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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 9 / July 2007
REVIEWED BY: @C Study (Grain of Sound) • Constructed over a period of three years, this is the first @c ("at-c") release where the Portuguese duo of Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais bring their laptops off the stage and into the studio. Study is more than just the title of this album, it indicates its method of inspiration, production, and listening. Visual arts professors by trade, Tudela and Carvalhais (and their Austrian live collaborator Lia) come off as humble guides of material for themselves and for witnesses to interpret and explore, as any good educators would do. Just one problem: In a live setting the spotlighted performers and striking visuals sometimes come off as the focal points where the newly constructed music runs the risk of being ultimately anonymous. On Study, @c acknowledge that it's really the found sounds' world, and they just live in it. @c devote healthy liner-note real estate to lists of the building blocks used to construct each numbered composition, filenames such as "noise02.aif," "rec1-15," and "20040530.02.aif" associated with finished titles like "40." Which piece of code (if any) forms the bubbly foundation for "33," and which the distorted whisper? We ask, where and when were the trampling feet in "31" recorded? That inherent curiosity is the big selling point here, as other than the generated winds that whoosh by in "52" much of the actual music of Study travels a plateau of clicks and light drones more calming than insistent. The deep bell tones of "32" and the lightly-plucked bass of "33" are representative sonic pleasantries snuck into the mix that make @c's efforts border on quaint and sleepy. (Your faithful scribe is down with quaint and sleepy; your own mileage may vary.) Study as a whole remains a refreshing lesson—@c let listeners pay attention to the samples behind the curtain, getting both content and context in order to more accurately form their own conclusions about what they hear. (AB) • www.grainofsound.com Back To Top AS LONELY AS DAVE BOWMAN Pod (Projekt) • Projekt prime minister Sam Rosenthal shucks his Black Tape for a Blue Girl goth melancholies for an equally forlorn side project of ambient/drone miasma. Actually, this is a most welcome return to "form," as Rosenthal hasn't been seen travelling down this road since his 1992 collaboration with Vidna Obmana under the moniker Terrace of Memories. That particular outing made much of sepulchral fog and post-industrial-blasted fug, but on this go-round, Rosenthal's convinced space is the place. Well, the antecedents are obvious, from the 2001 iconography (Rosenthal states that the recording was inspired both by the titular film character and his infant son's fascination with the film's imagery, who also—quite precociously, I assume—accidentally captured the solar radiation flanges used for the digipak's cover) to the work of numerous colleagues the artist champions on his label (Roach, the aforementioned Vidna). As a "literal" interpretation of the events that surely took place post-2001 and pre-2010, Pod is a determinedly stark and visceral aural portrait of a man caught in stasis, trapped in vacuum, lost in time forever. As isolationist music, the five tracks herein—loops composed of electronic dark matter and what must be the residual cries of distant quasars pulsating endlessly in the void—are every bit as searing as Lull or Lustmord's horizon-bending epics. Of course, listening to this it's easy to instantly call up a virtual font of folks who've built entire careers nestling comfortably on the well-worn upholstery adorning such thrones of drones (Oophoi, Mathias Grassow, Troum, denizens of labels such as Cyclic Law and Mystery Sea), reciting similarly elongated paeans to minimal sound discourse like some ancestral mantra. Despite this (or, perhaps, in spite of it), it's difficult not to fully admire Rosenthal's sterling contribution to the canon. Cursory listening allows the subtly shifting patina to narcotically massage the brain; deeper listening, wherein the music's subliminal layers reveal themselves and methodically blossom, exact multitudes of pale sonic hues that drift, suspended, in the mid-range. The hues themselves trick the senses—does the ear detect respectfully rubbed samples of David Shire's 2010 score occasionally irising out of the mix, or are they just ghostly, half-remembered echoes? Like the subject matter it refers to, Pod's tactile, ethereal slipstream makes analogous the soundtrack for alien shamen guiding terrestrial souls from this mortal coil. (DB) • www.projekt.com Back To Top WILLIAM BASINSKI Shortwavemusic (2062) • Surely one of the most influential experimental ambient artist(s) of the last decade, Basinski has spent a long time making much out of doing a great deal with very little. Basinski's Big Idea: the strange synchronicity of his Disintegration Loops project's coinciding with 9/11, and being pronounced emblematic, a Zeitgeist marker for the end of all Zeit, was certainly instrumental in his star's rise in 01-02. It's strange to be confronted by the somewhat grim pusillanimity of many actual releases, and it is consistent to point to their less than compelling quality, whilst still being absorbed by the ideation. In fact this partly accounts for his pervasive influence on others (see for example recent recordings by Andrew Deutsch, The Caretaker, Celer, and Milieu). In its foregrounding of the ethnography of sound (specifically timbre) and relegation of technology to a support role, Basinski's work has provided a vital counter-current to the prevailing wave of technological over-mediation which has surely contributed to the increasing erasure of the Author. So it's pleasing to report that Shortwavemusic is a work on which concept and realization have converged to create a consummate musical artwork. We witness the symbiosis of process and sounding material in actual beguiling musical product. The methodology involved the recording of muzak fragments from radio to tape, the editing of the tape into loops of varying lengths, and their re-pitching. The themes were then layered together in real time while being drenched in shortwave static, humming and hissing in accompaniment. The trademark hypnotic melodic motifs play host to parasitic shortwave frequencies, setting up aleatory (an)harmonics, as the infinite loopings are ever-supplied with new counterpoints. Centerpiece "On a Frontier of Wires" is 23-plus minutes of just this, but such is the resonance achieved by the methodology that what could be an interminable longueur is an engrossing exploration of high-end boundaries of aurality, and the spectral contours of vaporous soft white-noise. Trails of evanescent loops maraud across a progressively more obscured sequence that loops endlessly back upon itself while the whole dives as if down some sepulchral plughole. Its suggestivity is endless. A CD re-issue of a decade-old vinyl-only release, but you couldn't tell (in fact the original dates back to 1982). Bonus track, "Particle Showers," frustratingly for those of you who have the original, is 14:13, and outstanding. (AL) • www.mmlxii.com Back To Top ALEXEI BORISOV & ANTON NIKKILA Where Are They Now (N&B Research Digest) • The base elements of Alexei Borisov's Russian tongue-a rough and guttural language no matter the source-and Borisov and Anton Nikkilä's haphazard electronics come together to update last century's bongos-and-berets scene. Where Are They Now features what one would hope, pending English translation, are treatises at least tangentially tied to their titular subjects ("LŽon Theremin," "Georg Kargl"). It could almost be imagined that we are hearing voiceovers and sloppy drum and synth fills dubbed onto archival footage of Jack Kerouac or similar jazzbos, the finger-snapping results modernized, industrialized, propagandized-art for the people becoming the people's art. The pair's normally rhythmless rhythm isn't easy to embrace on first listen, and being right up front in the mix it's impossible to avoid; it initially sounds in the hands of two people who should have known better, much like the very young Ornette Denardo Coleman seated behind a kit on his father's The Empty Foxhole. Other pieces with spoken words ("Specialized Literature on Microsurgery," the growled/shrieked "Voimakassuolaista Voita") and without ("Engineer Strepetov's Curve") approach more engaging territory: the realm of seriously bugged-out bebop extensions, holographic projections of John Coltrane's Interstellar Space. Borisov and Nikkilä also make pinpoint connections to the roots of this work, despite those being located in both the past and the future. Able to stretch out big-band samples throughout the album's live centerpiece "Metaphysics of Swing" as well as turn in scratchy 4/4 beats on the dark, dank "Late Night Loop," they elevate Where Are They Now beyond its disparate and sometimes difficult sources. (AB) • www.nbresearchdigeest.com Back To Top CHRIST. Blue Shift Emissions (Benbecula) • Liquid Chris H (to his mates) might well have been the man who put the "C" in BoC. Instead of landing on him the usual tired references, a preferred reading would see him as part of the early 90s Hexagon Sun collective, involved in the making of Twoism and BoC Maxima, the blueprint for Boards' much-plundered mid-period palette. So that off-tuned warbly modulating analog synthtone might well have been a metamorphic miracle of Christ, turning preset water into hand-pressed wine. Whatever its provenance, it's still resonantly wobbling and doing woozy service around much of this quietly assured collection. Tracks like "Cordate" have been Christ.'s work since uh... B(o)C (Before (our) Christ.), occupying a space somewhere between wordless electro-pop ballad, ambient groove, and 70s science doc. And the moment might well have caught up with Christ., what with the recent upsurge of interest in things electronically retro (cf., Ghost Box, Mordant Music, et al.), though truth be told Christ.'s spirit resides somewhere else. This second full-length for Benbecula commits to the unalloyed melodicity of 2002's Pylonesque, full of familiar (though not overly so) elements, neither stale nor knowingly ho-ho retro, with a pleasing homebrew flavor. Tracks like "Blue Shifty Missions" with its Bola-esque chord cadences have a touch of the village hymnal or small-screen epic. The mood is downbeat but the carefully emplaced beats protect against any maudlin mope tendencies and sustain a sprightly step. "Vernor Vinge" might even have been a parallel-universe hit with perhaps a wisp or two more "figure" to turn its gorgeous chord-lilt into "hook." Individual songs have a built, developed feel, sometimes arising from Eno-esque drift-wash, then gaining momentum with the help of unfussy "proper" drums and editing