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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 12 / September 2007
REVIEWED BY: AMOEBAZOID Zuckung (Cycling '74) • The alter ego of Keith O'Brien insists on pushing the high end through the first half of the new Amoebazoid LP, Zuckung. On an album whose name is derived from the German for "twitch," songs like "Kamchatka," "5 Ziegen," "G's Last Day," the title track—these and more represent Amoebazoid's infatuation with treble-heavy clicks that rev a twitchy engine, sound bleeding into whines, drill'n'bass with the drill pretty much obscuring most of the present bass. Fear not, though, questioning listener: Passing into the comparatively sedate land of "Magnitogursk," we start to find more substance hidden in the synthesized sizzle. The interrupted bells and strings of "Prey" take on a meditative quality, and other softness in the form of organ and plucked guitar in "Defekt" bumps up against O'Brien's speedy blips. Here lies midtempo indie-pop dying to break out; elsewhere lies the speed metal homage "Omsk," double-kickdrum loops and all, as well as "Shugäza" slyly masquerading as a legitimate breaks tune. So much fluttering glitch with song titles straight out of Russia, written by an Irishman recently relocated to Berlin and released on a San Francisco label—Amoebazoid and Zuckung are nothing if not cosmopolitan. (AB) • www.cycling74.com Back To Top AUSTERE Pulse (Hypnos) • Last in a series of three Austere works applying ambient principles to minimalist practice (and vice versa), Pulse follows 1998’s Convergence and 2004’s Eco. This enigmatic pair are psychoactive musical practitioners, deploying a processing technique referred to as “Brainwave Encoding”: barely perceptible binaural panning generates spatial sound characteristics to enhance brainwaves and foster certain “mind states”. A still vital element in Reichian minimalism’s legacy—the phase shift technique—is also featured here: recurring identical motifs initially run in parallel, imperceptible shifts slowly taking them out of sync with each other, then back in again. The result is a long format piece whose surface is one of apparent statis, gradually revealing a longitudinally evolving deeper structure. Recall Reich’s enduring maxim: “to facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually.” So much for minimalism. As for ambient principles, Pulse’s stated function of promoting a state of relaxed concentration or disposition toward creative activity bears strong echoes of Neroli (subtitled Thinking Music, remember). And further appeals are made in accompanying commentary to established Enovian ambient principles of music as environmental tint - as psychoactive prosthetic. Austere profess to being inspired by Coil, Eno, SotL, and Robert Rich, and there is substance to their profession. Drones are wafted out into soft ambient clouds of minimal tonal vapor, initially interspersed with rests, then becoming denser and more overlapping as the phase-shifting kicks in, with the faint suggestion of a metallic echo halo constantly reconfiguring itself. With so little figure to grab onto, all being ground and field, the listener may range freely, dipping in and out with attentivity off the leash. Such spaces being all about the same tonemass swelling up and falling, infinitely recurring with minimal variativity, it’s important that the warp and weft of texture is sufficently beguiling, and Austere, while living up to their no-frills nomenclature, demonstrate themselves to be well-versed in the subtleties of these timbral dark arts. (AL) • www.hypnos.com Back To Top JONATHAN BLOCK AND THE CIRCULAR RUINS Shadows on Water (Gears of Sand) ENCOMIAST Transit Bed (Gears of Sand) MIKRONESIA Iris or Comfortable Too (Gears of Sand) • The ever productive Gears of Sand label, its discographic output now pushing thirty, is upon us with another trio of recordings that reassert its free-thinking eclecticism. Refusing to be aligned with any particular tradition or strain within electronic music, curator Ben Fleury-Steiner prefers to range freely across its perimeters, taking in experimental, drone, and more traditional synthesizer music, these releases serving to display this breadth of ambit. The union of Jonathan Block and Anthony Paul Kerby was apparently engineered by Fleury-Steiner himself, who claims it as a melding wherein individual is submerged in communal voice. But those with TCR’s previous collab with Off the Sky in mind, or a nodding acquaintance with Kerby’s Lammergeyer project, will surely