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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 13 / September 2007
REVIEWED BY: BPMF Parousia Fallacy (Serotonin) • Parousia refers to the second coming of Christ, related to the Greek for “presence”, while fallacy is, of course, connected with mistaken belief, its root coming from the Latin word for “deceive”. What this etymology has to do with the music of Bpmf and its curator, Jason Szostek is tenuous, but accompanying commentary from the artist clarifies the conceptual ambit. In short, given a systematization of belief (however misconceived), a mass eschatological fixation might itself be sufficient to precipitate the end of the world, prophecy becoming self-fulfilled. But, concept aside, does Parousia Fallacy tweak the ears with magical tone tricks or trigger toe-tapping? Neither really. An ambient techno veteran, having been Taylor Deupree’s early sparring partner in Prototype 909, and sometime member of loose-knit collective Rancho Relaxo All-Stars, Szostek started the Bpmf project as an outlet for for more “chill out” music (his words). Bpmf’s sphere of musical operation is not immediately smoothly rounded or graspable. Opening tracks “Ecce homo” and “End of Beginning” have an air of pioneers of electronic music early analog synth sound envelope inquiry. “Siddharta” combines a retro sci-fi machinescape with almost Robert Rich-like droning, and Prototype 909 background click and patter. “Zi Ran De Kong Jian (Personal Space)” is a peculiar protean piece, initially not light years away from a more dissipated Global Communications interlude, Szostek’s predilection for the clunky resonance of a sawtooth synth tone becoming more evident; there’s even some post-AE beat skitter, and a random babble of voices signifying nothing, eventually fading into peripheral ivory-tinkling ambience. “Wee World” comes on like a politer form of Rephlex-esque IDM, then “Trippin’ Through The Wild Strawberry Patch” veers towards some sort of experimental electro hybrid. As will have emerged from this blow-by-blow exposition, Parousia Fallacy has little truck with coherence, almost wilfully episodic and structurally dissipated, it leaves the listener with a sense of being witness to a scrapbook-style assemblage of audio-journal jottings from a spaced-out synth-obsessive. (AL) • www.bpmf.us Back To Top CALIKA Seedling Mother (Audiobulb) • What is the greater achievement: reaching a musical goal you have set, or merely following the muse and happening upon greatness? While the former is the obvious payoff for skill and planning and practice, the latter rewards creative wandering, the wonderment and joy of experimentation. One is sure to find this year better crafted sounds, and albums with more detailed blueprints, than those of Brighton resident Simon Kealoha. Yet the man who calls himself Calika unconsciously strikes a tenuous, sublime balance between sources that form both him and his art. It turns out Seedling Mother is indeed a most suggestive title for his second full-length. His land imbues Calika with awareness of the synthetic, the various and shifting electronic spheres juggled in general by Europe and in particular by his United Kingdom. On the other hand, his Hawaiian bloodline beckons him to the natural, even unto the extremes of native melodies and performance styles relaxed to the languid flow foisted upon the state’s tourist population and ultimate the residents who play to it. Normally, the script for this review would run as follows: guitar and bass over wildly inventive rhythm tracks results in excellent dub, or micronoise, or rhythmic noise, etc. Instead those strings are plainly plucked by Calika outside of a chord context so we sense each note’s benevolent intent. It’s common to find acoustic and classical elements complementing the generated ones (“Two Tales of Happiness”) or enveloped by them (in the title track). Atmospheres for the most part are toned down to khaki-like neutrals. Have we stumbled upon “glitch folk,” stripping away levels of decibels and complexity while maintaining substantial intellectual depth? It’s suggested by the “Mute” formula of soft guitars and ambience, sending the track chugging down a haunting and seemingly endless path—a long walk on the beach, a long wade in the ocean, a long look at sunset. Even the most jittery of drums are sometimes muted and cymbals are brushed, and there’s at least some evidence both were played live at one point. Any nods