EMERGE – HIDING PLACE (CD by Frozen Light) *
ASTARIUM – IN THE NEBULOUS SKY (CDR by Frozen Light) *
ALIENS VS DINOSAURS (2CD compilation by Frozen Light)
KARL J. PALOUCEK – VARIATION 1 (CD, private) *
KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI/EUGENIUSZ RUDNIK – HOMO LUDENS (CD by Bolt Records) *
KASPER T. TOEPLITZ – ALMASTY (CD by Sleaze Art) *
MILAN KNIZAK & OPENING PERFORMANCE ORCHESTRA – BROKEN MUSIC/RE:BROKEN MUSIC (CD by Sub Rosa) *
BARBARA KINGA MAJEWSKA & EMILIA SITARZ – FRANZ SCHUBERT WITERREISE (CD by Populista) *
JOANNA HALSZKA SOKOLLOWSKA – FRANZ SCHUBERT WITERREISE (CD by Populista) *
RICHARD YOUNGS – PARALLEL WINTER (CD by Populista) *
ZALYS – SUBLIME (CD by Reverse Alignment) *
RED FOG – BURIED ON VANTH (CD by Reverse Alignment) *
MOLLUSK – AEON SYNAPSES CONNECT (CDR by Reverse Alignment) *
MOLJEBKA PVLSE – A TRANSFORMATION (CDR by Reverse Alignment) *
TAROTPLANE – FIRST (LP by Aguirre Records)
BRENDAN DOUGHERTY – SENSATE (LP by Entr’acte) *
ENNIO MAZZON – PAVEMENT NARROWS (CDR by Disecreet Records) *
ARVIND GANGA/TINAS TELLO (split cassette by Andes Tapes) *
HEY EXIT – CAUDATA (cassette by Of Plants) *
CINEMA PERDU – A PERFECT NEGATIVE (2 cassettes by Audio Visuals Atmosphere) *
FRANCIS HEERY – CASCADE (cassette by Lamour) *
EMERGE – HIDING PLACE (CD by Frozen Light)
ASTARIUM – IN THE NEBULOUS SKY (CDR by Frozen Light)
ALIENS VS DINOSAURS (2CD compilation by Frozen Light)
Of course you recognize the name Emerge from the many releases he did for his own label
Attenuation Circuit, but now he’s ventured to a real CD on Russia’s Frozen Light label.
Like he did before there are vocals by Eljara of Prinzip Nemesis (see also Vital Weekly 996)
and there is a piece recorded with Russia’s Re-Drum (see Vital Weekly 875 for a release
Attenuation Circuit put out – it’s a small world). There are only five pieces on this disc,
yet it’s clocking in at close to an hour. It opens with ‘Flight 1’, which is a typical Emerge
piece of sampled acoustic sounds, which have been treated by digital means. As always
along the lines of Asmus Tietchens, sans the refinement he has but it is still fine music.
Of the five pieces, two are solo, and three are collaborations. In the first of the two pieces
with Eljara there is no vocal (which is odd seeing Eljara is a vocalist) but it has quite a
bit of tension, quiet mostly but noisy towards the end. In the second one there is a bit
of vocals, mostly towards the end, although I think most of the sounds are generated
through vocal samples. Both are quite good. In the one piece with Re-Drum there is
also a bit of vocals, but it’s otherwise built from a set of rhythmic samples, all of it a
bit vague, and perhaps a bit long. The CD ends with ‘Flight 2’, the longest piece, all solo
and sees a continuation of ‘Flight 1’, and my comment would be along similar lines.
The sounds themselves are not bad, but the whole effect is too much mid-range,
without much low-end depth. The first one sounded better. All in all a CD that was
quite good.
On CDR we find Astarium, which the label tags as ‘strange music dark ambient jazz
and improvised music new age post-rock space’ on their bandcamp. The music was
recorded by one SiN, except for one piece, which is a cover of Varg Vikernes. Strange
music might not be the right word, as there is nothing strange about this heavily
synth based music (although I realize the concept of ‘strangeness’ lies very much
in the perception the receiver; if you only hear country & western your entire life,
the kind of music in Vital Weekly might all be strange). SiN strikes me as a guy with
a bunch of synthesizers, on which he plays some long form chords, cemented by a
fine amount of reverb. All of this by hitting the keys in the lower region of the
keyboard. There is this church organ feeling one gets from this rather sombre music.
Where ever is Astarium’s hometown, it is no doubt quite a grim place. One could argue
there is very little difference in these pieces, but I believe this to be the idea behind this;
tracks are numbered ‘I’, ‘II’ etc. so maybe that’s the whole idea? I don’t know, but the
sky is grey, so a suitable soundtrack is most welcome.
