GLOWICKA & WALENTYNOWICZ – RED SUN (CD by Bolt) *
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CD by Mosz) *
CLAUDIO PARODI – HEAVY NICHEL (CD by Creative Sources Recordings)
THE JIST – THE JIST (CD by Vafongool)
BRUTE FORCE – BRUTE FORCE (CD by Vafongool)
ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI & BRIAN O’REILLY – THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING (CD by Monotype Records) *
GAAP KVLT – VOID (CD by Monotype Records) *
SCHLOSS MIRABELL – GHOSTHOUR DIARY (CD by Monotype Records) *
DAVID MOSS & HANNES STROBL – AT THE BEACH: MUSIC FOR VOICE AND ELECTRIC BASS (CD by Monotype Records) *
HILD SOFIE TAFJORD – BREATHING (CD by +3DB Records) *
STINE JANVIN MOTLAND – OK, WOW (CD by +3DB Records) *
MORTEN J. OLSEN – BASS DRUM! (CD by +3DB Records) *
THOMAS ANKERSMIT – FIGUEROA TERRACE (CD by Touch) *
ROUGH FIELDS – WESSENDEN SUITE (CD by Bomb Shop) *
RODOLPHE ALEXIS & STEPHANE RIVES – WINDS DROPS POPLARS (CD by Herbal International) *
GREGORY BÜTTNER – POCHEN (CD by Herbal International) *
MATHON – LIEUS PERS (2LP by Everest Records)
NEARLY DEAD (LP by Geriatric Records)
RECONNAISSANCE FLY – FLOW FUTURES (CD by Edgetone)
TRI-CORNERED TENT SHOW – WELCOME TO PSYCHOVILLE POPULATION 4 (CD by Edgetone)
KAROLINE LEBLANC & PAULO J FERREIRA LOPES – HYPNAGOGIC CARTOGRAPHY 1 (CDR by Atrito-Afeito) *
ROLANDO HERNANDEZ & BRYAN EUBANKS – SALE EL SOL & DIE SONNE UNTERGEHT (CDR by Thema Park For Ear) *
RISHIN SINGH – TWO DEDICATIONS (CDR by Thema Park For Ear) *
D’INCISE – 1CYM/2CYM (cassette by Hideous Replica)
MIGUEL A. GARCIA & OSCAR MARTIN/VASCO ALVES & LOUIE RICE – MNEFFA/ARCS (cassette by Hideous Replica)
GRZEGORZ BOJANEK – WARM WINTER MUSIC (cassette by Twin Springs Tapes)
MODELBAU – BLADE (cassette by Barreuh Records) *
GLOWICKA & WALENTYNOWICZ – RED SUN (CD by Bolt)
This spring piano player Malgorzata Walentynowicz won the first price at the 37th Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition, ‘a highly regarded event in the environment creators and performers of the newest music’ – which is a term classical music reserved for themselves. Whether they program the ‘newest’ is to be seen. Here she works with composer Kasia Glowicka, who is also from Poland and who is a composer of music for opera, dance and symphonic orchestra. Here however it’s all about electronic music meeting the piano. Electronic music of the more ambient variety. I am not sure if the electronic sounds I am hearing are part of treatments of the piano or whether they are stand-alone sounds. It doesn’t matter, I guess. It’s the result that counts and that result is nice. Not great, mind you. It’s a fine work of piano sounds guided by some carefully places glitches, bits of hiss, a processed sine wave and such like. All seven pieces are very careful, atmospheric, moody perhaps at times, all meandering away in a very friendly manner. There is not a single piece of aggression, a heavy counterpoint, an intense break to be spotted around here. Maybe ‘Presence’ tries this on very few occasions, but throughout this is a fine work of modern classical piano mixed with electronics, but not in a very traditional – as in modern classical – way. Nice for a rainy day. (FdW)
Address: http://www.boltrecords.pl
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CD by Mosz)
It seems as if I was out touch for a while with the releases on Mosz but here’s some sign of life. Music by a duo called The Twentieth Century, being Lukas Lauermann on cello and Pieter Gabriel on guitar. They play their instruments and fed the signals into ‘an armada’ of effects pedals. The cover indicates various pieces on their debut album, three to be precise, but they are cut into a single, thirty-five minute piece of music. They move from something that is nearly inaudible to something very audible. Imagine Stars Of The Lid amplified by Sunn 0))), or Oren Ambarchi putting up his speaker to 11. In the final part the cello is something we can identify very clearly, whereas in the rest of the piece(s) it’s all a bit more abstract. That cello piece is another reminder of Stars Of The Lid, while in the opening piece, ‘A Slow Descent’ this is all more abstract. The guitar is being played with an e-bow, there is an organ below deck, and it builds up to a heavy cadence. The second piece is all more quiet and subdued, while the latter builds up in a straight line again. I quite enjoyed all of this, as much as I enjoy the odd Stars Of The Lid every now and then, and perhaps that’s the ‘weak’ thing about this release: it sounds like something we already heard before. Not necessarily a bad thing if you like to carve out this particular guitar ambient tag a bit deeper, but it’s not something you haven’t heard before. And I love it. (FdW)
