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AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism INSTALLMENT 15 / December 2007
REVIEWED BY: ASHER The Depths, the Colors, the Objects and the Silence (Mystery Sea) FIVE ELEMENTS MUSIC VarunaGhat (Mystery Sea) NINTH DESERT Zone (Mystery Sea) • With this trio of recordings, Belgian experimental ambient/drone label Mystery Sea have now reached the fortieth installment of their now six-year lifespan. Each limited edition CDR release comes decked out with full color matching artwork themed with its musical content. In fact two of these three tie themselves in explicitly with not just visuals but with the wider theme of a mystery sea. First up, though, the one that got away: The Depths, the Colors, the Objects and the Silence is more brimful of Asher than the expected “night ocean drones” trailed by the MS website banner. Asher Thal-Nir’s materials are no more nor less "dark” than those of his roster-mates, but rather more austere, dried up, less of an indulgent audio-bath; not so much lo-fi as no-fi, and barely musical, like some fly-on-the-wall environmental audio-documentary with sparse traces of post-production authoring. To illustrate, a signature Asher technique involves him playing his own electronically-generated sounds quietly over a speaker while simultaneously recording the ambient whole with a dangled mike. The ensuing soundscape comes out scrawled over with all manner of peripheralia from the room (ambient hum and tape hiss), the building (fleeting voices), the street (sirens, traffic sounds) and the sky (passing jet engines). Filtered and laptop-scrunched, 90 percent of these hermetic swathes’ content could be described in terms of a high end of grainy static that goes ‘hiss-buzz-crackle’ and a low end of liminal crawl motion that goes ‘hum-drone-rumble’. But frequency highs and lows are not salient to Asher’s enquiry, with all being reduced to a nondescript middle, laying down a prickly blanket of remote isolationist discomfort. The three pieces capture a mood of blankness emptied out of all colour but monochrome greys and, paradoxically for an art drawn from life, drained of nearly all vitality. On “Partly framed in sunlight” and “The blue gently linked”, at least a few attenuated tones, miraculously unestranged from harmony, hang in the air; a few half-there Basinskian keyboard slivers relieving an insistent layer of enshrouding enviro-detritus and digi-dirt, but they’re as if flowers sprouting at the edge of a refuse heap. The listener could be in some existential update of Kafkaesqe bleakness, in which a veil of anhedonia cuts off the protagonist from the fullness of experience. Make of it what you will, but it’s certainly thin gruel for the audiophile. Cyril Herry’s Ninth Desert, on the other hand, has the feel of being played out inside a massive reverberating shell—the antithesis of an anechoic chamber. His Zone is a virtual vacuum into which is sucked a variety of passing winds from nowhere, most of them chill and bearing a host of sonorous foreign bodies. It's roughly sectioned into seven fairly homogenous stretches populated by long stringy wisps, flutings, and keenings, drizzled in a strange lubricious effect-oil that drips off every contour. Rather than conventional arrangements which pull together a range of sounds and layer them, Herry tends to dissociate sounds from each other, so in this sense the desert in his project name—in contrast to the teeming jungle now expected of Mystery Sea people—becomes metaphorical, as isolated organisms spring up and snake out exposed to a wilderness left devoid of recognizable landmarks. On “Strate”, the sounds are those of bird-like twitterings or a remote metallic clangor, while “Marhbe” flirts at both ends with near-silence, and “Alke” features what sounds like a harmonica manhandled into strident smears. These foreground events are periodically attended by a quiet riot of background flutter, skitter and rustle, disappearing with a sonic snail’s trail of liquid reverberation into a wide open soundfield. Sometimes the loneliness of the sounds, whispering and whistling with edge-of-overdriven echo-delays, like long drawn out wheezes with feedback haloes, accentuates the sense of vacuum in between. Overall it's a work that bears more than enough reward for the more conventional deep listener to make it worthwhile, but its sound field becomes in its own way as limited as that of Asher. Ultimately the drone of Zone is one that floats high above ground, its resonances unconcerned with earth or fire, all water and air. Which leads seamlessly to Five Elements Music, whose name alludes to a vedic concept whereby a galvanic fifth element (ether) is added to the standard four. The science of five elements purports to offer a platform for nature and its organizing principles to be understood, offering access to all levels of material nature, and Five Elements Music presumes to embody this somehow in an approach to sound, through the manipulating of incarnations of such material elements. After which strained effort to