here to Antipop Consortium are far outnumbered by those to Tortoise, Four Tet, possibly Greyboy Allstars, but these familiars don’t engender the homespun feel Calika does. Seedling Mother leads us out of the bedroom studio and man, oh man, it feels nice out here in the realm of backwoods electronica. (AB) • www.audiobulb.com Back To Top CEPIA Natura Morta (Ghostly International) • Obviously there’s no war between record labels in electronica—no equivalent of hip-hop’s Bad Boy/Death Row tussle, no real gauntlet thrown down in the Big Pond. It’s not part of the art- and artist-centric culture of the genre at large, but struggling to grab the attention of the same sea of ears (not to mention new ones) is. Two tracks in on Cepia’s second CD, Natura Morta, and we hear floating above the zen state funky-drummer fills of “Opening Parade” tones that damn near meow at you, tones we’ve heard before and love to this day. This is not to say that Cepia’s ripping off anyone; it’s more like he, Huntley Miller, is settling into a style or hitting a harmonic or using a particular instrument/sample that sends us into orbit. Even with a roster featuring up-and-comers like Lusine and Matthew Dear, it is this album in sum that delineates just how much ground Ghostly and their ilk have gained on stalwarts such as Warp. Yes, stuff like Squarepusher’s sociopathic jazz is inferred at the start of Cepia’s “Clay Face,” but Miller eventually contorts that skronk into approximations of classic rock guitar riffs. The opening spirals of “Tape” stay in that oeuvre by recalling the intro of David Bowie’s “Fashion,” and then Miller twists the rest back into shape: it still revels in synthetic majesty, just violinesque glitch and brass-like swooshes full of bravado instead of Bowie’s androgynous divadom. Where electronic acts have remixed indie-rockers often beyond recognition, you might also mistake “Hoarse” or “The Undeniable Bend” for instances of turned tables—Coldplay hypothetically softening the edges of Autechre, for example, with the results sounding nowhere near as frightfully bad as you might imagine. We even find nods to the eerie: drumbeats like gasps of air and loops that suggest failing motors, detuned music boxes, slowing windup toys, a submerged carousel. Amid all the lively activity it’s these sounds that really make us wonder about what inspired Miller to hunker down at home in Minnesota and polish up this little gem. There is far greater depth on Natura Morta than is suggested by its 33-minute length; it’s more a mine from which to reap benefits rather than a cave in which to get lost. (AB) • www.ghostly.com Back To Top TAYLOR DEUPREE/ KENNETH KIRSCHNER / TOMAS KORBER / STEINBRUCHEL / AARON XIMM May 6, 2001 (And/Oar) • Some few months before the event which seemed to hamper all motion like a jammed cinema reel took place, Kenneth Kirschner was prowling the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, that area where a rupture in the real took place on the eleventh of September. These now overexposed events would seem to have retroactively infused Kirschner’s recording with a certain ominous complexion. In the staid immobility of pieces, in their reliance on heavily processed concrete sounds which oftentimes sound frozen, halted, they render this urban activity more fully alive and visible. Strange, then, that while the events which gave this recording its bite is now itself dead, assassinated by the camera, perhaps, Kirschner’s work still possesses a certain glimmer, a certain vitality or sense of life. Asides from Kirschner himself, Taylor Deupree, Aaron Ximm, Steinbruchel, and Tomas Korber act as parasites, colonizing the surprisingly quiet aural environment that collected like dust around the Twin Towers. The selection from Steinbruchel is a dry, intimate, and detailed low frequency drone while Ximm, filling out the other end of the spectrum, features slurred electronic tones interspersed with sudden moments of panic and fluidity. Even in the clearer, more coherent moments, as in the work from Deupree, where tone clusters are allowed to refract gently in subtle ways, there is an overarching sense of something physical and dangerous. All of this comes to fruition in the twenty-two minute piece from Korber, which is an endless sliding from silence, to methodical probing of nocturnal themes, to downright unsettling audio murk. Korber’s piece is thus vigorous and vibrant; especially near the latter portions of the composition where particular