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LABEL PROFILE U-COVER CDR LIMITED SERIES In the kingdom of IDM, an abbreviation that at this point has become so nebulous as to be devoid of all meaning (let alone signifiers), U-Cover might very well be crowned king. Much like the age of the cassette and its attendant DIY ethic, the new age of the CDR has opened up unlimited possibilities, not to mention abject prolificness. The U-Cover monarchy, operated by longtime techno-ician Koen Lybaert (The Artist Formerly Known As Starfish Pool, Llips, Holon, Lowground, et al) and partner Esther Santoyo (who both trade in plastic as the ever-morphing Ontayso) has grown in the last span of years from a considerable "official" CD label to a multi-limbed behemoth now sporting in addition three other CDR imprints, all of which comprise a combined 60-plus releases and growing, with new editions coming out more-or-less monthly. All told, it's a staggering amount of music, a veritable cottage industry of electronica in and of itself, cutting across the bandwidth of sub-genre as it unfolds artists known, semi-known, and unknown into the breach. Whether or not sufficient time exists for anyone on this planet to adequately parse such a huge musical menu is apparently of little concern to Lybaert, whose goal appears to be nothing less than global domination; all us minions can do is our best to simply keep up or die trying. In any event, Part One of this label profile bisects all of the latest in the "main" U-Cover CDR series, all housed in brown cardboard sleeves stuffed with Lybaert's stunningly stark black and white landscape reliefs. So, without further ado: Under the cloak of Biotron Shelf we find Wil Bolton and Murray Fisher, joint heads of UK electronica imprint Boltfish, already familiar to hep electronicats through separate solo projects, Cheju and Mint. The collaborative ID permits them some leeway to play around a bit more at the outskirts of their synthetic IDM with some more questing sound design touches: perhaps a trace of Biosphere-style ambient, suggested on tracks like opener "Offshore," while "Spindle" is possessed of a doleful but engaging Autechral orchestral sweep. Almost like a 40-minute paean to four decades of everything electronic—be it Gaellic, Anglo or Teutonic, it closes in futuristic hymnal splendor with the magisterial swells of the Jarre-ing "Displacement." 33 Minutes North presents a combination of deliberately under-done analoguery and carefully staged production interventions which bespeaks a meticulous technological skill gratifyingly backed up by a guiding sensual/sensory aesthetic. One of the best of the whole CDR series, at least to this writer's ears. Christian and Joanne Althoff's Caduceus project purports to be "striving to provide new ideas and sounds within the realm of computer-based music." A pretty lofty ambition, given the myriad of digital explorers who've been boldly going Out There for a decade or so. Perhaps were one to ditch that "new" and allow the merely "interesting," then we could avoid stalling this critical vehicle at the off. We're dealing on their Home release with a sound that will scratch the itches of abstract minimal-tech fiends; not the bpm brigade, but rather those who get their kicks on glitch 1996 (-ish), wanting a fix in the vein of Sahko, Mego, or a Touch of Rehberg and Ikeda. Home for the Althoffs seems to be conceived in terms of a closet filled with quotidian sounds, presumably sourced from the kitchen et al, digitalized so the sonics of the pan brush up against Pan Sonic. A head-to-head of environment-as-sound vs sound-as-environment is set up. Minimalist reduction flirts with indeterminacy, as a composite of Schaefer's 50s concréte is laid down in a 00s Raster Noton-designed klinik. Daniel Nieto is something of a U-Cover veteran by now, with debuts as (half of) Skipsapiens and Danieto (Cirugia Casual) under his belt, as well as an outing with compadre Flipper. Contemplacion de la Vida Inerte is more sonically adventurous and wider-ranging than previous Danieto, which tended not to stray too far from an established dub-inflected electronica sound (cf., Deadbeat and early Pole). On this release Nieto goes much more his own idiosyncratic way to make some intriguing harmonic inquiries of his own. Chiming marimba-like tones meander