savvy. From the opening "Substation" with its beatless droney Krankiness, it proceeds with a beguiling pillowed slow-to-mid tempo IDM that draws in influences from ambient and a few classic electro-isms (of tone not sub-genre). Never heavy-handed, employing deft strokes, swathes, echoes, and pulses, an almost amiable warmth miles away from the digital thunk and crunk of a more clinical electronica kitchen pervades without blandification. (AL) • www.benbecula.com Back To Top ALAN COURTIS Antiguos Dolmenes Del Paleolitico (Sedimental) • The title of Alan Courtis' first solo album for no-input mixing desk feedback translates as Ancient Paleolithic Dolmens, and draws inspiration from the stone formations captured in the album's cover art. Accordingly, the strident, sustained drones ooze out of a mysterious silence, and seem flecked with a sense of the inert. Pieces concentrate on modalities of gradual change and dynamic processes of particle synthesis. The opening track consists of a basic pitch skeleton, embellished by graceful sweeps and shivery staccato tones. Its near-stasis and incremental development displays a sensitivity to how tones can evolve in a composition, in the various manners in which tonal centers and different modes can be mixed to create a subtle musical fabric. This being said, at twelve minutes Courtis' technique is quickly rendered transparent. That Courtis obstinately abides by this formula for the other four works-the sounds from each are narrow-banded, all midrange, only sometimes grainy and gritty-gives the impression that this is largely intentional. As Courtis puts these compositions through a terrifically slow cross-fade, submerging all expression and sensibility in an endless hum of feedback, and in so doing abolishing all sense of distance and mystique, so too the sheer brute presence, the sheer Thing-ness of these compositions is proportionally heightened. With little framing, though, the objectality of these works is rendered less impressive than it could be. Indeed, only the third track breaks up the positive inert datum of the preceding pieces, its irregular rhythmic flutters brush against a bank of hazy flutes and looped electronic snarl, opening up a panoramic view of luminous plasma. In comparison to the other works, more in the way of rewards are had when following the nuanced sonority of this piece. The other longform drones might tap into the brute presence or the hard kernel which resides within the rock formations which grace the cover, but this is only half the story, leaving the ensuing distortions considerably less time to develop, and, in the end, leaving this album strangely incomplete. (MS) • www.sedimental.com Back To Top CYBERCHUMP Sankhara (Cyberchump) • Consonant and suspended drones recall the ambient disciplines of the 1980s (at moments even emulating the sonic characteristics of drone), dedicated synths just on the lip of the digital, with distant phrases shading the various toneclusters, belltoned and wandering. These 10 tone poems avoid the On Land restrictions by bending their reach to some less sonorous stretches that buzz with an aura of calm distortion, a noisette of dissonance and the intimations of hive interiors. In other moments there stand those delicate, house-of-cards structures that hold together less by volition and more by seeming coincidence. These, to again look back a few decades, behave in a manner analogous to the splendidly sad four minutes of the Frith (not Fripp)/Eno meditation "Through Hollow Lands," here absent of the interleaving pattern that let that particular piece seemingly rearrange itself on different listenings. From these two poles, the wholly subsumed masses (not meant as political inference) and the still granular chains-of-events, cyberCHUMP extrapolates some interesting middle ground. The decays, the muted attacks, the fragments of phrases, the harmonized reverberants, all act out miniature versions of the larger sonic chunks amid the nearly incidental coalescences of the instruments-heuristics in theory and practice, reconnoitering the perimeters of some still unheard ordering of notes. Meanwhile, the Chump remains in pursuit of some interior stillness, the reveals between muted events and around the concordance of notes, or more specifically, hearing the breakup of that which has been put together. (KL) • www.cyberchump.com Back To Top ROBERT DAVIES Primordial (Dataobscura) ¥ Rarely an ambient-related review goes by without mention of "drones," almost to the point of ennui. True, ambient and space music has long been premised on that sustained slow-decaying relatively invariate tone-the bedrock, the stratum, sub or super. But, given that so much is drone, more than a passing word-wield is needed to convey contours to the reader. It's a drone, yes, but how exactly and in what or whose tone does it drone? Drone is indeed a many-splendored thing, and Primordial does immediately pledge allegiance to its flag, but distinctly from other notorious Droners, and indeed from Davies' previous record(s), yet also alike in some ways. In fact the difference between Primordial and his preceding releases is to do with the nature and weave of said drone-tone: a shift of textural depth and atmospheric coloring rather than anything formal or structural. "Carboniferous Mist" announces a movement away from Sub Rosa's Budd-isms closer to a Rich-er creed (already partially adhered to). And the flow has shifted from Eno to Alio, with a half-approach to Roach. On "Paleozoic Humidity Rising," for example, the sound stage is a sumptuous sonorous mesh of arcing and unfolding sustains, lower upsurgings complementing high-end keenings. It would be misleading to talk of "dark" here, for all is in a transient inbetween, like the Twilight in which Davies' Garden was duskily bathed. The Mathias Grassow affinities are still perceptible, especially on a piece like "Serpukhovian Swamp Steam," which pares melodic figure to such an extent that it merges into a single semi-static tone colorfield. However, a more notable new fellow-traveller would be the similarly ambivalent tone poetry of dark-light Magus, Alio Die, and his arcane soundveils woven with earth and vapor. Solemn rather than somber, deep rather than chthonic, there's no abyss here, for all its febrile fissures. "Of Fern and Conifer" is the furthest from serene and reflective Davies has ever strayed, getting close to the doom edge. But, far from pessimist and nihilist leanings, it constructs itself more as a sense of teeming and untamed nature, with all its alien contours and spooky tendrils. Primordial, in fact. Uncomfily configured as it fades, fortunately you aren't abandoned here, as "Ageless" finds a less troubling resolution, as if perhaps to establish a reflective harmony between the externality of nature and that nature enfolded within us. (AL) • www.databloem.com Back To Top FORMICATION Icons for a New Religion (Lumberton Trading Company) FORMICATION Redux (Harmful) FORMICATION The Untitled Wasdale Recordings (Harmful) • That no specific style—though a highly specific aesthetic—emerges from these three releases is the case for compulsion. To the spirit then, if not the letter, of Throbbing Gristle, possibly at times being covered by OMD. Everywhere, the emanations of an inarticulate suffering and anger are acknowledged and understood to be learned and relearned, played and replayed as Formication traverses dark electronica and collage techniques, finding their best expression in strained moments of cross-breeding, as the soundstages collide and gurgle among fractured musical remnants and the elusive clatter of outside world captures. With an ear to the unsettled and disturbing, often ineffectually soothed-over by the simplest major chords, focus and attention shift slowly in and out of comprehension. The Untitled Wasdale Recordings (a limited edition release packed in a formidable wooden objet d'art) provide the most interest of the three and proves the least categorizable and least risible of the trio. Possessing that rarer-by-the-moment feel of discovery and accident, there is an innocence about the whole thing that maps out the garage/basement/afterwork home experimentation of the thousands whose music never got beyond the cassette revolution or out of the CDR backwaters, musics which derive from an accidental discovery of feedback, the still interesting flutter of tape, of turning it all backwards. In fact, the juxtaposition of sounds and sources that manage to agree in unagreeable ways or letting the inherent infidelity of the equipment malform the impulses, decays and afterbirths, and in such a way as to make artist and audience alike witness to the self-organizing abilities held deep within the warm and blood-vessel rich, silkly-haired folds of 21st century musical context. With Redux, we are on more practiced and familiar ground, easily more self-conscious and manipulative, alert and yet distractedly on watch offering a few childlike subversions, the track title shuffle being both admirable and sorta pointless. Trading off the same elements and techniques as Wasdale, the results demonstrate what happens when something in the system seizes up and the pursuit of the unconscious gets a little too conscious. Better again is Icons. There are 11 pieces that methodically traverse the distance from drone to rhythmic, seemingly systematizing the axiomatic largesse and automatic writing of Wasdale. The progression moves across the pieces without the high-fructose suite-ness of musical suites. There is again the gloomy industrial machine presence, the drones that remain sleek, loaded-up with internal detail. The voices of the rhythms are at times inscrutable and alluring, following patterns that become predictable or following no pattern at all. There is a steady sort of counter-intuitive incline towards more evident aspects of organization and order, while the sounds themselves cling to the contrasts of smooth against rough, full against twee, shrill against calm in an endless addiction to juxtaposition that denies rest, musical or otherwise. The knock remains a harmonic one as Icon proves itself another example in which the actual pitches do not offer the same level of insight and experimentation as every other component here on display. The timbral drivers of this music are as a result more conversative than they ought to be. Formication is that feeling of insects crawling all over your skin—and to one degree or another each of these three inflections manage that sensation metaphorically. Still, each implies some very different direction for Formication's work to pursue: at one extreme the familiar and by now safe exaltations of the nearly and neatly formulaic constructs of Icons, or the ecstatically neat and near subliminal associative power of Wasdale. Or the disappointed inbetween. (KL) • • www.theformicarium.com Back To Top ROBERT FRIPP At The End Of Time—Churchscapes: Live