number 1125
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week 13 ---------------------
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ROHAN DRAPE & ANTHONY PATERAS - ELLESMERE (CD by Immediata) * STEPHEN O'MALLEY & ANTHONY PATERAS - RÊVE NOIR (CD by Immediata) * SLAGR - DIRR (CD by Hubro) * INSUB META ORCHESTRA - CHOICES & MELODIES (LP by Insub) * CHRISTIAN SKJØDT - DISSOLUTION & SUSPENSION (LP by Tonometer Music) CHRISTIAN SKJØDT - ILLUMINATION (10” by Tonometer Music) ZOË MCPHERSON - STRING FIGURES (LP by SVS Records) TERRITOIRE - ALIX (CD by Humo) * DREKKA/REMST8 (7” by Red Frost Industries) MARCO FERRAZZA - CITZIZEN (CDR by Setola Di Maiale) * GRAY ACRES (CDR by Sound In Silence Records) * YNDI HALDA - A SUN-COLOURED SHAKER (CDR by Sound In Silence Records) * LLARKS - METALLIC SUMMER SEA (cassette by Scala Tapes) ERICAMOUR YOVOGAN & QUENTIN NICOLAÏ - WUTUTU (cassette by Tanuki Records) DALE CORNISCH - ETIQUETTES (cassette by Midnight Circles) * MATTHEW ATKINS - THE SUBTLE SILENCE (cassette by Midnight Circles) * CATALAN COAST - BAYOU (cassette by Midnight Circles) * OESTERGAARDS - ROTTERNA (cassette by Lamour) * ALPHA MOUND - DVAHLA (cassette by Lamour) * MUSIK TILLAGNAD BETTIL ENSTORUNG VOLUME 1 (cassette compilation by Lamour) ROHAN DRAPE & ANTHONY PATERAS - ELLESMERE (CD by Immediata) STEPHEN O'MALLEY & ANTHONY PATERAS - RÊVE NOIR (CD by Immediata) Immediata is the label run by Anthony Pateras and all of the releases deal with his music, one way or another and these two new ones are no exception. The first one is a duet with someone I never heard of, Rohan Drape, who plays a Yamaha YC45D and Pateras plays a Farfisa compact duo. Both of these are ancient machines and the Yamaha one looks like the one my cousin once had, on which he played cheery versions of pop songs. They are machines for the living room; in the seventies that was. No pop songs on ‘Ellesmere’, but two pieces, ‘St Johns Wood’, lasting some thirty-six minutes and ‘Harleian’, thirteen minutes. As always with Immediata releases there is much to read, and this is not different, with some interesting observations by both players (but not ascribed to one or the other, which makes it more interesting) and on the backside of the poster there is the score for the long piece, which in this case is a ‘real’ score of notes. Drape is a founding member of the Slave Pianos collective and concert organiser when not playing keyboards, composing or dealing with computer music. This is the first time he’s on a release, so perhaps that’s why I didn’t hear of him before. In both pieces the two deal with microtonal sounds playing together, but in ‘St Johns Wood’ it is quite mellow. The notes are played somewhere in the middle of the keyboard, and held for a while and then another cluster of tones is played. They overlap each other most of the times, but it has a very gentle character. The music is split in both channels, and it makes a very fine delicate piece of music. ‘Harleian’ is altogether a different beast, which allows the listener no rest as the notes overlap each other and it is all in the higher register of the tones. This makes this quite a brutal piece I think. The sound is high in frequency yet also quite dense and powerful. It keeps shifting back and forth and it is a very tiring piece of music. Good or bad seems irrelevant, I should think, but it completely got me and I kept listening with total fascination. Watch the volume there I would think. I can’t say I am a very big fan of Stephen O’Malley’s work, mainly, I guess, because I know very little of it. I once spend some an afternoon playing a bunch of Sunn 0))) music from their Bandcamp but realized that loud music with guitars is not what I like (maybe remembering what Kraftwerk said about guitars being a phallus symbol). I didn’t keep up with his work as KTL, along with Peter Rehberg, simple because we don’t get promos. It is as if O’Malley belongs to an entirely different league of players, who are part of a more serious/different/over ground music. But then so is perhaps the classically trained Pateras and yet we welcome his work on a regular basis. Well, either way, I am pretty blank when it comes to O’Malley’s work and had very little expectation, which is good, I think. The basic material for this collaboration was recorded in concert in 2011 and a bit later on in 2016, where O’Malley plays electric guitar and Pateras egregore software, Farfisa Compact Duo, Revox B77 and Stuart & Sons piano. The Revox machine is the main instrument here for ‘remixing and deconstruction’ and while I am not sure how that works, the three