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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 14 / October 2007
REVIEWED BY: GIUSEPPE IELASI Autumn (12k) • The somniloquies on the sixth full-length from musician Giuseppe Ielasi are compellingly cinematic, though lucid in their detailed description. Rumblings from guitar, piano, hammond organ, and synthesizer evolve and divide like amoebas filmed in real time, their irregular movement marked against the steady flickering of static. This process establishes a mosaic of sound which possesses a hypnotic and energizing directness. While these percolating elements cohere to form an iridescent glow of waking machinery, of crucial point is the fact that they nevertheless maintain a strong sense of clarity and distinctness, never dissolving into vapidness. This is epitomized in the second track, where tense strands of energy from guitar and hammond organ are dissolved into a gray monolith of short-wave timbres. Also circling around this core, though, are piano and Hammond organ, which are positively alive with multitudinous timbres and fragmented melodic ideas. The plaintive, cracked, and waywardly inventive quality of the compositions makes for rather moving music. On the fourth selection, too, the piece is pitch-shifted such that it unsettles any real sense of serenity, yet at the same time, the central theme remains very much present, eternally pulsing with unsaturated crystalline potential. Unlike some of his other releases, Ielasi never meddles with the listeners’ perceptual instincts. Instead, in using an expansive and elongated aural field, subtle gradations in texture, and dynamic and melodic intervals, not to mention a certain mournful mood, he continually provokes a renewed sense of wonder. The fifth composition brings this all to a close. Full of timbral friction, the piece wavers like a massive cosmic sigh. As one has come to expect from Ielasi, however, it is restrained and candid in approach, making this one of his most direct and personal statements yet. (MS) • www.12k.com Back To Top NURSE WITH WOUND Shipwreck Radio: Final Broadcasts (ICR) NURSE WITH WOUND Rat Tapes One (ICR) • Released as part of the Shipwreck Radio series of albums by Nurse With Wound documenting the local radio broadcast residency of Steven Stapleton, with trusty assistant Colin Potter, in Lofoten, Norway in June-July 2004. The brief was to produce three radio broadcasts per week for local station Lofotradioen of music constructed from whatever they heard or could find around the island. Each broadcast was preceded by a jingle of a male voice saying “Velkommen Til Utvær” followed by a female voice “Welcome To Utvær” (the most remote island in Lofoten, with no permanent residents but two lighthouse keepers). The sounds from the Shipwreck Radio are, predictably, somewhat disturbed and disturbing, far removed from the elegance of more “musical” works such as Soliliquy for Lilith or the spooked ambience of Salt Marie Celeste. This final emission presents two half-hour tracks involving live treatment and processing of field recordings. On “July 22,” sound becomes so far removed from source it becomes acousmatic. An infernal creation sounding like emissions from some haunted behemoth factory caught between Industrialism and Futurism, as if Stapleton had fabricated updates of Russolo’s Intonarumori reverberating with all manner of thunderings, metallic bellowings, and steamy exhalations. Undead hangs uneasily replete with the expectation of the next bilious irruption. “Final” final broadcast, “July 13,” opens with a drawn out moan, presaging loops of the “Welcome to Shipwreck Radio” fragment subjected to recursive manipulations that becomes a progressivle mangled audio sculpture, technologically not so much deconstructed as destroyed. It remains a self-indulgent exercise in DSP-processing sample fiddling whose course is eventually as predictable as “July 22” is laden with surprise, and it’s more the visceral heft of this latter piece that will pull NWW enthusiasts in and keep them rapt. Rat Tapes One is a collection billed as “an accumulation of discarded musical vermin 1983-2006”, a statement which contains within it implied protection from any critique based on its scrappy fragmented undercooked nature. Fair enough, it seems there are certain artists who achieve a status as Unotuchables, and Mr Stapleton would appear to have passed beyond Normal Criticism, with nigh on 30 years behind him as Dada Daddy-O. Suspending disbelief, however, let’s assume that critique matters (though what criteria apply to such work is thrown into a certain flux). RTO is, reductively, eighteen largely unprepossessing untitled and sometimes unlistenable tracks, exploring a familar ugly parade of sampled flotsam and jetsam through dyspeptic collage. Some echoes of former inglories (from such as Rock and Roll Station and Thunder Perfect Mind are detectable for the serious Wound-spotter. Any number of lowlights could be pulled out at random: “Untitled 12” is a spoofed drum’n’bass nightmare track with little of the NWW signature other than some whacked out insertions and a whiteout ending. On “Untitled 14” SS apes a style between Zappa and Beefheart to semi-rant over a lo-fi beat sliver populated with recordings from a somewhat barren field, ending in bizarre elephant-trumpeting simulations. Some amateur hour field recording antics comprise “Untitled 16”, which starts with frogs and insects before drums and an explosion drags it into an ur-kraut bash. The disc concludes with a spoken word collage of respected musicians’ names, not all of which are distinguishable, ending with the statement, “All of these bands are complete shit”. Which withering sardonicism seems to symbolize what this scrappy chancer’s will-this-do offering says in regard to an artist who’s become removed from connection with his art’s valency. One for die-hards only. (AL) • www.icrdistribution.com Back To Top PATRICK O’HEARN Glaciation (Patrick O'Hearn) • Genre appellations notwithstanding, O’Hearn’s career has bridged numerous styles over troubled categorical waters for going on past two decades now. At one point the brightest light on Peter Baumann’s fledgling Private Music label in the late 80s, O’Hearn, like most contemporary artists, has forsaken the trappings of the majors to become a staunch independent, in the process securing his own niche by realizing a stately presence on the “scene,” where his impeccably produced and finely-wrought releases hit the streets ever year or so, making their mark ever so subtly. A negative this is not. So many musicians inhabiting that noxious grey area between “space music” and “new age” (ugh, that term again!) have come and gone, either cast adrift into grand anonymity (after being stripped of major label support) or bludgeoned by the realization that what little artistic integrity they possessed was mere proprietary illusion. Not so O’Hearn. Having virtually reinvented himself as a more serious “composer” post his career in the comparatively short-lived environs of Missing Persons, over the last 20 years-plus his career hasn’t exactly been meteoric, but it’s comforting to know that his muse is reliably authentic. Which means that Glaciation, a record that hardly breaks new ground, remains nevertheless an involving, inviting, and, naturally, gorgeous experience. Preceding years have seen O’Hearn move away from the energetic rhythms and melting-pot percussion fantasies of Rivers Gonna Rise and Eldorado. This is music now of introspection, contemplation and literalized landscape, far more poetic and serene. Glaciation highlights silken guitar reveries and John Adams-esque piano etudes, O’Hearn’s electronic ambient wash relegated mostly to background color, mistiness rather than Modularity. The one exception is the overtly spatial interphase synthesis of “Resourceful Adaption,” four minutes of twinkling diode-driven starshine that is resolutely electronic—perhaps the best piece, it’s strangely out of place within the album’s chosen palette of sounds, yet fits well in context. There’s the odd glimmers of O’Hearns past (the shimmering “trumpets” and deep-bass strum of “Upon Solitary Expanse,” the tribal rhythms of “Our Temperable Host, which patently recalls similar threads found on Rivers Gonna Rise), but O’Hearn seems to be shucking off yesteryear’s glories for more considered realms. The end result is music of such sublime beauty that it’s a crime the man still endures so little notoriety—perhaps it’s the audience that is in fact Glaciated and not the artist who carves out the exquisite lines of sonic sculptures reflected on the digipak’s arctic-wreaked tableau. (DB) • www.patrickohearn.com Back To Top COLIN POTTER It Was Like This (ICR) JONATHAN COLECLOUGH & MURMER Husk (ICR) • Integrated Circuit Records and studio have been behind some of the most acclaimed post-industrial soundscape and experimental drone works in the past decade, Potter being sound engineer in residence as well as label curator. He’s collaborated with and been member of projects involving ICR-associated artists, notably Monos and Ora, and latterly Nurse With Wound. It Was Like This... consists of two disks of live material spanning a 7-year period. The assemblage functions in affect as an archive of his sound art over the last decade. Potter’s self-authored work is more recently founded on extended soundscapes predominantly involving manipulated field recordings, as demonstrated by the two 30+-minute pieces “KJFC California 8/03” a long drawn out dissipative piece of fairly untampered with fieldwork that had this listener scouring the wallpaper. Its partner on this disc, “Soundland Sedbergh 4/06,” possesses marginally more detail and drone matter to lure in. Disc 2, which features older performances from '99/'00, is in fact more engaging overall. Mainly comprising arcane stretched out drones mixed with field recordings, refreshing a sometimes tired sub-genre, and also including, rarity for Potter, some beat matter. In fact, those au fait with his work with Nurse With Wound will find a certain familiarity in the scuffed light-industrial rhythms of "Windmill London 11/99," an unsettling and eerie place to spend 24 transfixed minutes. The two other tracks, both titled "Red Rose London 5/00," are further slices of eldritch sonic collage, the first underpinned by a down-in-the-basement sub-breakbeat, the second a piece of difficult listening creepiness involving queasily stretched voices that will tax the most ardent of avant-ophiles. Challenging material, a substantial portion of which is worth rising to. Kindred spirit and sometime Potter collaborator, Jonathan Coleclough has risen to the very top of a by now august UK experimental drone underground with his skill in long format explorations of distended