In England & Estonia 2006 (DGM) • Let's start with making a distinction: there is a great volume of music that we can work to comprehend, and there is a more elusive body within the body of music that it is best to apprehend. The first, of course, is a conscious understanding; the second, one of emotional understanding more appropriate, perhaps, to sacred works. That Churchscape fits into the broad category of sacred music is not a point of contention. By performing in the churches of his homeland Fripp aligns with the performance spaces of John Tavener; in Estonia, with the performance spaces of Arvo PŠrt. The word "passion"-so readily appropriated by any and every obsessive who feel passion about their dishwashing liquid while corporations express their passion about your potential-has obviously lost the intricacy of its original meaning. With more than one evensong for his rack of Eventides, Fripp remembers that passion's original meaning is to suffer, to sacrifice, each a key tenet of the Western Canon. Consequently, the music of Churchscapes dutifully avoids the typically glossy, sunny, enthusiastic or merely derivative excrescences of the Jesus rock. (No real chance it would not have, just wanted to use the phrase "the Jesus rock" in here somewhere.) Latent in much of the Soundscapes work-in particular That Which Passes and Love Cannot Bear-Fripp seems to be owning up here that much of the yearning, sorrow, and doubt flowing from his fingers belongs to the sacred, or at least his sense of it, instead of solely to the club/small venue auditoriums of the Soundscapes series. Acoustically, Churchscapes does not sound very different than Soundscapes. Comparing this recording with Pärt's Kanon Pokajanen recorded down the street at the Niguliste Church would lead the listener to think that the acoustics of the church were not employed in the recording. If true, it is an odd decision to exclude the church acoustics since the soundscape amplification is typically so well-tuned to its environment and since such acoustics have traditionally played such a central role in sacred musics. But the fact that these venues are so far outside the popular music and rock streams does both Fripp and the music credit because, driven by the fantastical being of your choice or not, genuine sacred music has managed to set down a rigorous set of specs and traditions that define it perhaps more closely than many other Western forms. What happens with Churchscapes that does not happen with John Tavener or Arvo Pärt is that we now have a composer/performer adding not just contemporary compositional technique and gesture to this genre, but also adding improvisation and technology to the (no pun intended) lexicon of sacred works in direct and immediate ways. To varying degrees the ten interrelated tracks take the open loop into account, and there is surely no more appropriate or fatalistic system. Fripp is able to voice a number of instruments and there's less a sense of guitar-only here than in other soundscapes. He even seems to quote fragments of "Starless" at one point, then proceeds with the deconstruction of what is one of his purest and most melodic passages into a shimmering intersection of the formed and formless. Other instances reveal a welcome, gapped openness, as plectrum bell-like events coalesce into pattern and are allowed the long declines of Eventide's 80+ second delay lines into absolute and undisturbed silence, making for a fitting resolution to the carefully arc'd complexities that precede. Surely different from the Soundscapes series, but in some ways not different enough. (KL) • www.dgmlive.com Back To Top RICHARD GARET Intrinsic Motion (NVO) • Sound artist Richard Garet studies gravitational space and how it has always oriented people's habitual activities. On this occasion, though, telluric gravity is losing its grip, a fall upwards is more the focus, as events channeled instantaneously through audio and visual time-based media are pre-neutralized and occur in an empty field. The lowercase compositions are appropriately open and fluid, the sharp high drones and other softly sculpted granules drift along a generalized cycle, tumbling one after another in a self-sufficient glossolalia. Along these lines, the spasms of static even reveal that a certain self-regulation is taking place, appearing to scrape and smear the pieces functioning, but in fact edgily cohabiting with the abstract electronics. There aren't any jarring shocks, though, as the album colors within the lines of a joyless sterility. It is seductively economical, however, and a certain pleasure is derived from getting caught up in the pristine surfaces and lovingly sculpted spaces. Otherwise, the only rupture is seen in "For Shimpei Takeda," where the glimmering of a faint organ melody throws some light on the slowly paced notes and incessant generator hum, reviving a sense of space. Elsewhere, everything is finished, smallscale, appealingly brittle, but largely bereft of imagination. (MS) • www.nonvisualobjects.com Back To Top JEFF GREINKE Winter Light (Lotuspike) • These days simply calling yourself "musician" or "composer" is evidently a bit limp. "Musician, composer, performer, sound sculptor, and visual artist" is Jeff Greinke's pitch. Product of a media-saturated age, this long-list is replete with redundancy, needing only the slightest prodding for the musician-performer division to dissolve and composer-sound sculptor to merge. But his new label Lotuspike further endow him with the fussy designation "texturalist." Now, Greinke has successfully trafficked in textures, admittedly, but on Winter Light his role is more that of workmanlike mover of melodic and harmonic building blocks than any kind of bespoke tone-color tailor. He is here, moreover, "evolving his use of sound" (allegedly). More immediately apparent, however, is the timidity of textural ambition, and over-reliance on insufficiently altered sound states. The album's air of musicological conservatism may not bother those who come via new age and/or post-classical paths, but those whose route is via experimental ambient should be forewarned. The first ten minutes play host to prim presets before sparse melodic motifs are deliberately drawn into sluggish sequences. As the collection ponderously progresses, the meager motility may accurately capture the half-light torpor of a grey-skied snowbound terrain, but it falls unalluring on the ear. A mixture of real instruments (piano, chimes), samples and electronics (synth-strings, choral emulations) are deployed in a hybrid of classical chamber Žtude and ethereal ambience ("new age" by any other name). A remote sullen landscape makes itself audio-visible, attended with vestiges of distracted melancholy, as digital synths act uninspiringly as ersatz-harps or faux-strings, and polite piano features as a rather wooden lead-a dull landscape, all patch-work and no tweak-play, makes Jeff a dull boy. In fact, rather than "evolving his use of sound," this recording merely compounds the New Greinke, he of the synthi-symphony nature-documentary atmospherics (Weather from Another Planet, Wide View), erasing the older one, of less polished more ambiguously grained layers (Cities in Fog, Places of Motility). We get well-groomed signifiers redolent of soundtrack hack Mychael Danna blending and blanding into a flavorless Budd Lite, not so much evolution as a shift of stylistic paradigm, an artist moving from a more rugged smeary impressionism to a refined self-consciously designed respresentationalism. But Winter Light struggles to heave itself out of a heavy-handed formalism, remaining enmired in its dreary post-new age chambers, cloaked in borrowed tones of paint-by-numbers grey and tasteful off-white. And in a period when a number of albums have more imaginatively traded in audio-realizations of polar, wintry or desolate environments, Greinke's status as an ambient practitioner of distinction is, regrettably, diminished by this most literalist and accent-less of articulations. (AL) • www.lotuspike.com Back To Top HILDUR GUDNADOTTIR/BJ NILSEN/STILLUPPSTEYPA Second Childhood (Staubgold) • The effulgent, flaring lines and dark undertow of Second Childhood, thickened on occasion to the sonority of a detuned cello or a not entirely consonant church organ, twine in on themselves rather than unfold outward. The album thereby deals heavily in sensual, incestuous transactions with its own self-image. Movements occur on credit-at first there are simply traces, white spots, if you will, which, through subsequent development and repetition, retroactively achieve signification and become what they in a sense already were. A composition such as "It's About The Size Of A House" brims with openness and simplicity, billowing clouds of sound devoid of any signposts. Later, Gudnadottir's plosive and slightly sibilant ghost notes bring the angles and edges of the music's timbres and intervals into focus. A certain indigestible rock serves as an appropriately supportive structure, though, ensuring for all their amorphous structures, a minimum positive consistency. In their inexorable, unhurried manner, each piece gazes at the russet shades of enveloping dusk, traversed only now and again by mysterious susurrations which are looped and meddled with, and which afford a certain presentiment about the dimensions of the original object which has ensnared this group's collective attention. The object itself has a variety of aspects, and so pieces aren't riveted simply or even primarily to nostalgia. In fact, many slyly tease out some jouissance by getting stuck on a particular pitch or chord, renewing it patiently, obsessively. That being said, the pleasure had is not particular to each player, as an ensemble unity is achieved, the players experience its dizziness together. "How To Catch The Right Thought," for one, is constellated by repeated, muted notes, while Nilsen caresses harmonics and other subtleties. A wrenching out of discontinuity entails a degree of violence and violation, however, and this is well articulated in "The Direction Was Foggy Or Cloudy" and "Arrival", as Gudnadottir's long tones sound through a bloated belly of textures like the faintest grumble of death. (MS) • www.staubgold.com Back To Top KEN IKEDA Mist On The Window (Spekk) OPITOPE Hau (Spekk) • Spekk has quickly opened up a space in which artists may chase the chimerical object of their fantasy. Generally speaking, the releases are singular statements and this is mirrored by the loving way in which the efforts are packaged-each recording is bound in a booklet that, rather than being archived, demands to be displayed prominently. Its two new releases stem from sound artist Ken Ikeda and Tomoyoshi Date and Chihei Hatakeyama, who operate under the nom de plume Opitope. From the former is a work ordered by the object and its lure rather than the subject and his desire. Ikeda's statement "Why do