pieces here sound quote fascinating. While I am not sure how that Revox treatment works here in the opening part, the longest on the release, it becomes a very mysterious howl of guitar sounds combined with some fine distortion. Sounds fly in an out of the mix, as if there is some tape saturation that can’t keep up with whatever else is happening, which adds an odd effect to the music. Maybe that’s the software part, so I was thinking. In the second piece the piano pops around and the guitar is now the creator of feedback moves in what is an otherwise also quite intense piece of music. In the third piece they show another aspect of their work with a somewhat more louder approach towards the guitar, now howling about, with other instruments heavily transformed but here I can also see the addition of the Revox in the process of transformation, shifting sounds backward and forward, sometimes so it seems at the same time. This is a great release! (FdW) ––– Address: http://metamkine.com SLAGR - DIRR (CD by Hubro) Many of the releases by Hubro are left with our jazz/impro specialist mister Mulder, but I always check out new releases before sending them onwards, as I know Hubro can also release something that is very much up my alley. Something like Slagr for instance, a trio of Anna Hytta on hardanger fiddle, Amund Sjølie Sveen on vibraphone and tuned glasses and Katrine Schiøtt on cello. I never heard of them, either as Slagr, or as solo artists. Their music is firmly rooted in the traditional music of Norway, but also sounds like something very modern. This trio plays some beautifully eerie music. It is centred on the repeated playing of notes, very minimal, with singing overtones. The glasses sound like a Theremin, like sine waves and like wine glasses. It is ringing and singing, but the music is kept very small. It is not abundant with massive tones or big movements, but Slagr likes to keep their music reduced to a few notes, which they explore through length of a piece, which can be somewhere three and seven minutes. This is all very gentle music, maybe even at times a bit close to the world of new age, especially when the sound is very quiet and folky. The fact that this was recorded in church, with its natural reverb may also be responsible for a sort of medieval atmosphere that one can also hear in a few pieces. And yet there is always something very ‘now’ about the music; the minimalist moves, the higher pitched sounds and the role of silence. Quite a remarkable album, which could go down well in these Easter days, should you be looking for such a thing or be bored with Bach. (FdW) ––– Address: http://hubromusic.com INSUB META ORCHESTRA - CHOICES & MELODIES (LP by Insub) This is surely an orchestra, with twenty-five musicians playing the two sidelong compositions by Cyril Bondi and D’incise and performed by all these people and all these instruments. Too many to list them all, so I list none. Quite a number of saxophone players, but also laptops, analogue synths, snare drum, bassoon, flutes, electric guitar, violin voice and so on. On each side there is a single piece and they are quite different. For the A-side it is ‘Two Choices’, which has the “simple instruction of producing two noises per person and the possibility of a change every five seconds”. So that should be about fifty different sounds in always different patterns playing together, and perhaps a recipe for chaos, but that doesn’t happen. On the contrary, this is a beautiful piece that upon first hearing sounded rather soft, but when I turned up the volume a bit a whole world of sound opened up. Almost like a bunch of sea sounds/tape hiss, but with lots of detailed variations in the entire rumble they produce. It is a very mysterious sounding piece, in which one has a hard time recognizing any of the instruments, I would think, but it is a thoroughly intense piece of music that I liked a lot. Instruments on ‘Autonomous Melodies’, on the other side, are easier recognized, I should think. Not per se as individual instruments, but the Orchestra’s many strings and wind instruments seems to prevail here. It is, I am told, one of the louder pieces they have played so far and it’s all about volume and “a free melody of three and four note”. Here too I have no idea how a diverse group interprets that, but they play a powerful almost acoustic drone music here, with short movements, repeating on and on and it gives the piece a most interesting cadence, going up and down in perfect rhythm, almost like everybody is playing one bar, with either three or four notes, on and on. This piece is a total contrast