grasp the project’s opaque metaphysics, one might justly ask "yes, but can you get horizontal to it?” It’s Russian Serguey—the [S] half of Exit in Grey’s (S) & [S], who have previous on Mystery Sea—who’s behind all this, but he seems to find it inspirational, so let’s cut him some slack. In a further conceptual slant, he’s taken the label name as a springboard for the set, in effect supplying theme music for “Night Ocean Drones” Productions. Be warned, though, that a bathroom trip is advisable for the listener prior to embraking on this voyage, as a pronounced aqueous quality flows throughout VarunaGhat, varying from a trickle to a cascade. Source sounds in the form of recordings of water come into contact with interactant elements, with [S] folding in various sound combinations to achieve a strange amalgam, one foot in a surrounding environment that’s real and another in an arcane parallel universe. On “Untitled 1” the waters are heavily disguised by processing initially, but a ghostly rivulet gradually reveals itself as a more present stream, becoming more audible above its surrounding buzz and rumble. Two other pieces follow which explore variations on the same, the waters leeched into by more viscous whorls of post-industrial scum. Nothing in Five Elements Music has not swept past before in the thirty-odd previous Mystery movements of this strangely engulfing Sea, but VarunaGhat’s blend of environmental ambient and field recordings proves to be a worthy addition to an experimental tradition represented by a catalogue that begins to look more distinguished with each passing year. (AL) • www.mysterysea.net Back To Top MATT BORGHI & BEN FLEURY-STEINER What the Night Leaves Behind (Gears of Sand) MOLJEBKA PVLSE Driftsond (Gears of Sand) • For release number 30, Gears of Sand founder, Ben Fleury-Steiner, proposes a ambient two-step in the near-dark with Slobor media sound artist, Matt Borghi. What the Night leaves Behind sounds some inky depths of submarine liquidity around the vicinity of a Mystery Sea (on which label Fleury-Steiner has incidentally released as Paradin). On opener “Broken Connection” the sounds bring to mind the softer side of the effected guitar warp’n’wooze of erstwhile GoS compadre, Aidan Baker, while the subsequent “Tracer” is configured with a similar ambiguous queasy quality of stilless and hypnagogue motion to Adam Pacione’s recent Infraction release. Truth be told, you might arrive at this recording’s sound in your mind’s ear by drawing a line to link the obscured harmonics of Borghi’s previous solo release, The Phantom Light, with Fleury-Steiner’s dronier GoS work, such as Chroma. These artists share in some DIY alchemical knowledge that enables the mutation of simple guitar figures into tonally variegated loops trained in eukinetics. There’s enough pleasing roughage of timbre in with the smooth to make this a chewy earfeast, though the twenty-plus minutes of “Tracer” gets more extended than it warrants. A better-judged cut and fit is the eight crepuscular minutes of “Coastal” with its dissolution of steel string solid into molten. Overall these two establish a nicely oneiric feel of ombrous voyaging under an in-between half-light. The (Un)Holy Trinity of Dark-Drone-Drift is here, certainly, but don’t fear the Reaper of Lustmordian myth. You might catch some creepings of Roach, a trace of Rich-ness, and a little what-the-Hecker. One small caveat is that, though the presence of Borghi manages to impart enough of a voice to endow this release with a distinct character, Fleury-Steiner’s work (over several discrete projects) can tend to fall too easily into articulating through the idiom of others, allowing his own musical lexis to become effaced. And What the Night Leaves Behind, for all its undeniably engaging qualities, is not free from this sensation of borrowed tone. Moljebka Pvlse man Mathias Josefson, another trafficker in tonefloat, has varied his template in recent years between multi-instrumental collaging and field recordings (e.g. Sadalsuud earlier this year) and a simpler layered guitar-based drone style (as on 2005’s Mystery Sea release, Irdlirvirisissong). The latter ground is where his latest, and first for GoS, is played out. Drawn to the meditative and contemplative qualities of zen (rather than the full-on Buddhist aspect), Josefson styled the titles of his five tracks after zen names, creating a hybrid neologism for the album title, taking “sond” (Swedish for “space probe”, while recalling the English “sound”) and combining it with the predominant sensation of movement he wanted the songs to have: that of drift. The resultant appealing image, of a small vessel adrift in some vast space, is particularly apt for this collection’s sound and motion. Based on processed guitar tracks, its amelodic but harmonic material is extended into swathes of sound crawling with detail where tone colour and earfeel is focal. It’s grounded in minimalism in the sense that each piece is premised on a single sound set which is developed with an eye to avoiding over-elaboration or over-playing. So, no massive walls