the sounds that cups and chairs make feel so distant?" reads like an echo. His tailored and trained sense of detail, variety, economy, grace, and risk wells up before the preexisting challenge constituted by the object, an empty, elliptical sign into which one sinks as though into an abyss. Over a period of two years, Ikeda used an instrument made of rubber bands and nails to harvest sounds from his everyday environment, and in so doing, he depicts a passage into a universe of floating variables, a universe, as he puts it, "of eternity and nothingness." Rather than probing these objects in order to show how much "they" speak, he gives himself the humility of a mirror, but a skillful mirror, like Perseus's shield in which Medusa found herself horrified. Everything begins with "Diary," which sometimes sounds barely formed, bolstered by varispeed loops and halcyon pulses until the piece collapses in on itself. The ensuing composition offers a microview of textures and effects. It is dominated by woozy, swaying chords blurred by layers of caterwauling vibrations, which slip down into liquid insubstantiality before sluicing off into time shifts. With the pieces admixture of natural and processed sounds, an immersive elision between the determined and the indeterminate takes place. Elsewhere, the syncopated subtlety of the rhythmic coordination of the compositions reveals itself to have a large part in the maintenance of the album's ritualistic theatrical dimension. The disc opens, organizes, and absolves a sense of perspectival space. In giving himself over to these everyday sound events, Ikeda creates a clear-eyed document of note frequencies and acoustics. More than that, he points at some of the undecidables which form the ground on which these structures are based. The modus operandi of Opitope is markedly different; its sojourn through astral electronica soundscapes being constellated by electric guitar, bass, piano, vibraphone, and electronics. The compositions participate in the spiritual quality of the mirror only insofar as pristine piano repetitions and understated electronic punctuations seemingly caught in the gaze of a single, immutable point. A track like "Trees Reflecting On The Surface Of The Lake" is marked by asymmetrical runs and smears of piano and vibraphone. Were it not for the technical finesse, the piece would veer close to lush romanticism or even new age realms. As the work ages, however, this intricacy of composition only grows. During "A Place Under The Paired Sal Tree," the elasticity of the textures-melodic and thematic-is stretched to capacity, achieving a delightful sense of synaesthesia. "Bird Standing On The Fall," meanwhile, is harmonically sophisticated and emotionally affecting, its lyrical guitar melody finding a place of immediacy and intimacy. (MS) • www.spekk.net Back To Top ANDERS ILAR Ludwijka-Extended Visit (Shitkatapult) • Ludwijka here gets opened up from its Merck 12" origins into a Shitkatapult-hosted extended visit. Anders Ilar's back mining a chewier soupier vein, less minimal tech-tramlined, returning in fact to the wider electronic ambit first described by 2003's Everdom. Melodies spider their way out over deliberately DIY beats, a fragment of piano here, a submerged pad or bass thrum there, with an infusion of DSP-hijacked organix. Ilar's distinction comes more from a meticulous ear for timbral detail than any great ambitions regarding tearing up sub-genre blueprints. That's fine, since most good art, not just music, comes from those who understand their genre(s) and knowingly use its resources, crucially engaging the brain bit labelled "imagination." Half-buried in these tracks is a personal cultural archaeology of the eponymous town, from where Ilar has salvaged old tapes of himself singing, playing instruments, along with more recent autobiographical field recordings, including the cat's meow, the Dad's trumpet and The Birds. Ilar states that it's a very personal album for him, which is nice. But it's no warm wet wallow in nostalgia, filtered as it is through the present and its post-digital veil. "Ludwijka I" introduces Ulf Lohmann-lush pads, alongside a backdrop as teeming as Noto, with downplayed but quietly insistent beats. "Ludwijka IV" comes closest to being a pleasant memory, with muffled piano chords shimmering like Budd and Eno. The most prevalent theme in Ludwijka is echo, as though these memories are still partly cavernously interred. The resultant, reverberant semi-resolved half-murk through which the successive movements are articulated holds invite rather than menace. The album is continuous but has the feel of a tripartite division: the first third is more aligned with his recent thump-tronica, though, as always, crawling with organic textures, analog synths, as well as the cat's et al. The next portion is more pared back by comparison: IDM-cum-click-tech rhythms, minor chord synth and piano, and mucho reverbo. The closing "Ludwijka IX", though, is a 15-minute swathe of more noise-edged ambience that would give them Kranky Keiths and Tims a good run for their money. Ilarity bites. (AL) • www.shitkatapult.com Back To Top JAN-M. IVERSEN 1.05 Drone (Triple Bath) NOKALYPSE Ocean of Inexistence (Triple Bath) (((STEREOEFECT))) Ping (Triple Bath) • These three fledgling releases on the new Greek Triple Bath CDR imprint confidently work the fine seam holding together the Mariana Trenches of genres drone and noise. But an extremely thin seam it is—the use of sounds informing these works, suffused with the now-ridiculously overused terminologies coined "noise" and "drone", fairly renders the need for such appellations moot. In short, it doesn't really matter. Truth be told, from a listener's point of view, these three recordings unveil an untold embarrassment of sonic riches, veins, and outcroppings. The abject listener only becomes humbled when he or she dons their reviewer's cap to find suitable vernacular that in some noble way articulates what cochlea and cortex process so effortlessly. Iversen's a marginal figure to many, but to those sharp few cognoscenti tuned into the multi-tentacled underground CDR network, his name is rapidly ascending the proverbial ladder. Or at least it should. It's a crying shame that Iversen "chooses" (if that descriptor is apt) to operate on the periphery of things: whether collaborating with like-minded souls or operating solo, his is a righteous murk whose broader anonymity does it a grave injustice. The title of his debut for Triple Bath is obvious enough, although the numerical symbology remains mysterious. Interestingly, so does the resultant soundscape. Over the course of its nearly 65 minutes, one psychological state the listener surely never achieves is boredom. Iversen's aural surface isn't particularly subtle; he's not above using piercing tonal sub-oscillations to emasculate the speaker fabric, but the use of, for lack of a better word, noise, is strategically placed, never overpowering, and ultimately, tacitly powerful. When these pressurized cauldrons reach critical mass and "explode," they do so out of quiescent black voids populated by their own stark signifiers, filling up the surrounding vacuum rather than imploding upon it like some Merzbowian exercise. Iversen's sounds reek with a similar gigantism, yet their cosmic malevolence is more big bang than big bang-up; at least the enveloping effect spares you from getting too battered and bruised. Bleak, burned-out, and strangely becalming, Iversen's intellectualized chaos never gets so cerebral it loses its latent ability to whelm both mind and gut. Symphonic might be an oxymoron when hitched to dronenoise, except in the case of Nokalypse, where such contradictory styles are vigorously forged during the very act of creation. Surely the longest compact disc to thus far grace this reviewer's collection (it clocks in at a towering 81-plus minutes), yet there's not a wasted moment or squandered idea to be found. Like his olympian moniker, Nokalypse seeks to stamp some grandeur onto his fractured fugues: the five epic-length tracks are each broken up into a number of distinct "suites" bearing titles such as "Duality of Singularity," "The Drive to Gradual Arrogance," "Oasis Amidst the Brutal Vulgarity," etc. Such constructs painfully suggest that Nokalypse is forever stuck in some middle-school sub-Elizabethian poetic purgatory, and that conclusion would indeed be correct if the attendant sounds surrounding these portentously-titled pieces weren't so utterly mindfucking. Yes, this is all "symphonic" stuff, as the multi-tiered works teeter from fire and brimstone to industrial browbeating, from hard-drive battery hum to febrile glitch, from deep Moog space-pings to ordered pianissimo, all on a dime. "Orchestral" electronics that brings to mind an ungainly menage a trois featuring Nurse With Wound, HNAS, and Klaus Schulze in dark-cloaked embrace—a scary proposition to be sure. Nevertheless, this is a superb piece of work. Canadian Steve Burr, who operates as the parenthetical (((Stereoefect))), apparently has been on the "scene" since 1989, which means he's probably no stranger to the DIY cassette ethos that brought out nameless hordes of experimentalists eager to hawk their art on an unsuspecting public. Of course, now CDRs have wrenched control from that previously unreliable format, but the working model remains the same, and this gent seems to be a natural. Burr is a new name to me, but Ping ought to remedy that fairly quickly. Triple Bath releases have thus far demonstrated that there's usually more than meets the ear after initial exposure, and although Burr's wall of sound at first appears to be more simplistic in tone and architecture to his colleagues, successive listens reveal him to be better than just a chip off the old (Ni)block. Wavering curtains of pealing static, aftershock tectonic rumble, castrated amplifier feedback and other machine-decay ephemera jostle for position across the album title's three lengthy episodes, varying in pitch, intensity, density, and poison. Burr's approach is certainly not one of affability—these are electronics that take great pains to boast of their palpable electricity, that invade the aural canals like Martian war machines, that pan and scan across a soundfield pockmarked by a very sharply taloned nettle of textured, yet unbridled, noise. Don't despair, however: this is not "noise" in the sense of machinic ambience whose prevailing exhaust is left on automatic. Rather, Burr understands how to sculpt, nurture, and reconfigure the rather obvious ugliness into something indescribably...beautiful? Of coarse. (DB) • www.triplebath.gr Back To Top ANDREY KIRITCHENKO Stuffed With/Out (Nexsound) KOTRA & ZAVOLOKA Wag the Swing (Kvitnu) ZAVOLOKA VS. KOTRA To Kill the Tiny Groovy Cat (Nexsound) • The Westernization of contemporary sound design has managed to inexorably creep into all four corners of the planet, even