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LABEL PROFILE FOR 4 EARS In emphasizing weakness over strength, the ongoing endeavors of For 4 Ears maintain a freshness of sound, giving rise to a minimalism pregnant with excess, to a roughness of surfaces that complement rather than compromise their soft, mutable center. No small part of this is due to the emphasis on intersubjectivity in the relationships between the respective players. The questions the players pose consistently lay open, denude, and expose their addressee. The most elementary reaction to such questions being shame, the first volume in the Signal To Noise series impresses for its steady hand in the cultivation of this sentiment. No small amount of trust is displayed the ways in which the players interact, each turning the other into the subject-presumed-to-know, and by mediation of this illusion effectively conjure up fresh techniques and extend established musical practices into neoteric domains. Volume One is couched in the vernacular of a permutatory (post)minimalism. The players inhabiting a perilous point, somewhere between the double imperative of repeating the redemptive message and striking out on an aesthetic advance, the finely tuned feedback whines and curious, string-scraping sounds suck one in as they manage the multiple tensions harbored within it - tensions between purity of form and expression, collective effort and individual ego, and so on. Tomas Korber, Christian Weber, and Katsura Yamauchi continue on in a similar material realm, the changes in relationships of color and contour often sounding like the structural distortion of an unseen kernel, yet then their compositions segue into more of a positivization of this indigestible rock, as moments begin to lose their earthly form, and lines morph at their outer edges into odd, ectoplasmic emanations. () saxophone, for one, begins with faintly noticeable dry wheezes, but is gradually led to mirror sounds rooted in experimental electronics - among them, wheezing abrasive tones, hisses and long sustained sounds. In a paradoxical manner, these desolate, harsher textures seem to expand rather contract the closer one travels into them, and despite their physical presence, grow less knowable the more clearly they appear. Volume three marks another shift of seismic proportions, with changes in pitch relationships growing more dramatic. Here, Jason Kahn, Gunter Muller, and Norbert Moslang spin thick webs of harmonic expansions and inversions, creating a new atonal center within the music, which serves as a foil for percolating drones and highly microscopic events. It all ends with a certain sharpness, a biting, intense quality which rounds this series out as a dense, impossibly detailed and multiply erupting thicket of sound. Although strung together in a relatively short time-span, the dimensions feel intuitively right, and the intellectual and sonic realms it outlines are very much advanced and determined. Squire, a collaboration between guitarist Oren Ambarchi and Keith Rowe participates in this very patience. Ambarchi imparts on Rowe his characteristic heaving guitar-drones, often sounding like a wasp entombed in honey, angrily chafing at a glass jar, which Rowe fills this with a school of voices and buzzes, swimming and swirling inside the near-oceanic mix while simultaneously amplifying its space. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is one of the more immediately accessible releases to grace the catalogue. As it has an almost symphonic sense of itself, it is comfortable with enabling the listener to have both passivity and participation as equally adequate responses to the proceedings. One can pick up on the most minor components or quite simply get lost as it builds organically, enjoying the graceful, spiraling feel that recurs throughout the album. Of a vastly different dispensation is Burst_Log, a reworking from Norbert Moslang of one of his previous works, Lat_nc. Whereas scheduled moments in the aforementioned works were galvanized with entropic fury, with coarse textures of jagged edges that would jut out and produce so many breaches and arrest or otherwise heighten the mobility of a work like some internal regulating principle, this recording all but lacks such a center, and possesses a most unusual sense of movement. In focussing intensely on small segments of sound, Moslang creates a fascinating collage of repetitive grooves and unidentifiable, reverberating noise. The album builds out from the rhythmic structures, but never beyond them. Often, blocks of sound and painfully slow power chords unexpectedly phase into walls of static or morph into a growling lycanthropic incantation, yet there always remains a residue of the original rhythm, a range of abstract electronic squiggles and high-pitched beats that menace anything that might otherwise be mistaken as a sort of fusion. A collaboration between Gunter Muller and Moslang works in a somewhat similar vein: coated with layers of sonic dust, the the latters untamed manner plays against the grain of the formers taut textures. Other moments are thrown off center further still, as Moslang’s insistence on extreme register and alienated colors which sour and embalm the proceedings like milk. Although a veritable hotbed of unstable activity, the two players thrive in this setting, turning it into the mainspring of their power. On each occasion that a syncopated beat is introduced into the field, its presence and subsequent dissolution add gradations of suspense and movement, showing Muller and Moslang to be surprisingly at ease in this setting. A particular highlight in the For 4 Ears catalogue is Fibre, the collaboration between Tomas Korber, Gunter Muller, and Keith Rowe. A crackling electricity is discernible between the players, paced with space in mind and populated with carefully nurtured sounds unencumbered by any nodal points that might quilt or otherwise stop their sliding. At times, the recording sounds almost homogeneous, yet played at but a paltry few decibels higher, and a percussive element is revealed, one which rises up into vaulted chords and swooping feedback tones of a grander scheme. It’s certainly a congenial context for Muller, his chameleon-like presence continually lubricates this music’s incessant repetition of a beginning ex nihilo, in the restrained yet quite dramatic annihilation and retroactive restructuring of the presupposed contents. Til We Meet Again favors more clearly demarcated internal subdivisions. Jason Kahn employs some surprisingly conventional percussive sounds. The rhythmic rumble of his gong-like tones is distilled by low frequency electronic detritus, but before this, lengthy stretches in which the he and Tetuzi Akiyama prowl around each other are largely dominant. During these moments, Akiyama displays characteristic precision and technical finesse in his playing, veering from serrated slide-figures to atonal scrapes and pinches on his acoustic guitar. Considered in themselves, these respective elements betray a certain paucity, yet entwined they stand as subtle, hypnotic, seductive pieces that blend concept and luxuriance. Tanker, led by the throaty harmonics of Ami Yoshida, encourages quick connections on the part of Gunter Muller and Masahiko Okura such that the recordings as a whole are experienced more intensely. On occasion, Yoshida’s voice, though always divorced from anything remotely human, is still recognizable, if only so that it might be subjected to a chorus of metallic shrieking and crackle, bearing out a fractious three-way dialogue. Though a testament to Yoshida’s talent as a vocalist, Muller and Okura are to be praised for almost perfectly doubling Yoshida’s twittering birdlike squeaks, such that all one hears is the distant spittle of ack-fire amid a howling gale. It’s a monumental recording, the trio virtually tearing a wormhole in time as they shift the location of the music dramatically up and down. For 4 Ears thereby disclose that in the distance between the rigid anatomical line and ecstatic transcendence lies a whole spectrum of possibilities. MAX SCHAEFER • www.for4ears.com |
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