Address: http://www.mosz.org
CLAUDIO PARODI – HEAVY NICHEL (CD by Creative Sources Recordings)
Parodi is a classically trained musician who started playing jazz when he was in his mid-20s. A meeting with Barre Philips in 1991 connected him with the improve scene. He plays piano, Turkish clarinet, tape electronics and tape. Involved in numerous collaborations and projects. On his new release ‘Heavy Nichel’ we learn more about him as a player of the Turkish clarinet. On this disc we find four lengthy solo improvisations. Parodi tells about his habit of continuously buying new instruments, “in order to find new tools to express my own music”. When the right moment is arrived, he arranges a recording to document what he learned from and through this instrument. ‘Heavy Nichel’ marks his research on the Turkish clarinet. As far as I know Creative Sources Recordings is specialized in improvisation that concentrates on sound research. This is also the case for this one. It is a journey full of subtleties and nuances. I feel sympathy for records like these on the one hand, where a musician demonstrates his vocabulary and not for its own sake of course. On the other hand, abstract solo improvisations can give you something to work on. It is not a quick meal that is served. The magic worked best in the second part of this one-hour improvisation. A moving and concentrated improvisation. The session was recorded by Paolo Valenti at Loud Music, Genova, Italia on June the 9th, 2012. (DM)
Address: http://www.creativesourcesrec.com
THE JIST – THE JIST (CD by Vafongool)
BRUTE FORCE – BRUTE FORCE (CD by Vafongool)
Va Fongool is an Oslo-based record label for new, challenging music. Brute Force says hello in one extended track of 28:12 minutes. They open with an outburst of energy comparable to Dutch power unit Cactus Truck. Brute Force is Karl Haugland Bjorå (guitar), Egil Kalman (bass) and Ole Mofjell (drums). They started as an acoustic outfit in 2013 turning quickly however into a noisy improv trio using electric instruments. During their half hour trip, they excel in loud outbursts, interspersed with more open and improvised sections where they take time to recover and to find a new way to built up towards a new climax. The Jist is a duo of Natalie Sandtorv (vocals, electronics) and Torgeir Hovden Standal (guitar), who started their collaboration in 2011 in Oslo. After a few years of developing their own voice, they are now ready for their first release. They offer noisy, improvised textures. Over the top, but that is the way they like it. Ranging from torturing loud battles of guitar and voice to quiet and intimate sound poetry by Sandtorv. No compromises here, but extreme and radical music. (DM)
Address: http://www.vafongool.no
ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI & BRIAN O’REILLY – THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING (CD by Monotype Records)
GAAP KVLT – VOID (CD by Monotype Records)
SCHLOSS MIRABELL – GHOSTHOUR DIARY (CD by Monotype Records)
DAVID MOSS & HANNES STROBL – AT THE BEACH: MUSIC FOR VOICE AND ELECTRIC BASS (CD by Monotype Records)
Some weeks ago I wrote about the late Zbigniew Karkowski: “In the mid to late 90s I frequently saw Zbigniew Karkowski, at concerts and at the office of Staalplaat and at one of those occasions he told me that he thought playing concerts was nice, but that perhaps the best way to get more known was to release lots of CDs, preferable one of each label in the world, maybe taking a cue from Merzbow.” That didn’t happen but now, a few months after his demise, we have seen already a few, so maybe post-mortem he will succeed in his goal. This work was recorded in Signapore in 2010 with one Brian O’Reilly, who also worked with Eliane Radigue, Matmos, Christian Marclay and a whole bunch of others. He’s a contrabassist but also works with electronics, such as is the case here. Actually, come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t recorded in Signapore, but the cover says ‘buchla 200e sounds generated in Singapore 2010’. This is not the usual harsh noise Karkowski; I am not sure who does what etc here, so perhaps it’s O’Reilly toning it down? Not that this is all that quiet, as there are plenty of moments when things are pretty loud and mean. In close to forty minutes they traverse the dynamics of sound, via radical routes of long form synth sounds. Slow in development, but with changes throughout that occur quite regularly this is an excellent album of moody meditative music.