with ‘Two Choices’ when it comes to approach and execution, but in terms of beauty and intensity, it is very much the same thing: excellent stuff. Where and when can I see the Orchestra perform? (FdW) ––– Address: http://insub.org CHRISTIAN SKJØDT - DISSOLUTION & SUSPENSION (LP by Tonometer Music) CHRISTIAN SKJØDT - ILLUMINATION (10” by Tonometer Music) Since reviewing his debut album, ‘Works Of Uncommitted Crimes’, back in Vital Weekly 959, I didn’t hear again from Christian Skjødt, composer and sound installation man. But it seems he’s been around town doing his work in Quebec, Linz, Lund, Copenhagen and a whole bunch of other places. Now he returns with two new releases, to be released at the same time. The first is a LP, even when both sides spin at 45rpm; it’s still some sixteen minutes per side. On the LP he delivers a contemporary reinterpretation of Carl Nielsen’s string quartet in F-minor from 1892, which should be no surprise is something I haven’t heard. It was conceived as a four-channel set-up thing (quartet, four-channel, you get the drift) and the process applied by Skjødt is something he calls ‘advanced audio analysis of recordings of the individual acoustic instruments [...] transformed into dense (dis-) harmonies and almost frozen processes and developments”. Which translated means some extensive computer treatments, granular synthesis, time-stretching and what have you in order to deliver four pieces of some very fine drone music. It reminded me of a not so subtle Stephan Mathieu; there is a mass of drones, but also a fiercer approach when it comes to applying extra sound effects to go along with the drones, lifting it up towards a more power drone, occasionally. In ‘Movement IV’ however he returns to a very mellow approach of isolationist drone music. Quite a fine record, perhaps along the lines of his debut record; solid and good but also not the most innovative drone records. The music on the 10”, also to be played at 45rpm, was created for a wine cellar in a botanical garden in Riga, “harvesting the energy of the sun, and bringing this directly into the darkness of the cellar in the form of sound”. Skjødt used 100 small solar modules, organised in chains of 10, outside the hill-like cellar, connected to 10 analogue circuits/speakers mounted in a circle inside the cellar and so the outside weather conditions are the players of the piece. Both sides were recorded on the same day, but the first side from 12:00 to 12:12 when it was sunny, party clouded, and from 15:00-15:12 when it was just sunny. That is good to know as both sides sounds quite similar, and like the LP before Skjødt deals with some powerful drone music. Of course you can’t imagine what it would sound like based on the description, but this is some loud and powerful drone music, and curiously enough both seem a bit dark to me anyway. Indeed, perhaps, maybe, who knows, is the first side a bit darker than the other one, but sunny isn’t a word I would use to describe the music. Both of these pieces are cut from a much longer sound event, and it would have been nice to have somewhere a very long, say six hour, version available, so we could check how the music evolves over a longer period of time. Of the two releases by Skjødt I enjoyed the 10” more than the LP, simply I guess because it moved away from the more regular drone approach that was found on the other side. (FdW) ––– Address: http://www.tonometermusic.com ZOË MCPHERSON - STRING FIGURES (LP by SVS Records) TERRITOIRE - ALIX (CD by Humo) These two releases I put together into one review, partly because I can see some similarities between them and partly because I don’t really understand both projects. First there is a LP by Zoë McPherson, who is a “producer, vocalist, performer and String Figures’ artistic director” and she researched Inuit cultures, Kurdish feminism etc. and this record is part of a multimedia thing that includes performance, film and a record. She works with rhythms, lots of them actually, and also field recordings of the Inuit, if I understand correctly, as well as “horse hooves in Turkey and the sound of bees in France”. “The album is fundamentally one of duality, exploring the traditional and the contemporary, organic and electronic, audio and visual, history and future”, and thus also mechanical beats, samples and field recordings of bees and horses, as well as the Inuit, even when I fail to see the relation between all of this. And here I guess my ‘I don’t understand’ comes in. The rhythms may owe to the world of techno music indeed yet I don’t see easily people dancing to this music as it the