SEIJIRO MURAYAMA & JEAN-LUC GUIONNET – MISHIMA, DAY & NIGHT (CD by Ftarri) *
E-SAXBOW – U-T-O-P-I (CD by La Muse En Circuit) *
DAMIAN ANACHE – CAPTURAS DEL UNICO CAMINO (CD by Concepto Cero/Inkilino Records) *
PAAK & TBC – LENIN DADA (CD by permaREV Platten) *
ELINTSEEKER – GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART (CD by Plop) *
GERARD LEBIK & PIOTR DAMASIEWICZ & GABRIEL FERRANDINI – VENN CIRCLES (CD by Bocian Records) *
NEZNAMO – AIWYASTO (CD by Muzyka Voln) *
LUNAR ABYSS – AIKANA UNI (CDR by Zhelezobeton) *
UHUSHUHU – GEOSCIENCE (CDR by Zhelezobeton) *
KARL BÖSMANN – COMA (LP by Alt.vinyl) *
MAURIZIO BIANCHI – CMRS/OPEA (2LP by Urashima)
LYOTO MUSIC (LP by Urashima)
MAUTHAUSEN ORCHESTRA – NECROFELLATIO (LP by Urashima)
MAUTHAUSEN ORCHESTRA – FROM HOMICIDE TO SLAUGHTER LP (by Urashima)
LE SCRAMBLED DEBUTANTE – DELICIOUS TROGLODYTE (CDR by Attenuation Circuit) *
DEAD EDITS – LEBERGE VARIATIONS/POLAR VORTEXTS (cassette by Fluxus MT)
JASON SOLIDAY/PETR J. WOODS – ANOTHER FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (cassette by Fluxus MT)
NAOTO YAMAGISHI & LAURI HYVARINEN – BONGOCHI (cassette by Rypistellyt Levyt)
SPYROS EMMANOUILIDIS & SAVVAS METAXAS/TURBO TEETH (split cassette by Granny Records)
RINUS VAN ALEBEEK – SUPER 8 (cassette, private)
SEIJIRO MURAYAMA & JEAN-LUC GUIONNET – MISHIMA, DAY & NIGHT (CD by Ftarri)
E-SAXBOW – U-T-O-P-I (CD by La Muse En Circuit)
Two releases, two duets in fact, in which the saxophone plays a role. First we move to Japan for a duet of Jean-Luc Guionnet who plays alto saxophone, and who is in duet here with Seijiro Murayama on percussion and voice. It seems to be recorded in two different locations but on the same date, July 7, 2013. This is quite some extreme music. Towards the end of the first piece, ‘Temple 1’, Guionnet makes his saxophone play a steady tone, almost like feedback or a sine wave for minutes; the opening of ‘Temple 4’, on the other hand, has the saxophone sounding like a saxophone, but very sparsely. Silence plays a big role too in almost all of these pieces. Murayama’s percussion is nothing ordinary, no drum roll, nothing conventional at all, but whatever he does on his percussion seems to be the cracking of acoustic objects, irregular but with a fine technique. Like objects falling on a drum skin, rather than something percussive. In ‘Teke Teke’, the final piece and the only one recorded somewhere else, there is suddenly (?) a more free jazz approach, at least so it seems, from time to time. At seventy-one minutes this is quite a long release, and not one that is easily digested. A lot is demanded of the listener, but it also gives a lot, as the total release is quite beautiful; it left me somewhat exhausted.