About Gaap Kvlt we know nothing. I won’t repeat the ‘mysteries’ from the label. Just a guy with a laptop, as the press pciture shows us. He has released a cassette and two mini CDRs before and playing a few concerts. Monotype refers in the press text to techno, and while there is indeed some form of rhythm in some of these pieces, I would hardly use the word ‘techno’. Some of this is very slow – although ‘slow’ is ‘in’ I recently learned – and just an on-going rhythm to support something else: masses of drone like sounds, ambient patterns and all of this of the blacker and bleaker variations. It’s isolationist music with a bump. It’s an excellent production, using the entire sound spectrum, but with an emphasis on the low end. Dark and mysterious music, probably more fitting while driving a car than sweating away on a dance floor. What is this ‘void’ I was wondering? The music of Gaap Kvlt is not very empty; rather the opposite: it’s quite full with sound information. Nine pieces, forty-five minutes and with a fine amount of variations of the colour grey. Gaap in Dutch means gape and that’s not what this music does. Quite nice altogether.
Florina Speth hails from the mountains near Salzburg and when she was 11 she studied at the University Mozarteum in that city and won several prices. In Cologne she later studied cognitive musicology, neurolinguistics and music therapy and started to work with electronics under the name Schloss Mirabell. Her original instrument is the cello and she still uses that, along with electronics. Much of this was recorded at night, hence the title of the album. Following most pieces there is a short interlude called ‘Promenade’, which all sound alike, and for me is a bit unnecessary. Maybe I just don’t see the point of this, it’s just seems repetition. I am not sure what to make of the rest of the music. One way or another it seems hard for me to get into this. Some of it sounds modern classical, which I don’t seem to like very much, while some of the other pieces are atmospheric, with a bit of rhythm thrown in, or lots of them such as in the opening ‘Memuture’ and in ‘Die Seele’. This all makes this album highly varied, but also it sounds like she can’t make up her mind when it comes to which music she wants to release. I surely liked some of these pieces, but not all of them.
While I was playing the last new CD on Monotype I was trying to remember when I saw David Moss Dense Band play live. Twenty-five years ago? Longer? I am sure I went by recommendation of Dolf Mulder and I do remember it was a nice concert. The name David Moss I see every now and then, but this CD with Hannes Strobl might be the first thing I properly hear in ages. Strobl has worked with Moss before, together with Hanno Leichtmann as Denseland. He’s a bass player who also works with electronics. Moss himself was originally a drummer, but went on to use his voice, and played with the American Composers Orchestra and performed with orchestral works of Heiner Goebbels. The starting points for this collaboration were pieces for electric bass by Strobl, to which Moss added his voice. I gather this is all in some improvised way, but it perhaps sounds less likely than what you would expect. Maybe you (I?) would expect some jumpy, free jazzy music, but the seven pieces here are actually quite moody and introspective. Densely layered with sounds – bass and electronic one assumes – with the voice talking (also layered) as in ‘Shoebox No 4 Open’, but also just wordless mumble in ‘Placing Reeds’, an excellent obscured piece of music. ‘Critical Band’ is then what you would expect, but it’s also the shortest piece here. The whole thing has more a notion of ‘hörspiel’ around it, of a more mysterious origin. Excellent stuff, which sounds more composed than improvised. (FdW)
Address: http://monotyperecords.com/
HILD SOFIE TAFJORD – BREATHING (CD by +3DB Records)
STINE JANVIN MOTLAND – OK, WOW (CD by +3DB Records)
MORTEN J. OLSEN – BASS DRUM! (CD by +3DB Records)
It’s been a while since I last saw something by this label, but here are three releases in a series called ‘Music For One’. I started with Tafjord’s release. She is a member of Spunk, Lemur, Agrare, Zeitkratzer, Trinacria and Phantom Orchard Orchestra, among other things and her improvisation skills are also used in music for dance, film, theatre, installations and sculptures, plus she performed with tons of people. ‘Breathing’ is, however, her second solo CD, and sees her playing the French horn, an instrument she always plays. However here she plays this instrument in large spaces at the Bergen Kunsthall among others. Expertly edited by Bjørnar Habbestad it is hard to say whether this actually all ‘live’ or perhaps the result of multi-tracking. I am not sure. I tend to believe the first, but would be surprised to learn something else. Of course I am not sure what kind of techniques Tafjord uses or maybe electronics, but at times this sounds much more musique concrete and electro-acoustic, then someone playing a French horn. ‘Tokkotoko’ is an excellent example of that. Here room acoustics play no role and some other times the acoustics of the space play an important role, like in ‘Shoal’, and the horn is something we recognize as such. Quite a fine display of possibilities here. The French horn, the use of spaces, the various techniques used by Tafjord: all of this makes this an excellent release.