beats are rather complex and sometimes the music too alien I guess. I played it with interest, but I couldn’t say if I liked it or not. It surely had some fine moments. It also had instances, which I didn’t liked very much. Too much of a mixed bag for me I guess, but perhaps also something that is a bit too far away from what we review. Olivier Arson is the man behind Territoire and he’s from Paris. He works with other musicians, who add metal, percussion, guitar, beats, tuba and clarinet, while Arson plays synths, sampler, voice and processing. I believe ‘Alix’ is their third album, and Oscar Mulero, who is called a “techno veteran”, produced it. The album tells the story of Alix, a slave, from his birth as a submissive being until the final encounter with the ones who sold him. Quite a heavy subject one would say, and that shines through in the music with some top-heavy, almost industrial beats, along with some very dark synthesizers and voices reciting texts, I should think, but which aren’t always easy to understand. I am not sure if that’s the meaning or not. There are stretched out sceneries being painted here, combined with the mechanical drum beats, and I guess it’s very much the same thing as with McPherson’s record: I don’t know whether I like it or not. It has its moments, surely also, but also some that weren’t too well spend on me, and maybe it’s also a bit too far away from my usual scope. (FdW) ––– Address: http://svs-records.com ––– Address: https://txrrxtxxrx.bandcamp.com DREKKA/REMST8 (7” by Red Frost Industries) Despite all the joy people seem to have towards vinyl these days, the 7” is more and more something of the past; someone called the 10” ‘the format of doom’, not being a 7” (easy to mail) nor a LP (not enough music), but the production costs to do a 7” in this day and age is quite hefty. That I think is a pity, because it’s best format for a ‘song’, or ‘a great idea’. The well-known project Drekka, also known as Michael Anderson, exchanges sounds here with Remst8, who is called ‘an experimental computer musician whose on-again/off-again affair with sound began in the early 90s”, but was also out of the music industry for seven years “to focus on his software engineering career”. On this 7” the two exchange sounds from their archives and rework them. Remst8 reworks ‘Tarwestraat 52’ from Drekka’s trilogy on Dais Records, using only the sources and Drekka takes ‘Lissajous’ (which I believe is also the name of a bit of software) from Remst8 ‘Accumulator’ album, adding a bit of field recording from Drekka archives. Remst8’s piece is a very delicate piece of processed sounds; guitars are stretched out a bit, loops of high-end squeaking sound (a hinge maybe?) are added, and throughout it is a very mellow piece of ambient guitar music. Remst8 makes sure to have it fully formed into a song, with beginning and end, and not a cut out of a longer session, shortened down ‘because, hey man, it’s a 7”’. On the other side we find Drekka in a darker mood, with more ominous drones playing centre field and sunken below the surface there are the insects outside (but recorded through a wall). Drekka marks his territory with a clear start and a clear stop, and as such defines it also a ‘song’, but unlike Remst8 this could have been much longer as far as I was concerned and span the length of a 10”. I am not complaining! Both pieces make up for a lovely 7”. (FdW) ––– Address: http://bluesanct.com MARCO FERRAZZA - CITZIZEN (CDR by Setola Di Maiale) Like with his previous release there is not a lot we learn about Marco Ferrazza, who calls himself a composer and performer of electro-acoustic music. Previously we heard his release on Luscinia Discos, ‘Inextricable’ (Vital Weekly 999). On his website you can find a long ‘statement’ from him in which he says that his “work is based on a process of re-codification of concrete sounds by means of electronic manipulation” and that “everything in the world is sound”, which I guess sums up what he does, although I surely recommend reading it all as it pretty interesting. He goes about with a recorder and records whatever he can; children playing on the street, church bells, traffic and in his studio he uses whatever technology to effectively alter those recordings and put all of these processed forms together, sometimes combined with whatever residual sound of the original scattered throughout the original. As before I can easily see a relationship between the work of Ferrazza and composers who release their work on Empreintes Digitales, but with some differences. I think that the pieces composed by Ferrazza are a bit