We return to the format of a CD, a double one at that, with four dark ambient projects
from four different countries, and all of which are unknown to me. First there is from
Portugal one Hulduefni, who has four pieces in which the guitar plays an all important
role, howling about in a true metal fashion, but shrill, with lots of feedback, except
perhaps in ‘Intergalactic Space’, which I immediately thought was his best piece. The
other ones sounded truly old-fashioned, but this piece of mutated guitar sounds was
tranquil and out of the ordinary.
I Am Esper hails from America and in the booklet we see his statement ‘animals first,
humanity never’ (not that animals will ever care about music, I thought and perhaps
making no music would be of more help to animal life? What do I know?), which might
be all a bit Merzbow inspired? He too might use the guitar but arrives at more interesting
results. It started of with ‘Cosmic Dreams’, a very mellow piece of drones, which worked
very refined in terms of dark ambient. His ‘Cosmic Death I’ has a bouncing, looped rhythm
played on the guitar, with some great hissy effects, and slowly cascading away. The
second part of this track is close to twenty-eight minutes and is all about harsh noise
with tons of feedback jumping around like hitting his distortion a lot or not. This I didn’t
care about.
The second disc has four pieces by Paleozoic from Belarus, more guitars and more effects,
especially reverb is again a hot item here. But his four pieces, unformed as they seemed,
were not bad. Chilling, cold, loud at times, but apart from the old-fashioned ‘Immobility.
Indifference And Toughness’, the other three worked pretty well. Dark and atmospheric;
as promised on the box.
And finally, from Russia, Satanath, who says ‘save the planet, destroy all of humanity’
(these are not really people who want to sell a disc or two, it seems; who do they consider
their fans to be?). He has the most tracks, which are also the shortest. He’s also the one
that has the most variety when it comes to using sounds, instruments and techniques.
Rhythm plays some role when hitting the guitar, although it sometimes slips away into
a morass of sound effects, such as in ‘Satnagor’. In ‘Um Moktud’ there are various keyboards
in play and in ‘Daralao’ even a drum machine hammering away to end with drum & bass in
‘Sotekius’; while some of this wasn’t bad, it seemed to me as if Satanath hasn’t made up
his mind yet what he wanted with his music. Maybe, with the wish of humanity disappearing
it doesn’t matter? (FdW)
Address: http://www.frzl.ru/
KARL J. PALOUCEK – VARIATION 1 (CD, private)
Ever since arriving on the scene with his ‘K’ release (see Vital Weekly 870), every new release
by Karl J. Paloucek is welcomed with much anticipation. ‘Sail’ was a great work (Vital Weekly
949) and his collaboration with Z’EV was fine as well (Vital Weekly 997), but following two
great releases perhaps not his best. Now he offers a forty minute work, ‘Variation 1’, which
is ‘for Peter J. Woods’, and which might be an extension of the Z’EV piece. Much of what
Paloucek does deals with the ‘studio as instrument’, and that is of course an interest he
shares with many of the musicians in Vital Weekly, but Paloucek takes it out of the realm
of musique concrete and creates his own version of it. In this case a forty-minute exercise
in drones, created by rattling of metal pipes, amassed in a big way. Maybe by looping a
whole bunch of these recordings around in various big blocks (say ‘the Niblock way of
creating a drone’) and on top of that smaller blocks of metal rumbling, and then cross
fading these various layers of recordings together into a massive orchestral work. At one
point (post the twenty-five minute break) I heard a church organ, which may have changed
my perception of this piece. This is all about a church organ and metal pipes – so there you
go, I was wrong again. It’s only because Paloucek plays the organ in strange intervals at one
point that I recognize this to be an organ as otherwise these drones could have been
generated from metal pipes. This is a fine piece of music for sure, but I feel from the four
releases I now heard from him probably the one that I found least attractive. Partly because
I heard such works before, but maybe also because it seems a bit too easy made. Maybe not
a work that required much attention, and something that Paloucek regards as something in
between? I am not sure, but let’s wait for the next major work then. Maybe this is something
for the die- hard fans. (FdW)
Address: http://www.karljpaloucek.com/
KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI/EUGENIUSZ RUDNIK – HOMO LUDENS (CD by Bolt Records)
Somewhere in the back of my head I know that Krzysztof Penderecki is a Polish composer
of serious classical music; I may have even heard some of it. I am not sure if I knew that he
also composed electronic music, but perhaps that’s no surprise. All of the big wigs from
modern classical music did that. Many of these pieces were commissioned by films and
theatre productions and recorded at the studios of Polish Radio Experimental Studio,
which are lovingly released by Bolt Records in these past years. Here we have five pieces
by Penderecki and two by Eugeniusz Rudnik, who worked as an engineer and composer in
the same studio (see also Vital Weekly 1017 for a release about his work). It is, as always,
not easy to judge these things merely by their music and not in context of what they were
made for, the film, an animation or a puppet theatre. Now, while some of the music is quite
serious, perhaps as one would expect from such composers working in such serious
surroundings, but then there is also a bit of silliness to be noted in this music. Odd
sounds, like farting, or funny vocalizations, a bit of jazz along with industrial sounds, or
just a fucked up collage of sounds, such as ‘Homo Ludens’ by Rudnik. I am not sure what
to make of this, other than that I quite enjoyed all of this. All seven pieces are powerful,
colourful, different and yet are very much part of the tradition of musique concrete, but
it all seems a bit less serious this time around (at least some of the time, perhaps not
always), which is, for a change, quite good. Life can’t be all-serious all the time. (FdW)
Address: http://boltrecords.pl/
KASPER T. TOEPLITZ – ALMASTY (CD by Sleaze Art)
By now I should think you know a bit about the work of Kasper T. Toeplitz. He’s a bass player,
composing serious works for solo bass as well as for an ensemble of four bass players called
Sleaze Art and also composes for other instruments and sometimes performing works by
others, such as Eliane Radigue. Maybe you think bass guitar equals Jaco Pastorius or Jah
Wobble (or Sir Paul), but what Toeplitz does with his bass and no doubt a few electronic
devices makes that his work doesn’t sound like anything that is made with a bass guitar.