I am not sure if I heard from Stine Janvin Motland before. She’s a vocal artist, performing and composing. Her she performs solo and it was recorded in a wooden church in Bergen, with the sound of children and rain not far away, although it’s not easy to hear those. This is all pretty radical music, with Motland screaming, singing, mumbling, and making high-pitched sounds, all just using her voice. Unlike Tafjord, the space itself doesn’t seem to be that important, as everything seems to be from the same distance to the microphone as the rest. Her work stands in a fine tradition of voice only artists, say Phil Minton or Jaap Blonk, and it seems that she is even more radical than those two. This is definetly not easy listening, in case you had any doubts.
Percussionist Morten J. Olsen you may best know for his work with MoHa!, but he is also a member of Ultralyd, The Pitch and NMO, a new collaboration with Ruben Patino. He is also a member of Splitter Orchestra, a 25-piece improvising group from Berlin – where he lives. ‘Recently he adapted a new hobby as techno DJ’. Oh. Here the bass drum is his primary instrument, but he prepares it with small percussion instruments, so the sound is extended and expanded. The large drum resonates whatever shakes on top of that. Bells, cymbals but maybe also a bow, balls, styrofoam. This is in terms of music an album that is more ‘musical’ (for whatever that term is worth to you) than the Motland. At times I am reminded of the best work of Z’EV. A (re-)search of drum sounds that may or may not necessarily make up rhythmic sounds, but an in-depth exploration of percussion based sounds. One long beat by exploring the surface of the bass drum with an object, such as in ‘An Extremely Cheap Sanjo’. Lots of noise, lots of silence, lots of dynamics. Olsen’s percussion is all over the place. This is intense music too, but of an entirely different nature than Motland. This is the one release I would easily play over and over again, whereas Motland’s release is more something one has to find the right space for. Tafjord is, I guess, somewhere in between these two. All three are excellent displays of what these people do, solo. (FdW)
Address: http://www.pluss3db.net
THOMAS ANKERSMIT – FIGUEROA TERRACE (CD by Touch)
When I first met Thomas Ankersmit he was a visitor to Staalplaat begging that we should stock improvised music of the FMP label. He played saxophone himself, quite noisy as I remember, but he turned down to a CDR for my Bake Records CDR label. Those are facts that may not make it to my Staalplaat book, maybe it does come to think of it, and every time I hear new music from Ankersmit I am reminded of these early facts. I don’t meet him that much anymore these days so I can’t add new memories I guess. How exactly he landed touring with Phill Niblock and establishing himself as a composer of modular synth music, I am not sure. I guess these things just happen over time. In 2011-2012 he worked at CalArts, Los Angeles, on a restored ‘Black Serge’ modular synth, filtering internal sounds, feedback and the scraping of his contact microphone. The result is a thirty-seven minute piece of music, and also his first released studio recording. I am not sure what to make of it – or, actually I do know what to make of this, but I can’t seem to make up my mind if I am really taken by it. I like the way it sounds, and Ankersmit put his various sounds together in a nice way, but it all seems also a bit unsurprising. Yes, a modular synth can get very high, or very low and Ankersmit puts these together in various combination, long form, cut up etc., with lots of attention for the dynamics of the piece, but I also kept thinking: alright, and then what? It’s nice, it’s fine, it owes to the world of more traditional electronic music, and it’s all right. Perhaps, that’s all we need. (FdW)
Address: http://www.touch33.net
ROUGH FIELDS – WESSENDEN SUITE (CD by Bomb Shop)
In the press text I read that Rough Fields – whoever that is, is not revealed in this text – released last year a ‘ground breaking solo performance of Steve Reich’s “Music For 18 Musicians”‘ on the same label; I would have loved to hear that. His (?) interest lies in ‘real time processing of sounds using Max/MSP and a series of resonant filters’. Here these are applied to a recording he made at the Wessenden Head Reservoir in the Pennines, during winter and spring 2013. Here we have three pieces, with a total length of twenty-three minutes. The first two sections are very quiet, almost like a remote thing, far away, whereas in section III, it becomes louder and we something that could be a pump of some kind at this reservoir, along with some environmental sounds, which, for all we know, couldn’t be recognized as such in the first two sections. I guess it’s all right, this music, but maybe it’s too short to fully form an opinion about it. I quite enjoyed the final section and wish this release had more of that. Now, it all remains a bit too vague, as far as I’m concerned. (FdW)