There is quite some information with the release by e-SaxBow (as the proper spelling dictates) but it’s all in French. I am not sure why someone would honestly think that sending out a promo copy to a foreign reviewer thinks it’s a good idea to enclose information in their native language (and I know I said something to this extent before, and no, there is nothing wrong with the French language, except that I haven’t mastered it properly; but I am apparently not allowed to say there is some chauvinism involved). Anyho, behind e-SaxBow is Florent Colautti on e-string and Francois Wong on electrified baritone saxophone. I have no idea what an electrified baritone saxophone is, but in none of this one can easily recognize the horn or anything with a string that is supposed to be the e-string. The latter is played using electromagnetic bows, ‘which he pilots from his computer’ (there is a little bit of English text on the cover). The saxophone is also transformed by computer means and thus the five pieces, which last thirty minutes in total, sound like nothing even close to improvised music. These pieces are drone like, have a bit of noise in ‘Ou l’onde Plonge’ and rhythm and noise in ‘Immergee’. At times rooted in the world of Merzbow, Pan Sonic but also in that of isolationist drones. Quite diverse and judging by the brief character of this release, I’d say there is more to explore for them in future releases. The sky seems to be the limit. (FdW)
Address: http://www.ftarri.com
Address: http://alamuse.com/
DAMIAN ANACHE – CAPTURAS DEL UNICO CAMINO (CD by Concepto Cero/Inkilino Records)
This is debut album the young Argentinian composer Damian Anache. His compositions have been played at various conservatoriums and festivals around the world, and he has been teaching and researching in Buenos Aires. His ‘Capturas Del unico Camino’ was already released in October last year, so let’s pretend we didn’t see that. The two labels behind this tell us to file this under ‘experimental, avant-garde, electronic, minimalism, and ambient, new age’. Ah new age. Three of the four pieces last exactly 14 minutes and 16 seconds and the fourth is 15:09, and all of these pieces were created with ‘an algorithm that proclaims the computer as a live performer (beyond the possibilities of this work being performed by musicians)’, so the computer plays back acoustic instruments, sounds generated by the mouth of the composer, synthesis technics and recordings of water. In Spanish we find some more text inside the CD (and yes, that didn’t mean anything to me, as my Spanish is worse than my French). I am not sure what to make of this release. It’s all indeed minimal and ambient, perhaps not so much new age; although I can imagine that some people would find this quite meditative. There is indeed nothing offensive in this release, but it’s also not just peace and tranquillity here. It is music that makes up a nice backdrop to whatever you are doing (reading, dozing off, relaxing, sipping wine) but doesn’t seem to go beyond that. In that sense one could say this is the perfect ambient release, exactly as Brian Eno it once intended. It doesn’t provoke or annoy, but simply offers a more than pleasant sound environment from a more modern classical point of view. (FdW)
Address: http://conceptocero.com/ http://www.inkilinorecords.net/
PAAK & TBC – LENIN DADA (CD by permaREV Platten)
This piece uses speeches from Lenin and Stalin mixed with electronic music to create something. Before embarking on an attempt to say what I think some provisos need to be made. Whilst I enjoy reading post-modern philosophy recently someone tried to describe or justify a pop group by reference to Badiou’s use of set theory. I would recommend Sokal & Bricmont’s book ‘Fashionable Nonsense’ but unfortunately its very badly written, but never the less the arts do seem lost within modernity and so manufacture the fiction of post-modernity. And now within the arts it seems Marxism is once again fashionable, and his words echo a long lost “truth”- “George Orwell once remarked that political thought, especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation in which the world of fact hardly matters.” – Noam Chomsky. The fiction however is real in the arts – so much so that its recent incarnation allows the following “There is no Higgs Boson. I’ll buy you all a beer if they discover the Higgs Boson.. I have my Object Oriented Ontology reasons. There is no Higgs Boson man.. they are going to look through all the data. They are not going to find it.” Timothy Morton.. And “Mao’s ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death [a tip of the hat to Stalin]. Is this not the only correct attitude… this terror is nothing less than the condition of freedom.”. Slavoj Zizek – (“I like to go to a really expensive hotel and stay in a suite..”) Hitler, who killed less but is guiltier because of his politics, is just as an amenable source to artists ‘working’ (see Orwell above) in this field. God is dead, in the arts if not in the sciences – and so the devil in all its forms is free to play. And here play ‘music’. So what if anything is wrong with this noise is that it’s neither wrong or noise more power electronics, in which – like in other art (The Chapman’s) mass slaughter is both funny but also a sign, an incarnation of the deification of neo-liberalism in culture which embraces Marxism in a prostitute’s kiss. This is not noise – its Good News – (‘Pleased to meet you’) not Black Magic- Only noise qua noise is the black hole of dementia, a timeless non-music, not a comment as nothing escapes noise just as nothing escapes the neo-liberal humour of the Monty Python silly walk AKA Spanish Inquisition. (Jliat)