of stylized axe-mediated brutalism a la Aidan Baker/Nadja, or the crushing steel-mangling of Fear Falls Burning, but a soft-pedal incrementalism that sits somewhere (or sprawls slightly) between Troum and Machinefabriek. Quietly swelling drone-tones of resonating strings, sometimes ebowed, often draped in effects, these four tracks may choose to drift but Driftsond shows Moljebka Pvlse to be possessed of a focus and intensity which proves more absorbing than some of his more grandstanding drone-peers. (AL) • www.gearsofsand.net Back To Top FRANK BRETSCHNEIDER Rhythm (Raster-Noton) SIGNAL Robotron (Raster-Noton) • Considering the trio of boutique microsound-minimal electronica labels—not just Raster-Noton, but also Mille Plateaux and 12k—that have hosted Frank Bretschneider (hereinafter FB) both as himself and alter ego, Komet, thereÂ’s a surprising raw in his cooked. Of all the founding Raster-men FB is the most down and, if not dirty, then at least rooting around grubbier regions than the dry white Raster house style. FB’s abstraction of electro- and house has always been premised on rhythm, so the album concept is a total shoo-in: a simple rhythm pattern is proposed, with breaks, mind, no doof-ism, after which it’s fed through sundry filters, plug-ins, and FX. Stripped down particulate patterns and lightly abrasive textures are harnessed into self-consciously minimal beat structures, interspersed with calculated breaks. On opening gambit, “A Soft Throbbing of Time”, a one-note bass pulse immediately grabs the gut and refuses to let go, while layering percussive patter and little else other than the odd scrunch or fizz, and further sub-bass wobble—maybe a Dubstep trace, to which FB merely alludes then eludes. The same base elements are deployed over the nine tracks of FB’s enquiry which does for minimal motor-funk something analogous to what Akufen’s micro-sampling frenzy of hiccup’n’stutter did to/for house, deconstructing it into base bits of bump and bass from which it’s re-built to self-conscious jigging skeleta. Witness “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, a distillate of funk that’s all a-twitch with fertile kinesis. Enthusiasts of Sahko-style reductionism will thrill to “Construction Shack", and admirers of SND through to M_nus mnml, once subject to the oblique acid groove of “All Summer in a Day”, will all be slaves to Rhythm. The triumvirate of FB together with Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender is, of course, the business end of Raster-Noton, whose busy-ness could explain Robotron’s status as only their second release in eight years as microsupergroup Signal. Be that as it may, Carsten seems to have mixed in a portion of the funk from his Transall Cycle with the reduced feel of his Xerrox Vol.1, and a few leaves out of Frank’s book on how to make it mean more of a thing with that swing, while Olaf um... basically bends. Robotron abstracts from techno, breakbeat, and electro templates, but instead of retreating to examine the material remotely—the old Raster-patented method, again gets up closer and more personal. Sorted for beats and fizz, the Signal boys loosen their labcoats to get a fuller-phat micro-funk on down. Recorded in 2001-2006 in Berlin, Tokyo and Chemnitz (Raster-Noton birthplace), Robotron’s sound design has moved away from the freeze-dried towards a somatic weight that has about it a Pan Sonic-like primality. It’s almost as if the spirit of a Kraftwerk de nos jours were abroad, updating streamlined electro through techno with an injection of Suicide’s fuzzy buzz. Somewhere in between the sweatier pound of CR-vintage Monolake and the abstracted cerebral jerk of Alva Noto and Ryoki Ikeda (see esp. Dataplex), Robotron grows into an insistent brute that takes the gestures of minimalism and sharpens its edges, hardens its beats, and thickens its textures, ending up much more of a pummeling polyrhythmic affair than past Rasters. The mechanistic precision is still present but the bloodlessness of texture has been given an infusion if not of human warmth then certainly a bigger-bodied basket of whirrs, buzzes, and sinetones. No tame IDM tippy tapping or flim-flam faux-funk, then, but a real visceral thunk. Raster-Noton are to be lauded for keeping moving, and, whatÂ’s more, keeping its output resolutely authentic to its own and electronic music’s Ur-spirit. (AL) • www.raster-noton.de Back To Top BTB Who Wants to be Healthy in this Sick World? (Boltfish) PRESTON Aespatia (Boltfish) • The Boltfish boys deliver a couple more of their monthly installments. The label’s identity as a kind of muso-techie version of a cottage industry purveying bespoke budget-priced electronica has by now been established over a series of well-mannered beyond-bedroom IDM. Lately the sound has become over-familiar and risked flirtation with the anodyne. So it’s gratifying to detect some injections of grit and substance to the Boltfish base courtesy of Argentine Franco Colombo, aka BTB. Tracks like “Ill Brain” and “Climatic Dot” pack a combo of full-on whomp, glitchy crunch, and top-end crack that