Address: http://www.bombshop.org
RODOLPHE ALEXIS & STEPHANE RIVES – WINDS DROPS POPLARS (CD by Herbal International)
GREGORY BÜTTNER – POCHEN (CD by Herbal International)
Field recordist Rodolphe Alexis already had some releases available through Gruenrekorder (see Vital Weekly 837 and 909) and here he works with Stephane Rives, the soprano saxophone player. They work strictly separated from each other; the two have no connection in a studio. At least that’s what I understand. The two have been sticking their musical pieces together quite randomly. It works together quite well, I think. On the one hand these field recordings, all described on the cover, recorded between 2010 and 2012 in France, Hungary and Spain and which have a fine texture. The rumblings of gates, wind, railway lines and such like work great with the saxophone playing of Rives. In ‘Autorail’ it’s very lengthy, very noisy almost in a sine wave like manner, and sometimes almost like being entirely absent in ‘Poplars’. Perhaps only in ‘The Poets House’, we hear the saxophone more dominantly than the field recordings. This could a hit and miss release, but I think in these five pieces it works wonderfully well. The whole John Cage/random approach wasn’t also convincing to me, but obviously there is a possibility I am wrong. This might be such a case.
Gregory Büttner from Hamburg is a composer and performer, as well as the label boss of 1000Füssler, but here is mostly a composer. For three weeks he stayed at the ‘Performance Arts Forum’ in France, housed in a former convent school. He explored this apparently big building by playing sounds in small corners, big halls, but also recorded the doors, planks, and electricity switches as well as prepared out of tune pianos. The result is a piece of music that lasts forty-one minutes and which holds somewhere between sound art, electro-acoustic composition, improvisation and field recordings. It starts out with just more loosely organised sounds – we are entering the building – but there are also more long form sounds, more resonating electro magnetic fields for instance. Or working with an iron bar on a fence. It seems to me none of this has been electronically altered or processed, but changes come from moving around the microphone and perhaps some equalisation. Sometimes the piece seems a bit too fragmented for my taste. Maybe I would have enjoyed a bit more dialogue between these sounds and perhaps less scattered around in single out pieces. It’s however, altogether, quite a fine work. (FdW)
Address: http://herbalinternational.blogspot.com
MATHON – LIEUS PERS (2LP by Everest Records)
This is quite a massive package, literally. Between the gatefold holding the two records is a LP sized photo book with photos taken by Stefan Flückiger, of abandoned industrial areas and subterranean canals that have been gradually retrieved and sprawled by nature. They seem like photo-shopped but perhaps this is not the case. It’s hard to say, but it surely looks great. Each of these pictures is an inspiration for the group Mathon to produce a piece of music. This is their sixth record. Two previous releases were reviewed in Vital Weekly 678 and 777. These days the group is a quartet of Pete Leuenberger, Thomas Augustiny, Roger Stucki and Nicolas Keller, plus a few other guests. The desolation of the pictures is something that is very workable for the mood music of Mathon. It would be too easy to say that Mathon plays ambient music, although by and large that is what they do. They use lots of synthesizers, set to ‘long sustain’, add a click like rhythm in a few sparse places. When coming to the third side of this package, there is also more electro-acoustic sound added to this otherwise delightful ambient music. Now the music is combination of ambient with these strange field recordings or instruments, but it still works very well together. All of this has a desolated feel to it. In Rhaeto-Romanic the title means ‘lost places’ and this is a soundtrack to such lost places. The most ‘musical’ pieces are on the fourth side and maybe those break too much with the three preceding sides, but if you would look upon these as an afterthought, it works quite well. On ‘Culp’ seems to be out of place with its guitar and jazz like rhythm. Otherwise: top class product offering audio and visual beauty. (FdW)