see the seams. The prolific Kerby’s mellow-dark soundtrackism isolated, the more insipid melodic doodle may be identified – presumably Block’s less immediately engaging contribution. The album as a whole seems over-studied, and struggles to leave earth for the space it would seek: tippy tap sub-tribal rhythms undermine the expansive quality of “Eye of the Beholder”; “The Outer Island” seeks resonance, but finds only retro-voiced synth and similarly-inclined organ fiddle. A bell-like pinging is nicely elaborated into Gamelan-esque neo-Reichian recursions on “Circles”, but it’s lamed by a whiffy virtualized oboe. More felicitous is “Dissolving Sand”, which again makes free with bell-tone percussives underpinning sweet swathes, but alas is gone within 3 minutes. The title track is more successful, though the quality of drone and textural detail of its organic/synthetic fusion strike these ears as pure Kerby. “An Ordinary Day,” on the other hand, professes kinship with Saul Stokes’s synth-exotic ambient lounge, clearly a hang-out nearer Block’s catchment area. Overall, though, Shadows on Water labours under a somewhat dull sound palette, awash with early Greinke and mid-90s FAX colourings, the occasional noodle inducing post-Tangerine Dreaming. The album cycles through its paces pleasantly enough, with discreet rhythms, tastefully trilling leads, atmospheric washes and environmental grain traces, but the overriding impression is one of sparks not struck, of fellows failing as foils. Ross Hagen’s Encomiast project is a wholly different beast, one whose dark drone underbelly is immediately presented in all its grubby glory, though later something less wicked this way comes. A floating cast contribute sundry instrumental segments, which are opened up and bled into inky pools of unsalubrious sonorities, roughly manicured. The opening “Rains Pass By,” for example, is twelve minutes stuck inside a large empty headachey water tank while outside a mutant gamelan orchestra accompanies digi-camera updates of the murky polaroids of Potter and Coleclough (and maybe some smeary slides from Ora’s scrapbook). Melody eventually comes wafting in, ectoplasmic, enrobed in delay trails, leaving a white noise slime slick. The bilious beauty of this opening statement’s sonography is redolent at times of the creaky lurch that was NWW’s Salt Marie Celeste, with hints of the wonked out melodics of The Caretaker’s Stairway to the Stars glimpsed in phantom snatches. The whole set is emulsified by a dollop of dark’n’long post-industrial treacle of Tate and Chalk brand. And Hagen enlivens the slow and glowering field of Transit Bed with figures fashioned from processed percussion, ominous thrum and hum, whorls and whirrs. Serpentine sounds are snagged by gruzz in the eldritch undertow till heavy tonal water is sluiced into the spaces between. Defying reduction to generic type through these unselfconscious shape-shifting timbre tableaux, not for Encomiast the dull demystification of artists declaring themselves “isolationist ambient” or “dark drone”, but an eloquent grimy grandeur all of their own. Mikronesia’s Iris or Comfortable Too is an essay at a piano paean with a post-digital sheen. The Budd/Eno legacy hangs heavy in the background of such works, as on the smouldering Cendre of the contemporaneous Fennesz/Sakamoto. A developing canon might also include entries from Alva Noto/Sakamoto (Vrioon and Insen) and possibly SWOD’s Gehen (CCO) and Edith Progue’s recent Timelines (MP). These are sons of pioneers, though, Satie and Debussy being the real progenitors of the ambient piano étude. Likewise the element of experimental intervention deployed by Mikronesia man Michael McDermott can be traced back beyond Kim Cascone’s aesthetics of failure to roots in Cage’s prepared piano experiments. But calling up this august assembly of modernists suggests a more coherent lineage than this work’s realization warrants, for Iris... is little more than a patchwork of fragments, of digital fidgeting and nervy errorism. It strikes as a fairly random micro-editing and re-stitching of segments of McDermott’s audio archive of stretches of grand piano improvizations. The artist’s stated intention was to stay true to the ambient piano form while being informed by the glitch and drone infusions of late modernity. In attempting to alter the piano’s states into another realm of poesis, however, its warmth and range of tone are severely compromised, pianoid essence largely erased. The beguiling timbral metamorphosis of such as Aloof Proof’s early 90s cult classic