across beats that stray from the dope-y headnod to the busily percolating, while beguiling timbral trails are draped over other sections. Eleven-minute beatless closer "Non Gravity Cycles" is particularly distinct, espousing a soundscapery nearer to the loopdrift of shuttle358 and Loscil, and this collection impresses with Nieto's oblique personalization, expressed through an appealing ludic experimentalism. Brian Grainger (Milieu) is at it again, this time roping Lee Batchelor in to pursue his Music World Domination By 2008 project. Grainger's been dropping roughly an album a week since—inducted here as Flax Harmonade allows him yet another front to take forward his cunning plan. A self-titled collaborative debut of 17 tracks, over which little-known other half Lee Batchelor seems to have written his somewhat quirky personality large; the sonic milieu of Flax Harmonade gets quite un-Milieu-like (versus his previous U-Covers Aurora Borealis and Night Currents). Grainger's presence is detectable but another voice predominates, and instead we get shades of Mike & Rich and early-Rephlex braindance, hints of freaky geeky tongue-in-cheeky playroom plunderphonics, like two jumped-up kids playing in the post-sandpit. The likes of "Nactral Pluem" and "Eisid" are textbook Milieu, all woozy tinkle-wibble and thunk-hop to please the Ten & Tracer Team and Freescha Fan Club, but frequent flotsam floats past, and it occurs that music may well have the right to children, but its right to get away so often with the "experimental" tag without being asked "but did it work?" is questionable. Flax Harmonade would merit such interrogation. Flipper, sometime Robin to Danieto's Batman, who, appropriately, masters his album Chiodata (Danieto, that is, not Batman). Chileans Claudio Cisterna and Daniel Nieto are more than just country-kin, for as well as creating the first Chilean net-label together, they share similar compositional strategies and the same percussive glitchy IDM template. Flipper, so-called because Cisterna's machine manipulations evoke the feeling of pinball-playing, clicks out a di-version of the micro-tech dance, with discrete Latino moves, especially in the busily percolating background kinesis (hola, Villalobos—Chilean too) and the rooty-tooty to the booty-kick digi-whizz festooned all around. It's a quiet riot of bedroom-house with a knowingness towards its genre templates that has some of the spirit of the Flanger of Uwe Schmidt (Santiago a-go-go) sans smirk, and maybe The Rip-off Artist, mash-mania muted. But Chiodata's a leggy 14-tracker that should've been judiciously pruned back to 40-minute spruceness. And otherwise intelligent design falls victim to Flipper's over-fussy hyperactive (dis)order, ever-cutting clicks'n'scrapes into cracks in scapes. Would do well to learn when to leave well alone. Forrest is in the homebrew ambient tradition of Milieu, Ohioan Warren Kroll's chosen source being guitar, assisted only by effects pedals, amps and tape recorder; one-takes, no overdubs. This contributes to that deliberately etiolated evanescent sound currently in lo-vogue. Intended topographic and psycho-soma referents are retrievable from name (Forrest), artwork (forest) and disc title. Thus Summer Sounds Asleep is already zonally configured as the first bars of lo-fi droney guitar-haze waft over you. The audio-mediated storyboard has you moving from the lull of late-afternoon and its reverberative heatstroke, cooled by summer breeze textures, into near-dusk in leaf-carpeted starry-canopied ambience. The gauzy monophony of the five main tracks shows little artfulness once set up, but should perform its low-level listening diversion well enough for those of appropriately suggestible disposition. Variation comes in the form of four remixes including a decent dub minimalist take under Kroll's Dorosoto alias. Milieu (quelle surprise) re-fits "Can You See?" with parts remaining from his Night Currents vehicle into a Boards-meets-Seefeel indie-ambient hiphop-tronica vehicle, equipped with edge-of-feedback loop delay spoiler. Even better is a crepuscular Deepchord-esque dub-tech rethink by Ontayso, with filtered shimmer-shards underpinned by heartbeat kick-throbs and liminal film dialogue trails. Not so much asleep as diaphanously doped. Tim Jackiw has been a low-light presence on the Australian