Address: http://www.everestrecords.ch
NEARLY DEAD (LP by Geriatric Records)
Probably one of the more distasteful covers for some time, a record released by Geriatric Records by a band named Nearly Dead and some more distasteful song titles. Shit piss. I expected this to be two sides of harsh noise walls, but it’s actually something different. This is punk, but slower and longer, with an extended role for the trumpet and a voice that recites more than it sings. Each of the twelve or so pieces is brought with much energy, much volume and much aggression. Something suggests that this is less demented than it sounds and especially looks, even when the lyrics are about nurses, death and chemotherapies. The production is all very much directly in your face, like standing at the front, near the stage. This has the great quality of everything post punk. The drive, the energy, doing something different than whatever else is out there. Maybe this was recorded as part of some healing ritual? It seems to me that these people exactly know what they are doing and the whole distasteful cover thing is just as planned as the music sounds organised. Limited to 108 copies, their bandcamp page says. With a fine printed cover and insert, something also says I may not believe that. Who cares? Absolutely great record that keeps growing and growing on me. Like cancerous growth perhaps. (FdW)
Address: http://nearlydead.bandcamp.com/
RECONNAISSANCE FLY – FLOW FUTURES (CD by Edgetone)
TRI-CORNERED TENT SHOW – WELCOME TO PSYCHOVILLE POPULATION 4 (CD by Edgetone)
Some new madness from Edgetone. First we have Reconnaissance Fly, a combo comprised of Chris Broderick (c-melody saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet), Amanda Chaudhary (electric piano, piano, organ, electronics), Polly Moller (voice, flute, bass flute, heat sink), Larry The O (drums, percussion) and Tim Walters (bass, computer). A melting pot of many influences: rock, latin, funk, improvisation, jazz, etc. Zappa-esque music in a way. Theatrical and a bit bombastic. Humour is not for away is this eclectic journey. The lyrics are taken from email spam and called spam-poems or spoems. Very capable performers, although the singing by Moller is a weak spot in my experience. Not my piece of cake. I felt more at home in ‘Psychoville’ by the Tri-Cornered Tent Show. It has Philip Everett on electric lapharp and clarinet; Ray Schaeffer on electric basses; Anthony Flores on drums and Valentino O doing vocals and FX. Tri-Cornered Tent Show is an improvisation group that explores music inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Everett started his first group in 1967 and many were to follow. Also Flores and Schaeffer started in the 60s. So we are talking here of a bunch of experienced musicians. Valentina O is of a younger generation, an eclectic vocalist working as a opera singer, actor, performer, etc. They present an unusual blend of blues-rooted psychedelica and avant garde. Loosely constructed and played pieces. With an important role for the electric lapharp. The vocal performance by Valentina O however is the crucial element. Her acrobatics and expression give flesh and blood to their weird excursions. (DM)
Address: http://www.edgetonerecords.com
KAROLINE LEBLANC & PAULO J FERREIRA LOPES – HYPNAGOGIC CARTOGRAPHY 1 (CDR by Atrito-Afeito)
More music by Paulo J Ferreira Lopes (see also Vital Weekly 903), now collaborating with Karoline Leblanc. This is a ‘non-esoteric attempt to portray, in a fake field recording fasion, our personal understand and interpretation (generalization) of the intermediate states of awareness that oddly groggily lie between hope and despair, tragedy and dream’. I have no idea what that means. Leblanc plays ‘alesis micron & Dave Smith Mopho x4 synthesizers’ and piano on one track while the whole thing was mixed and edited by Lopes. I am not sure to what extend Lopes added anything, or whether he was just shuffling Leblanc sounds around. Here we have four pieces. One is about three minutes, and the longest is close to twenty-seven (total