shorter and while I am not fully versed in the rules of acousmatic composing, I would think that Ferrazza is the odd man out in that world. I seem to detect a sort of punk-rock approach to his work, where a touch of industrial music (to avoid the word ‘noise’) is never far away. Ferrazza doesn’t seem to particular care about nuances and rather throws his sound thick and far. Then there is surely something dark and sinister in his work, not very often seen in the world of academics; or at least not to this extent. Throughout this is an excellent release. I wonder how his work is received in the academic world. (FdW) ––– Address: http://www.setoladimaiale.net/ GRAY ACRES (CDR by Sound In Silence Records) YNDI HALDA - A SUN-COLOURED SHAKER (CDR by Sound In Silence Records) Gray Acres is a new duo of twin brothers Andrew and Michael Tasselmyer, who are also ‘core members’ of Hotel neon and The Sound Of Rescue. I hadn’t heard of these before, nor their releases on Home Normal and Fluid Audio. In Fall 2017 they were contemplating a project about “seeking beauty and stillness” and Grey Acres was born. It is not easy to recognize any instruments in these drones, but surely a guitar and piano are strummed and plucked, but with the right amount of added sound effects these are rendered beyond recognition, which might also be the case with any field recordings. In the opening of ‘Rituals Of Belief’ there is a faint trace of water dripping, but that seems to be a rare thing. Gray Acres offer seven tracks, all of which seem to be closely linked together when it comes to the ambient approaches of the sound. These drones are, like the name of project already implies, are all a bit grey and darker, and a moment of lightness seems far away. Very much like looking at grey acres under a similar grey sky in autumn. Here we have seven pieces, spanning fifty-four minutes of pure dark ambient bliss, and while nothing happens here that you haven’t heard before, this is surely some excellent drone music going on here. Something entirely different is the music by yndi halda (no capitals needed apparently), who debuted in 2005 with ‘Enjoy Eternal Bliss’, which was followed by ‘Under Summer’, eleven years later. I haven’t either of these albums. ‘A sun-Soaked Shaker’ is something that was left behind while recording their second album. Originally it was the idea to include this, but somehow that didn’t happen. It is an almost twelve minute piece (also available on a single sided 12” by Burnt Toast Vinyl/ Big Scary Monsters’), so it’s a rather short release on CDR. Like I said I never heard of this band before and I have no idea how this piece relates to their other releases. yndi halda is a group of post-rock qualities, with lots of ringing guitars but, and I am no expert, what sets them aside is the use of multi- vocals singing in a great harmony. It is hard to say if this is a case of double/triple tracking the same voice or if various members of this are singing together. It is quite beautiful and while the music is no doubt a bit too (post-) rocky for my taste I thought this was a most enjoyable piece. Short indeed it is and for someone like me hard to judge a band by their eleven minutes and forty-one seconds but what can you do? Exactly, put it on repeat for a while. The rocky opening and the spacious closing of the piece make that this doesn’t become boring. (FdW) ––– Address: https://soundinsilencerecords.bandcamp.com/ LLARKS - METALLIC SUMMER SEA (cassette by Scala Tapes) Chris Jeely is back on track with his Llarks project. A long time ago he was on a track called Accelera Deck and, to a lesser extent, September Plateau and then quiet for some years, but Llarks is new name and as such he releases quite a bit of music (see Vital Weekly 982, 1005, 1037, 1051 and 1107) and now slowly his music finds its way to other labels as well. This new one is “inspired by the dualistic qualities of metals and it’s infinite potential of being both fluid and solid”. As with his previous work as Llarks it is not easy to say what it is that Jeely does here. I could easily think that the guitar is most important, but that is only based on the knowledge of his older projects and that the guitar was a primary instrument for him. I would say that there is ‘surely’ a guitar in here, but also, and probably on an equal footing, the use of sound effects. These can be stomp boxes or happen inside a computer but they are not doubt responsible for a lot that Llarks does. The five pieces here span thirty minutes of music (the other side of the tape is blank) and it spans the whole auditory trajectory of