prove he’s no pussy. Keyboard tones remain resolutely in that Plaid-ish ambient techno vein that’s become Boltfish regulation issue by now, but this collection somehow provides more chewy harder-edged sustenance than the norm, especially at the lower-end. But there’s also a pleasing variation in sound design and architecture between tracks, often a shortcoming with neophyte electronic artists. A scrunched up leftfield hip-hop loop provides the bedding for the woozy synth sprawl that is “Life To B#”—a sure-fire Merck-pleaser, while “Sweet Lysoform” takes a satisfying urban detour into a late-night landscape prickling with soft static, borrowing deep Detroit chords and remotely tuning in to basic Berlin channels. Obligatory Boltfish remixes come from boss-Boltfishermen Cheju (ok so-so) and Mint (decent anthemic electro-infused), but Milieu’s combo of head-nod and skygaze synth-haze wins out, while Melodium (faux-naif classico-arpeggio piano and harp with inelegant stomp beat) gets the booby prize. Preston’s offering, Aespatia, is another set of deep, lush electronica. Yes, “deep” and “lush” are de rigueur epithets for this variety, if you need the code crack. Boltfish is where you go for Geek Age kicks now Neo Ouija and Toytronic are defunct, and Expanding has contracted. Maybe even disenfranchized Merckers and n5md-men can join in the fun, now it’s almost hip to be IDM square. In there are sounds that mouth “mellow” and beats that beg for a “groovy” appellation, in a music that always remains on the best of melodic electronica behaviour. After a few nicely composed pieces, you wish it would either loosen up and get totally supine or phatten up and wig out a bit more. Instead of which, it potters around in a kind of 00s electronica update of 70s MOR. And Preston does tend to stay close to territory already staked out by other like-minds, there being a load of new electro-kids on this Boltfish block. You’ll know the neighborhood by now: soft-toned pads, ambient-inclined, backed by skitter-beats that playfully somersault over each other. Preston’s talent seems spread a bit thinly at this early stage in his development, and overall Aespatia lacks sufficient textural and variation to achieve distinction. In fact the notable variation here is in tempo, whether in the lullaby Isan-isms of “Swerky” or in the busier rush of “Giantoic” and the almost ambient-d’n’b of “Gibotn”. The latter in fact turns out to be Boltfish colleague Test Pressing with a remix, of which there are others from label-chums, Mise En Scene, Jash and BTB. This latter reminds us that, where this variety of electronic music is concerned, the devil is in the detail, and BTB knows it and does it better. (AL) •www.boltfish.co.uk Back To Top JODI CAVE For Myria (12k) • For Myria is a personally inscribed universe awash in swathes of expressionist tone color and arpeggios that scatter like a flock of birds. As on her contribution to 12k’s Blueprints compilation, Jodi Cave exhibits tacit concern with these delicate pulses and pings that stairstep into the stratosphere, shaded by harmonium, guitar, and clarinet. Here, however, they are presented in an altogether more musical setting. The same thumps, skips, and gurgles recur in varying formations, establishing clear patterns, in relation to which the listener can orient themselves. Such a structure does not defy any expectation, but its sense of fluid motion and aquatic ping and delay is defined and sinewy enough to support one’s attention for the duration of the tracks, which, on a whole, range from two to seven minutes in length. With this foundation established, Cave focusses all the more on developing a strong polychromatic suite out of her small palette of sounds, collaging together small melodic scraps that, although they bear little trace of their original context, are nevertheless imbued with a nostalgic aura that remains like a residue hidden within the shimmer or hiss of the respective works. "Untitled", for one, is a stately, strangely pastoral blend of smooth, artful guitar figures and fluttering electronic tones. Taken as a whole, it is a piece of some beauty and sensuality, which is all the more satisfying for having been arrived at unaffectedly, without much calculation. The album presents a lightness of touch in the arrangement of brittle, flinty sounds; and, in general, pleasing tones fade into each other or fold back on themselves in a casual, almost playful, yet refined manner. Against the continuously flowing arc of blips and burbles, then, a stimulating encounter develops between intention and happenstance, abstraction and anecdote. These dialogues thereby extend the otherwise admittedly short life-span of such a record, ensuring the cerebral is counterbalanced with pleasure of a more sensual kind. (MS) • www.12k.com Back To Top DEEPSPACE The Barometric Sea (Deepspace) DEEPSPACE Slow Moving Lifeforms Volume 1 (Deepspace) • When growing up, Brisbane phonaut Mirko Ruckels was apparently obsessed with deserts, plains and um...deep space—isolated places where he was completely alone, indulging the urge for