electronic music scene for a decade or so now. Adelaide is the base from which Criogenesis was forged, conceived as temporary residence audio diary—notes from a small apartment in a semi-industrial complex. A form of personal cultural archaeology through sonic media, the music is far more appealingly outfolding and less isolationist than this conceptual brief might indicate, though the likes of "Composite Memory 6" hint at a certain shadowy post-industrial bleakness at outset before being illumined with twilit Zorn-like twinkles and Modell-lite deepchords. Eleven tracks, simply titled and numbered "Composite Memory 1," "Composite Memory 5," etc., document fleeting moods, with Jackiw wringing a good deal of affect from these drifting assemblages of machine-mediated music memories. In a list of "interesting people, places & things," the Viennese (Peter) Kutin, includes "nightwalks, tunnels, reverb," as well as "drone records, deep listening, openmusic," a welcome to his world on his debut Panora. It is indeed something of a nightwalk on the psycho-active side of sound design, with cameos from special guest star, music. Field recordings are the order of the day on first track "Cité [Intro]," the furthest U-Cover has ventured from IDM and ambient towards an aesthetic of installations and radiophonics. "Balancoire" then gets harmonious on you, adrift unmoored in Eno/Stars of the LId somnambulism, albeit with vaguely unsettling wheezes and a hint that sleep will be less than serene. "Vague Things" is the stuff of an Eraserhead migraine, loop'n'pulse colliding with rasp'n'rustle, before an elegiac pianist enters to stop the concréte setting. "There Are Pipes Everywhere Under Your Ground" wins the award for suggestive and discomfiting title, a beguilingly dense timbral feast of brimstone smoulder and black treacle, coming on like Eluvium and Maeror Tri's vaguely menacing lovechild, baptized to the pipes of a phantom sky-organ. "Sulamith" then revisits daydream-nightmare Lynch-land for a queasy quarter-hour. Kutin's collagism is eerie and engrossing. Lan Formatique is Scots electronicist Gavin Lees, who makes busy with a pocketful of patches and a bagful of busy-bodying beats. Christ only knows how that country's Benbecula imprint didn't snap up this debut release, it being a dead-ringer for something off their Celtronica roster. A workmanlike take on the old airbrushed bit-crush'n'beat-crunch combo that's served numerous indie-disposed IDM-ers well since Morr music moved off the patch (leaving it to Neo Ouija and Toytronic), and, yes, now it's for eclectic long-haulers U-Cover to carry on the fading torch. Goodnight Noises Everywhere is screaming to be labelled "emotional" but remains only gesturally so. Like the bulk of popular electronica acts that have surfed in (third-hand) on Schnauss waves (already second-hand), it's blowsy, fussy and over-plumped, like a too fluffy lavishly-embroidered pillow. GNE might've been a contender for Flavor of the Month for March, but that'd be March 2004, not 2006, its actual release date. Pleasant enough but now overripe, and sounding well past its use-by date. Motoro Faam is three Tokyo musicians, Mizukami Ryuta (samples and programming) making electronic mischief, some of it with Kobara Daisuke's violin and Kato Ayumi's piano, but a substantial part against them. On Fragments, it's a rich chamber blend that gets subverted on the likes of "Dancer on a Tangent" and "A Change of Cityscape," where refined passages of classically articulated piano and violin are assailed by digital hail and light squalls to create peculiar collaged artefacts. The disc is willfully hard to pin down, wriggling free no sooner you've fitted it in at the quirkier end of City Centre Offices, close to the Dictaphones or Donato Whartons of the world. No matter, for these three Japanese whippersnappers bring something distinctive to the U-Cover table, something that makes subtle passes at emotions, that refuses its melodies then grinningly offers them, playfully roughed up. Apparently, pieces were created with "capricious changes in feelings that may occur in everyday life" as the theme. Bingo—aesthetic contextualized. Flagship U-Cover act Ontayso (bosses Koen Lybaert and Esther Santoyo), emblematic of the label's output, deliver yet another echoing delight of post-industrial