sonorities, atmospheric tableaux whose peculiar resonances transcend their provenance in field recordings of everyday audio events. There seem to have been more collaborations (with Colin Potter, Andrew Chalk, and Lethe) in recent years than solo work, this latest with Patrick McGinley, aka Murmer. Coleclough and McGinley’s art, as demonstrated on Husk, is rooted in their methodology, which provides for rough documents of the everyday to be audio-processed into something above and beyond, albeit a dark and even frozen beyond. The drone methodology goes like this: gruzzy low-end drones of a sub-harmonic inclination are layered with undulant mid-range sustains, stretching out into sinews and nodules further flecked with organic detail. Four tracks, each a variation on smeared crystalling drones offset by grittier timbres, whose dynamic essntially involves the option of reaching for a quiet glow of mini climax or maintaining a stern frown-on-the-void chronostasis. This reductive analysis shouldn’t detract from the wealth of sonorous matter for the deep listening-inclined ear to dive into here. A cornucopia collaged overlay, wrought from refrigerators, thunderstorms, sheep, car horns, ferryboats, windblown sand, and crackling charcoal, is woven into an impressive and immersive mix. (AL) • www. icrdistribution.com Back To Top KLAUS SCHULZE ...Live... (Revisited) KLAUS SCHULZE Kontinuum (SPV) KLAUS SCHULZE'S WAHNFRIED Trance Appeal (Revisited) • Slowly, the work to construct the Klaus Schulze legacy begins. For those in the know it begins anew. [For us in particular, our editor-in-chief began many months ago, the results viewable at http://www.ei-mag.com/features0001.php.] This process may always be drawn out; with its origins in his memberships in Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel almost forty years ago, Schulze's catalog is monstrous in size, hydra-headed in direction, far-flung in its rerelease path from Germany to the world and especially to the United States at long last. This process may in fact have no clear endpoint, as the unreleased hides among the reissued and the brand new among the unreleased. Let's distill the obvious goal of all of this effort, a deceptively easy goal: defining and legitimizing Schulze alongside TD and Kraftwerk as a foundation for so many beats and beeps that followed, from off-putting experimental whines to variations on the almighty groove. Each voice in the chorus supporting his influence, each album made newly available, even Schulze's assumed/assured position in some holy trinity of krautrock electronics—all in all, these are all just bricks in the wall. The music both new and old often cements Schulze as a skilled foreman of sound, creating walls from bricks and solid structures from walls. On revisiting 1980's ...Live... we hear him taking up TD's mantle of synthesizers molded into orchestral if not operatic epic journeys, none shorter than seventeen minutes. There's a significant Middle Eastern feel to this work. "Bellistique" is a two-section suite that begins as a whirling dervish, a plug-and-play dance of seven veils, before becoming a fog of aching analog strings; "Heart" reverses the order and features keyboards faking flutes. House-like funk and live drum effects make appearances, while "Dymagic" is a primal scream of Arthur Brown's chants and dissonant guitar[-like] washes. Fast-forward to the 2007 release Kontinuum, which from the opening notes of "Sequenzer (From 70 to 07)" takes back from the modern masters who took from him: The Orb, BT, Banco de Gaia among others. Indeed, Schulze reaches even further to incorporate sounds that one might think could have passed him by. As natural as they may feel, are the breakbeats in "Euro Caravan" and the trance workout occupying the back half of "Thor (Thunder)" instances of natural development or playing catch-up? Are Schulze's latest forms post-modern forward thoughts or merely neoclassical derivatives? Further, is it appropriate to look to the past in order to see his future? While 1996's Trance Appeal—performed and released by Schulze as [Richard] Wahnfried—is but one building block in his career, it too reveals he is not above merely using templates to maintain the appearance of being contemporary. There are certainly moments that are uniquely and obviously his, chief among them the opening diptych of "Suspense" (which could have been excerpted from the other two releases discussed here) and "Bizarre" (along with "Dymagic" the most out-there track in this grouping, punctuated by screeching keys and vocal samples). With "Rubbish" we find the first evidence of his admitted conversion (at the time) to pure techno by said music of the age and his Wahnfried collaborator Jörg Schaaf. Save the layout of the album—some of Schulze's shortest tracks on record followed by momentum-killing longer ones—there's nothing here that's actually bad. It's just that the titular appeal of trance, along with the occasional homages to house, happy hardcore, and even acid jazz makes this seem like an effort on the part of an aging artist to stay relevant, especially in the supposed absence of efforts on the part of the artists he inspired to promote that inspiration and simply imply relevance. Construction must therefore continue; Schulze's legacy awaits, patiently. (AB) • www.insideout.de Back To Top |
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