, that of past-perfect looking back to the sometimes amusical preoccupations of 20th-century electronic experiments that have today become such an integral aspect of many listeners’ Weltanschauung. (KL) • www.nonvisualobjects.com Back To Top GLUID Gluid (Esc.Rec) MAGA My Mind Machine (Esc.Rec) MAGA The Wired One (Esc.Rec) SLO-FI ‘S Latest Hits (Esc.Rec) • Dutch label Esc.Rec if anything validates the credibility (and buttresses the DIY ideal) behind CDR labels. In and of itself, the format is no instant barometer of quality (any more than cassettes automatically were over CDs) but the startling amount of good music arising from outside the margins is finding its way into the world on the cost-effective CDR (and, at least from this writer, better that than on artless, faceless, sonically diminished MP3s). This batch of releases are all of an interesting piece—on face they seem stylistically naïve, but are in fact aurally deceptive; what appears to be de rigueur genre-wise quickly mutates into something undefinably else. The crime is that the material issued from Esc.Rec, like numerous outfits, begs for a larger audience and will probably fail to bag them—these four volumes are a good first move toward rectifying that situation. It’s indeed difficult to believe that Gluid’s tracks on his self-titled debut are all sourced from microphones (real time, and literal, samples) and MiniDiscs; the record’s methodology immediately lifts it legions beyond what at first appears to be a journeyman (if well-accomplished) batch of glittery microsound experiments. Successive immersions into Gluid’s (one Bram v/d Oever) aural frame of mind, however, reveals instead an artisan at work. Compositionally, the disc is, dare it be said, “flawless”—regardless of their origins, the sounds are no doubt manipulated, layered and ultimately juxtapositioned via Gluid’s chosen software du jour—meaning that not only is the recording immaculately produced and pristine in the extreme, but that the ends do in fact justify the means. There are enough breathy sequences and snatches of sublime “melody” (such as the bittersweet flurry of chirping notes that form the central motif on “Ekal Naws”) to keep the attention focused and the mind engaged. In fact, despite the obvious infatuation with clicks‘n’cuts, Gluid’s m.o. actually proceeds gainfully across many of electronica’s sandier borders—anyone complaining of a lack of substantial IDM records need look no further than right here. In between the chunks of ambient space sequestered alongside spasticized rhythms (“A Mare’s Nest”), arcing over yards of laptop buzz and dripping liquid chords (“Peeters”), or nestled in echo chambers whose sensuous pings are chilled below absolute zero (“Maybe My Fault”) lies the best record Warp or the late Defocus label never released. Madness into method, actualized with brilliant results. Maga confounds expectations as well. On My Mind Machine, track titles such as “Acid Drops” and “Shadow Fu” might instantly make one reach for the usual litany of artist comparisons—early Atom Heart, Luke Vibert, Depth Charge, Patrick Pulsinger, just about anyone on the Rephlex roster—and, to some degree, those checkpoints are accurate. However, thanks to a remarkable economy of means (both of these discs are fairly short), not to mention some pretty handy knob-twiddlin’, slider-shufflin’ ability, Maga’s Marc Fien manages to distill the lively essence of primitive Detroit techoisms, spiky old-school New York City 80s electro, and contemporary noisebeat merchants all down into one messy splurgefest. No doubt a categorical malcontent, the guy’s simply down with letting his freak flag fly: “Shadow Fu” upsets the hip-hop apple cart with gleeful abandon, “Love Walk” is a delicious ode to tincan beatboxes and quacking waveforms, “Sleeping Trouble” enjoys making the kind of motorgrind rhythmic mayhem so beloved by last decade’s ex-pat citizens of the 808 states. Fien turns his genre-baiting into such infectious homage it would be downright blasphemous if it wasn’t so goddamn good. Better still is The Wired One, an apt metaphor for both the technician and his attendant tech. The circular, jacking beat contours of “Mono Acid” perambulate so wildly they look to knock the randy electronic orb-blurts off their axis at any moment—it ends way too soon. “B* Sleepers” benefits from the kind of bassline thump that Barry Adamson would kill for, cinematic to a fault and a cocktease to boot—he’d probably envy the shifty hi-hats and penumatic synth wheezes, too. Forget the recent B12 shot(s)—this is the kind of drum machine dada that still goes down a storm 17+ years after the first bedroom boffins beat their boxes into sonic poetry. If the proposition had been made that audio/visual artist Roel Meelkop of all people (he of “strict” musique parallelists Goem, Kapotte Muzeik, and THU20, outcasts all) had the wherewithall to straighten up the rigid techno aristocracy in a couple fell swoops, those in attendance would have indulged in the time-honored tradition known as knee-slapping. The joke’s on them—as Slo-Fi, Meelkop hasn’t reinvented the wheel as such, but he’s sure as hell greased the treads and tightened the spokes. Slo-Fi’s first long-player, released on Staalplaat CDR sublabel Microwave, was a knotty filigree of squiggles, spangles and beads, the type of dry-as-Nevada, sparse minibeat tapestries that “parent” band Goem built its rep on. ‘S Latest Hits (hee hee) lets some welcome humidity into the grooves, but don’t underestimate Meelkop’s tenacity: all of the untitled tracks not only look for the perfect beat, they find it in spades. Track four’s galloping synths, viral bassline and wet-blanket of effects recall nothing less than the illegitimate offspring of mid-90s Cabaret Voltaire (notably International