The work here is, if I understood well, a recording made at the concert of this piece and
while it had four parts, now cut together as one long piece of some fifty-seven minutes.
There is a mean low end to this music, deep on the bass one could say, but it also sounds
like a lot of hiss being fed through a bunch of sound effects. It’s like listening to a deep sea
from way below the surface. As Toeplitz points out in the information, this is a work about
electronic music, and not so much about the bass guitar; it could have been performed on
another instrument (show us the score!), but Toeplitz has been playing the bass for years
and so it is performed on that instrument. It is quite a heavy piece of music, but that is
perhaps something one would expect from Toeplitz. All of his composed works are dark
masses of electronic sounds. Deep, drone like, mysterious and atmospheric, causing
seismic waves if you play this too loud. Toeplitz’ music is one of uneasy beauty that
works best when played loud. (FdW)
Address: http://www.sleazeart.com/sleazeart
MILAN KNIZAK & OPENING PERFORMANCE ORCHESTRA – BROKEN MUSIC/RE:BROKEN MUSIC (CD by Sub Rosa)
Somewhere in the mid to late 80s, when we all thought we did something very avant-garde,
someone blurted out ‘Kapotte Muziek means broken music, and what The Haters do with
their ‘destroyed music’ is all done before, there is a guy who did that in the sixties called
Milan Knizak’. Maybe we (speaking for myself is probably better) quickly moved from
‘avant-garde’ to ‘I am more than happy to entertain myself’, as there is always someone
older than yourself who had all those grandiose ideas before. Milan Knizak for instance,
who in 1963-64 already started playing records too slow, or too fast, creating new
compositions and in 1965 he started to destroy them, punch holes in them, scratch
them and have them play on end – or at least until the needle was really broken too.
Obviously none of Knizak’s music was easily to find in those years and later on I partly
forgot about it, or perhaps lost interest, so much to my surprise there is now this CD,
which has a forty-five minute piece by Milan Knizak as performed in 2014, along with
Phaerentz (of whom we recently reviewed a disc), as well as a sort of remix by the
Opening Performance Orchestra, ‘five laptops & fraction music (broken section,
re:broken section, fraction section)’ as it spells out in the booklet. 78 minutes of
music: that can’t be a coincidence. The Knizak/Phaerentz piece sounded exactly like
I would have expected; scratched records, collated and collaged together making up
a dense mass of sound. You recognize singing, spoken word, orchestral sounds,
scratching and looping – and all of this from records and broken vinyl, CD players
and CDs, cassette players and cassettes and keyboard; there has been an update
in technology that one could also break down and use. Is it good? Is it bad? Hard to
say, I thought; I quite enjoyed it a bit, trying to visualize the Christian Marclay concert
I saw in 1985 and everybody else I saw since then who used a turntable to create music
but then I also found forty-five minutes was also a bit long and also a bit on the loud side,
blurring any details. Maybe that comes with seeing enough turntablists at work over the years.
If I understand well, the Opening Performance Orchestra, do a kind of live remix of the work
I just heard and/or in some a remix of Knizak’s earlier work; maybe it’s a bit of both.
Whatever they do with their laptops, the result is thirty-three minutes of sheer noise
and nothing else. I wondered what the relevance was of putting this forward as a remix.