ambience and syn-drone. A more experimental minimalism than the recent basic channelings of Procesamiento Digital Uno and Dos, this Solar Terrestrial Activity is another music from a different system. "Solar 20060821" operates in a loopland redolent of the quieter drone confabulations of Dutch guitar-mangler Machinefabriek, then gives way to "Solar 20060715," space echoes on stun, opening into a post-industrial ambient meets environmental-dub driftscape cum wind-tunnel. "Solar 20060322" shifts dramatically out of the sustain to the staccato, with anharmonic stabs of random synth and thumps and clanks that errantly circle around consistency of tempo without ever finding it. Occasional Scanner-esque radio-transmission voices and edge-teetering echo-returns spread liminal feedback wisps everywhere. "Solar 20060117" gets closer to the Basinskian mist murk of Shortwave Music via the still recurring residue of 90s Chain Reaction. "Solar 20051230" closes with an exploration of percussion and the micro-variations in timbre of its echo-haloes. Intriguing stuff as always from these intrepid ear-canal ethnographers. Paradigm is Tomohiro Kimura, the man with the programming plan, and Yuki Takahashi, the human touch, singing, playing accordion (um... yep, accordion) and percussion. On Simulacre, Paradigm's, er, paradigm, provides for Yuki to play Müm, organo-yin to Hiro's Oval-leaning glitch-yang (especially on "Darkness Shall Cover the Earth"). So "Abismo" opens with all the teeming detritus of Vladislav Delay's Entain, but with a background airiness of its own. "Sleepers Awake" shifts the Paradigm paradigm (clever stuff, this) to a Nobuo Uematsu-like clangor, before "Offline" comes on all queasily easy-breezy Japanese-y on Ice(land). "Biolum" is back on abstract track, and all is full of DSP trickery and moody synthstring swathes, bypassing Autechre to channel Einoma/Traject. Ultimately, however, there are a touch too many Paradigm shifts, and the energy of Simulacre ends up dissipated. The following will proceed with no elephant in the room whatsoever, and certainly none bearing initials B. O. C. (none, okay?). Neophyte Reza Nugraha, out of California, USA via Indonesia, is Renu, mixing lo-fi floaty ambient groove (remember that?) and soft plastic hip-hoptronica, with nods too numerous to enumerate (Ten & Tracer, Milieu, Deru, Casino versus Japan, Machine Drum, Vesna...that do you?). Into the Skyland floats and lopes by engagingly (and disengagedly) enough for doped daydream purpose, primed with woozy synthwash and warbly pads, bolstered by those ubiquitous downbeats. There's warmth and depth, more than a foot-tap and a head-nod, and many a twinkle and shimmer along the way, but ultimately no scrambling to scribble Renu high up there on the list of reasons to be extra-cheerful. Music for chillin' in your funky stay-home cyber-crib to. Michael Santos' Soft Pocket is immediately warm and so invitingly detailed as to have you reaching right into it to find a blend of Oval, Sogar, and Fullerton Whitman with a hint of the residue of post-4AD daze. Based around soft swellings and harmony-infused fizz, Santos captures processed guitar and threads through a filigree of static, hiss, and ground failure noise into an intricate microtapestry. Textures are carefully arranged, motifs recycled and reconfigured to maintain flow-motion so the loop base doesn't turn loop-bound. Take "Motion Light," which starts off all helicopter-blade cd-skipping (cf., Fennesz' Endless Summer's "Before I Leave") and muted glitch incursions, before stretching out staccato to sustain. He unites digital and organic tones, found sounds, and underlying static crepitation with luminous drone textures, so that much of Soft Pocket naturally sees him nudging nicely alongside Kranky kin or bedding down with Room40-mates. But with the lately emergent glut of Fennesz-flecked and Hecker-lite placid/active digital soundscapery around, one might wonder what would draw the interested listener into this particular attractively airy pocket. The likes of Kranky and 12k, with their homogeneity of brand identity, boss the drone-based pointillism pitch, so some critical analytical noise needs making to distinguish this release and others in this series, and demarcate certain waves amongst the stream of U-Coverage. -Scaldis- are Belgians Jef Aerts