into the depths of the Ukraine, which as fact would have it is home to Andrey Kiritchenko and his genre-defying Nexsound imprint. A musical nomad of sorts, Kiritchenko's storied acts of sonic coitus include hook-ups with full-on noise, microsound's macrobiotics, concréte collage caches, and windblown ambience-in short, he's something of an agent provocateur, casting the rank fundamental materiél of Western electronica into awry moulds that often yield surprising results. Which is why this particular outing resounds with something of an overly familiar thud. The central sound source purring through Stuffed With/Out (packed in one of Nexsound's usually distinctive square/round die-cut cardboard digipaks) is unabashedly the guitar in fact, plaintive squalls simplistically plucked out of the crushed velvet sunsets of autumn days spent in the Eastern bloc. Tucked discretely between the "chords" is the barest hint of processing, but for the most part Kiritchenko seems to want to regale us with his own particular strain of "folk music" (though decidedly not music "native" to his mother land), crisscrossing his nylon strings with subtle inflections from his trusty laptop. The effect is that of a pillowy lazy confluence of Fahey drift and Eno-esque drone—these aren't sounds that look to set the world afire but rather to accompany its burning embers. Despite the grandiloquence at play here, much of what Kiritchenko's realized in this guise is rather like a dappling of honey on the tongue: syrupy, calorie-sweet and once absorbed, tacitly forgettable. Perhaps this is future "folk music" for the global village; me, I'm more of an urbanite. Kotra and Zavoloka are the dilettantes of the Nexsound cadre (further aligned with their Kvitnu imprint), two chaos technicians having a blast in their digital sandboxes, kicking dirt in their friends' faces, thumbing their noises at the bourgeoisie. The software autopsy the duo enact during Wag the Swing's 24 tracks skims across a veritable who's who of glitchery, cut-ups, plunderphonics and much other somersaulting chicanery. Sounds spill out from the speaker fabric as if K&Z decapitated a kaleidoscope, the colored particles wafting in the air like so much audiological confetti. Pointless to just pick specific tracks in any kind of summation, but tasters include the Jethro Tull-ish "flutes" dueting with plug-in snarl and sampled guitars ("Analogue Tender"), 70s blurp-funk pastiche ("Space Drift"), static whispers and Bernhard Günter-esque tone vignettes ("Silver Poem," "Black Gold"), and, of course, outright garbage-cans-down-the-stairs abandon ("Uneven Walk"). For the record, the duo surely give fellow splatterfesters Kid606, Venetian Snares, Aphex Twin, and about two-thirds of the Mego crew a run for their money, although belonging even peripherally to such a fraternity is probably dubious at best. Too chaotic, too abbreviated, too elongated—I'd suggest pruning shears next time out, and a tighter rein on the compositional muse (or simply a little less intimacy with the mouse). Looking at To Kill the Tiny Groovy Cat shows that brevity can indeed be a virtue. Splayed over just a tidy 16 minutes (not sure it matters whether an ampersand or a versus is applicable for either disc), Zavoloka and Kotra's economy of ideas is not only admirable in their execution, they're actually more fully-formed and hospitable. Therefore, "Diminutive" is as advertised, a few minutes of soft-static electra glide in blue. The duo shuffles synths, bass reverb, and ticking rimshot percussives on "Charming" as if the sounds are face cards held in a gin rummy bluff, while the fat robot burps and Ryoji Ikeda sinewave footsteps informing "Caterwaul" proffer drang rather than sturm. Quantized sounds buzz, chirrup and bleat, locked once again into that pretty "post"-Mego matrix; those whose joysticks have grown cold by lack of use will rev theirs up over the razor-edge retorts these Ukrainian chaps unleash. The rest of us will sit and wonder if K&Z have simply recast the electroclash emperor in Eastern garb, pretty pink disc and snappy grey disc housing notwithstanding. (DB) • www.nexsound.org / www.kvitnu.com Back To Top KTL KTL 2 (Editions Mego) • As time of day once morphed Jekyll into Hyde, so does volume-both the measure of sound level and the expanse of space-transform even the remotely uplifting noises and senses on the second KTL release into impressively oppressive work. The four tracks on KTL 2 continue a collaboration between Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley and Editions Mego leader and glitch pioneer Peter (Pita) Rehberg, incorporating more elements from their score to the recent Gis?le Vienne/Dennis Cooper theater piece Kindertotenlieder ("Dead Child Songs"). Most of the instrumentation here never really points to Rehberg's electronic presence; "Snow 2" seems to hold the only true evidence of his microsound, the scratchy backgrounds obviously made up of infinitesimal parts. This album otherwise carries O'Malley's indelible thumb, nay, boot print. The truest test of aural stamina is "Theme," as symphonic organ-like chatter (maybe constructed by O'Malley, maybe modified by Rehberg) that would be vaguely positive at normal volume turns into a swarm of sonic locusts for the better part of twenty-seven minutes, buzzing over an off-time beat that attempts to eat its own tail and implode into pure atmosphere. Beyond that it's all endless loops and runout grooves, hints of melody cutting out halfway through "Abattoir" only to build back up from scratch, strings effected into growling and wailing on the shockingly accessible "Game." Akin to experiencing Wagner's Ring Cycle without, say, The Met's attendant onstage wizardry, removed from its original production context KTL 2 becomes that much tougher a listen-not that anything involving the Sunn O))) brand of black metal would ever be easy, of course. (AB) • www.editionsmego.com Back To Top FRANCISCO LOPEZ Lopez Island (Elevator Bath) • Another schizophonic musician. Few realize that Lopez goes way way back—not only does he have something like 140 works spread out over a growing pile of cassettes and CDs (and over an equal number of labels as well), he's personally responsible for one of the most unsung masterpieces of ambient concréte set to plastic, 1993's Azoic Zone (on Spain's just as unjustly neglected Geometrik imprint), the sounds of which are culled from the créme de la créme of the worldwide experimental underground, eventually reconstituted into a lambent phasic under its curator's nimble tutelage. Lopez continues to cultivate a rep as a "confounding" artist, one whose projects can either inflict blunt force trauma (courtesy of his notorious noise juggernauts) or lull you into a semi-conscious rigor via stealthy, dreadnought ambience. While by no means a summation of any sort (the man's got a long way to go yet), Lopez Island finds the artist burning the proverbial candle from both ends, albeit with stunning results. Hell, let's go a step further: Lopez Island is easily the most arresting sonic portrait Lopez has committed to disc since that epochal 1993 event. Few recordings require (or even beg) repeated play—this one demands it. On surface, Lopez is working with fairly recognizable "cues" and sources—archly processed static that alternately mimics both rain and the crackling of campfires, portentous silence, orgasmic hum, draining water, spatial movements that resemble the inertia of dust motes—but his positioning of them in the stereofield belies an omniscient hand that buttresses their power, and only successive attentive listenings reveals the complex chain of sonorities devilishly apace. As the piece opens, the burgeoning pinpricks are so subtle you're inclined to reach for your amp's volume control (a move I'd advise against—"normal" output levels are recommended for maximum absorption), so let patience out. Once the symphony of pellet downpour/kettledrum sizzle/static headrush winds down at the 17-minute mark, and the pitchblack silence is left to engulf you, suddenly, at 20 minutes in, Lopez slowly coaxes this galvanic ecosystem on towards its magnificent fulmination. Whether filed under "soundscape" or "(whatever) ambience," it's doubtful they'll be a better, if not essential, "genre" record this year. (DB) • www.elevatorbath.com Back To Top LUSINE Podgelism (Ghostly International) • There are your loving commissioned tributes, your exhibitions of needles from musical haystacks, your most extreme of makeovers—and in spite of all this, rare are the remix collections that feel absolutely necessary. Absent this quality, they play for cash at worst and attention at best; why Lusine sensed the need to drum up the latter (ostensibly) is impossible to fathom. Entertaining yet totally unwarranted, Podgelism comes in advance of the ready-to-drop Language Barrier release and three years on from the Serial Hodgepodge album that serves as its primary source, an album that scored some of Lusine's best reviews to date. This is dangerously close to a par-for-the-course maneuver for Texas native Jeff McIlwain, whose work doesn't really break new musical ground so much as cover a whole lot of existing ground. That said, Podgelism's end product is mostly big, dumb fun, all groove and not much else, another Lusine attempt to meld understated funk and trip-hop and spirited IDM in order to out-Underworld Underworld. The remixers—among them Apparat, Robag Wruhme, John Tejada, and McIlwain himself three times—seem to do little but focus on the sleek beats and loops that underpinned the originals. Whether they're thick and sputtering ("Drip") or bristling ("Auto Pilot," "Falling In") many bring the listener to the same laid-back endpoint, although there are plenty of other compilations where the listener could do much worse. Excepting Wruhme's fine, airy exposition of "The Stop," standout tracks come not from the reworked Serial Hodgepodge material but from the 2004 "Flat" vinyl remixes also included here; pay special attention to Cepia's moody staccato take and the gurgling pop posturing of Lusine's Ghostly labelmate Matthew Dear. In the big pond of leftfield electronica, Lusine suddenly seems the little fish trying to keep his territory marked by spinning in place to muddy the waters. (AB) • www.ghostly.com Back To Top MACHINEFABRIEK Weeler (Lampse) • You simply cannot trust liner notes or press releases. In this case, they promise an unclassifiable music which is in fact pretty much an eclectic summary of industrial, musique concréte, electronic, drone and phonography that is brightly aware of the traditions upon which it stands. Rutger Zuydervelt's now four year old project is gleaned from a variety of independently released CDRs, selected and reassembled on this double CD of 22 pieces. The first feels more industrial and jagged, and sports the missing quality of naiveté that impelled so much of the earliest dilettante studio