parts exceed their limited place and explode the constraints of the balanced totality, that is, when the high-density textures ring out in deranged exaltation before collapsing into a dull shimmering. It’s a rich and inventive set of interpretations, and a fine twisting together of individual fibers into an intricate whole. (MS) • www.and-oar.org Back To Top ANDREW DEUTSCH The Sun (And/Oar) MARC BEHRENS / PAULO RAPOSO Hades (And/Oar) • With The Sun, Andrew Deutsch aims to construct a sound event that is static, or which, at any rate, shimmers in its fixed place. Towards this end, an ocean’s wave is adopted as the sound source which becomes the object of an excessive fixation on the part of Deutsch. Over the course of the work, however, the recording moves from its largely immobile, frozen state, and comes alive as a spectral apparition. What remains fixed, that is, what one experiences as stationary, is the gaze of Deutsch itself. Through various digital processing devices, then, Deutsch not only makes the ebb and flow of the waves chime, rattle and clang along an expanded dynamic range, he stands himself in as the frozen point of immobility, creating a fine catch and retreat game between him and his source sounds. Hovering clusters of organ-like notes and panoramic spaces are thereby seen from a fascinating perspective, one that participates in rather than frames the proceedings. Deutsch himself makes efforts to point out that this is music specifically intended to aid in the process of painting. While this work is no doubt successful on that front, intentions be what they may, the simple appearance of this work, with its sonorous humming and eloquent, effulgent tones, is becoming in and of itself. Successful, too, is Hades, a collaborative work between Paulo Raposo and Marc Behrens, which took place over some three years. Sounds featured are the knocking of a ship’s hull, the clanking of gates and thrum of motors, all of which were captured aboard Lisbon ferries at the quays of Cais do Sodre, Trafaria and Cacilhas. Quite clearly, the pair are not only interested in the exhibition of a sonic environment, with all its respective particularities and manners, but their arrangement in a complex structure of many levels that feed into each other, overlap, and separate in a partially controlled yet spontaneous fashion. Unlike The Sun, which is largely serene, Behrens and Raposo favor abrupt oscillations, doleful pauses, and more or less sudden changes of attack. It stands as an approach that comes to work as well as it does on account of the concise and insightful way that it is employed. The boom and squeal of machinery, while exaggerated many a sawtooth edge, providing a leap in intensity, is shaded well by metallic monochrome reverb and brooding, suspended chords and hovering atmospheres, which approach and recede like the tides. Although more manic, then, with so many muffled squawks and rasping, churning drones that enable one pleasure through displeasure, it also oozes a sublime oceanic stillness. A most remarkable document, it seems to give a presentiment of the dimension of the kernel from whence this environment came. (MS) • www.and-oar.org Back To Top LEGIAC Mings Feaner (Sending Orbs) • So, not content with their polynymic orgy of Quench, Cane, Cenik, Eaven, and Mystery Artist, as well as a recent jam with Kettel as Scone, and going Automotive with a couple of jazz-tronauts, not to mention several hip-hoperations with Shadow Huntaz, the Funcken Funckarma brothers propose yet another spin-off, Legiac, this with friend Cor Bolten aka BMP, also collaborator on, yep, another project, Dif:use. Got all that? What’s the skam? The flavour is one of a kind of digital update of Far-out Son of Lung ramblings, all post-Blade Runner atmospherics attended by trademark Funckarma splice-and-dice cut-and-shut rhythmix. It’s the contribution of Bolten (vintage analog synth-guru and professional soundtracker), though, that seems to give added value here, with a more lustrous filling/topping/undertow (depending on the track architecture) serving to place this above the last atmospherically-challenged Funckarma outing, Bion Glent. A far fuller phatter beast entirely, Mings Feaner may seem a bit of an overegged pudding of an album on first listen, for all its wondrous post-Vangelical atmospherics. And, notwithstanding a liberal speckling of short-format interludes, Mings Feaner goes for the established Sending Orbs 70-minute epic blueprint. Slight concern