Llarks music. It starts out with rusty cascades of crashing metal in ‘Ifsoever’, winding down over the course, and then via fuzzy ambient roads to the very mellow ‘Array (At Night)’, which is the point of relatively relaxing in the middle, followed by the somewhat orchestral ‘Lighthouse’ (sparse in orchestration, quite nice) ending on the spacious drift of grainy textures of ‘Only Ours’ and we have in five pieces the full operative scale of Llarks. This can serve as an introduction or a further expansion of his music. This is another fine addition to an already fine body of works. (FdW ––– Address: http://www.scalatapes.net/ ERICAMOUR YOVOGAN & QUENTIN NICOLAÏ - WUTUTU (cassette by Tanuki Records) Belgium’s Tanuki Records always know how to surprise the listener with strange music, brought to us by musicians that aren’t always known at all. At least not by me, if that has any validity. Here we have a trumpet player going by the Ericamour Yovogan and Quentin Nicolaï who plays cassettes with field recordings he made in Abomey (Benin) and sampler. In June 2017 they played an outdoors concert in Brussels, and this what we have here on this cassette, two sidelong pieces, in total thirty- four minutes of music. It is of course a great idea to play an outdoor concert while using field recordings from another place and let it all blur. Those birds we hear: Brussels of Abomey? We simply don’t know. Throughout there is more to puzzle here, I think. Don’t expect, for instance that Yovogan plays throughout. He only sparsely contributes a bit of fairly traditional trumpet playing to the proceedings. It can happen that for some time we hear vague rumble, nothing if you will, save for some shuffling about, but then, suddenly music from a cassette pops up and Yovogan plays along. His playing add a somewhat lazy (summer?) jazz feeling to the music, which now, end of winter, makes me long for longer days and a bit higher temperatures. This is altogether quite a curious release. It’s very difficult to think of this in terms of good or bad, but perhaps this should be seen as a one-off action and this is the documentation thereof? Most curious indeed, as some would say. I quite enjoyed it. (FdW) ––– Address: https://tanukirecords.bandcamp.com DALE CORNISCH - ETIQUETTES (cassette by Midnight Circles) MATTHEW ATKINS - THE SUBTLE SILENCE (cassette by Midnight Circles) CATALAN COAST - BAYOU (cassette by Midnight Circles) In the world of cassettes it is not uncommon to a sidelong piece, especially when dealing with cassettes that hold ten of fifteen minutes of music, so it is a surprise that Dale Cornish has fourteen pieces on his twenty-four minute cassette. There are various releases by Cornish available I see but none of them made it our way, so I am not entirely sure what Dale Cornish is about then, and listening to the fourteen pieces doesn’t provide a very clear idea either. There are radio cut-ups, synth experiments, rumbling on a xylophone, ideas for longer musique concrete pieces, doodles and sketches. That’s at least what I think they are, sketches and ideas, starting points if you will for longer compositions at any point in the future. There is not a lot to say about this. Some of the sketches are very nice, while others are way to short to say anything about it. Matthew Atkins of course we know from the releases he does under his own name as well as the more rhythmical work as Platform, and usually on his own label Minimal Resources Recordings, but it’s good to see he releases on another label as well. Atkins, in the work carried out under his own name, uses field recordings, acoustic sounds from around the house and recordings of instruments to create somewhat dense and moody pieces of electro-acoustic music. This time, in these six pieces, the fact that he samples all of his sounds together and loops them around, thus adding a slightly more rhythmic edge to this music is perhaps something new. One can hear a snare drum, various other parts of the drum kit (Atkins is a drummer also), a bit of drones, quite gentle, and some obscured processes in which we are no longer to recognize any of the sounds used. Throughout the music is very modest, but not necessarily very ambient. I don’t think it is Atkins objective to treat us with some ambient music, even when they whole thing has quite a moody character. This is all lovely intimate music. When I reviewed Catalan Coast in Vital Weekly 944 I wrote that this was a guy from the Southern parts of Germany, now I am told he’s from Spain (or perhaps Catalonia?). On his first release he used various layers of electronic sound, slow