Language and The Conversation), its relentless, seesawing rhythm making for an ideal copy of dark House. As the corroded ping-pong bell tones underpinning track six’s post acid crash envelope your listening environment, suddenly it’s déjà vu all over again, the ghost of 1991 peeking out through 07’s covers, but Meelkop tweaks the formula so well the sensation feels utterly contemporary. Slo-Fi’s maxim bequeaths that everything old is, apparently, new again—if he keeps releasing stuff this good, Meelkop could conceivably quit his day job. Henke, Kirk and co. better watch their backs. (DB) • www.escrec.com Back To Top JORGE HARO Musica 200(0) (Findel Mundo) JORGE HARO U_2003 (Findel Mundo) JORGE HARO U_xy (Findel Mundo) • Composer and audio/visual artist Haro is living proof that function can follow form. The electronic scene in Argentina being a small and fragmentary one (distribution for their musicians’ works being just about nonexistent), not including the salient fact that microsound beatmusics occupy a small enough sub-genre as is, means someone like Haro has to struggle against greater odds than contemporaries such as Carsten Nicolai and his Raster-Noton concern, perhaps the prime influence governing Haro’s work. Nevertheless, these three discs make a persuasive argument to the girth of Haro’s abilities. The EP-length Musica 200(0), released in 2001, adequately holds its own against the types of sinewave blip buffets served by Nicolai, Ikeda, Frank Bretschneider, et al. Haro buoys his sinuous low-end musings with early 80s synth atmospherics, submarine pings, and enough calibrated momentum to make his machines groove, even outright funk. Clinically precise, cooly captured, but hardly sterile—this is glitch-a-go-go. U_2003 somehow crams seven tracks of Ikeda-esque high frequency tone poems into a scant 14-minute timeframe, but as the tracks segue from mouseclick chatter and beatless acid to harddrive pile-ons and brief send-ups of Mego-ian soundbytes, you realize that Haro’s infatuation with the process is why the whole thing works instead of crashing down. Recorded live in different cities around the globe, U_xy is Haro’s first formal full-length work, proudly announcing on its tray card that it is a project “based on real time electronic sound construction” rather than the usual studio-bound desire to overdub. Sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel, here Haro’s frequency bisections are less obviously informed by overt “rhythm” and instead develop into tactile, science-lab soundscapes. “Barcelona” squishes bell-like tones into a series of Reichian flatulence stalked by ‘ware-wolves. “Hamburg” is nigh on indecipherable almost a minute in, gradually becoming a solid state mass of subterranean trills amidst muted, half-heard Harlan Ellisonian robot howls, until those very robots begin trekking across desolate, grey geographies. The parched strings of “Lisbon,” nestling up against pools of drones, posits microsound as classical music in reverse, an intriguing area begging for further exploration. Haro’s definitely on to something here, erecting bridges between the aridity of academia, the propulsion of post-dance musics, and the residual atmospheres lurking about microsound’s tonal exhaust, threads of these ideas coalescing during the good frequency vibrations of “Huelva.” And just like that…bam! A star is born. (DB) • www.jorgeharo.com.ar Back To Top CORDELL KLIER Espionage (Gears of Sand) M. PECK Glacial (Gears of Sand) PATRICK BALTHROP Autopoetic (Gears of Sand) • Gears of Sand add to their huge and ever-growing pulsating roster, as label supremo Ben Fleury-Steiner ups the release ante in his ever-more determined bid to rule from left of center of the post-digital ultraworld. And a warm wallow in a chilly geyser by the name of M. Peck ushers in the accomplished collection of tonefloat and spacedust balletics that is Glacial. A disc that will not be tied down either to genre or influence, Glacial eludes precise descriptive and referential coordinates. But that doesn’t preclude approximations: here the semblance of an Eno lilt, there the touch of a Schulze-ian tilt, now a ghost of a Roach tone, then the arc of a Biosphere drone. Michael Peck traffics in a melange of analog, digital and soft-synths to tease out a suite of innerspace and offworld icicle works. New technology goes beachcombing and picks up a chunk of old-school ambience and throws it in with some still warm fossils of Emusic. A refrigerated air wheezes through Glacial’s contours, as states are subtly altered, mellow-icy, warm-frigid, granular-viscous. Between the minimal wheezing wafts of “Cold Flow” and the more complex orchestrations of “Debris from a Thousand Landscapes” lies an uningratiating yet accessible ambient expanse that yields its rewards slowly, requiring further revisitings, mixing up non-linear and narrative, freeze and thaw, gossamer and crystalline. Best of all is “The Impending Solitude”, which emerges from its initial amorphous chrysalis to become the most elegant of sparsely harmonized elegiac butterflies. In contrast to M. Peck’s low-profile presentation, many and various are the credentials and designations paraded by Cordell Klier, who appears to have been around the media arts and musical genre block a few times. Experimental sound artist is, for our purposes, the most salient signage for this digi-art-punk-pop proteus, his latest incarnation coming on the back of a gamut-run of 90s-00s genres, taking in various types of pop and a few tips of hop. Klier has alighted upon minimal drone and glitch as his currently preferred mixer flavors, pushing Espionage into the area of what he describes as “cold pop music.” He brings to bear his predilection for minimal drone and Raster-ized microsound and glitchscapes