The input could have been anything as the music was your typical solid stream of
Merzbowian inspired noise music. Not bad, not great, but hard to see the relation
with the Knizak piece. (FdW)
Address: http://www.subrosa.net
BARBARA KINGA MAJEWSKA & EMILIA SITARZ – FRANZ SCHUBERT WITERREISE (CD by Populista)
JOANNA HALSZKA SOKOLLOWSKA – FRANZ SCHUBERT WITERREISE (CD by Populista)
RICHARD YOUNGS – PARALLEL WINTER (CD by Populista)
Here we have three new releases by Populista, a series of CDs curated by Michal Libera,
mainly for the performance of modern classical works, but now it’s turn for Schubert’s
‘Winterreise’, opus 89, a cycle of twenty-four piano pieces with the poems of Wilhelm Müller.
They form a story of a young man who is rejected and starts traveling. In the last song
he meets ‘Der Leiermann’ with his hurdy-gurdy, who represents death. All of this stuff
one finds on Wikipedia, as I’m not a lover of pre-1900 classical music, so you don’t think
I know all of this off-hand. It’s a pity my mother passed away, as she loved Schubert,
and I would have loved to hear her opinion on these two versions. I am sure I heard a
version of this work before in the ol’ parents house, with Gerald Moore on the piano
and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (probably one of the more famous versions), but I can’t
recall how it sounds like. I could look it up of course, but I didn’t.
The first of two discs is by Barbara Kinga Majewska (voice) and Emilia Sitarz (piano),
‘as it is supposed to be’. They have turned the pieces into something else. Sometimes
songs are without words, and I can tell by the way that these are performed that
these two ladies do something else with the material. Odd phrasing on the piano,
using Sprechstimme, singing and that leads to quite some interesting results. Is
it funny? Ironic? Sweet? Or just a lot of crap? It is hard to say, but sometimes it
has this cabaret feeling, sometimes sad and tranquil, and sometimes very joyous.
It’s quite odd, but it’s quite all right, even when I think this is perhaps a bit out of
place in Vital Weekly; too much official modern classical music.
Which is perhaps also something we can say of the interpretation delivered by
Joanna Halszka Sokollowska, who just uses her voice to sing these songs. She
recorded her album in two hours in a theatre, with any overdubs and post-production.
Her album lasts seventy-five minutes, and has just one piece, which is perhaps odd.
I am also told she didn’t use any rehearsals. It seems, but I might be wrong, that the
songs appear in a different order here, and she uses quite some silence, especially past
the fifty-minute break. (Amplify that silence and a whole world opens up!). Now while
I enjoyed the folk character of this interpretation, reminding me of Berio’s ‘Folk Songs’,
this too I would think is a bit too modern classical for my taste.
Which brings us to the release by musical chameleon Richard Youngs, who plays guitar
and zither, while singing. The truly devoted Youngs fans, and there are many, know
what this means: mister Youngs is not playing home made instruments, electronics
or field recordings, creating experimental music, but playing songs. In this case, one
song, of thirty three minutes. The guitar is played rather minimally and there is an
occasional strum on the zither (how did he do that I wondered) and in the meantime
Youngs sings/recites this long text about… winter probably, but I was not really paying
attention to the words, but more to the way the whole thing was delivered. Also folk-
like, but perhaps more traditionally folk-like and not just a song of a short length. Or
at least how I imagine such thing; a long winter’s night, fire place given warmth and
someone singing a long tale about winter; maybe a bit romantic notion, but that’s
how this works for me. Youngs remains a fascinating musician, always going out for
a surprise. This is another one. Excellent release. (FdW)
Address: http://boltrecords.pl/
ZALYS – SUBLIME (CD by Reverse Alignment)
RED FOG – BURIED ON VANTH (CD by Reverse Alignment)
MOLLUSK – AEON SYNAPSES CONNECT (CDR by Reverse Alignment)
MOLJEBKA PVLSE – A TRANSFORMATION (CDR by Reverse Alignment)
Four new releases by Reverse Alignment, two of which appear on a CD, while the other
two are CDRs. I don’t what decides what here. Not everybody here are people I heard
of before, such as Zalys, which apparently is the musical project by one ‘M’, “who is a
multi faceted artists”, as the label says, and through discogs I learn this is an one-woman
project from Tours in France. ‘Sublime’ is her fifth album (I count more on discogs, but
alas) and she gets her inspiration from black metal to cinematic soundtracks; the first
is hard to believe, but then, just to what extent do we need to hear back any sources
of inspiration? The music here seems to created using a bunch of synthesizers and
sound effects, primarily reverb in the latter department. That gives the music quite
a spacious character, but it’s also icy and eerie. It’s like traveling through space in this
rusty space ship and there is just not always a lot going on in this part of the universe.