Address: http://permarevplatten.blogspot.de
ELINTSEEKER – GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART (CD by Plop)
From Singapore hails Fuzz Lee, who works as elintseeker (no capital in there), who likes to travel a lot; from Krakow to Copenhagen and then to Tokyo – why not – and then back home. On the road he has collected a whole bunch of sound material from such guest players as Jessica Bailiff, Genoveva Kachurkova, Ferri, Shunichiro Fujimoto, Junya Yanagidaira, Darren Ng, Scott Cortez (of Loveliescrushing), Victor Low, Charlie sage and Noel Akchote. I must admit I only recognized a handful of names there. I gather some of this was recorded in and some of this expanded on at home. Lee himself plays acoustic and nylon string guitar, electric guitar, mandolin, electric bass, programming, processing, field recordings, electronics, effects and vocals. The music has quite a pop/folk feel to it, but that is most apparent in those pieces in which Lee is singing. If he doesn’t sing than its suddenly more ambient, quieter and subdued, and those pieces seem to be the majority of these twelve songs. Many of these are like watercolour paintings, with a major role for the guitar, tinkling, looping and sometimes mildly screaming about. Other instruments play a smaller role here, but paint similar colours. The pieces with vocals are rockier, with the almost eight minutes of the title piece as the rockiest of all-them all, and ‘Strasswalchen In November’ with vocals by Ferri as a more dreamy counter piece. This album is quite beautiful and it wouldn’t have been out of place on say Static Caravan. Breezy ambinet folk for an early summer’s day. (FdW)
Address: http://www.naturebliss.jp
GERARD LEBIK & PIOTR DAMASIEWICZ & GABRIEL FERRANDINI – VENN CIRCLES (CD by Bocian Records)
The first time I encountered veNN circles (what is it with these names nowadays?) was in Vital Weekly 896 and they were a duo, of Gerard Lebik and Piotr Damasiewicz. No instruments were mentioned back then but on this new release I learn that Lebik plays electronics and Damasiewicz is on the trumpet, but also they are now a trio, with Gabriel Ferrandini on drums. The front cover lists all three names, and below veNN circles, so we could also assume this is the title of the release. From the earlier release I gathered them to be an all-electronic outfit, but that one was was a collaboration, so maybe my judgement was a bit clouded. On this release this trio surely moved over towards the world of improvised music, with what seems to be a live recording of sorts. The recording could have used a bit more clarity, unless the somewhat muffled sound is part of the aesthetic. The drums are the one instrument that can be clearly recognized and in the second piece even plays a steady rhythm of some kind, sometimes. The other two play something that focusses on the electro-acoustic quality of the sound. Deep ends rumble at the start of the third (all pieces are untitled) piece, some mild distortion in the second and the trumpet being all about false air, the object, the horn and hardly about the trumpet itself. There is a noise like quality to the music – hey, this is on Bocian Records, of course – but there is a well-kept balance between noise, silence, playing around with steady rhythm and sound and improvisation. The overall recording could have been better I think; that is the only downside it seems. (FdW)
Address: http://www.bocianrecords.com
NEZNAMO – AIWYASTO (CD by Muzyka Voln)
LUNAR ABYSS – AIKANA UNI (CDR by Zhelezobeton)
UHUSHUHU – GEOSCIENCE (CDR by Zhelezobeton)
On CD we find Dmitry Shilov, also known as Neznamo, but who started out in 1996 as Unknown. He released a couple of albums back then but after five albums he stopped and in 2006 awoke from hibernation with a new name and a new approach. He released several mini-albums on Monsun Productions and collaborated with Russia’s finest drone meisters such as Misery, Bardo, Lunar Abyss and Siyanie. ‘Aiwyasto’ is his first full-length album and it has one, forty-two minute piece on it. It’s a whole bunch of sound layers tied together, melted as it were and slowly swirling. Every now and then you can see the changing of colours in here. These changes are very minimal yet they are surely there. Looking at the sound-file (ripping for the podcast), this piece looks like a cigar indeed: a quick fade in at the beginning and a fade out at the end and in between this slow changing mass of sound. Lots of drone sounds, coming from synthesizers and computers (maybe, I have no idea) and no field recordings, or so it seems. Quite dark, pitch black even, but not as loud as say some of the releases on Malignant Records, but surely highly atmospheric. This is not the kind of music one should be listening to on a sunny day like today, but these autumn-like drones belong to a grey and rainy day.