with what feels like a Groundhog Day experience around halfway stage, perception of recurrent variations on a similar 10-minute pattern setting in: one of beatless vaporous atmospheres being suddenly irrupted onto by hyperactive beat structures then dragged off into clattering populous futurist symph-funk workouts. But when the Funckens and their Cor member get the blend right, it’s a heady brew: behemoth beatscapes like “Tretz Dizm” bristle with latter-day FSOL-isms, time-shifting near-d’n’b rhythms, liquid bass funkery, curious flamenco-esque percussion, and e-Vangelic syn-clouds, even spinning a few ethnoid flutings in a grandstanding kitchen-sink-too production. Another, then, to add to the Sending Orbs Headtrip Cinema series to swell its growing back catalog of widescreen fantasies. File next to Secede, Yagya, and Blamstrain. (AL) • www.sendingorbs.com Back To Top MNORTHAM Autumnal 2003 (And/Oar) • Autumnal 2003 is a testimony of Michael Northam’s nomadic life, which has seen to it that he relocate thirteen times between the moments bookending 2001 and 2003. The three extended tracks that surface here represent three distinct junctures along that journey, a glacier along the Switzerland/ France border, crickets captured from Eagle Creek in IIndianapolis, and an assortment of sounds taken from what sounds like a walk in the woods of Ils Grosbois, Montreal, respectively. With the first selection, plangent notes and long string resonance evoke both a peaceful meditation and an underlying restlessness that is indicative of the work on a whole. Successive pieces, though marked by long stretches of slowly evolving sounds, are thereby of a more questing rather than simply soothing disposition. From the beginning, compositions are texturally sophisticated and diverse in mood, but as the album ages, it continuously moves away from lengthier passages of slow-moving, more or less constant sounds, towards pieces that are stringent and rigid. Along the way, the switching of angles and perspectives are significant yet ingenuous, dynamic yet immediately involving. Accordingly, pleasure is had in witnessing so many percolating details get swamped in the low swelling of the pieces, a certain pleasure in being taken over and giving into absence. Indeed, the relentlessness of Northam’s approach all but ensures that one will give in, be it immediately or over a certain period of time. The final work, for instance, being characterized by intense internal arguments and clashing directions, encourages quick submission, and the varying degrees to which this is the case in other works only adds to the album’s appeal. It’s a venture that the mind enjoys, then, but of which the body eventually grows tired. A challenge, certainly, yet this document exhibits an impressive variety of states—both of the garden-variety and those of a more specific nature—which no doubt colored Northam’s time over the course of his travels. (MS) • www.and-oar.org Back To Top ORIGAMIBIRO Cracked Mirrors and Stopped Clocks (Expanding) VS_PRICE Songs06.txt. (Expanding) • Expanding’s operation has been at the boutique end of the melodic IDM-electronica market from the outset, but a change in orientation has been occurring lately, moving the imprint towards a sort of filmic faux-folktronica. Tom Hill may already be known to some for his work as half of Wauvenfold, but he’s unveiled a new moniker for this new material. The previous angular beat-driven electronica has softened into a sound centred on computer-mediated stylized acoustica (like we needed more). Pieces such as “Dissect Ephemeral” are delicate constructions in the tradition of Kim Hiorthøy—all very fireside-comfy. “Womb Duvet,” for example, is just too cosy for words (other than “zzzzzz”), and the odd passage of looped string arrangements falls in with the neo-bucolic cascadings of new electro-acoustic maven, Colleen. The pronounced truck with string-pluck on the likes of “The Last of Its Leaves” and “Gathers in Puddles” also recalls Phelan/Sheppard’s Harp’s Old Masters—obvious kindred spirits. But for all its fine filigree, pedigree, and agreeability, much of Cracked Mirrors and Stopped Clocks meanders with an oddly disengaged mixture of languor and tame background patter, only the odd piece striking a chord, more out of its dissonance from the prevailing prissy surroundings, as with “Unknown In The Walls,” a creepy psycho-thriller soundtrack excerpt. But overall Origamibiro’s just-so-tronica rapidly becomes cloying, settling