In the opening piece, ‘Cosmic DNA’ (all of these space references is of course not
something I think of myself) it sounds like she opened the most ambient book from
the ambient house mid 80s, Heavenly Music Corporation (the band, not the piece)
springs easily to mind here and that happens with more pieces, but ‘Beneath The Surface’
is, you guessed it, a bit too dark for the world of ambient house. It makes all of this a pretty
varied work, which not necessarily opens a lot of new roads. I think a bit of additional
mastering would have helped to get more out of the music; it all sounds a bit
low, volume-wise.
Red Fog from Canada has four tracks on their release, in the range of twelve to fifteen
minutes on the CD. Following eight online releases, ‘Buried On Vanth’ is their first CD;
at least if it’s ‘their’ and not ‘him or ‘her’. There is absolutely nothing on the cover to
go by in terms of names, instruments, studio or producers. That leads to the usual
assuming and guessing on the side of the reviewer. No problem. I would think there is
quite some acoustic objects and field recordings being used to create this music, but
all of these sounds are heavily treated with all sorts of sound devices (effects, synthesizers,
maybe even granular synthesis) rather than electronic sounds, and which then turns into
this deep, atmospheric pieces of music. The use of objects and field recordings give the
music a more bumpy sound, going up and down, rather than having drones that are made
with pressing down a few keys on an organ. The cover shows a few rays of light, but that’s
hardly about the music I think; the main colour is ‘black’ here, pitch black as the night, or
the cosmos, but somehow this music sounds very earth-like; it’s less the sound of a
spaceship and more that of being locked in a cave with rain pouring hard outside, making
a droning buzz. Highly recommended for a pleasant night outside in the cold forest; unless
some of these sounds scary you. Then it’s best to stay inside.
With Mollusk we meet someone whose music we heard before, Per Ahlund, who also works
as Skare (with Moljebka Pvlse/Mathias Josefson), Stendahl (with Jan Kruml/Instinct Primal)
or solo as Diskrepant. With Mollusk he records with Johan Boberg, who is schooled by Stockhausen
and Coltrane (I am not sure if this means he actually had lessons from them, or is ‘inspired by’).
‘Aeon Synapses Connect’ is the first of three albums they will produce this year for Reverse
Alignment and both musicians get credit for ‘electronics’, by which I understand this to be
modular synthesizers, as the label describes this release as ‘modular soundscapes resonating
within the organic machinery feedback’, so there you go. I also see mentioned on the cover
‘live transmissions’, so for all I know these five pieces were recorded in concert, or a
concert-like situation. Whereas the previous two albums by this label were moody and
atmospheric, here we go out to the world of experimental electronics. Things buzz, sparkle,
scratch and bop, not through highly scratchy electronics but through quite slow evolving
sounds; not exactly soothing drone material, as Mollusk knows how to use a bit of high p
iercing sounds, but by using slow curves in their music, reminding of modern electronic
music but played with a somewhat more improvisational thought. Maybe some more
editing could have been necessary, but throughout I thought this was a most enjoyable
release. Something I wouldn’t mind seeing in a real concert one day.
And then there is Moljebka Pvlse, also known as Mathias Josefson, who has been around
for quite some time. There was a gap in his release schedule a few years ago, and also
some works under his own name, but he’s back now and on this new release he uses
material that were originally recorded in 2008 with Karin Widin, when Josefson played
in Israel. Now this material is updated and cut into three long slices of drone music and
processed field recordings. It’s comes in a highly professional digipack cover, which looks
great (just like the Mollusk one looks excellent too); who says CDRs have look like shit?
The music is very much common ground for Moljebka Pvlse: a drone based rumble,
generated through the use of electronics, knitting dense patterns of overtones while
on top of that there is the heavily treated field recordings. Or maybe some of the
drones are derived from a constant recycling of field recordings, like an endless loop
of processed sound. It is not easy to say, but it’s what Moljebka Pvlse does best.
It’s not as dark as Red Fog, not as cosmic as Zalys, or as experimental Mollusk. It’s
exactly that daring middle ground position that Moljebka Pvlse holds. It is a bit
experimental, a bit dark but not too much and with enough reverb to have a lift
off into space. This is another refined addition to an extended body of works by
Moljebka Pvlse. (FdW)
Address: http://www.reverse-alignment.se
TAROTPLANE – FIRST (LP by Aguirre Records)
Tarotplane is a solo project by PJ Dorsey a musician from Baltimore. His debut is recently
released by the Belgium label Aguirre Records. A few words on this label first, as it has not
been featured earlier in Vital Weekly. Overviewing their small catalogue, we find most of all
electronic music from the 70s, with releases (cassette and vinyl) of old stuff by Joel Vandendroogenbroeck (Brainticket) and JD Emmanuel. It might interest you that they will
be releasing the Shandar-catalogue (early minimal by Reich, Glass, La Monte Young. But
also Sun Ra). Let’s turn to Tarotplane. The music I heard first when holding this record
in my hands, was of course Beefhearts ‘Tarotplane’ from the ‘Mirror Man’ album: “Gonna
take you for a ride in my Tarotplane”. On the record itself I couldn’t detect traces of
Beefheart. But much other music from the 70s is mirrored on this labour of love by
PJ Dorsey. The cover art of the album refers to design of the French BYG Actuel Records.