Piano Text would be a benchmark, but, Iris... gets nowhere near it. In fact, part of the problem of this album is that it labours under its “concept” of postmodern pianistics, when it could have been happier and freer acousmatic. (AL) • www.gearsofsand.net Back To Top CANARTIC Bouncing Radar Beams Off the Moon (Dank Disk) • Any psychedelic-leaning group that employs samples unironically or anti-academically advertising things like "this is grass, go ahead, light it up" automatically takes a minus-2 hit on its dexterity. Thusly damaged, Canartic end up in the unfortunate position of desperate geeks (or bullheaded frat boys) for the space-rock set on their second release. Their predicament is made even more disappointing by the presence of plenty of squishy, squeaking hints to suggest Bouncing Radar Beams Off the Moon would normally be a more than credible electro-reggae update. There are percolating samples and scratches deep with "Syd's Psychedelic Adventure," and the vocal clips and guitar elements of "Send" can trace their origins back to the days when Gong and Ozric Tentacles spun off Steve Hillage and Eat Static, respectively. Had this Austin, Texas trio followed the path indicated by "London 67," Jon Coats' introductory alt-country guitar forming a false facade for the female-led atmospheres behind it, it would be easier to believe they took the development of the whole dub genre—or at least the development of their own compositions—seriously. Absent that, and in spite of Gerard Smith's humdinger bass parts (the only consistent element here), a flatness flowing into downright cheesiness dominates this recording. One has to put up with Randall Peterson's near-commercial sound bites while wading through work such as "Narcatic," and likely be on grass just to enjoy the messy "Pie Eyed Piper." Worse, the production on Coats' guitar usually fails the band at large. Too often there's a jam-band feel to Canartic's brand of dub, as if it's Pink Floyd having tried to stretch "On the Run" or "Run Like Hell" into a club career or, more accurately, the techno-producer approach to rock promoted by the likes of Paul Oakenfold or The Crystal Method. From the song titles forward, there's nothing subtle about Bouncing Radar Beams Off the Moon and, therefore, nothing truly subversive about it either. (AB) • www.dankdisk.com Back To Top ENRICO CONIGLIO Areavirus—Topofonie Vol. 1 (Psychonavigation) • At the micro level, longtime guitar looper Enrico Coniglio purportedly uses his newly gathered ensemble Areavirus to set the composition Topofonie in and around an imagined lagoon in his native Venice. At the macro level, Coniglio prepares us for another in the long and growing line of creative treatises on nature vs. industrialization. There are a few occasions where Coniglio's atmospheres alongside the rest of the Areavirus crew take on the psychosonic feel of a whirling blade; songs like "ExistenZ minimum" and "Stalking Venice" suggest helicopter or airboat rides searching for pristine land, or maybe investigating urban sprawl into it. "Areavirus" does this too, but in that song's larger context its manufactured chime, insect and bird sounds also transform it into a dark paean to air and wind, nature's native tongue. "Waterphonics"—like the album title, a word made to juxtapose sound and the elements—is a weird, winding abstraction that grows in intensity from a whisper to a wail to warped waves, possibly matching the Earth's progression of its inhabitants from animal to man to machine. All of this thematic speculation is a wonderful thing, and in light of the actual music it very well has to be. Granted, the songs featuring Piero Bittolo Bon's bass clarinet win the day: "Murania" becomes the forest's spy music, suggesting something sinister in the woods near the water but leaving us to guess if it's man moving further outward or the trees preparing to rise up in revolt. "Olivolo," the song with anything close to basic rhythmic structure, sets off Bon against a slow keyboard shimmer, a treated string loop, and atypical drums and bass. "Lav(a)sciuga" has no clarinet, instead channelling a little of Cornelius' aloof style in the sad jazz running underneath electronic whining and pinging. Beyond these, though, Topofonie is rife with sound decayed to the level of "contemporary instrumental" meanderings. If the medium is the message, Areavirus at this moment aren't all that clear. (AB) • www.psychonavigation.com Back To Top DETALLES Micros Morning (Kupei) • Welcome to a world missing its great pairs: No yin and yang. No hooks