length however being forty-four minutes). The music seems to be all electronic and quite moody, but not in a regular sort of drone way. Leblanc seems to me is more an improvising mind, with perhaps a love for all things modern classical. That is most apparent in that one track that uses the piano, the short ‘Dichotomic Syntony’. In the other piece it’s all more electronic and highly moody, but also quite playful. That’s something I quite enjoy actually. It stretches the boundaries of your perception a bit more. Oh yes, it’s a bit ambient like, but hang on, there seems to be more to it. That sort of thing. It works out very nicely. Not always as great, or perhaps innovative, but it’s a most pleasant release. (FdW)
Address: http://atrito-afeito.com
ROLANDO HERNANDEZ & BRYAN EUBANKS – SALE EL SOL & DIE SONNE UNTERGEHT (CDR by Thema Park For Ear)
RISHIN SINGH – TWO DEDICATIONS (CDR by Thema Park For Ear)
Thema Park For Ear is a sub division from Herbal International and their main goal seems to release live works, although the first one may not necessarily be recorded in concert. One Rolando Hernández plays guitar and voice and Bryan Eubanks plays oscillators. They recorded this seventy-five minute piece last summer in Berlin. This is a very quiet work. I opened it up in an audio-editor, normalized it and even then it’s very much inaudible. I am not sure why this is. When it’s so quiet it’s likely others will do this too, so why not make the whole thing louder? One long piece, all chopped up in smaller section, but cut as one piece on the CDR. There is lots of careful strumming and scraping, a bit of plucking the strings and all along there is a bit of oscillators neatly humming somewhere. This is quite an enjoyable release, but perhaps a very long one, although I think the longitude is part of the idea behind this. It seems to me music without commitment, without much thought, but rather a steady stream of different sounds.
Bryan Eubanks is also the performer of the first piece composed by Rishin Singh called “Alekhine and Junge at Prague (After Jas H Duke)”. I assume he still plays oscillators here, making a short sound, of variable lengths, and silence inbetween, lots of silence actually. Maybe this is supposed to be some sort of zen meditation thing, but it somehow eluded me. Maybe we should see the score? Probably also conceptual is “For Sam Pettigrew, even though he pissed on me”, which is ‘performed Sam Pettigrew, Bermagui – Yuin Country. Recorded by Sam Pettigrew & Rishin Singh 2012’. Here we have field recordings and an occasional guitar bump, which may occur only three times. There are also some static crackles here and there. I am not sure what this all is about, really. Is it very conceptual in some way? Is there a score that tells these musicians what to do? Or is it all about field recordings in the end? That’s the sort of thing I was wondering about, really. I quite liked the second piece, but didn’t care for the first that much. Oh well. (FdW)
Address: http://themeparkforear.blogspot.com
D’INCISE – 1CYM/2CYM (cassette by Hideous Replica)
MIGUEL A. GARCIA & OSCAR MARTIN/VASCO ALVES & LOUIE RICE – MNEFFA/ARCS (cassette by Hideous Replica)
Two new releases on Hideous Replica, the label run by Louie Rice and Vasco Alves, two-third of VA AA LR, who are slowly expanding their scope with a wide range of like-minded people working with sound, electronics, computers perhaps. D’Incise for instance is such a person, from Switzerland, who has two thirty minute pieces here, both ‘composed with recordings of cymbal experiments and electronics’ as it says on the otherwise sparse cover. Sparse cover equals sparse music. I have no idea to what extend D’Incise is using his cymbal recordings in combination computer treatments, but I really think this is the case here. No cymbal can easily be recognized in these pieces, since it’s all about long form tones, which gradually shifts and mix with each other. It’s all recorded at a very low volume, which is a pity, I think (unless there is some esthetical idea behind this low volume), but it’s two beautiful long pieces of relatively little sound information, but it works wonderfully well. You could easily think ‘I can do that’, and maybe you can but you didn’t, and D’Incise did. I thought this was great work of microsound. Very meditative. I wish I had the time to go out with a walkman and this tape on repeat while cycling around in nature. Damn, I haven’t got that time available.