arpeggios, and quite a bit of hiss was added. That hiss is still present, and perhaps also the bit with the various layers of electronic sounds, but along the way Catalan Coast also recorded some field recordings from various places on a bunch of likewise hissy cassettes and creates six excellent pieces of moody electronics, but there is a bit more happening here than it seemed the first time. The mood and melancholy is the same as with Atkins but more single mindedly focused on the use of synthesizers and bit of field recordings. On the first side the pieces are a bit shorter than on the other side but it hardly makes a difference; either way the music sounds lovely. (FdW) ––– Address: https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/ OESTERGAARDS - ROTTERNA (cassette by Lamour) ALPHA MOUND - DVAHLA (cassette by Lamour) MUSIK TILLAGNAD BETTIL ENSTORUNG VOLUME 1 (cassette compilation by Lamour) Here we have two quite diverse releases on Swedish Lamour label, home for some of the wacky outskirts of pop music, even when all of that seems far away. The third release is a compilation. The differences between Oestergaards and Alpha Mound are quite big. Oestergaards was born in 1977 and is besides a festival organiser also a “front figure in traditional Americana band’ but now focuses on electronic music. I would think he took the textbook ‘dark ambient’ off the shelf and follows the rules religiously. There is an abundance of reverb to be spotted around, the dripping of water (in cavernous surroundings of course), some computer manipulation of voices and the dark rumble from the lower end of keyboard. I would say that fun Nordic sound that was once released by Cold Meat Industry. There is a bit of paganism, mysticism or even gothic thrown in and the label quite rightly make a reference to Lustmord; I would say not when it comes to the use of voices (which I never heard a lot in Lustmord’s work), but certainly that slow, dark ambient with the occasional low end thump (in ‘Ladan’ for instance, which ends in a fury of beats and sounds). It’s raining outside, and inside there is a burning fire of Oestergaards’ sick society/demented folk music; or perhaps the lurking danger in Swedish woods, full of mist and danger? Pleasantly discomfort! And for something completely different we turn our ears to Joakim Westlund, who calls himself Alpha Mound. I thought I heard the name before but it wasn’t. ‘Dvahla’ is his third cassette release and takes the listener out of damp and misty Swedish forests and out into... what exactly? That is not easy to say; it’s not a dance floor, but a chill-out room is surely a place where Alpha Mound could try his synth based ambient music. Maybe it is sometimes a bit on the heavy side, as in ‘Into The Onward’, but the ‘Crystalline Choir’ certainly could hum a tune down there. It bounces back and forth between surely delicate blankets of ambient sound and more washy, fuzzy waves of shoegazing delights. It is, in fact, a bit of everything. There is room for ambient, shoegazing, a bit of Tangerine Dream’s arpeggio’s and perhaps all of this thrown together makes a somewhat unbalanced release I would think, but after Oestergaards’ musical nightmare this is a most welcome point of relaxing. And then a compilation. “Bertil Enstöring is a professor and holds a Phd in philosophy, medicine and technology. As a matter of fact, he refuses to meet other people, with the exception of Skrotnisse and Kalle. The work of his book takes him several years, one time he plans to live alone. Although he may seem grumpy, Bertil is a happy figure and has often conversations with himself. He always walks in a red robe”. It is a character out of Skrotnisse och hans vänner, a Swedish TV series with puppets, which I never heard of, so I am sure to miss out on a joke here. Of the various participants I recognized the names of Lehnberg and Slim Vic. The others are Olle Oljud, Stenbit, Catterfly, Plasmafuse and Girilal Baars. As I said if there is a joke to enjoy in here, I am not aware which one it is, and maybe there isn’t. I somehow expected something silly with sampled voices from a TV series but these musicians like their work to be drone like and most of the time a bit noisy. I guess no puppets were harmed in making this music. It is all a bit on the experimental side of drone, which I liked very much. Only Girilal Baars seemed a bit out of place here with some time-stretched 2-bit voice sample. I expected more like that and was lucky not to get it. While it all remains a bit of a mystery to me, I quite enjoyed the rest of it. (FdW) ––– Address: http://lamour.se |