and eyes. No chocolate and peanut butter. This is the world of Chicago and Chile (huh?), composer-then-electronicist Kate Simko (eh?), artist-then-producer Andres Bucci (whah?), their duo Detalles and their second album Micros Morning. (Oh.) Shapes of Summer may have implied Detalles were a great pair in 2003; simply put, Micros Morning merely finds them grabbing what they can, breaking things to fit, and painting them to match. "Move On" isn't just the album opener, it's a decent piece of advice—acid jazz organ inserted in jittery microhouse is just one bad idea among many. The scratches and squeaks of "Permeate" do just that to the track, infecting what might have been a decent dub while the one true dub here, "Dubby Tangerine," somehow uses both formless foreground noise and slick production to detract from its effectiveness. Apart from the soulful parting shot "Distance" and the big surprise "Sociber"—an airy winner full of ohsodeep bell tones at two-thirds speed—Detalles have turned Micros Morning irredeemable through the absence of one rather important pair: substance and style. (AB) • www.kupei.com Back To Top DUNAEWSKY69 Xquisite.Xcerpt. (Kvitnu) • In spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sound, it's a safe bet that the average music reviewer rarely has Russia and its former/neighboring republics high on the list of regions known for innovation in the field. To the casual observer, the remnants of the Eastern Bloc mostly ape the basics of the West in developing the soundtrack for their young efforts in democracy and capitalism: plastic pop meant for the most generic of discos and the shadiest forms of adult entertainment. The pride of Kiev in the Ukraine, Alexandr Gladun puts together a second LP (for himself and for the Kvitnu label) which raises the intellectual stakes for the scene and for his work as Dunaewsky69—yes, in spite of the juvenile innuendo in that stage name. Xquisite. Xcerpt. finds Gladun just knowledgeable enough about styles and genres beyond your basic club-thump to be dangerous. Wide synths and a cluttered topsoil of tuned percussives allow "Does Somebody Live Inside Me?" to patrol the border between German minimalism and the New French Touch. The center of the album addresses industrial music and its offshoots: The minor-key melodies of "Mishush" peek through the powernoise, the washes of "One World's History" grunt and growl more than they glide, and the sense of old-school EBM menace in "Dancing Glare is Visual Surrounding" is gloriously out of left field. Two tracks dedicated to acquaintances of Gladun close things out and, with surprisingly subdued funk ("Liya") and ties to µ-ziq and the fringes of big beat ("Roman Kosh"), make their pitch as high points for the album and Dunaewsky69's career to date. There are maybe a few too many straightforward 4/4 moments throughout, and tracks like "The Opening of Infinity" and "The Children of Underground. Inhalation. Exhalation." don't help matters by piling a mess of extra beats and beeps on top. That said, Xquisite. Xcerpt. is an altogether pleasant surprise. (AB) • www.kvitnu.com Back To Top THE GREEN KINGDOM The Green Kingdom (SEM) • Debut from Detroit sound artist Michael Cottone on new label Sem finds him beachcombing along already well-picked-over guitar-based post-rock electronica shores. The R-word needn’t cause undue concern; merely hinting at a residue of its legacy, Cottone’s is another architecture at the more delicate end of electronic manipulation. More troubling at first blush is the over-familiar fingerings of his compositions—guitar pluckings and chordings of various tonalities rubbing up against digital drones, discreet crepitation, and actual instruments (xylophone, music box, piano) melted down and reformed in a laptop crucible. This familiarity—from late-period 12k and Plop house styles—doesn’t exactly breed contempt, but those few traces of prissy pop-folk-iness lurking at the edges of its string-pluck do induce a certain queasy ennui. Sublimated enough eventually, though, for a sense of identity as a comfily pillowed electronic album to assert itself. The boundaries of song structure start to feel less confining, sliding more loosely into scape. Melody is always seeking to swim to the surface through slow-motion harmonies, sliding into apertures and unfolding into wide-open spaces, trying to stay just sweet, holding the syrup. The lustrous sounds do stray sometimes towards the over-prettified and guileless. It’s a more engaging listen when it sounds, say, like Fourcolor with a guitar and a less