on a series of emptied-out virtual song structures with occasional spoken word interleaving. The result is a kind of brittle cybernetic nearly-pop that dips its own-bristled brush largely into the palette of another’s stick-figure sensuality and freeze-dried (r)emotion (12k/Line). The artist’s personality emerges towards the end as a somewhat arch, even threatening entity. Glitches, drones, twangs, and found sounds cohabitate, though the notoriously annoying yowl of a siamese cat resonates the longest. Espionage is a bit like the difficult kid in the class—an idiosyncratic, occasionally discomfiting collection that both compels and repels, sometimes simultaneously. Autopoetic, by new kid on the synthetic block Patrick Balthrop, is an album located on the more harmonious clines of a notional Kranky/12k interface. Its title denotes a system whose boundaries, behaviors, and power relations are continually maintained and redefined through a “self-making” circular process which produces its own components; these in turn structure the entire system as a unity, maintaining its integrity and identity despite the constant flux of its dynamically changing components. Which definitional dsicourse seems to neatly summarize Balthrop’s method/process, though leaving its precise musicality unilluminated. This resides more in microsound than IDM, eschewing overt trap drum sounds or sampled breakage, preferring more subtle allusion to rhythmicity—fluttering and fibrillating lower-end sonics in the Raster-Noton tradition of Nicolai (Alva Noto) and Bretschneider (Komet). Over these percussive elements Balthrop weaves a gentle glitchwork tapestry, with tuneful keyboard textures, never overstating or overstaying (11 tracks covering barely 37 minutes, the longest track coming in at 4:02). Some pieces such as “Throwaways” and “The Night Rose featuring Sententia” are a little too twee-pretty for their own good, though individual pieces tend to flow internally, seguing without much of a seam or tonal alteration, keeping to an effectively pared back palette. Best of all is the gorgeous end pair: “Bedbox,” an object lesson in a small-is-beautiful approach to sonic architecture, whose textural delicacy somehow gets big on you without making any large gestures. Then an elegiac sad-happy closure with “Until We Meet Again.” Autopoetics: microbeats, microsounds, and microsongs from under the new bedsit floorboards. (AL) • www.gearsofsand.net Back To Top LAWRENCE Lowlights from the Past and Future (Mule Electronic) • Force yourself to reimagine the realm of microhouse as a DMZ between the persistent hypnotic suggestion of Josh Wink and the glossy scores of glossy films of the 1980s and early 1990s—your author keeps picturing scenes from the likes of Wall Street, Manhunter, Risky Business—and you might get some idea of the territory Lawrence patrols. Oddly enough, where that no-man's-land notion might be apropos of the uneasy beats with which Peter Kersten made his [stage] name, we instead find with few exceptions on Lowlights from the Past and Future altogether friendly textures that invite and envelop like the most comfy of blankets. Not that a positive spin on Lawrence's work makes for an unpleasant listening experience here, but this collection of his own sides and his remixes for others seems like too much of a good thing if not multiple good things. "Friday's Child," "Swap," and "Spark" represent just part of two-hundred-plus forms of mostly bell-tone-heavy happy-go-luckiness—all right, we kid about that number, but only the acoustic guitar in the mix of Egoexpress' "Aranda" really seems to tease any boundary. Further, they contrast so starkly against the darkest moments present (mostly in Lawrence's remixes of Superpitcher's newly ironic "Happiness" and Antonelli's "The Morning") that the comp feels that much more like it's been put together in rather slapdash fashion. It turns the LP into a seventy-six-minute trip through a musical Bizarro World, the bright highlights over time becoming the titular lowlights. (AB) • www.mulemusiq.com Back To Top MINAMO A Herdsman’s Life (Esquilo) GÜNTER MÜLLER Live & Replayed (Esquilo) • Is it me, or has Portugal been a teeming beehive of activity along the electronic/electroacoustic/unclassifiable front? Some of the world’s finest, most forward-thinking imprints there have made quite the global splash in the last handful of years (citing, in particular, the eclectic audio output of Cronica and Sirr). Now add Esquilo to that honor roll. Though not yet approaching the enviable back catalog of their erstwhile (or even Erstwhile) colleagues, they’ve nevertheless carved out a niche for themselves in an area still ripe for exploration. Both Minamo and Müller are names well-known to eyes perusing these words. Across a mere handful of innovative recordings, this electroacoustic quartet has managed to charge up quite a rep in many circles, and justifiably so. Artfully smearing the storied vocabularies of lowercase/microsound onto a canvas that supports an almost childlike sense of wonder about the electronic/acoustic diaspora, Minamo’s works never fail to surprise, becalm, and bewitch. A Herdsman’s Life is no exception, despite its short running time (just 26 minutes). Tucked inside the thin digipak sleeve depicting a photo negative illustration of a forest in stark blues and whites, the accompanying soundscape is at once static and revealing, as the various instruments gradually come into synergistic play, painting the surrounding environment slowly, carefully, in methodically arranged (and subtle) tone colors. The opening piano motif reeks of naiveté, the short keystrokes raindrops that seem frozen in air and time, nearly inert, until shimmering waveforms and gently flicked guitar strings ripple through the ambiance, basking the cooler computer sonorities in a warming glow. It’s all strangely affecting—part sonic haiku, part pixellated symphony, Minamo’s universe is one to get forever lost in. Believe it or not, Müller’s Live & Replayed is only the man’s second solo album in 20 years; he can usually be found recording in tandem with any number of fellow colleagues along the electro-improv circuit (Jason Kahn, Tetuzi Akiyama, Norbert Moslang, Jim O’Rourke, Aki Onda, ErikM—a list that is by no means exhaustive) both on his own For 4 Ears label and others (Kahn’s Cut imprint and the aforementioned Erstwhile Records, to name but two). 