immersion into and exploration of such places. His attempts to channel that dreamy, detached and lonely feeling into his music are fairly successful on this evidence. His influences are openly admitted, and include Steve Roach, VidnaObmana, Pete Namlook, and Stars of the Lid, meaning it’s (S/s)pace music with both upper and lower case “s”, both celestial and earthly manifestations being embraced. The Barometric Sea, the earlier collection, is a decent debut, and the Deepspace sound is at once familiar and of itself, calculated to appeal to old-school Emusic lovers while including enough of a tweak to make it modish. It does occasionally strike you with that larded over feeling you get from Schnauss-ist “indietronica”, where it’s all Deep and no Space, but tracks like “The Drop of Nowhere” are nicely drawn out into a Stars of the Lid elongation haze. Overall it’s nicely judged. Follow-up Slow Moving Lifeforms Volume 1 is an even better crossover exponent, with a foot in the classic spacemusic camp and another in the ’90s New Wave of Ambient. “Slow Moving Lifeform 1” opens, nestling nicely between mid-period Vidna and one of Eluvium’s more open pieces, or a synthetic rendition of mid-period SotL; there’s that sense of heightened harmonics that can result from artfully minimized melodics. “The Endless Repeat of Waves Onto a Landscape” and “Amniotic Orbit” reinforce the Vidna RoA connection by bringing in a deliberate one-finger piano motif redolent of RoA’s prologue. Swathes of nebulous harmonics are competently choreographed. On “Winter pushes Autumn” we start to experience the symptoms of bloating that come from the the excess sugars of a little too cloying and over-egged a pudding. The New Age morass of Windham Hill is sometimes only a motion away, though the final “Slow Moving Lifeform 3 (closure B)” is a hard-to-resist space hymn with a lilt of the sacral epic to it. (AL) • www.deepspacehome.com Back To Top ECHOSPACE The Coldest Season (Modern Love) • The Coldest Season collects eight tracks originally released on four separate 12”s, re-edits them and slings in a couple of extra CD-exclusive pieces for good measure. Echospace, for the uninitiated, is DeepChord’s prime mover Rod Modell plus Steve Hitchell (aka Soultek), synthesizing an amalgam of Detroit (Modell’s techno base), Chicago (Hitchell’s house) and Berlin/Kingston (out of Detroit, by way of Jamaica, courtesy of Basic Channel). A touch of gear-fetishism is possibly present, with vintage analog equipment exclusively being used, including “the unparalleled sonic capabilities of the Roland Space Echo, Korg tape delay and Sequential 8-bit samplers,” but given the teeming grain and viscous smearage it’s facilitated their wrenching out of them, forgiveness is easy. Over the course of its fully 79-minute duration, a parade of trapped field recordings and echo artefacts are released, combined with resonant metallic synth-stabs, making of the listening space a kind of aural hologram of a polar danceclub, blasted by a mighty wind from way out west of Roland, regularly pounded by incursions of deliberate bass and insistent carpeted kicks down below. Otiose, in a sense, to single out tracks since it comes across as a continuous gush of steamy hiss and subtle speaker-quake, though one might note, for example, that “Ocean Of Emptiness” and “Winter In Seney” are more zones of oceanic drift, where the pulse is withheld to let atmo have its fill; and that, in contrast, on “Celestialis” and the outstanding “Sunset” (the nearest thing here to a floor-filling anthem), the beat chugs at its most tech-motorik, thrusting iceberg-like up through the icy floe motion. And finally, slightly out of step with the prevailing warm-cold ambient air, the closing “Empyrean” is all headnod bassline and vibey reggae-dub-style skank. Ultimately The Coldest Season is a convincing proposal of DeepChord/Echospace as natural carriers of the dub techno torch for a new generation that missed the original Detroit-Berlin shuttle. (AL) • www.modern-love.co.uk Back To Top NELSON FOLTZ / TOM LYNN Still Life Volume Three (Stillsounds) • Nelson Foltz and Tom Lynn are studio musicians who have, we are told, “worked on more song-oriented projects.” On the Still Life series, of which this is the third volume, it seems they not only wanted to get away from song, but also from electronics. This by rights ought to disqualify Foltz and Lynn from entry to e/i for flagrant contravention of its strictly electronic dress code, but somehow they manage to make it in by dint of their music’s spirit. If not “electronic”, it’s certainly based on an ethic of conventional instruments unconventionally instrumentalized, rendering them “otherwise”. Foltz has apparently worked with S. Dan, A. Franklin, and R. Flack, to invoke but three signifiers of artistic worthiness, and Lynn comes trailing a further list of achievements in a similar sphere of uncompelling music industry orthodoxy. Fortunately they leave their MOR credentials outside the room for these thankfully less polished, more exploratory sessions. Still Life is aptly titled, since