nervy demeanour than when the overtones of RF are pronounced. The Green Kingdom is most resplendent on more expansive pieces like the penultimate “Nocturne 2”, which opens out and spreads itself languorously into the ambient space domain, all instrumental provenance veiled. It’s this kind of texture map, rather than the woolly tweeness exemplified by endpiece “Cherry Sunrise”, that Cottone would be best advised to follow in future verdant conquests. (AL) • www.semlabel.com Back To Top WYNDEL HUNT Nk Ak (Dragon’s Eye) SON OF ROSE Divisions in Parallel (Dragon’s Eye) • Sonic curator Yann Novak’s been buzzing and humming around Seattle spaces the last couple of years with a combo of installation art and field recording-based experimental electronica-cum-dronebient, accumulating a posse of kindred spirits as he goes. His Dragon’s Eye label and its roster have been quietly conducting various sonographies, as Novak’s space has opened out to extend beyond installation and studio to form an ever-growing hub around which avant-garde Seattleites have started to orbit. Wyndel Hunt is one such orbiter. His Nk Ak rides boldly on a crest of sound, surfing not so much on sinewaves as breakers of flickering digi-pointillism that get sucked down in soft-noise eddies. Under a comparatively well-kept exterior a teeming well lies waiting to be tapped. Only serious archaeologists of micro-cacophany need apply. At the heart of this work, for example, lies “D Leofl”, a 12-minute piece on which welters of fuzz-drone buzz-tone surge across nocturnal hum that builds ever-layering into a monumental thrum-wall. Hunt could almost be a beefed-up Tim Hecker with a stern one-note agenda, or a Sogar with a more developed sense of adventure. Nk Ak documents the sound of different levels of delicacy and frequency of unpitched sound being explored, like in a painting where perspective becomes a focus in itself rather than a mere technique in the artist’s armoury to achieve something else. Kamran Sadeghi is more a dealer in shimmering and sustaining micro-tones, and his latest recording Divisions in Parallel seems to document sounds in transit towards, but staying shy of becoming, full-blown music. In this respect, Sadeghi’s Son of Rose is less a musical enterprise and more of a sonic travel operator, vaguely shepherding his sounds towards finding design and harmony, but without spelling the route out too clearly so they can stray interestingly along their chosen pathways and find interesting tangents and by-roads. He engineers a felicitous encounter of grand piano strings and E-bow via DSP intermediation which finds articulation in contours evoking terrain in an experimental ambient expanse roughly mapped out between Sirr and Kranky, or and/OAR and 12k. Opening in sparse tinkles, the sound stage gradually builds into a thin liquid drone infused with fibrillating droplets and aqueous timbres like minute bells in melting motion (“Triple II”) before a microsonic bio-mechanic sine-drone takes over for the lowercase minimalism of “Triple III”. The 18-minute “From The Walls” shifts from slow sustain-swells in a gauzy rotation, choreographed into tonal balletics glimpsed as if through a smeared glass darkly. Engrossing. Compositions suggest the secret inner life of sounding objects aspiring towards a cryptic melodicity in quiet and drifting soundstreams. These eventually find satisfying semi-static consonance on the closing “Eleven Eleven” (AL) • www.dragonseyerecordings.com Back To Top DAVID MORLEY Ghosts (Ursa Major) • Theoretically, David Morley should need no introduction. He's a remixer of some repute for the likes of The Orb, Depeche Mode, and Steve Reich. A performer blessed by good timing, his "Evolution" single is considered an ambient classic and his collab with Andrea Parker, Two Sandwiches Short of a Lunchbox, showed up in Tom Cruise's Vanilla Sky. He even occasionally takes up the only-half-joking mantle of "that English guy at R&S Records," having rubbed shoulders with Bolland, Beltram, and Aphex while at that legendary Belgium raver label. For a guy with all those names to drop, though, Morley is apparently content enough to quietly produce, hook up equipment, and listen for the next big thing. His self-released compilation Ghosts follows that lead to the rear; a collection of songs seventeen years in the making (recorded and shelved throughout the Nineties, finally mastered in 2007), it's music that's awfully fond of staying in the background. From its title onward, "Trampling Gently" forms the nadir of this album and represents the