Side one is named ‘Excursions 1 – Formless Projections of Inner Light’, side 2 ‘Excursions 2 –
Sacramental Circles and Liquid Dreams’. Titles that bring back in mind titles of early
Tangerine Dream tracks. Both pieces offer a kaleidoscopic range of smaller tracks, often
sliced together as a collage. Something that was characteristic of the early works of
Franco Battiato that for sure inspired Dorsey. Don’t know much of his musical whereabouts,
but Dorsey proves to be a capable and entertaining zig zag wanderer. Eastern flavoured
passages, folk inspired guitars, psychedelic, krautrock, cosmic space travelling, spoken
word, it is all there. These recordings were not made overnight. Dorsey took time to shape
and polish the building stones that he edited into varying wholes. I’m not sure but I guess
Dorsey used old techniques to create his pieces. He plays guitar, tape loops and effects
processing. Although Dorsey gives all reason to link his work to the 70s, his music stands
on its own feet and contains some beautifully, deep resonating passages. Using the
parameters of 70s progressive and experimental music Dorsey creates an engaging and
satisfying album that meet the standards of our days. Sensitive and warm music.
Carefully constructed, fine treatments and well-chosen sounds. For example, ‘Garden
or Dreams’, the opening piece of the second excursion has intimate guitar work and
atmosphere, to follow by psychedelic meanderings, again dominated by guitar. Just
beautiful! Forget about all the references that might pop up, and join PJ Dorsey on
his surprising and satisfying excursions. (DM)
Address: http://www.aguirrecords.com
BRENDAN DOUGHERTY – SENSATE (LP by Entr’acte)
Based in Berlin, but hailing from Philadelphia is Brendan Dougherty. He is a co-founder
of Idiot Switch and ‘dirty ambient’ Charrd, while also being a drummer in Transmit, a
side project of Tony Buck, but also work with theatre and performance art. The music
on ‘Sensate’ took him five years to record and uses ‘prosumer music equipment’ and
‘exploits the heavy-handed engineering of various hardware and software synthesisers,
samplers and sequencers’, which promises what turns out to be true. I am not that
much of an audio expert that I easily detect differences between a real synthesizer and
a software version thereof (at least I admit that I do not always hear the difference), so
what Dougherty does here is a bit beyond me, but it sounds great. The interesting thing
is that is uses synthesizers (A/D), rhythm machines and sequencers, and that leads up
to something that is rhythmic, but none of the ten tracks are necessarily ‘dance’ music
or some such like, or even it sounds like anything you might know. Dougherty uses a bunch
of sounds together, which by merit of being played together sound like they belong together.
How does that work out? Sometimes it’s just one of two sounds being played together,
topped with some sound effects, such as in the short opening piece ‘A1’, but usually it
is something a bit more complex and at times reminded me of some early SND, the stuttering
of sequences and rhythms, fast thumping, along with white noise. But then some of these
pieces seem to be more tonal pieces, like the minimal synth inspired ‘A7’ or the minimalist
cosmos of ‘B3’. Play loud and there is more to discover here with lots of hidden details.
Sometimes it all seems quite melodic and sometimes the influence of industrial music
is quite apparent. Excellent record with a highly varied sound, yet sounding very
coherent. (FdW)
Address: http://entracte.co.uk/
ENNIO MAZZON – PAVEMENT NARROWS (CDR by Disecreet Records)
It seems to be a while since I last heard something from Ennio Mazzon, who first came
to my attention when he had some self-released CDRs on his Ripples label, but in the end
it was more his work with Gianluca Favaron that got reviewed, a project called Zbeen.
I believe I didn’t review his solo ‘Xuan’ album from 2013. Time for a sort of come back
then? It seems, judging by the eleven pieces on this new release, that Mazzon made
some changes in his approach towards music. In the old days it was all about electronically
processed field recordings, creating somewhat chaotic patterns of ambient/drone/click’n
cut music, now it’s about the use of ‘metal-scraping distortions, electronic rhythms and
never ending sound object struggles’; still the man with a computer, but it seems that
he started to think about such things as ‘what would it take to create a song?’. That’s
what he essentially does here; creating loud and crude beats, hazy (shoe-hazy?) fuzzy
guitar like sounds and sometimes a melody. I am not sure why he decided to make all of
these pieces flowing into each other, as that seems to be not working properly with the
notion of creating a song. But that’s what Mazzon does: each tracks flows into the next.