2006 also saw a solo recording on Cut, which parallels his Esquilo debut—two in one year (leaving out the sundry collabs) is practically riotous for the former drummer. He’s been reviewed and critiqued by more magazines, paper or plastic, than can be counted, but few have failed to recognize that Müller has become a force to be reckoned with. Possessed with the kind of well-ingrained intuitive sense (for the “proper” placement of sounds within their given contexts) that is outright uncanny, his presence with others casts a formidable shadow on any gig/recording session in which he participates, simultaneously assuming the roles of both leader and follower. Alone, left to his own devices, Müller turns the very air around him to ionized steam. Disc one of this two CDR set collects three performances in front of no doubt respectful audiences in Sydney, Paris and Kyoto. At each, Müller navigates his way through a trio of distinctly imagistic, alien environments; his invention is boundless, the avenues along which he travels rife with considered yet pronounced events. The Sydney set is perhaps the most restrained of the bunch, moving into and out of quiet storms of hum, nettle, bubbling oil, dead radio buzz, and other less identifiable noises. Paris’ set finds him upping the amps on his iPods, creating surging vistas of machinistic sound offset by upward-spiralling software pops and detuned fuzz. In Kyoto, Müller lets loose what might be the orgiastic calls of silicon critters mating in a plastic, multi-dimensional landscape—becoming fairly noisy a good way in (not the usual Müller m.o.) allows us a glimpse into yet another aspect of his variegated persona. On disc two, Müller basically remixes/recontextualizes himself, using the previous CDs’ sounds as templates to expose the raw sinew. “Replaying” the Sydney tracks, the sinoid wows and butterfly flutters become cyborgian, the line between machine and man growing ever so tenuous; eventually this hybrid construct is subsumed in great cresting tidal sinewaves. The Kyoto variations, comprised of pulsing fat cells that sound as if they’re cruising in an artificial bloodstream, tickle the cochlea in yet more subversive ways. In effect, Müller’s working a brazen aural syntax that musicologists will spend years struggling to describe and dissect. Good luck. (DB) • www.esquilo-records.com Back To Top JOHN MORTON Solo Traveler—Music for Music Boxes (Innova) • For anyone who has the interest in the direct results of simply overlapping events and letting the phases work out relationships on their own, and the less direct results of manipulating both circumstance and outcome, John Morton’s Solo Traveler will fit in nicely beside the works of Nancarrow. Not nearly as limiting as the description might lead you to believe, this spring driven thing proves itself capable of all manner of variation and intriguing clockworks. Alternately sounding like a vast collection of kalimbas and mbiras—or the soft tines of a pianet—the overtly western scales inherent in the source materials prevent the music from sounding like some tribal ethnic gloss. We are instead in a landscape of workshops and tinkers—obviously not tinkerers—with the sense of mallets falling near and far in epicyclic rounds. The percussive character of the music boxes come across as individually distinct as fingerprints, at times reaching ensemble depth, at others solo clarity, but not always staccato. Through manipulation not every envelope jumps from nothing to zero dB all at once. The contrasts of softer and harder attacks—overlapping in agreeable then disagreeable pitches and patterns, in and out of phase, moire, and relaxed predictability, harmonies and durations predetermined and rearranged—makes Solo Traveler’s instrumental pieces a sort of nineteenth century mechanical extrapolation analogous to the digital ingeniousness of Henke’s Layering Buddha: machine music made human by reevaluation, reinterpretation, and restatement. The exception to an overall mood of metallic bliss is the title piece. "Solo Traveler," for five voices and five music boxes. The vocal work, performed by Dare to Breathe, words by Cynthia Nadelman, is a difficult piece, sounding at times like medieval polyphony then shifting to the more abstract tonalities of Ligeti. How the vocal passages were determined and integrated with the music box elements would make for an interesting story, and as an exercise in reconciling two vastly different forms into a single piece of music is no small task. But in the breadth of its nearly 16 minutes, the overall feeling is mostly one of hard work for composer, performer and listener, and consequently lacks the intuitive accessibility of the strictly instrumental pieces. However, yet another resolution in the ongoing search for new methods of originating compositions. Great cover, by the way. (KL) • www.innova.mu Back To Top NETHERWORLD Mørketid (Glacial Movements) NETHERWORLD Kall: The Abyss Where Dreams Fall (Mondes Elliptiques) • In a tradition anchored in experimental drone, ritual and dark ambient, there’s a discernible Italian strain—one of indulgent introspection, of over-exaggerated