experimentation. (In fact, this edition of Audio Verité includes at least two such incidents: have a look at the Formication reviews above.) Like Formication's excellent Untitled Wasdale Recordings, Machinefabriek exudes a zeal and responsiveness towards discovery. The work itself has all the familiarity of the forms mentioned earlier with little of the encumbrances of formality. The overall tone of Disc 1 is unsettled, unsettling and unsympathetic. The machinations of now commonplace industrial elegy may not be especially unique, but the work displays a keen touch of subliminal structure, an aether-induced logic that is less reliant on the juxtaposition of sounds as it is to laying bare their unexpected and internal correspondences. For the all the steady avoidances of gesture and inflection on Disc 1, Disc 2 sounds for all the world like an update of Eno's now long ago and first Music for Films. Still pursuing a variety of styles and instrumentation, there are several excursions into the melodic. This extends from some stately droning with phonographic counterpoint to a fake eastern-ethnic sort of piece that, at least, has a light touch with the plectrum. But the gravitational center here is "Lief," a long drone that sandwiches bristle and cream atop a long, slow crossfade to reveal some manipulated phonography. The internal elements are reflected front-to-back, giving this expansive aural plain a deliberate symmetry. The drone material itself undergoes a variety of substates, including some deliriously deep distortion on what sounds like every single even-numbered harmonic, becoming almost unbearably dense and lush. The trick of course lies in getting so many influences to behave as if they were good neighbors, or a least acquaintances still on speaking terms. And that brings us back to the over-arching sense of experimentation and play which typifies this work. Aware of a lot and unaware that anything in particular should be the defining attribute, Zuydervelt takes every opportunity to remind the listener that classification can occur a priori or ex post facto. (KL) • www.lampse.com Back To Top NORTHERN Drawn (Infraction) • Here with a debut offering, another in Infraction's sweet sleep-stream of supine-inclined ambience, are bros of Canada, Davin and Kevin Chong, known as Northern, dealers in heating up cool digitalia with toasty warm sample food. Drawn is a study in turning lost to found sound, capturing momentary guitar passes, and releasing them, subtly altered, into enduring motifs, finding felicity in the fleeting and making it stay awhile to become compelling. What happens is that this Northern music initially seems to drift by asking nothing from you, but you gradually find yourself, oddly, wanting from it. And it yields graciously. In being quiet, unwanting, you want to be quiet with it. It's the New Quiet. The album opens with "Coasting" in zones that distantly recall those charted by Loscil (Submers and First Narrows), the aqueous becoming a subtle leitmotif (cf., the later "Pacific"). The architecture becomes more digitally-enhanced, espousing sound 12k principles. Shuttle358, Taylor Deupree, and Fourcolor would all seem to be Northern touchstones, sharing a similar delight in deployment of small gesture processed loopstrata, fluting, floating, fibrillating, at once a surface over which to skitter a glitch-scatter and a cushion for repose. No fear of Northern exposure here at the warmer end of digital, gently meshing textures, lapping into laptop. It's a deceptively small sound that can get big on you, like on "Migrate," which dwells in semi-stasis just long enough to lull, then spills over with swells before slipping out of sight. Drawn's digital means of generation takes on an increasingly naturalistic sounding aspect helped by its manipulated guitar-enriched intake. The guitar tradition drawn on is the ostinato introspections and plucked intimacies of 1 Mile North, Labradford, and Dan Abrams (Fenton). Ostensibly different from the Infraction stable signature sound, it somehow sits comfortably within it, while sometimes secreting something other. Like the 11-minute "Lesser," whose drone-blots spread over a pronounced rhythmic pulse that becomes a platform over which to cast a gauzy drift-web, speckled with punctuative crackle. The first 150 copies come bountifully endowed with a bonus CDR, Jessa, a collection which signals the next phase in Northern development, though the seeds of Jessa's future-indicative are retrievable from Drawn's present-past. It evidences a deeper denser dronier zone-out music, minimizing digital intervention and renouncing microsonic patter. The gestures here are towards a half-light almost-orchestralism, moving from the likes of Marsen Jules and the secular sacral of Eluvium, shoulder-to-shoulder with the submersible slowcore Star-iness of The Lid. Sidenote: Northern bid their myspace visitors: "be quiet with us." More resonances of SotL, and their "Be Little with Me"? Sshhh. It's Northern. It's the New Quiet. (AL) • www.infractionrecords.com Back To Top GABRIEL PAIUK Res Extensa (Sedimental) • Contrary to a certain doxa which would have one grasp events in the totality of their interconnection, Gabriel Paiuk concentrates on snippets extracted from our everyday sound environment-marginal sounds from electric devices, whirlpools of street noise, etc.-so as to harness their ability to arrest and immobilize historical movement. These edgily pointillistic elements deliberately dislocate their meanings, exploiting their tonal and textural possibilities. Paiuk slices up mundane activities and quotidian mutterings of strangers and mixes them with sounds of unknown origin. A strange randomness ensues, yet more than anything, given the sustained concentration and long duration structural strategies enlisted by Paiuk, which craft slow-forming soundclouds out of these jittery atoms, a certain uncanniness tinges the air. These propelled whirrs, shards of abrasion and miscellaneous field recordings, in their present arrangement, have never existed, but their careful mixture and manner of unfolding is altogether convincing. It's a fine hallucination of detail. Continuity is created through the repetition of basic motifs, and a sense of space and time ensues as Paiuk moves from dense hollow roars that decay into gritty rumbles, and all but barren vistas, which are open and roomy, and which shift their gaze on singular events. The latter occasionally crest in pointed bursts that tantalizingly refuse to solidify, while others are content to see how far recontextualization can take ordinary events in the production of Otherness. The tracks aren't throngs hot with adoration, yet their patient, carefully considered nature deftly explores the respective relations of the whole to its component parts. (MS) • www.sedimental.com Back To Top STEVE ROACH Immersion: Three (Projekt) STEVE ROACH Fever Dreams III (Timeroom Editions) • Two years on from reaching his half century, and far from entering into the twilight of his career, Steve Roach's output has multiplied. Troublingly so for some, for whom it's not so much the feeling of being overwhelmed by sheer volume of product, but the inevitable side effect: saturation. It's not so much that Roach is felt to have lowered his quality control, releasing his every muso-doodle, but that familiarity breeds if not contempt then, at the very least, jadedness. As if to rub it in, these latest two releases secrete within them five whole full-length CDs, each of 70-plus minutes. That said, the Immersion series does have an element of distinction about it, provided by its conceptualization as a kind of background listening; smells like Eno spirit, Ambient with a capital "A." Roach's recordings may have long been classified thus (through a combo of convenience and custom), but the bulk of Roach is too large and attention-hogging to fit into simply "ambient." Recall the key criterion: a music just as amenable to being ignored as to active listening, ambient was envisioned as a form of New Muzak that might simply aurally tint an environment: music as perfumed room-spray. Then what of Immersion: Three? Explicitly created as "tone meditations for the living space," the Immersion series openly allies itself with the utilitarian, albeit with a hefty charge of some new age-cum-spiritual fairy dust. The series was inspired by Roach's personal interest in the hypnagogic state (between awake and asleep), and the music is trailed as tailored for "creative states, sleeping, reading, long hours at the computer and other functions where traditional music could be considered invasive." Intended for low-volume use, it seems eminently fit for purpose on the basis of several playthroughs. Adorno (and others) promulgated a snootiness towards music as anything other needing an overt focus of "rapt attention," so a certain amount of similarly-inclined criticism is likely to come Roach's way for "reducing" his music to the functional. Adorno talked scathingly of "distracted listening," but it should be remembered that music for specific purposes, as accompaniment, used to be commonplace before the idea of the Grand Artwork took over. Nowadays, relaxation, sleep, chilling, dinner parties, even thinking (cf., Eno's Neroli, subtitled Thinking Music) are all "activities" for which music is used to configure setting. So, in short, let all Adorno-inflected criticisms be muted, for the uses of music are many and various. Of the three individual pieces, Disc 1's "First Light" is all gossamer consonance with a diaphanous glow of cloudy harmonics. Suitable for when more light is needed to complement, its layers offer fertile folds into which a straying mind may burrow, then come up for re-engagement with what it came loose from. Disc 2's "Sleep Chamber" has a slightly foreboding edge, a somewhat less than sunny backdrop, making a denser more tenebrous tableau amenable to something wilder (similarly inclined to Darkest Before Dawn). Disc 3's "Still" stays nearer dark again, but more aerated, with a superstratum of sonorous shimmers, one for the midnight moon and late-night psychic paleontologies. Next to the likes of Eno and Budd, Roach's are weightier drone-tones, deep cerulean waves massified by reverb and processing, yet a low event horizon is soon established, with minimal differently phase-shifting layers set adrift into a kind of aleatory shadowdance ballet. Non-invasive, while you think or daydream backed by these subtle plate-shiftings, they shift to the liminally pervasive when total immersion mode is selected. This latest in the series has moved nearer to pure flow than ever. Next time you are sitting in a room, try Immersion. The Fever Dreams series presents the other side of Mr. Roach, the shamanic mechanik, with lineage traceable from Suspended Memories, through Body Electric to Serpent's Lair, and now here to the end of the line in Fever Dreams III. Still resounding