it’s all about low-motion unfolding tableaux, self-consciously exuding their nature tones into three extended pieces of subtle revelations. With the unpromising trombone, an instrument that traditionally blows an ill wind to these ears, Foltz takes a leaf out Hassell’s book of altered trumpet states to possibilize its music, opening up its sound. He semi-solos semi-drifts across much of Still Life’s contours—drawing together a hybrid of modal drone, ambient and jazz inflections. A plethora of unlikely sources from zithers to a half-filled bathtub were co-opted into sonorous communion on Still Life, now at Volume Three and still maintaining interest, the outcome tipping a discreet wink to tribal ambient while remaining aloof from the tired gestures of Fourth World imperialism. (AL) • www.stillsounds.com Back To Top MOSKITOO Drape (12k) PJUSK Sart (12k) TAYLOR DEUPREE/CHRISTOPHER WILLITS Listening Garden (Line) HERIBERT FRIEDL Trac(k)_T (Line) • Traversing the poppier plains of the 12k spectrum, the immaterial, crystalline, and microscopic laptoppery of Sanae Yamasaki, aka Moskitoo, enshrouds the organic environment—consisting of guitar, organ, metallophone, and keyboard—like so many specks of snow. Throughout, the quirky processing of Yamasaki takes these basic, ever-shifting rhythmical mosaics and injects them with cirrus detail or colors them with some phosphorescent, atmospheric touches. This approach yields string-caressingly fragile passages interpenetrating with weebling synths or others in which a playful resourcefulness beckons one forward. All of this leaves Drape on a mellow, smoothed out, yet slightly unstable grounding that never goes quite so far as blandness. Sart, the fruit of a collaboration between Dahl Gjelsvik and Rune Sagevik (aka Pjusk), displays a greater, not to mention murkier, depth. As with Drape, this recording bears witness to a branching out on the part of 12k, as they apply their refined minimalist approach to the realms of dub, dark ambient, and sound art, respectively. The recording is thus another slab of ghostly, sub-aquatic assemblage of crackles, moans and delicate percussion lattices. More particular to itself, however, are the manners in which its interpenetrating layers create a complex network of cross-connections. Such a structure enables a slipstream of electronic particles to flow into jarring rhythmic judders and a myriad of other soundshapes without easy classification or forensic tracing of their provenance. Even at more extreme ends, ominous bits of ambience are able to open up portals to violently flickering fluctuations of electronic tones and industrial found sound. It's a work that retains its own sense of charm and magic—indeed, as it stands, Sart is one of the stronger experimental electronica releases of 2007. Recently released on Line, meanwhile, is Listening Garden, a work composed between Taylor Deupree and Christopher Willits for indoor tea spaces installed at the Yamaguchi Center For Arts and Media in Japan. Turn it up and the real-time energies of Deupree and Willits becomes more palpable, what with the guitar of the latter dancing like galactic wrinkles while the synthesizer thrum of the former stirs up eddies of cosmic dust, but this is to miss the point. While one might feel embarrassed to simply surrender to such decor, sparkling as it is, the recording works not only as a lubricant but also as a considered element within the social exchange of a more intimate sort. Towards markedly different ends, Heribert Friedl uses a cymbalan as his chief source material for this work on Line. A clearly connected series of short tracks capture an assortment of textures and relationships towards the instrument. One constant is the skewed percussion, which often manages to fizz with static energy. In places, the energy of the whirrings and scufflings is compressed such that the intensity builds to some proportion. Mostly, though, Friedl opts to sensitively flesh out the main—and sometimes marginal—tonal themes of the cymbalan. The pieces often come in a cold film of sonic sheen and anxiety, but rather than work on these levels, Friedl creates a conceptully enticing recording in which the proximity, rather than the distance, of the material fosters some dimension-stretching motions. (MS) • www.12k.com Back To Top RED NEEDLED SEA Old River Blues (Triple Bath) SIMULACRA Eidolon (Triple Bath) • Athens-based experimental music label Triple Bath has had a small release schedule of limited edition CDRs. The label states that it “values highly music of ascetic and religious nature regardless of any connection to or detachment from specific traditions, cultural weight or political beliefs.” The presence of words of this nature would seem to suggest a kind of mission statement of a quasi-spiritual ambit, and, truth be told, Belgian Miguel Boriau did cause some trepidation here, especially coming on with heavy nom de disque Simulacra, backed up with further New Age meets Nihilist Gothic title-atrocities like “Wandering the Spirit World” and “Disintegrate into Nothingness”. Nomenclatural qualms