withdrawal, like a minimalist ambient musical negative of Italian’s notoriously over-florid prose (think Oöphoi, Alio Die, Tau Ceti, Opium, and the denizens of Umbra and Hic Sunt Leones). “I'm interested in capturing sounds generated from the nature’s flow. Through my music, I would like to play the quietness of silence, desolate darkness and glacial landscapes,” quoth Alessandro Tedeschi, whose Netherworld manneristically aligns itself under the flag “Isolationist Ambient." A sub-genre line born circa 1994 with the Ambient 4: Isolationism compilation, Netherworld’s conceptual update “confronts the individual with forces beyond his control, while trying to mirror the beauty of epic, barren landscapes with immeasurable dimensions.” On Mørketid (Norwegian term for their period of Arctic frost-encrustation and near-total blackout), this is translated into a collection of reduced arrangements, wherein a single chord progression or harmonic motif is extended recursively over a set periodicity. Interestingly, unlike the earlier Cryosphere, the result is far from frosty or alien, but rather suffused with a remote warmth and ambiguity of atmosphere. Meditative and virtually breathing, it falls in the wake of a post-classically drawn landscape (cf., Basinski, Marsen Jules), but not quite there, ending up a more stylized spartan Italian cousin of Guentner/Lohmann Pop Ambient crossed with Milieu’s Beyond the Sea Lies The Stars. Its soft sustains evoke the recondite and the crystalline, remaining above ground, aerated, here haunted by snatches of spectral voices, there by manipulated fragments of Arctic-sourced sounds, and then again by a slow thunk-thunk like the Pole’s heartbeat. Letting radiance peripherally filter through, Mørketid offsets a certain textural and compositional depletion against an appealing ascetic allure. Who took the ice from the isolationism? Netherworld. Kall: the Abyss where Dreams Fall is the evil twin of Mørketid, the cold, the distance, and the resonance present on that recording here configured so as to variously invoke confinement, menace, and fear, amid familiar signifiers of dark portent and doom ritual. In contrast to Mørketid’s benign sub-Hypnos or Infraction-like atmospherics, the same cadences and kinetics are stripped of all harmony and light, to the point where Kall would find its unhomely limbo on the blasted subterranean heaths of CMI or Cyclic Law. “Kall Part 1” establishes the sphere of signfiying operations, all exhale-inhale hell’s-bellows, enrobed in dread reverberation, the merest slivers of peripheral drone harmonics, and a hint of Jorge Reyes-style ritualism creeping at the edges of an austere industrial ambience. These in-out air movements could be the sleep effluvia of somnient underworld gods captured and channeled by Tedeschi into some weird shadow-ballet. The 4 parts present variations on a theme of the same soundwave movements - of swaying, lurching, slooshing, wheezing—as respirations and upswells of anharmonic timbres are spread, smeared, and bled over a stark canvas. This is hardcore, but of ineffable nature. Darkcore, perhaps. The 22-minutes of “Kall Part 3” will test the most resilient of isolationist expeditioners, as an already befogged Stygian cavern is further fumigated with infernal surges, haunted sirens, and distended foghorns, into a reverberant rumbling of claustrophobic nullity. Incursions of various timbres incide, but nothing good will come of it all, only dystopian visions and dire murmurations. Eldritch undertow pulls eternally downwards. Netherworld has never been truer to his name than on this single-minded expression of nihilist minimalism. As with a “Stalker”-esque horror movie, the “goodness” of Kall is ultimately a function of the listener’s desire to inhabit such expressively limited and existentially beleaguered scenarios. (AL) • www.glacialmovements.com / www.angle-rec.net/mondes Back To Top ANTHONY PATERAS Chasms (Sirr) PEDRO CARNEIRO Improbable Transgressions (Sirr) STEVE PETERS Three Rooms (Sirr) • More often than not, the releases that float within the orbit of Portugese label Sirr offer pennyworths, that is to say, acts of audio and visual commentary on conceptual and concréte pertaining to experience in today’s world-city. The first selection on hand is that from sound artist Anthony Pateras. Though he parries any suggestion that this might be a homage to the magisterial presence of Ligeti, in an act of surrogacy, the actions of Pateras carry his influence, the way the composer used polyrhythmic intensity and delicately volcanic rapidity of key phrases to allow the piano to shed its skin and become a virtual ensemble onto itself. The tracks that bookend the album are heavily rhythmic, full of constant splitting and delimitation's, and crackling electronic embers whose participation in the sprawling web of concrete sounds amplifies the strange magnitude of the work. It avoids becoming an agglomeration of rapid, dreamlike associations, though, deftly steering itself as a series of studies piecing together various insights and recollections. From this paralysis of one’s faculties by way of overexposure, on the title track—which here drives a wedge between these other two aforementioned works—Pateras seeks this end through the use of underexposure. The piece creates a much greater uniform mass that at first relies on cyclical movement, but then grows increasingly animated by decaying sounds. In either form, accelerated or near-stasis, this is a stirring performance that offers a great deal to digest. Improbable Transgressions, a collection from contemporary percussionist Pedro Carneiro, deals in solo five-octave marimba pieces—or tokens, to use Carneiro’s term—which were passed along to the artists whom they were created in thought of, each marked by