That’s something I didn’t particular like. Sometimes it seems that some of these songs
are stuck in a short frame, a loop of a rhythm, fuzz and distortion, but not yet has
developed into a proper song. With the fuzz and chorus pedal pushed to the floor it
easily sounds like a ‘noise pop song’ but that might not always be the case. And sometimes
it is just a bit too long for my taste. C’est la vie, I guess. But having said that, I enjoyed
the overall touch of this. It is always good to see someone break out of the comfort zone
and try out something new and while not entirely yet, I think this all sounds quite promising
for another musical road to follow. Maybe not wait another three years with a follow-up? (FdW)
Address: http://discreetrecords.it/
ARVIND GANGA/TINAS TELLO (split cassette by Andes Tapes)
Improvisation guitar player Arvind Ganga is from The Hague, The Netherlands and quite active
when it comes to playing concerts, the natural habitat of the improvisers. So far I reviewed
two of his releases, a solo cassette, ‘Saraswati’ (VItal Weekly 948) and a CDR with
percussionist Rogier Smal (Vital Weekly 895). This new release is a split with Tomas
Tello, who is from Peru and who also plays the guitar.
Ganga has three pieces on his side of the tape, in which he plays the guitar with objects.
I assume this to be an electric guitar. He plays it with great care; hard to say of course what
kind of objects are used. Some metal sheets, wiring or wood is placed upon the snares and
Ganga adds sparse effects to that and creates some wonderfully great music. It never bursts
out, becomes a drag, but it remains playful until the end. Carefully, but not necessarily silent;
delicate and sketch like but without the idea something is half finished or missing. Excellent
improvised music; now that’s something I wouldn’t mind seeing in concert!
On the other side we find Tomas Tello, who plays here guitar and charango, a traditional
string instrument from the Andes. Along with these uses field recordings he made in
Bhubaneshwar in India. In the first piece, called ‘Electric Storm – 2 Radios – 3 Cameras –
Train’ it is very hard to recognize either of that, instruments or field recordings. It seems
as if Tello is taping sounds through the pick-up device of the guitar. There is some thunder
outside but otherwise it sounds like feedback generated through very low means. Perhaps
the sound sources are indeed radios, cameras, train and electric storm? It has some great
captivating quality. Here we have a highly obscured sound but it creates a lot of richness.
The other piece is ‘Máquina Natural (Charango y viento)’, in which I assume to hear the
Charango, coming to me with some beautiful overtones, ringing and singing, while along
we hear some distant rain falling. This is quite a moody piece, which shares a similar
loose notion as the other piece. Great cassette altogether. (FdW)
Address: http://andestapes.tumblr.com
HEY EXIT – CAUDATA (cassette by Of Plants)
More music by Brendan Landis, a guitarist from Brooklyn (see also Vital Weekly 992),
and I was surprised by the diversity of the music on offer; for each variation he seemed
to have it’s own release. On his new release he mixes various styles into a single release.
Tagged with ‘ambient, noise, drone, melodic’ and that is surely all part of this. I am not
sure if it really works that well, but perhaps the early arrival of noise in ‘Irises’ did put me
off a bit. Landis uses baritone guitar, bells, voice and contact microphones to generate
his music, and throughout these eight pieces (seven, not counting ‘Irises’) there is a
fine ambient drone thread being woven and that works pretty well. The music is very
mellow at times, with ‘Twin Moss’ holding some middle ground in between noise and
ambient, but it works well with the rest. I don’t know how he plays his guitar, or if there
is a lot of processing going on, but he manages to make it sound like a guitar but it
generates also a fine depth in it’s sound. If it was all ambient and drone I would have
enjoyed it even more as it would have stayed in a similar flow, which I think works better
for this kind of music. Now there is one piece a bit out of place, but so be it. Landis
doesn’t do something that you may not have heard before, but he does a great job
at carving his own niche of ambiences and drones. (FdW)
Address: http://heyexit.bandcamp.com/
CINEMA PERDU – A PERFECT NEGATIVE (2 cassettes by Audio Visuals Atmosphere)
Because there wasn’t a lot of information on the labels website I looked a bit further
and ended upon the band’s website and read this: “Cinema Perdu is my project in which
I express my love for modern / contemporary or classical music composed by sound art,
ambient drones and scapes. Below you’ll find all kinds of projects I did thus far”. I must
admit that is also not a lot of information to go by. The cover is all Xeroxed on transparent
plastic, which works well with the title of the release. One cassette has nine pieces that
are all called ‘Underexposed’, while the other has ten pieces, all going by the title ‘Illuminate’.
Images of whatever kind play an important for this lost cinema, as the band name translates.