rather too appeasingly into the likes of classical-inflected guitar politesse, background bits of click’n’pop grain adding only meager fiber to flavor-lite fingerings. Passing from fingering to tinkling, as Vs_Price (Toulouse-based Vincent Papon) unfolds an array of fellow-traveller keyboard-inclined compositions, stitched together, precise and precious, with minimal glitch threads on his second Expanding album. Stock-in-trade is another version of Origamibiro’s moody-twee instrumentalism, with Songs06.txt dealing in twinkling lullaby treatments and slightly arch micro-concertos. Screw your ears up, and “Grains,” with its fractured Francophonics and stuttering guitarings, could be an early beat-depleted Tunng. Elsewhere pointillist loops encoded in crispy digitalia are strung out into playroom serenades of ISAN-ity and Morr-ish toytronics. It’s salutary to register that “Fucking Phone” is the first track (#5) on which all the self-conscious toy-tinkering is finally foregone and a musical and emotive hit of palpable resonance is registered. Songs06.txt generally prefers to play around referencing moods of lilting sentimentalism with an occasional telegraphed dark edge, as on “Cordes de Stars”, which gratifyingly breaks with the prevailing glazed serenity. Overall, though, there’s more contracting than Expanding in evidence on these releases. (AL) • www.expandingrecords.com Back To Top ADAM PACIONE From Stills to Motion (Infraction) • An age of virtual audio saturation, of pre-articulated sound. Expressivity, once an array of possible voices, is ever more probabilized. Originality, once primary criterion, is cast from the platform, problematized. Wondering, late in modernity’s day, what does it take to make a noise that matters? A keen-eared recontextualizer, an alchemist who can make sound, found or unfound, walk its own way, outside the ready-made parade. Adam Pacione is one such new recruit to a group of like-minded musicians, kindred-spirits Brian Grainger (Milieu), Mike Bennett (Zimiamvian Night), and Kiln, who have brought the ferment from their sound stills to the Infraction table. That label is now streaming a vital strain of New Backwoods Ambient, this latest from deep in the heart of (Fort Worth) Texas experimental, but harmonically-inclined, apparently lo-tech, but substantially audio-cratic. Pacione’s distinction lies in drawing the vectors of several lines of musical enquiry into a trajectory which leads to a suggestive affective place. Witness how centrepiece track “Sodium Lit,” at outset a water-treading body-double for Andrew Deutsch’s Loops over Land, is slowly re-cast, a sonorous line drawn from Eno’s process drift towards Tim Hecker’s glitch ice-sculptures via Stars of the Lid’s downhome dronezone. It’s an illustration of how FSTM opens lacunae within itself, pulling the listener into its emergent sonic tableaux within which one’s feelings find their own projections. Echoes of the enviro-drone clan, low-lying labels like and/OAR, Twenty Hertz - old familiars of Infraction, the silhouettes of whose kinfolk—Keith Berry, Paul Bradley—are heard remotely. From Stills to Motion is evocative titling too, signalling dynamic, as on “Good Morning Mockingbird,” a near-static suspension of amorphous wisps finding flow from folding in further loopstrata and subtle drone infusions, snapshot morphing to moving picture. Sonority, then, shifts From Stills, gently tugged To Motion, into a woozy wonderland. Pacione starts from base material, conventional instruments, mainly guitars, the odd analog synth and sample, but no tone is left unturned. Like a tenderized but still chewy analog to recent Kranky fuzz-blur harmonizations, his source-sounds quietly exult in altered states—compressed, granularized, weathered, distressed; in a word (Pacione’s) “grexed.” Grex comes from cross-breeding: environment traits spun with the string-steel of source, further fleshing out, the familiar contour lent unfamiliar edge. A delicate and intricate weave results: a warp to the weft, dissonance offset by harmony, consonance subverted by pitch-bend. Basinski may have modelled the suggestivities of disintegration, mate Milieu pointed the emotive caché in sepia-stained sonorities, and Boards brothers the heart-swoop from modulating detune. Maybe a memory captured from The Caretaker’s Haunted Ballroom, whose dazed derangement of time-stretched timbres leaves traces on “Pinhole Sunrise.” No matter, for Pacione asserts proprietorship over these movements of