negotiated, however, Eidolon turns out to be a gratifyingly involving piece of drone-driven Dark Ambient-cum-Space Music, with Boriau adept enough at making his timbres do the talking to drown out the verbals. “Wandering the Spirit World” may well at its outset seem to be dismissable, reductively, as a bleak ballet of Lust-y ebb and flow, but once sucked into its ominous upsurge and giddy reverberating fall-aways, the unsuspecting listener will find its engulfing effect slowly surmounts any preconceptions. Similarly, “Disintegrate into Nothingness” may spool out superficially the same deep-breathing turgescent synth sequence with obsessive recursive insistence, but the devil is in the micro-variative detail, transforming a sci-fi dirge into a mesmerizing immersion zone in which to darkly luxuriate. Hanging not far from black stars once charted by Roach (The Magnificent Void) and Rich (Trances/Drones), somewhere down by a more elevated Cyclic Law (cf. Gustaf Hildebrand, Visions), Eidolon’s two 20-plus minute pieces of black-edged ooze, dark-hole drift, and low-end voidism offer well-sculpted updates on old-school space music for a new cohort of grim-faced aura-nauts. Moving into a different and more variable frequency range, we find Panos Alexiades, who’s already poked around the piano on previous Red Needled Sea releases. Now, on Old River Blues, he takes the ivories for a runaround in some less surveyed textural fields. Alexiades varies between more purist ambient compositions to light dronology and on to a form of electronic minimalism, occasionally pushing into the realms of improv, albeit a reined-in version. His old Johanna is the most present of elements, treated variously with soft digi-showers and drone-backwashes, while periodic electric guitar infusions impart more timbral resonance. Despite the odd sighting of an ambient trope, Alexiades manage to avoid setting off the worst cliché alarms, as he stretches out his doleful atmospheric miniatures. A music of withdrawn but graceful manner is proposed, steeped in melancholic minor keys redolent of solitude and abandonment—wherein maybe lies the linkage with the spirit of the eponymous blues. There are also some undertones of the oddly disengaged engagement of Andrew Chalk and the odd look in the direction of his Mirror, beyond which can almost be glimpsed the spectral outlines of Popol Vuh. Old River Blues is suffused with a strange sense of evanescence—of music that’s almost not there, or half-there half-mirage, or, once established as there, forever abandoning you, but yet somehow always returning. (AL) • www.triplebath.gr Back To Top SAWAKO Madoromi (Anticipate) • With little compunction, Sawako attributes the cello on her recent recording to one Jacob Kierkegaard, the sleeping melancholy to Pandatone, found memories to Cokiyu and Grandpa, and, at last, apples, voices, and music boxes to herself. A pinch of quiescence thus informs these sound sources and the works in which they play a part. Rather than take them apart and reassemble them at will, plumbing their depths for a secret content hidden beneath the form, Sawako takes up concern with the forms themselves, with how the content is articulated through them, and how they can stand in relation to certain others. Her approach thereby has more tenderness than virtuosity about it and, in like manner, the resulting songs hang heavy with the blithe play of sun and shade. At the same time, a certain disdain or mumbled word of misgiving might be cast towards these compositions were it not for Sawako’s having invested them with a certain poetic mystery. Particular passages sink to a rasping whisper while, on a whole, the sound sources are largely blurred into abstruse assemblages of crackles, moans, and delicate chimes. No piece builds to a death rattle, yet there are passages of nostalgic, unsentimental epiphanies about impermanence that should be enough to keep one’s thoughts churning. "Appled Soapbox", in particular, manages to extract an atmosphere of unease from the slow swirl of spectral electronics and soft vibes that wind like ribbon around the jumbled recollections of an elderly man. A faint displacement thus accompanies the music’s undulating forward motion. Indeed, whichever space Sawako canvasses, the music is stately throughout. (MS) • www.anticipaterecordings.com Back To Top GREGORY TAYLOR Amalgam: Aluminum/Hydrogen (Palace Of Lights) K. LEIMER The Useless Lesson (Palace Of Lights) • Gregory Taylor is evidently preoccupied with matters of musicogenesis, in the sense of looking to supplant conventional compositional and improvisational methods of music creation with technologies capable of “intelligent” music generation. The air of the academicized conceptual is not so thick as to leave no room for appreciation of and borrowing from traditional musics, though. Opening tracks, “Bem” and “Gulu”, for example, clearly establish the frame of reference through approximations of the timbres and tunings of gamelan. Subequent pieces like “Pelog” reprise this feel with more overt metallophone tones and gongs, while other