Just as black and white/transparent as the cover is the music of Cinema Perdu. Mostly black
I would say. Instruments as such aren’t easily recognized here. At times I believed to hear
guitars and effects, but then it might as easily have been an organ, or heavily processed
field recordings. I simply don’t know. Much of this kind of music I heard before and I could
complain about that, but I won’t. It was a Sunday afternoon well spend with this music in
the background, which could have been as easily the complete works of Mirror, that bundle
of Jonathan Coleclough recordings waiting to be played again, or something by Machinefabriek,
but it turned out that the 100 minutes of Cinema Perdu worked just as well, reading a book,
drinking coffee and thinking: what grey and dark weather outside, thank god, I can stay at
home and listen to music. I must say that the notion of modern/contemporary music eluded
me a bit here, but like I said, for all I know the source material might also stem from that world,
with sustaining strings the most particular object of desire. This classical sampling seemed
more on ‘Illuminate’ than on ‘Underexposed’, but maybe I was hallucinating by then. I thought
all of this was just mighty fine drone music well worthy of a repeated play on my double
deck for a dark afternoon. (FdW)
Address: http://audiovisualsatmosphere.com/
FRANCIS HEERY – CASCADE (cassette by Lamour)
The only previous occasion the name Francis Heery popped up in Vital Weekly was back in
Vital Weekly 714 when he was part of a compilation put out by Gruenrekorder. Heery is from
Ireland and ‘his compositions have been premiered by some of the world’s leading performers
of contemporary music’, without being specific who these performers are, and a quick survey
of his website learns that I didn’t know any of these names, but there are bunch of scores
presented, which look great. It is most of the times a mixture of instruments and electronics,
usually max/msp.
Here on this new release, Heery presents two side long compositions, spanning sixty minutes
of music and is probably one of his more electronic works. It ‘incorporates synthesized textures
that evoke the unearthly sci-fi weirdness of bio-acoustic phenomena’, as the label writes and
it sounds like a bunch of field recordings being fed into the laptop and according to a randomized
patch of max/msp configurations transformed, like a cascade indeed, of endless sounds in a
seemingly endless amount of variations. It reminded me of the release by Christophe Charles
on Ritornell, released in 2000, which came with a bit of the same software as an added bonus,
so you could play around with your own sounds in a randomized process. Heery’s music here
sounds not unlike that whole early laptop movement from the turn of the millennium, which is something not a lot of people seem to do these days, and I thought it was great to hear
something like that again. Almost like some anew, and not like a voice from days past. Maybe
it’s about time for a revival of this kind of music? (FdW)
Address: http://www.lamour.se
•
1. Frans de Waard <info@kormplastics.nl>
Two concerts this weekend;
Friday 26th: WaSm (Frans de Waard & Jos Smolders) will play at the opening of Sonic Acts Academy in Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Two sets of thirty minutes, early evening.
more info: http://www.sonicacts.nl
https://www.facebook.com/events/1504392296522215/
Saturday 27th: Modelbau at Reggehof in Goor along with lots of other people. I play in the afternoon already, at the main stage, so come early!
more info: http://www.livingroommusic.wordpress.com
2. Hans Velden <h1966@xs4all.nl>
CELEBRATING 5 YEARS OF LIVING ROOM MUSIC.
What started back in 2010 with a single living room concert evolved into a ‘stage‘ for experimental music at the Schoolstraat 87 in Goor.
Harmonics And Nonadaptive Sounds; 25 artists in five years time from countries such as Canada, France, Germany, Japan, England, Belgium and the Netherlands performing in an intimate setting in Goor . Driven by the love for music our living room grew into an internationally well respected meeting place for both artists and visitors.
After five years of living room concerts is time to spread our wings and take it to a new level by offering ‘our’ artists a proper stage at De Reggehof Theatre in Goor.
Saturday, February 27, 2016, the following artists will perform:
– Dirk Serries
– Machinefabriek
– Modelbau
– The Star Pillow
– StringStrang
– B/\RST
– N + [ BOLT ]
– Poteau Mitan
– Treha Sektori
This day we will also present you the exhibition ‘Pillow Talk’ by art photographer Patricia van de Camp from Goor and Consouling Sounds from Belgium with merchandise such as CDs, LPs and more.
Tickets:
– € 22.50 (presale)
– € 25.00 (at the venue on February 27th)
If Dutch isn’t you native tongue and you want to preorder tickets without using the internet site of De Reggehof we offer a little help. Send us an e-mail with your name, and number of tickets you want to order and we will send you a PayPal money request. The tickets will be waiting for you at the venue.
Info:
http://www.livingroommusic.wordpress.com
•
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All written by Frans de Waard (FdW), Dolf Mulder (DM) <dolf.mulder@hetnet.nl>,
Niels Mark (NM), Jliat (Jliat), Freek Kinkelaar (FK), Jan-Kees Helms
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