worst elements found throughout the work: lush yet generic music full of shuffling percussion that ventures perilously close to Jan Hammer-esque crime soundtrack stuff, saved only by the purposeful randomness present in a wispy wash, a surprise keyboard vamp, so forth and so on. Other little things lift some tracks above the pale—the use of a simple woodblock adding texture to "Stuntman" and "Equator," the murky voices of the title track making it predictably yet effectively dark, the mellow drum'n'bass of "Wall." Morley's biggest failing here is his insistence on subconscious ties to the soft, the immaterial, the insignificant—represented by everything from his micro-bass and micro-tones to his titular Ghosts to those "little things" that separate winning songs from losers to the apparent lack of a frontman's ego and bombast. That latter item is rare for an artist with their name on the label, and even more so for one with a pedigree such as Morley's. While there's welcome refreshment in a celebrity being unassuming, one wonders when it crosses the line into passiveness. (AB) • www.davidmorley.com Back To Top PLIIANT Cloakin’ (Ampoule) • Following on two double 3” mini-discs on Ampoule’s Talent Hoover offshoot comes a debut full-length from the enigmatic Pliiant, about whom a location in Glasgow is the sole known coordinate. 18 tunes spread over an hour, and unlike the hiphop-tronica of Pliiant’s previous release, this is a resonant spacey ambient stargaze daze occasionally reminiscent of a Pantomime-period Pub with a few lo-fi indie and IDM quirks. Opening passages herald an ambient melange that somehow hints at the Kraut of Cluster and Ashra meeting the Brit of The Orb and FSOL with yje odd post-AFX Warping. Lest this knowing orgy of referencing should give the impression of derivativeness, let it be recorded that this album is possessed of an individuality of voice that distinguished it from a mountain of ambient/electronica/IDM that stacked up in this locality over the July-August period. Pliiant manages the considerable feat of being winsome without being ingratiating, of being melodic without being cloying, and of obliquely channeling the wooze of shoes (gazed variety), while avoiding the usual suspects (MBV, Slowdive, Cocteaus et al.). Cloakin’ is also resolutely electronic yet pulses with organix, coming out sounding somehow both scuffed and refined. The crankily beautiful “Obruere” is an object lesson in how this whole indie-techno-tronic crossover thing should be done, hitching smeared ambience and weird field noise to a discreet techno thump and shooing some gorgeous gauze over the lot. Might be of interest to lovers of the epic adult fairy-tales of Sending Orbs (Secede, Blamstrain, et al.) as well as those finding Ampoule soulmate Pub’s latest Sekatuo Ton rather less approachable than anticipated. (AL) • www.ampoulerecords.com Back To Top SZELY Processing Other Perspectives (Mosz) • Determined to not just redirect himself after his 2004 debut Welcome to My World, Peter Szely ballyhooed as a true artistic break his decision to let musically inclined friends and colleagues come up with the source recordings he would massage into his next final product. To get some context, if you ever run into trip-hop termini Massive Attack on your musical travels, dollars to donuts they're involved in some sort of collaboration—inviting some singer to warm up their cooldowns, adding production touches to someone else's work, or tacking on a guest vocal of their own. It therefore comes as an unpleasant surprise, or no surprise at best, that this second Szely album mostly sounds like Massive Attack and in particular 100th Window, that outfit's most poorly received effort. "Themes" 3 through 6 at the center of the album comprise a creative black hole, all stalled loops of moaning guitars, ticky-tack cymbals, Nina Erber vocals and dub misdirections to sketch the outline of any anonymous and moody moonlit cityscape. Szely stumbles on a few sounds of interest to salvage "Theme 2" (the improv laid on top of an out-of-nowhere metallic pounding) and "Theme 7" (a feedback-filled violin and guitar dialogue, Prince and Fripp gone sad and Arabic), but then closes out the album with beats so hard in "Theme 8 (Backtrack the Brain" that the foolishly wannabe operatics of Melita Jurisic mercifully break on impact. Processing Other Perspectives is not just the title of the work, it is Szely's guiding principle. Too bad he has been led astray. (AB) • www.mosz.org Back To Top |
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