from earlier installments of the trilogy, FDIII's progressive ethno-tribalism forges on from its predecessors while continually looking back. Though some may lament the air of "recycled" sounds, reflection will reveal Roach's practices as analogous to those of a writer purveying a varying though homogeneous style through differing textualizations over time. So, as ebow guitar arcs plangently in "Electro Erotic" and a slow-beat tribal tattoo thrums through a soupy gloop, you'll know the texture map, if not the exact animistic territory. And occasionally, as on "MetaSense," it'll branch out differently, in this case switching synthetic strategy and calling on a distant relation of the fractal groove, cycling for a subliminal trance-like 18 minutes on an elastic acid ping, with pads and percussives primed. Or "Pulse Current," which traces a fetid glide through wetzone rapture, lightening up across the breadth of "Pulse Impulse" on another febrile fractal ride through Roach's signature breathy pads, airier than ever, a veritable audio-Zephyr. Then there's "Borderlands," with its large frame drum workout harnessing another wind from nowhere to vie with the background droneclouds. Disc Two's single track, "Melted Mantra," is extended narcotized oneiromancing propelled by Byron Metcalf's tribal eurhythmics and oceans of Roachean burble-brew. Undershadowing the beats, Roach smears leitmotifs of sonorous matter from earlier FDs everywhere, while pillaging prizes from the temples of other fleetingly identifiable past glories, and atavistic fires rekindled walk with you. No sign at all then of approaching twilight in Tucson, where Roach has evidently set the timer of his Timeroom to timeless. (AL) • www.projekt.com / www.steveroach.com Back To Top JESSICA RYLAN Interior Designs (Important) • Despite the fact that Jessica Rylan forgoes the head-spinning power electronic excursions on Interior Designs, these long, open-ended pieces for analog synthesizer engage in a sharp, overblown attack and multi-layered tonal interplay which is informed by the very same vitality and fecund imagination. Rylan follows the flow of massive amounts of information, seeming to hold hundreds of combinations before her mind's eye before cutting out a select few. The results evoke a sense of dislocation, not least of all on account of the fact that the emphasis on moment by moment rupture over continuity spells death for the concept of totality. Each moment, each segment of sound, stands as a single matrix haboring all of the information needed. Their reproduction spawns minutely delineated compositions that dwell on a surreal plane insofar as they avoid paying homage to style, and instead offer up a challenge to functionality. Rhythms tick and splutter, constellated by static frequencies, but they all ebb and flow around an off-center hole which doesn't allow them to settle, and which reveals an underlying irregular orbit. As they feed off their own hubbub, a frenzied autonomous development establishes itself, an incessant change whereby inertia is the result. Light and ambitious, the elements that make up "Timeless"-multiiphonic waves, streams and burrings-radiate in all directions, short-circuiting poles and all but eliminating space in favor of a manic physicality. As the jagged waves, blips and squelches continue to form bold dashes, on the final track Rylan suddenly shifts to an earthiness conveyed through the predominence of woody tones. It's a move which essentially amounts to dotting the "I"s, displaying the full effectivity of form over content. (MS) • www.importantrecords.com Back To Top MARCUS SCHMICKLER/HAYDEN CHISHOLM Amazing Daze (Hapna) • Dispersing his efforts under the flag of no small number of guises-among them, Pluramon and MIMEO-Marcus Schmickler acts as an artist beholden to the principle of diffracting oneself into a multitude of miniaturized egos. The nature of many of his works attest to this atomization, to this dream of annihilating one's content so as to better distribute and find oneself everywhere, be it in the realms of cheeky shoegazer rock or measured electroacoustic improvisation. The modus operandi remains much the same on this album. Alongside saxophonist Hayden Chisholm, who here opts for the bagpipes and sho (a Japanese free-reed mouth organ), Schmickler plugs into the horizonless expanses of drone-based music, with a specific emphasis on those fashioned in the tradition partially shaped by one Phill Niblock. At just over 25 minutes in length, the opening piece favors close-grained sounds and has a tincture of the vertiginous slides and uniform motion that informs the latter's recordings. Long-winded and verbose, it seeks a homeostatic balance. But although they are more inert than torpid, this duo's compositions are also careful to include the blind automatism that troubles this balance. Through all of the writhing masses, moments glisten with variegated sonorities and maintain a sense of motion and action in these sequences of electronic sound. The second track moves even further in this direction, a tempered Frankenstein's pastiche, as Schmickler's cutting and processing shakes the piece down to its febrile core. The composition maintains the former's quiescent dynamism, but with a stronger nod to asymmetry and instability, at times straining to almost bursting with an irresolute tension. A disciplined rigidity ensures that this passion is compressed enough so that it becomes a ferocious energy, a sharp yet gritty dissonance. Carried as they are beyond their logical boundaries, these segments function at one remove, giving onto a phase of insensitivity where Schmickler really lets the rough, sordid edges of these textures shine through. (MS) • www.hapna.com Back To Top 65DAYSOFSTATIC The Destruction of Small Ideas (Monotreme) • Where does the progression in progressive rock end? As we witness the development of a subgenre trying so desperately not to be prog that it darn near breeds contempt for that term, we find the actual "post" in post-rock still largely undecided. Is rock's electricity on an evolutionary path to pure electronics, destined to be swallowed up by generated drones and clicks? Or is it primed to devolve from structured anti-establishment content to some hybrid of both complex classical-leaning arrangements and pure improv? The Destruction of Small Ideas, the third album from Sheffield quartet 65daysofstatic, succeeds in splitting this musical difference where more established artists both high-falutin' (Main, Jim O'Rourke) and mainstream (Tortoise, Tool) might occasionally fail. Even if we begrudge the fact that these guys are only a few steps away from just being neo-traditionalists-hear the plaintive indie during the album's only sung lines in "The Conspiracy of Seeds," or the dance-rock at the heart of "The Distant & Mechanised Glow of Eastern European Dance Parties"-it still shows they have more tricks up their sleeve than, say, Explosions in the Sky. Amid the album's introspective drum parries and demanding guitar thrusts ("Don't Go Down to Sorrow") are grand piano interludes that do (Ryuichi) Sakamoto proud, the ticking clockwork of IDM microbeats, the guest violin that is smartly more accent than afterthought ("Music is Music as Devices Are Kisses Is Everything" contains all of these). At its swirling height on tracks like "A Failsafe," the band's complexity is knowing yet not overbearing like The Mars Volta or Mogwai. Over the course of a beautifully produced 62 minutes, 65daysofstatic grafts the harder edges of sub-subgenre math rock back onto its post-rock forebear, the result generating kinetic energy: The Destruction of Small Ideas is thoughtful instrumental rock that, you know, actually rocks. (AB) • www.monotremerecords.com Back To Top TARAB Wind Keeps Even Dust Away (23five) TIM CATLIN Radio Ghosts (23five) • In general, no small portion of the releases on 23five deal with pure magnetization—the answer by the question, continuity by the discontinuous, the transgression by the taboo. Much in line with this reasoning, the field recordings that curl through Wind Keeps Even Dust Away are boldly defined, thanks no doubt to the fact that Eamon Sprod doesn't forget to include in the scene his own act. In going through the compositions, the respective objects are revealed as manifesting and shrouding a fundamental antagonism. The chimerical objects of this fantasy lead about Sprod's desire while simultaneously being posed by it. This friction opens up a flexible and dramatic sense of time, as whistling wind ululates and proliferates alongside thin, high-pitched electronic sounds and other random noises filtered into buzzes and croaks that read like messages cutting through the borders of perception. The stirrings of "Even" first crystallize certain themes, but then undergo serial changes of state as pungent chords fester, blend, and enter into a state of degradation, an orgy of annihilation. "Dust" is made up of grimy metallic sequins that slide in and out of recognizable patterns, infused by a low groundswell of resonance, and undergurded by swirling, insistent but centerless expressive motifs. A great many contingent sounds—from shattering glass, wood groans, rustling leaves—bristle within this dense hive, filling out a panoramic space, and in so doing, celebrating the inexhaustible multitude of beings. Over the course of the rest of the album, this fresh surge of malcontent, decaying sounds and piercing squeals testify to a fascination over nature as a squandering of energy. Without discarding this imbalance entirely, Radio Ghosts puts more of an emphasis on its cultivation. The album as a whole is superbly measured, yet its changes ring true. Catlin places motor devices such as ebow and ventilators on the strings of his acoustic guitar so that a vast resonant hum emanates from the instrument. These slow-moving, spacious drones, far from coaxing one into complacency, twine the aura with the non-homogenous: metallic percussion, low-end sublimities and jittery high frequency tones all allow the ambience to open up, grow in complexity, and reveal its polychromatic dimension. Although the terms of its development are easily discernible, given that Catlin replays them time and again throughout the album, it's nevertheless refined in its management and ultimate collusion with the objects at hand. (MS) • www.23five.org Back To Top VARIOUS ARTISTS I, Mute Hummings (Ex Ovo) • What strikes here is the fundamental suitability of each work to the other. Not that the drone genre is now so far into the can that any and every piece of music is instantly interchangeable with any other, but that the organizing principles of the form are broader and better understood-some 30 years on from, say, Schulze's Irrlicht-than one might reasonably expect. Aside from the conceit of a few "remixes," a designation that has less and less value in an era now fully acclimated to the use and reuse of