liquid lilt that hum with out-tune. They come into being as if re-animated in slow melt from suspension, reaching “Zenith,” a 13-minute finale, which takes a twirl in tweaked timbre-land, then slowly lifts off, leaving hills, plains, and depths of earth, ending in ascent. (AL) • www.infractionrecords.com Back To Top ROBERT RICH Michael Somoroff’s Illumination (Soundscape) ROBERT RICH Music from Atlas Dei (Soundscape) • Originally created for the Rothko Chapel, artist Michael Somoroff’s re-presentation of his Illumination I installation offers Robert Rich further fertilizer from the field of visual art—a mode that’s already been creatively generous to him, 2003’s Echo of Small Things being inspired by still photography. Now we have both Atlas Dei, an affair of all-singing-all-dancing computer graphics, and Illumination, conceived to link with Somoroff’s piece. Somoroff’s Illumination concept seems to be expressive of emergence from the darkness of ignorance and/or suffering (“enlightenment”), and , no doubt with this in mind, Rich’s drones seeming to carry a more luminous edge than on previous similarly-inclined work. Illumination seems to treat of a form of transcendence, establishing a space of secular sacrality, in contrast to the “enlightenment” brought by more mundane (literally) industrial applications of science and technology. Dare one say a “spiritual” release? However you want your semiosis spun, musically it marks a welcome return for Rich from Electric Ladder’s hyper-exotica and widdling sequencer detours to his kingly throne of drones, with all its attendant cavernous resonance. A piece such as “Curtain” is a magnificent voidoid update of his seminal Trances/Drones (now, it pains to report, of fully 25 years’ vintage). This weightless effortless strain of Rich’s music has no truck with melody, heading instead for infinitely drawn out mono-tonal swathes of great density in freefall, sometimes a rumbling low-end, other times a strangely queasy harmonic dislocation induced by trademark Just Intonation intervals. Then again a feeling almost like a slow-motion gravity-free gamelan emerges on “Temple,” which also secretes some sublimated slivers of a mantroid voice, ending up bathed in celestial glurp. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space, and everything is illuminated. Richly. Quite different, but equally representative of a distinct strand in the Rich musical repertoire is Atlas Dei. The full package is in DVD format with 5-channel surround sound facility, images by one Daniel Colvin created to accompany various Rich soundscapes. The music is comprised partly of re-toolings of tracks from previous Rich releases, but a substantial proportion consists of new pieces, these being assembled on the Music from Atlas Dei CD. Taken overall, it showcases Rich’s more composed side, emitting familiar post-eMusic and faux-ethno flavorings (think of a Rich styling roughly represented by 97’s Seven Veils and 07’s Electric Ladder as bookends). More than the designer drone of Illumination, it is instrumentally wide-ranging, including acoustic material (may contain traces of flutes) and a too-cool-for-Berlin-School sequencer strain. Colvin’s visuals may be a bit rich and fruity for the blood of the more grounded viewer/listener, teeming as they are with rampant cosmic symbolism and geometric mythopoesis. One would, however, expect self-selection to have led to only subscribers to his applied psychology-meets-numenism creed being on board the RR trip by now. Colvin’s images are largely sympathetic to the Rich-ist spirit, but the music works on its own as a suggestive facilitator for those wishing to explore, without other-directed visual support, the wonders of life, the universe, and everything: art, biology, chaos vs. order, cosmology, macrocosms and microcosms, myth and magic, natural vs. human-made objects, sci-fi, technology. Ought to about cover it. Compendious. (AL) • www.robertrich.com Back To Top TERRE THAEMLITZ You? Again? (Mule Electronic) • The adjective “long-suffering” might be tagged on Terre Thaemlitz only insofar as seventeen years in the business of being a DJ, composer, and activist haven’t really resulted in the most madding of crowds. One senses, even hopes, that time and trends are finally aligning for this left-of-center Middle American. His brazen refusal of the norms of sexuality and gender roles is shared and being brought to the cultural forefront by other artists: Psychic TV and Amanda Lepore on the