On CDR we have Evgeny Savenko’s musical project Luna Abyss. In March 2015 he was working late at night and found some interesting combination on his machines which made ‘an interesting sweeping combination’ so he hit record and fell asleep a few minutes later. More than an hour later he woke up and he had this piece waiting for him, but he first added some ‘thin layers of field recordings and modulated sound waves’: we don’t want to think that all of this was made when being asleep. This sixty-four minute piece is just exactly that: a piece to fall asleep by and I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. Over the course of this hour, the piece becomes softer and softer and yet it remains very static. Only the field recordings seem to be changing, ever so quietly, but that’s just deception: also the synthetic parts change, more so towards the end, so it seems. It is a very consistent piece of music, with a beautiful, gradual changeover. The perfect release to go to sleep by.
On CDR and DVR we find the group Uhushuhu, from St. Petersburg. Back in Vital Weekly 933 I thought this was the project of Daniil Kharms, but now the information says ‘group’, so who knows, maybe there is some extra band members. Besides the previous released work, there just one other release. On ‘Geoscience’ we have four lengthy pieces of music, but obviously not as lengthy as the previous two releases. Unlike the other two releases, it seems to me that Uhushuhu uses a lot more sound sources than just a few synths and field recordings. Intercepted radio transmissions, lots of sound effects, lots more field recordings, loops and voices, whispering, sighing and such like. It makes up some highly vibrant music. Ambient, yet vibrant. It moves and it shakes, like a firm walk in the woods – or better like a fairy tale flying through woods, across hills, swamps and such like connotations. Music for a great fantasy movie. Especially ‘Loam Glade’ is a great piece in that respect, a lovely lush piece of whispering ghosts and bird twitter set against a finest set of electronics. Along with the music on CDR there is also a DVDR with ‘special fractal visualization’ by VJ B≜H⊗G, which looks actually not too bad, but I’m afraid this is the kind of the stuff that doesn’t much for me. I can watch this with some interest, I can see it’s all right, but then I start thinking: why this? What does it mean? Is there supposed to be a connection? That sort of thing. I can see that people would like this though. (FdW)
Address: http://zhb.radionoise.ru
KARL BÖSMANN – COMA (LP by Alt.vinyl)
By now Karl Bösmann has quite a mighty catalogue of releases on vinyl, CD and CDR, and some of these were reviewed in these pages. Would you, however, wake me up at night and ask me ‘quick tell me what kind of music does Bösmann do?’ I would scratch my head for some time, and not just because it is the middle of night. It’s hard to say I guess, but if I had to make an assumption, I’d say it’s something along the lines of industrial music. There is, so it seems, always something creepy and nasty about his work, and in general he has lengthy compositions, which not necessarily are very tight. His new album contains two sidelong pieces, whereas a limited art-box set edition also contains a CDR with a third part of ‘Coma’ in three parts. I got a copy of the CDR too. All of the pieces here were recorded with a curetronic modular synthesizer, a Korg MS-20 and a Mopho synth. With these he exactly creates that kind of industrial synthesizer music that shows a love of this big amorphous pieces of synthesizer music. One is reminded of the mighty Maurizio Bianchi, especially in his early 80s phase, but it also harks back to the far edge of the 70s cosmic music, especially Conrad Schnizler’s non-keyboard music comes to mind. Bösmann plays this with quite some vigorous attack; a bit of rhythm is never far away, hammering away like a jackhammer in ‘Coma 1’, and one can imagine what it is like trapped inside a factory that goes out of control. None of these pieces is very static, as Bösmann cleverly shifts quickly back and forth through his doom scenario music. Quite dark, very austere and penetrating right into one’s darker corner of the brain. Excellent record. (FdW)
Address: http://www.altvinyl.com/
MAURIZIO BIANCHI – CMRS/OPEA (2LP by Urashima)
LYOTO MUSIC (LP by Urashima)
MAUTHAUSEN ORCHESTRA – NECROFELLATIO (LP by Urashima)