The other tape is a split tape. Both sides of the cover have been printed, so you can turn it inside out, which I think is a nice idea. Both sides contain collaborative works. On side 1 (it’s still called that) we find six pieces by Miguel A. Garcia, who hardly needs introduction, and Oscar Martin, from Switzerland, who sometimes works as Noish or Noish~. He’s a firm open source advocate and creates his own tools and works mainly with computers. His work was released by such label as Free Software Series, Uzusounds, Drone Records and others. The cover doesn’t indicate how and where this was recorded, but it’s a nice battle of computerized madness and weirdness. Loosely organized, this is the typical outcome of a night of good fun working together, rather than thorough planning and meticulous construction. Quite nice actually. Alves and Rice on the other side are likewise in a bit more noise mood than we probably know. Much of what they do here deals with the crackling of tin cans, waste plastic and such like, all distributed over a few microphones and speakers, but all captured with considerable force, so it seems. It’s an expansion of their other work, which works around speakers/spaces/microphones in a more obscured way, and here it’s all a bit in a louder fashion. Very nice too. Don’t expect some brutal noise, on both sides of the tape actually, but some well-thought, intelligent noise. (FdW)
Address: http://www.hideousreplica.co.uk/
GRZEGORZ BOJANEK – WARM WINTER MUSIC (cassette by Twin Springs Tapes)
A tape dealing with the past winter period, which, certainly here in Europe very mild. I loved every minute of it, but that’s me being peculiar. In this period Bojanek recorded these two pieces of music, using guitar, piano, double bass, flute, melodica, synths and field recordings. So far I assumed Bojanek was more a man for laptop music, but he proofs me wrong here. Both sides of this tape are filled with a rather nice stream of unconsciousness sounds, all flowing into each other and then out again. It seems more or less loosely improvised to a multi-track and mixed down blindfolded. Its rather warm music, reminding me of the work of Machinefabriek, Giuseppe Iealasi, Andrea Belfi, Andrew Chalk and such like, not too focussed on a composition per se, but also not too improvised and falling apart into small particles. Both of these pieces have an excellent tranquil atmosphere, introspective, drone like, Zen like if you want. Very gentle, very refined. This should be re-issued on a CD(R), I would say and if not it would be a good idea perhaps someone could commission Bojanek to do something similar one day. The best work I heard from him. (FdW)
Address: http://bojanek.bandcamp.com
MODELBAU – BLADE (cassette by Barreuh Records)
Frans de Waard and names of his projects, which is a project itself, because it seems for every occasion he invents another name. In 2012 he started with the project Modelbau as a reaction of years of doing concerts with laptop. He wants to create music with analogue material and with a backing track. The music is recorded onto a two-track recording and later edited this way. No complex multi-layered music, but music played “live.” The tape is released by the Dutch label Barreuh Records. The tape starts like a radio wave with a little distortion at the background, repeating and repeating and slowly the intensity of the tone grows and fades also always. Great minimalistic track. The second track is like a test of a microphone. Just hitting the microphone, but the tone is changing and moving to higher tones and another intensity. I really like this kind of basic compositions, it is just the sound, which you don’t want to hear, but what you always hear at meetings when a microphone doesn’t work. But now it has been used in another context and it becomes a basic rhythm piece. The last track Boost” is noisy and drony. Just a repeating electronic sound with some higher sounds, which are circling around this penetrating sound. The first track “Blur” at side B has the same concept, but is stronger and more penetrating. An intense track which splits your head in two pieces. “Bite Hard” is a fragile piece of sound created by some fine clicks and flows into a penetrating sound, but for now by some circling high tones which are singing around in your brains. The minimal clicks continue and give some space into your head. Great track and highly suitable for a torture session. The tape ends with an intense piece of music which works on other levels. The tape reminded me of some old tapes by Kapotte Muziek, maybe because of the concept and maybe some of the tracks with high annoying tones. But I must say… memory is not the same as the reality, it is just an interpretation of the past. But for now, this tape is worth listening for people who like pure sound. (JKH)
Address: https://www.facebook.com/barreuh