pieces like “Nem”, and “Barang” are hazier, denser, more manipulated affairs of ambient otherness. Individual track titles are something of a conceit, for Amalgam is in essence a single unedited recording of a live semi-improvised performance in which Taylor, adept in RadiaL (Cycling 74 software), effects his eopnymour amalgam—of the tunings and forms of gamelan (Aluminum?) with the architectures of microsound and lowercase (Hydrogen?). As the set progresses, the later sections extend into longer non-percussive and increasingly dissonant synth-tones that meander around the verges of Glassian minimalism. Truth be told, listener disengagement has already begun to set in by this point, with Taylor’s voicings engaging fitfully while in initial process, slowly but surely taking on an artificiality, a gesturalism reminding of the kind of “computer music” that once made the term pejorative. The Useless Lesson is a different animal, and, unusually for K. Leimer, a bit of a stylistic hodgepodge. Listening to first piece “To force closed our eyes” prompted wonderings as to whether Leimer had had his head turned by the recent flourishing of classically-informed works by artists at edges of electronica and ambient—the likes of Max Richter, Eluvium (see last full-length, Copia), and Ryan Teague. Unlikely for this ambient veteran, so it’ll be that most contemporary post-classical, when not drawn from Pärt, comes from similar Görecki-patterned cloth. Following track “Failing need of more”—a collab with phonographer Anode—reassuringly occupies a more familiar (Leimer-wired) zone of spatial ambient drift draped with gauze curtains of serene high-end drone. Lovely stuff indeed. But the album’s flow then gets further diverted. “Music That Conceives Of Itself As Music” is a short piece that fuses doleful string-based classicisms with initially hesitant, then somewhat fast-and-loose drum patterns. Even more uncomfortably, “Anosognosia” finds Leimer and Dwight Ashley conspiring in a slab of club-footed quasi-postrock atmospherica, all heavy-handed kit-drums and noodly axe-wires that never really gets properly linearly propulsive or interestingly vertical. Finally, frustrated recourse to liner notes illuminates the schizophonic tendencies: “The music is comprised of constructed and deconstructed pieces juxtaposed to disclose the contrasts and commonality of organizing and recognizing sound... the ensembles used in each case differ broadly. The constructed—composed—pieces are mostly for string trio and are traditional and surface-oriented. Set in contrast with collaborative, steady-state and hybrid pieces...” All revealed now, but, concept notwithstanding, musically the feeling remains that Leimer sounds happier in the ambient apertures of “Long After Dowland,” rather than among the the starchy classical stringiness of “Trio (Sentimental Music)” and “Declension Of Need”. (AL) • www.palaceoflights.com Back To Top VARIOUS ARTISTS Ikude (Shima) • UK-based Shima Records are, allegedly, “Specialists in experimental techno, electronica listening music, braindance, breakbeat and ambient.” Some scepticism is harboured on the grounds that, in celebrating its 10th release, and considering its boasting of a cast from far-flung corners of the world, “specialists” should surely be capable of coming up with something better than this undistinguished assortment. Indeed if these 14 tracks (featuring Parallel Worlds, Cato Six, Signalform, Riamiwo, Tachikoma, Self oscillate, Naono, Melorman, Alkin engineering, Laputa, [710W3], Pascal, Nighthaze, and Seriatim) represent the best Shima Records could wring out of England, Canada, Greece, Australia and Germany, one might suggest they undertake an apprenticeship enabling the training of their critical-evaluative faculties, something that might qualify them to become better judges of what distinguishes "good” idm-electronica (notable by its scarcity on Ikude) from “so-so” or “no-no” (an embarrassment of impoverishment to be found herein). Where to start, though? While the deliberately kitschy Taiwanese hip-hop of Tachikoma’s “I Frank Too Much” is (presumably) a joke (please), the tired Global Goon-isms of Pascal are motiveless, and Riamiwo’s charmless “Details won’t detain” needn’t have detained anyone, least of all Riamiwo, this tedious indietronica strain already having been done to death by half of Morr Music’s roster years ago. Perhaps Cato Six’s joyless trudge through the incoherent clubfoot glitch-funk of “Milpobeam”—truly a study in the emptiness of human endeavour on a Sisyphean scale—would be a good place to end the outing. It isn’t all that bad, but on this evidence it’s hard to envisage Shima competing even with relatively new melodic IDM-electronica labels like Boltfish and Rednetic, let alone institutions like Warp, Skam and Rephlex, all looking more distinguished with the passing years, as upstart pretenders decline and fall. As will surely happen to Shima if quality assurance socks, way down on Ikude, are not pulled up. (AL) • www.shimarecords.co.uk Back To Top |
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