the tempting offer or, better, challenge—hack me. So, to name a few, Ralf Wehowsky, Stephan Mathieu, Brandon Labelle, and Andre Sier took to it, mixing and rearranging the data they were confronted with, scrubbing them with subjectivity, and otherwise infecting them with traumatic traces whose ensuing series of failures spells strange developments in composition. Put differently, in not trying to ferret out crisis, in, quite the contrary, turning these vices into its splendor, these are works that, like cities, feed off their own hubbub. Teeming energies abound—Wehowsky guides one through delirious sonic clusters and swarms; Mathieu erects a piece of enhanced atmospherics and cavalier cadences; and Chris Brown merges rough tonalities with smooth glissandi. Such a restless succession of technically challenging and advanced works betokens rigorous, rewarding participation on behalf of all those who lend an ear. The recording from Steve Peters, meanwhile, sets about documenting interactions with physical spaces. Like so many artists before, Peters aims to veer away from himself as a skin-encapsulated being and tries to inhabit a path somewhere in between subjectivity and objectivity. Pateras essentially becomes the funnel through which things—nails, sliding doors, metal, dust and so many other inhabitant of an old warehouse in Sante Fe, New Mexico—make their appearance. Not surprisingly, "Centre Of Gravity" and "Mountains Hidden In Mountains" draw material from Peters’ own breath and the sound of the densho (a meditation bell) at a Zen Buddhist temple, both bearing out the strong influence of Eastern thinking on his artistic practice. There is no denying that the timbre, texture and timing of the unraveling of these works is well-executed and effective in its displacement of clearly demarcated dimensions between inside and outside. Music, sound, and silence are continually shown to take up numerous poetic encounters, so even if it lacks ingenuity, it is at times surprisingly invigorating. (MS) • www.sirr-ecords.com Back To Top ELAINE RADIGUE Jetsun Mila (Lovely Music) • Inspired by the life of the 11th century yogi and poet Milarepa, Jetsun Mila occurs in ten seamlessly joined sections that demonstrate a profoundly well-wrought and fundamental example of completely interiorized drone music. Originally composed and performed in 1986, the piece is stately and rich, evolving through subtle modulations and pulses subsumed within a largely unsentimental—which is to say “unpretty”—electromechanical sustain. Interiorized because as often as not the combination of sounds, which pulls at times to the reedy throatedness of ancient and middle eastern timbres, presenting itself as facets of a single sound, mostly impossible to untangle. This is a clearly deliberate cornerstone of the composition which later does in fact realize a singleness of sound as its resolution. Unlike much more automatic drone music, the harmonic content here is hardly shy or conservative. Radigue eschews the expediency of those instances in which a typically major scale is left wholly intact while all the compositional energy is poured into the timbral quality of the strands that comprise the drone. Given her classical training and study, as well as her immersion in both 20th-century music and Buddhism, the harmonic components here are much more developed, incorporating microtonal elements with the unpitched gestures of stretched belltones, sub-bass shudders and metallized incursions derived more from pitch modulation than the safer and more common filter modulations. Easily compared to some aspects of the Deep Listening catalog and, at the pop end of the spectrum, the more seemingly sacred stretches of Popul Vuh, all the volition remains internal across the length of an 84-minute incline. Evenly divided between two CDs, there is an unflinching and determined beauty at work as the changes continue to offer that rare ability to stand still and progress, in this case with a fatefully recursive structure that moves steadily upward in pitch to a dense and open cluster of horn-like calls, blended into a shimmering indefiniteness then becomes at last a single and vast sound, bearing the title “Death/Nirvana”. That all lives could be so linear. (KL) • www.lovely.com Back To Top ROEDELIUS Snapshots/Sidesteps (Psychonavigation) • Hans-Joachim Roedelius already has a bust in the more obscure section of the electronic musical icons pantheon thanks to his work with 70s kraut cosmicians Cluster. A 10-track assemblage featuring several variants on collaboration, Snapshots/Sidesteps is really too slight an affair to be represented as a twilight-years comeback bid. Essentially, it’s the by now august septegenarian’s hook-up with the known, the little known, and the downright unheard-of for a decade-spanning trawl through a range of ludic experimental electronica. And it’s effectively played down by the unassuming Roedelius as “sidesteps” by dint of its unpremeditated, almost accidental, nature; and as “snapshots”, presumably, for having no pretense at Big Picture status. Most of the tracks are little more than passing modifications of others’ original tracks, with a certain casuality and spontaneity trailed as a virtue. The exceptions (i.e., actual real-time collabs) were with inveterate playmate Moebius, an excerpt of a live performance, another with members of The Orb, and lastly with a certain Fabio Capanni. An inauspicious beginning comes with “Ad Honorem,” featuring Keiichi Suzuki (“member of the famous Japanese band, Moonriders”), a dull poke at the corpse of trip hop (a style revisited with more textural and head-nod resonance later with one Timothy O’Keefe) infused with field recordings of public space ambient conversation and general dub-drift. The following “Belvedere” is a collaboration with TV composer George Taylor and the Fratellis, results in some odd wibbling combining with introspective piano meanderings a la Jarrett/Sakamoto, tremolo guitar chords, wandering bass, and thereminal whistlings—hardly a qualitative quantum leap. On “Claire Obscure,” Roedelius adds “melody lines or layers of sounds” to a piece by Patrick Pulsinger, also involving bassist Werner Dafeldecker, sometime Autistic Daughter. Perched somewhere between experimental ambient and quiet improv, Dafeldecker thwacks and tonks his bass like he’d never played one before, while Pulsinger makes Woob-y ambient BBC Radiophonic Workshop noises in the background. Genuine atmospheric substance is elusive until “Elektrum,” a studio collaboration with The Orb’s Paterson/Fehlmann, a typically involving mixture of ambient dub and foundsound exotica. “In Natura," with fellow Psychonavigator David Bickley, has a nice enough virtual chillout downtempo groove with faraway pad trails, but in the end, however, a hodgepodge impression ensues from Roedelius’ withdrawn presence, as fairly scant traces of an identifiable sonic signature are left. Snapshots seems, inversely, something of a scrapbook style album. (AL) • www.psychonavigation.com Back To Top SAMARKANDE / OBLIVION ENSEMBLE Split (Samarkande) • A document of two live and mercifully short performances that fit the “I guess you had to be there” category. Samarkande, comprised of Éric Fillion and Sylvian Lamirande, offer foundation: aggregated drones, some phonography-like elements, and filter-pulsed rhythm patterns that enter and exit in no discernible order, sounding like a gloss of any several aspects of the drone/electronic genre. Evoking a decidedly “do this, then that, then this again or maybe something else” lack of structure and direction, the sounds drift and drift and remain adrift. Samarkande’s stated goal is to break the rigidity of electronic music, a rigidity this reviewer is frankly and completely unaware of. While their claim to surrealism is unfounded (look it up: André Breton actively practiced disdain for music of any form) Oblivion Ensemble, at least, is not also dedicated to breaking the non-existent rigidity of electronic music. They are, however, willing to break a few guitar strings. Playing as a three-piece this time out, Brannon Hungness, John Bergstrom and Joyce Chirachinde broaden the instrumental spectrum, sound(in)g her dream. Including some voices and guitar as well, thin shivers descend into layers of feedback and the minute, busy clatter of percussion, drumming, and a nostalgic dose of white noise. Again, shapeless but at least not hapless, occasionally attaining some density made more interesting by the recognizable markers of guitar and voice and their sometimes unexpected uses. (KL) • www.oblivionensemble.com / www.samarkande.ca Back To Top SPITZNAGEL Sensor Blue (Level Green) SPITZNAGEL SMX (Level Green) • Two very different releases, SMX sounds for all the world like 1970s basement tapes while Sensor Blue takes several pages from the instrumental activities of the one-off Doo-Bop by Miles Davis and gleefully takes off from there. SMX is good old-fashioned knob-twirling music, propelled by the Moog Voyager, a lovely digital/analog hybrid descendant of the Minimoog. If you like sample and hold rhythms, unadulterated sawtooth waves and long, shamelessly swept filters, SMX will prove to be a virtual time machine. Its sonic allegiance to the analog synthesizer is nearly absolute. The 15 tracks are all relatively short—only four go very much beyond four minutes in length. Owing some acknowledgement to a Zuckerzeit Cluster and a Ralf and Florian Kraftwerk, the generally raw and mechanistic tunes make no pretense at anything deeper. You have the basics—few pieces could be more typically and deliberately basic than the opening Xylem. From there, the work gets fuller, pretty much built on a pitched rhythm beneath a quirky lead, later adding some sampled drums for a fuller, more forgiving sound. The beats go on until the fourth track (same general pattern of beat/drone contrast is reflected in the sequencing of Sensor Blue). Depending on your age, SMX will seem either nostalgic or just another bit in the analog trend. It seems safe to assume that, if nothing else, SMX is at least a lighter-than-air approbation of the early days of electro-pop. Sensor Blue, while possibly being one of the names discarded by the product development team at Gillette, is a different animal altogether. Again, 15 tracks interleave a few drone or cloudscapes between beat-driven pieces. But in this case the inflection is clearly jazz and usually features a trumpet as the lead instrument. The horn work does a credible imitation of Miles as heard in his Doo-Bop sessions, and is further sliced and diced and overlaid for quick, staccato dialogs but never the expansive, languid or atmospheric smears of Hassell, et al. The clips and blips land on top of and between some torrid and glitchy beats, at times scratchy and complicated by delay lines and interesting counterpoint that bristles with percussive machinations without sounding too reliably mechanical. The other instruments usually play support with bendy, synth-like bass parts, big, warm, stringy chords and some nicely treated novelties sprinkled here and there. Mostly high-energy stuff (careful when dancing) there are only a few places where the inclines and declines of the envelopes are anything less acute than perpendicular walls. (KL) • www.levelgreen.com Back To Top DAVID TOOP Sound Body (Samadhisound) • Over the course of this album, David Toop’s "sound body" becomes the object of autistic worship, of an incestuous manipulation. It’s unapologetically contrived, planned, schematic, and conscious—and, although the