audio materials, the nine artists at work here smoothly and reliably contain most of the scope demanded by pitched and non-pitched assemblage. A few stand out as being less familiar, more committed to experiment. One is Dron¾ment's "Phonorecord III," which studies textural contrast and interaction by transposing scratchy glitch and pudding-skin smoothness without becoming just another frozen layer cake. Likewise, Troum's "Thrausmata Enos Eneirou" does something few others have paid much attention to lately, and that is to dwell on thresholds. Out there somewhere on the internet you might come across a piece by the phonographer Anode who does a highly affecting study of this idea with a piece called "Slippery Music," comprised wholly of perimeters and proximate events. Troum is in a similar neighborhood, perhaps less pure in execution, but still dealing with a fundamental aspect of how we humans perceive sound. At other extremes I, Mute Hummings goes down the forking path of manipulation with the simple but convincing "Everything Was Wrong," a guitarish piece by Fear Falls Burning and the prog-rock referent "One More Haggard Drowned Man" by former Tangerine Dreamer Steve Jolliffe. "Everything Was Wrong," aside from being a great title, plays smartly with envelopes and the distentions of decays, starting out with a fairly open field and proceeding to unflinchingly occlude and accrete while Peter Hammill's lyric, taken from Van der Graaf Generator's landmark Pawn Hearts (the take-a-whole side suite "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers"), doesn't exactly play out with the discipline of Bryars' pre-Tom Waits version of "Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet," it does set the pelagic nightmare in a new and convincing context. As a form, the "various artists" various artifacts have been around for a while too long and seem to persist as a promotional method first, art-form second. Who gets to tally the resulting interest is in fact of no interest at all here, but heard as a 70 or so minute advert this one at least has a high measure of coherence and an intelligent sequencing, expertly supported by a mastering job that lets you think, in the absence of the track listing, that I, Mute Hummings is all of a piece. (KL) • www.exovo.org Back To Top VARIOUS ARTISTS Nekton Falls (Sonic Dragon) • The dead and the grateful come together to form the iterative: three CDs which comprise a long, strange trip inspired by a long, strange trip. Closet university geologist Achim Reisdorf and full-time experimentalist Seetyca step away from the respective labels they run (On_Lap and Mbira) to lead more than two dozen friends and associates on an expedition into music's deep water. The Nekton Falls compilation takes its title from the natural phenomenon of dead and dying sea creatures descending to the ocean floor to join the lowest level of the food chain—figuratively and literally. It is the thematic launching point for work that, as on most collections of this nature, contains something to love and hate for all who encounter it. Excepting vivid rhythmic distractions like Gianfranco Grilli's slowly building "Organic Transformation," the mainstream tribalism of Matthias Grassow's "The Earth Rocks," and Niki Neecke's droll "Funnyfoodfactory," much of Nekton Falls is dedicated to manipulated noise meant to praise or recast the always-hungry abyss and address its ties to the always-hungry human race. Frankly, almost too much of Nekton Falls runs this course; in addition to contributing the frequency play "Benthos_A," Seetyca sees fit to insert meaningless intros, outros, and interludes alongside every track. Drone can transition on its own just fine, thankyouverymuch, and when The Oval Language's untitled composition runs shorter than some of these padding songs you have to wonder: Who was short on confidence at what point in planning this triple album? That sense of hesitancy extends to Nekton Falls' desired artistic connections to environment and consumption. They range from strong (the likes of Error and Clemens Presser & Fietsche Einselbock invoke technology lost at sea) to tenuous (Franziska Baumann still stuck in the Arctic) to foolishly absent; Hypersleep may contribute coolly violent Europop that's a ready-made hit but what their namesake "Dandelion Dreams" have to do with the ocean is anyone's guess. This is not a compilation without immediate bright spots for different fandoms, but it more often seems hopelessly adrift—if not ready to sink under its own weight. (AB) • www.sonic-dragon.com Back To Top ERIK WØLLO Blue Sky, Red Guitars (Spotted Peccary) ERIK WØLLO Elevations (Spotted Peccary) • Long before he mastered the kind of icy Nordic electro-keyboard ambience featured on works like Traces and Images of Light, Norwegian composer Erik Wøllo earned his keep playing guitar in various jazz groups around Oslo with the likes of Øystein Sevåg. After years of producing primarily keyboard-based works, Wøllo brought his guitar skills back to the forefront with 1998’s Guitar Nova, driven primarily by 6 and 12 string acoustics, along with the odd ethnic stringed instrument here and there. Blue Sky, Red Guitars follows in a similar vein, albeit with a tad more electronic seasoning. If you’re looking for fretboard pyrotechnics, you won’t find them here. Wøllo is clearly a talented guitarist, but all of the layers of guitar have been laid down in service of atmosphere and melody; here Wøllo proves to be every bit as adept in creating them with stringed instruments as he has been with keyboards. The music on Blue Sky, Red Guitars was, according to Wøllo, influenced by his travels in the North American Southwest. Thankfully, that doesn’t manifest in the sort of godawful faux-American Indian tribal nonsense produced by so many well-intentioned artists who claim similar inspiration. Instead, musical comparisons that come to mind more readily include the acoustic soundtrack work of Mark Knopfler (Cal, The Princess Bride,) Peter Maunu’s Warm Sound in a Grey Field, the quieter moments from any number of Acoustic Alchemy and Al Dimeola tracks, and even the “echo-guitar” techniques of Achim Reichel. The influence of Wøllo’s own keyboard composition techniques can be heard, as well, in the percolating background rhythms assembled with multitracked guitar as opposed to synths. Standout compositions include the title tracks “Blue Sky” and “Red Guitars,” and the brief but inspiringly quiet and beautiful “Rain Tree.” However, the biggest revelation here is the amazing guitar reworking of Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” (another Kraftwerk composition, “In the Hall of Mirrors” also gets the acoustic treatment). What sounds like a really bad idea on paper proves to be pure genius instead. It will immediately become your favorite version—trust me. It’s hard enough to avoid clichés about ice and frozen landscapes when writing about electronic music produced by Scandinavian artists. But when you feature snow-covered terrain on your CD cover and tracks are tied together by the sound of icy arctic winds, you’re asking for it. Fortunately, Wøllo keeps things interesting enough that clichés never seep into the music itself. On Elevations, he returns to the electronic soundscapes for which he is best known. In many ways, this record is something of a modern musical anachronism. It is purely and unabashedly melodic and programmatic, and breaks no new artistic ground whatsoever, which is fine—many artists have produced their best work when they weren’t trying to rewrite the book but stuck to what they did best. In Wøllo's case, that would be producing memorable electronic music that’s long on atmosphere, mood and melody and short on harsh sounds and musical experimentation. Which is precisely what we have here. Musically, the individual pieces on Elevations flow together to create an atmospheric whole evocative of passage through near-arctic mountain ranges; think Vangelis’ Antarctica filtered through Richard Burmer’s Bhakti Point and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you’ll hear. Those familiar with Wøllo’s earlier electronic and ambient works will recognize plenty of strokes from a sonic palette that is exclusively his. Unlike many albums where artists cram their best ideas into the first part of a recording and then cruise on autopilot to the end, Elevations, as good as it is from the beginning, actually gets more interesting as it proceeds. “Skyscape,” “Green Odyssey,” “Arrow of Time” and “The Land of Birds” are the last four of the CD’s fourteen tracks, and they encapsulate everything that is good about the earlier pieces while turning it up a notch in terms of inventiveness. Elevations stands with Wøllo’s best, and fans of Vangelis and Burmer (and either of their works mentioned above) would be well advised to add it to their collection. (BD) • www.spottedpeccary.com Back To Top THE WORLD ON HIGHER DOWNS Land Patterns (Plop) • The debut from this Wisconsin based four-piece reveals a lavishly tentative, exploratory quality nestled within their blurred and incongruous compositions. Unfolding in a dreamlike narrative, each composition has a studied vagueness, spooling sonorous textures of watercolor delicacy and chains of interlocking pulses into passages that have a languorous charm, and through which this sense of tumult appears. The group's delivery is taut, yet they ultimately have trouble freeing this ferment, this shivering fragility, from the slab Morse code electronic transmissions, ominous two-note organ fragments and rolling sonic miasma. As a cinematic space-outing, it achieves a lightness of touch and installs an atmosphere of steady, stolid progress, yet it comes to lack a refinement of its basic technique. "Acension And," while not aimless, loses its motion as delicate piano arpeggios, soft percussive samples and mushrooming textures are gradually etiolated by some warm hovering synth stabs. Near the latter portions of the piece especially, each of the elements, once conveying an unfettered awkwardness and warm melancholy, eventually shed their specificity and are subsumed in one another. It is never an album wholly given over to undifferentiated murk or saccharine serenity. "Waterpath St" effectively adopts a more minimal approach, a fine torpor that utilizes a small clutch of patterns-cracks and modulating buzzes-which hang on a line of reedy organ, establishing a shivering fragility. Similarly, clanking metallic percussion appear at crucial intervals on "Alpine Low," opening up the gates for a flow of energy which shakes and stutters in a more fluid and eventful manner. Still, even in its higher moments-seen in album closer "Sun Court"-the disc's cogency is dampened by its giving way to uninspiring conventionalities and the groups tendency to sink back into the ooze. (MS) • www.inpartmaint.com Back To Top |
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