real, Antony and Franz Ferdinand on the periphery. The blogosphere is waking even neophytes up to the fact that electronic music’s pretty good right now but damn, they shoulda been listening N years ago. Plus, it can’t hurt that label-of-the-moment Kompakt is helping to distribute Mule’s Thaemlitz compilation currently at hand. Wisely avoiding the creative missteps in his Rubato series and Mille Plateaux releases, You? Again? otherwise draws a clear thematic path through Thaemlitz’ work by collecting rare and deleted music and mixes from many of his projects. At point A on that path are his takes on deep house, highlighted by “A Crippled Left Wing Soars With the Right” (which he performed as Terre’s Neu Wuss Fusion and remixed as DJ Sprinkles): An epic built up from drum breaks in Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman” and topped off by computer-generated riffs approximating thunder, the crunchy center contains exhortations with a level of eloquence rarely heard out of the mouths of divas and a glitched-string breakdown that could wow a club or stop it cold. We find at point B lighter experimental-dance numbers: There’s more house that devolves into acid jazz because the piano hook is purposefully wobbly (the Social Material track “Class”), a version of the G.R.R.L. song “Face” that would fit in during Moby’s Ambient era, and a novel garage remix of “Crippled Left Wing.” Point C is home to Thaemlitz’ ambient jazz: The “Superbonus” suite finds Terre & Funk Shui imagining the score to short film noir, while the closing version of Chugga’s “Theme for the Buck Rogers Light Rope Dance” eliminates the beats and emphasizes the banging piano lead heard at the start of the album. This all positions Thaemlitz as panmusical—a blessing if listeners come away thinking he knows a lot, a curse if they think he knows a lot about a little, or just not enough. Taken individually, you can see the master at work for the betterment of dancefloors everywhere. On the whole, there’s an embarrassment of riches here; some might find it exhausting to try to take in the entire collection in one or even two sittings for the purposes of casual enjoyment. (Mule, anticipating your needs, has also released this as a series of three vinyl EPs.) You? Again? is best looked as a toolkit, the pocketwatches from which you can pick in order to induce different hypnotic states in the mix for your set, for your friends, or for the space between your ears. (AB) • www.mulemusiq.com Back To Top UUSITALO Karhunainen (Huume) • Berlin-based Finn Sasu Ripatti, better known to ambient dubsters as Vladislav Delay, once again moonlighting under his techno moniker, Uusitalo. Apparently named after his late father’s drama, Karhunainen (Bear Woman), this album sees Ripatti indulging the straight-ahead rhythmicity his more “removed” Delay alter ego more often denied, as on the early teasing beat-depletions of Entain and Multila, where tempo was alluded to—a spectral absent-presence, the pulse impulse almost entirely held in a straining state of ungratified deferral. Ripatti’s early-period groove-oriented tracks (i.e. those not Delay-treated) were more off the leash, in the style of Brinkmann and Hawtin, and openly expressive of his musicianly chops first cooked as a drummer and percussionist. Having decided to revisit these on Karhunainen, why not wheel out the Uusitalo vehicle once again, especially since the microhouse boat sank, leaving his Luomo project if not with no present lover then at least with admirers playing harder to get, what with the current rush to mnln mnml. Now it’s not that Ripatti can’t minimalize with the best of them, but more that the structure and gestures of minimal techno are not what he inhabits with most conviction or distinction, so much as the more dissipated grainy pulse dub-soup of Delay. In the end, his signature sounds change little between and over individual Delay and Uusitalo releases, just that they’re here choreographed into more of a four-square electro-techno flow, much as on last year’s Tulenkantaja. The ten pieces play out in a fairly homogenous manner that allows little discrimination between them individually, relying on a nucleus of propulsive 4/4 kick and plasmoid bass prods, with clattering percussives injecting a jerky kinesis into spidery synth nebulae and dubby swirls. It’ll do, but the report card reads: “must try harder.” (AL) • www. huumerecordings.com Back To Top |
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