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LABEL PROFILE INFRACTION Since 2001, a slow-release streamlet of contemplative and exploratory music has emanated from Infraction Records HQ in Ohio. Owner Jason Bryant is a solicitous curator, releasing just three or four CDs a year. Hardly surprising, then, that we get a series of quality packages whose musical transmissions find themselves co-articulated with a considered thematic approach to artwork. Koda’s Movements are ten in number, floating, hovering, lilting, and arcing in inclination. M. Derrick is the en-Koda of these variations of source material drawn from a quite narrow sector of the timbral spectrum: smooth, low attack, long sustain, slow decay tones, which overlap and interweave, mutating moods. Initially present as an almost anodyne and unresolved background tint, Movements builds cumulatively into a more affecting foreground experience. On segments like “Are We Water” waves of (presumably) processed guitar circulate, now in isolation, then blending harmonically, recalling Stars of the Lid, Rafael Toral, even the further-out shores of Jeff Pearce. An aleatory modulation of chime and blur engenders quasi-melodies and serendipitous harmonies, constantly refreshed. Kiln’s Thermals, recorded 1993-2000, released in 2001, now re-assembled and re-mastered, is a felicitous unearthing indeed. These are evocative micro-symphonies, odd loopstrata on tape retrieved from a potential disintegration fate, ephemeral tone collages whose reference points are Kranky-inclined, with the attending angel of Eno (esp. “An Ending (Ascent)”) not far away. Some beautiful pieces of slow-revolving carousel dynamics are wrought from an array of synthetic sounds, guitars and treatments, but the multiple-track concept (23 in total) brings with it some listener frustration; serially drawn in by a set of euphonious layers or gracefully choreographed drones, only to be summarily evicted when they’re truncated. The sense of felicitous flow present in Koda is here absent, but this episodic format has its admirers. With titles like “Largactil and Dilaudin for the Soul” English composer Andrew Liles announces his oblique intent on All Closed Doors. His music is at once alien and peculiarly intimate, like the reptile you might have in your lounge. Undoubtedly the most challenging Infraction artist from a conventional musical perspective, Liles might be situated in a tradition of Dadaist/surrealist art, were it not for the presence of conventional musical signifiers: a stark piano, an orchestra warming up, peculiar sonorities, progressively disintegrating. Creaks and thuds give way to real instruments, then to ambient drones, interrupted. Liles veers between analog gentility and digital fragmentation—entrances and exits are arbitrary. There are voices, but sense is errant. On the later double CD, New York Doll, much use is made of field recordings of various provenance, often interpolated into recursive drone fragments. Enigmatic, crawling with snatches of quotidian ephemera and found sounds, it’s an eerie 90-odd minutes of quietude and unease, moments of almost-repose disrupted by peculiar sonic turns. A streak of black mischief projects itself through collages of familiar sounds made strange and strange sounds attempting to be familiar. Not for those of a nervous disposition. No picnic either is Zimiamvian Night and his inky triptych of isolationist soundscapes bled from “prepared” guitar with environmental infusions. Unsettling and nocturnal, his (untitled) recording comprises two long pieces—the first tortuous the last bleak—separated by a short interlude. ZN’s Mike Bennett is perhaps best aligned with fellow-travelers in dark underbelly ethnography such as Colin Potter (who has an early Infraction release, See), proponents of the variegated depth of analog recording, enriched by recontextualized externa. A world of forbidding nocturnality is mapped out, where the comforting landmarks of melody are remote. The 20-minute “Amelie” is enrobed in shadows and fog, a drowning limbo of slow dives into sepulchral depths and wellings-up from tenebrous lacunae. In stark contrast, the 30 minutes of “Between Moments” are as a mute smudge to the former’s broad-brush blare. The ghosts of sounds hover barely audible above an almost subliminal drone-hum - not so much isolationism as desolationism. Dark whispers, wails, and waterfalls populate ZN’s lowtone creed. Eerie and discomfiting, this Night. Hard work for unbeautiful bounties. Music For the Head Ballet is a reissue of a 1996 limited edition release by Beequeen. First impression is of a fairly simplistic solipsistic set of distant organ drones, endlessly drawn out. But deeper listening brings insights. Beginning from a liminal whisper, a certain density emerges as tone-mass begins to coalesce, the drones revealing their variegation and complexity. This Dutch duo extend four wedges of thick, immersive textures whose superficial invariance invites a deeper archaeology, revealing a wealth of timbral detail in their gauzy, diaphanous, fuzzy entrails. Sometimes ominous, sometimes almost blithe and breezy, then melodic, melancholic, then atonal, anhedonic—enter and excavate. We find France’s Ultra Milkmaids At Home With... prolific Canadian guitarist Aidan Baker. Their cozying up on this collaboration emboldens them to chop up some of Baker’s chords and feed them to their pet laptop. It proceeds to ingest them, leaving a trail of surprisingly luxurious excretions spread across three tracks into a soft-noise-laden looping dronefest. Drones for dinner again? Yummy. Some surprisingly beauteous material is extruded, like a digital faucet splashing infinitely into a bucket while neo-organ tones fibrillate in the background. Spindly metallic elements leech into streams of bucolic consonance—absorbing and absorbant. Russia’s Beautumn serves us White Coffee on a bed of warm caressing synths floating over light spacious textures. Breaking off from moonlighting as IDM-y Sleepy Town Manufacture, his concoction suspends disbelief that early 90s ambient and Fax flotation have not gone away, awash as it is with deep-space emissions in reverb heaven. But Beautumn shows that he’s no greenhorn, having grasped the First Law of Ambient Essentialism, as classically stated by Eno on On Land: when a resonant synthesizer fragment is placed in a suspension of reverberant space, and the noise of something flapping, clanking or puttering is added, extreme ambience results. A largely beatless brew, some belated percussion finally enters, raising earthly spirits of Global Communication, creamy and dark. Milieu’s Beyond the Sea Lies the Stars, is Infraction’s latest reassertion of old-school ambient, née, in this case, of classical space music values. “The Sing Song Waters of An Endless Sea” hosts solitary glimmering tones ever-looping in a vast wind tunnel, finding communion with kindred synth-spirits, spiralling around each other in elegiac meditation on loss, absence, memory and forgetting—or whatever’s playing at your emo-theater. This solitaire could be attended by the ghost of early Roach (non-tribal small-picture version). Little occurs, much recurs, but it’s somehow engrossing, and gorgeous in its unadornment. “Vibrant Shores, Horizons” is suggestive of the celebratory pealing of churchbells and atavistic horn/pipe drones whilst being completely sonically other. Infraction may move slow, but they’re no slouches. ALAN LOCKETT • www.infractionrecords.com |
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