and Maarten Voeten, and For Starters is their debut, another of those bouts of nostalgic analogorrhoea over a tippy-tap move-to-the-groove base. "Bon Voyage" is nicely evocatively on the mark as an opening statement, but the album loses momentum with the following flim-flam fare of the Solvent-lite "Highfive," and then, alas, freewheels on in a paint-by-numbers sub-genre exercise. In a blind ear-tasting, you might attribute For Starters to any number of a group of U-Cover related suspects with "form." It's salutary to reflect on a track like "Cascade," which has moves only minimally in a sound design direction from an ambient-dub meets chill-funk template employed variously by everyone from Pork/Ninja Tune to Enigma/Deep Forest (yikes!) 10-15 years ago. -Scaldis- themselves describe their music as "lazy, warm, gentle, sweet, dark, beautiful, happy, nature, pleasure, fun, endless, glow..." All sounds cuddly, cosy, and coo-ey, and sure it is, and that's fine if you're fine with that, but rather too safe and so-so for the more exigent listener. Not sure quite what's in the air in Malmö Sweden, but Utom Alla's David Gülich and Johan Lenason are clearly breathing a peculiar rarefied version, at least on this evidence. Translating with somewhat queasy allure as "Beloved Disease," €lskade Sjukdom is the most perplexing disc of the whole U-Cover CDR series. One of those "unearthed from the depths of the dark woods of southern Sweden" alien transmissions that sound like the work of slightly deranged trolls grappling with malfunctioning software, they've coaxed out thirteen tracks of organic pulse broth, layered, lapped up, and topped off. Some fleeting vocal input from passing wood-nymphs adds a Bad Elfin charm. File next to Deaf Center, Svarte Greiner and that whole Type label uncanny film soundtrack shtick, or maybe the Fonal forest freak folk discovering DSP and feeding it weird things. Yoshinori Yamazaki and Kenichi Oka combine as Yamaoka for Build On Water—aptly titled, as its contours shapeshift even as you think you've got them pinned down. Its protean nature isn't apparent from opener "Per," which revolves around a deep ambient-dub Pub hub, all propulsive synth stabs and locked-groove bassline. The following "Flower," however, immediately blooms into a radically different ornament, one for a shady corner of smoky lounge cinematicity, heralding a series of abstract tracks drifting between semi-experimental ambient and short film music. The 15 edgy minutes of minimal waiting-room metronomics that constitutes "Klock" offers distinctly austere fare though. Interludes like "F.V.," with way-off yonder reverb-on-stun beats provide relief from a programme alternating alienated atmospheres and hypnagogue ambience. Yamaoka soundtrack some schizopolis twixt vague existential Mitteleuropa blankness and Land of the Rising Sun pomo neo-exoticism. Zool's first album Vadem finds Gerry Vergult (synth/sampling/guitar) making like a regular Flemish Four Tet ("Elysian") when not being Boards of Canada, in particular ("Chomsky"), or fishing around Kettel's friendly waters. Having said that, though his sonic aesthetic resembles these artists in certain respects, the samples and loops are rolled out with distinction, bringing out their grain and resonance more than the average digi- re-do merchant. In fact, digital is only a part of it, the computer being very much a tool to Zool rather than the crutch it is for the less musically endowed. Vergult makes free play of found sound and acoustic instrumentation in mildly altered states to create artificial environments that sound naturalistic, and Vadem hosts a blend of stylistic templates, ranging from dub to triphop, while loosely hanging out in the post-rock and ambient-inclined IDM lounge. As the label forges ahead with its abundant production schedule, it might be prudent to note that U-Cover's current prolificness risks being counter-productive because its over-supply. And in part two of this profile, we shall examine the label's other busy offspring. This therefore, as well as being a guided audio-textual tour, has partly constituted an attempt to distinguish currents in the various sub-streams of U-Cover's ambitious, wide-ranging, and often outstanding CDR project(s). ALAN LOCKETT • www.u-cover.com |
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