disc progresses with a rather obstinate selectivity (and with the unappealing self-sufficiency of the hardened celibate), it also opens up an unnaturally natural inner zone in which speed-time gradually overtakes extension in matters of importance. Indeed, to the composer’s own admission, rather than denoting a whole which assumes a place and meaning within a signifying frame, the body is here thought of and displayed as a collection of fragments. At first blush, these atoms of sound dwell in the inertia of the fixed point, attesting to Toop’s fascination with environments in which dramatic and dynamic sounds are all but absent. While still maintaining a link to this cold stasis, the Tibetan-clamorous tones gain in density, quietly booming and bloating, as the drones unfold new tendrils of musical exploration. Along these lines, the playing of violinist Angharad Davies and harpist Rhodri Davies slowly becomes more detailed. This process sees to it that compositions, encouraged by the shady complicity of Toop’s programming, reveal the vitality of synthesis, with the surface and volume of pieces losing their classic attributes. What the music gains is a series of gelid, elegant forms, colored by harp strings that well over into ethereal harmonics, and lyrical half-melodies that loom over swaying drones. The space is quickly rendered full, consisting of quick connections and shifts unencumbered by anything in the way of telluric landmarks. For all its crumbs of sound, then, its a delightfully fluid work, one that brims with dignity and personality. (MS) • www.samadhisound.com Back To Top STEWART WALKER Concentricity (Persona) TOUANE Figura (Persona) • Head Personage Stewart Walker went through some illustrious labels in a decade or so of minimal techno endeavour—Mille Plateaux, Force Inc., Tresor, and Minus among them—before founding his own Persona. His shift of base from US to Berlin brought with it a move toward more detailed, micro-rhythmical design, to the point where Walker’s technoid minimalism has acquired a highly controlled and decidedly musical pedigree in a scene whose egalitarian mongrelism has increasingly given its populous “I am a DJ” pretenders an air of threat rather than promise. The listening headspace Walker creates on Concentricity is a refined cerebral techno shell with a sharp kick inside, cloaked in remotely sensual fibers and harmonic vapor trails. Concentricity is more than just a title, referring to a cherished personal visualization of the attributes of his music—the impression of concentric circles of rhythm and melody, steady 4/4 kick drum as center, bigger phrases built off that at certain points in cycling through the bars, with the elements, once panned in the stereofield, inserted into an planetary-like rotation of beats and tones with listener/author at center. That’s how Concentricity can be suggestively heard. Tracks are segued continuously, but there’s no attempt at a faux-live DJ-mix effect. Rather Walker’s denial of pause aims to enhance flow and internal coherence, the set coming out smoother, less loose, and more precise than the likes of his Live Extracts. From the light pared-back propulsion of “Last Week’s Disappeance” to the quirkier near-warehouse bottom-end blippery of “Fragile Chemistry”, via the hybrid of Chain Reaction dub-tech metallica and space age electro-funk that inhabits “Madness, Like Schools Of Fish,” Concentricity is clearly the work of an artisan-musician, and marks Walker out as a studio man with a plan, standing out from the horde of screen-staring DJ rude minimal-mechanicals, coma-clicking through endless sub-Hawtin loopisms. Bundled here with the Persona premier by virtue of kinship of stable and spirit rather than signature sound, Marco Tonni (aka Touane) saddles up quite a differently bucking beast in Figura. Tonni’s background is one of early dues-paying in Bologna, DJ-ing and performing live, before a move to Berlin, where he came under Walker’s mentorship. Evolving from DJ into designer of electronic music, he has sought to deploy minimal techno as a platform from which to rise above the humdrum doof-doofuses. Being similarly inclined towards sub-genre boundary-surfing, Walker would appear to have been an invaluable touchstone, however indirect, in the developing of his protege’s artful sonic constructedness. The cornucopia of ideas that teemed through Touane’s alert debut, Awake, placed him at the left of the minimal techno field, and Figura finds him questing even further from the rigidity of the minimal techno ground he was weaned on, deploying a now de rigueur formula of electroacoustics, DSP-doctored and pepped up with found sounds to produce a distinctive sonic voice. In genrecidal freefall, upbeat instrumental electropop yields to vocal-inhabited lounge-electronica, by way of languorous cyber-jazz, with several petite-sized intermissions. Like a butterfly that’s built up a resistance to the chloroform jar, Touane no sooner pinned down has wriggled free from pins and fluttered off again to alight on some other backdrop. An air of restless ferment prevails. This could be a strength, but on Figura it tends to lean towards weakness. An Altman “Short Cuts” in audio clothing, it’s a carefully directed episodic narrative that seems similarly hobbled by needless overpopulation and hyper-editing flash. Big Picture plot is lost in constituent cameos, as the listener seeks to stay afloat in a plethora of interesting sounds and concatenations of quirky sonorites. However, Tonni’s inclination to eclectic drift and fiddle subtracts from the kind of focus achieved by his mentor, and a proper resolution, not to mention gratification, seems in constant deferral. (AL) • www.personarecords.com Back To Top |
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