MAUTHAUSEN ORCHESTRA – FROM HOMICIDE TO SLAUGHTER LP (by Urashima)
Recently I was looking at the catalogue of Vinyl On Demand and impressed by their effort of re-issuing all of this late 70s/early 80s music; it’s almost an encyclopaedia of that era, but there is more labels releasing music from that time, but are perhaps not in big boxes, and in more specialized niches. One such label is Urashima from Italy. I must admit their endeavours went unnoticed by me so far, but their back catalogue is as impressive as the one from Vinyl On Demand. These four releases are all more or less number 100, and judging by their catalogue Urashima specializes in good all power electronics and noise, with such as releases by Atrax Morgue, Merzbow, Sacher-Pelz, The Rita, Mauthausen Orchestra and all such like, and the main difference with Vinyl On Demand is that Urashami also releases newly released music. These four new releases however were all recorded in the early 80s, and all of these by legendary Italian noise artists. The collective designs of these releases add to the collectability of these releases. As a fan, well more or less (I’m sure I haven’t heard the majority of the releases), of Maurizio Bianchi, I started with his double LP. The letters spell out ‘Compresa’ (which means ‘included) and it is the title of a c90 cassette M.B. made in 1980 in an edition of 7 or 8 copies. He just acquired a Korg MS-20 syntheziser back than and somehow only had one jack output to record it, so all the music is in mono. Phil Spector would have been proud. Fans will no doubt debate over such topics as ‘is MB of 1980 better than the MB of 2015’ and surely everyone has favourites, but these recordings are quite interesting. It seems to me that Bianchi records straight from the synthesizer and by passes any sound effects, which he was so fond of in those days, especially the delay pedal. This gives these four pieces quite a clean sound. It’s at times also very rhythmical, but very dry. It’s like having a peek in Bianchi’s kitchen, a look at as yet untreated sound material. There is also more melodic stuff and some of these sounds like trying out setting. Bianchi plays a tune, hits a wrong note and then continues from there. That adds maybe an element of naivety to this music: ‘see me try this synth’ (and which sometimes gave cassette releases a bad name in the 80s). I quite enjoy this naive approach to electronic music and this historical recording of Maurizio Bianchi is certainly worthwhile investigating.
Of these three Italian noise mongers, Lyoto Music is the most obcure one. Back in the mid 80s their cassette on Aquilifer Sodality was one of the best sellers – we didn’t care who did what back then I reckon. They played just one concert with one person in attendance, Andrea Cernotto, their label boss back then. That best selling tape is what we have on this album, and we learn now that the music was produced by Pietro Mazzochin (who also worked as The New Sadism, Observation Clinique and Swastika Kommando) and Pierpaolo Zoppo (of Mauthausen Orchestra – lovely boys them). This is industrial music of the highest order. It’s loud, it has feedback, it has noise, it’s brutal and above all, it’s without end. Cascading smashes of white noise, an (over-) extensive use of reverb, synthesizers on overload – the whole enchilada is what Lyoto Music is offering here. It’s not to say this comes without any variation: they are there; sometimes a bit buried in the more sustaining sound fields of feedback and distortion. Lyoto Music is a very minimalist proposition and that’s something I enjoyed very much. There are certain psychedelic qualities in this music that justify this longitude/magnitude. I can surely see its appeal then as well as now.
Mauthausen Orchestra, the solo music of Pierpaolo Zoppo, was widely available in the 80s through a string of cassette releases on Aquilifer Sodality, one of which was ‘Necrofellatio’; the other one just released was recorded in the same period, 1982/83, but apparently not released before. I was thinking it would be nice if I could say there was some sort of Italian school of industrial noise., and whilst there are similarities between Mauthausen Orchestra and Lyoto Music, especially on ‘From Homicide To Slaughter’, one could also account that to the fact that Zoppo is part of both projects. On the ‘From Homicide To Slaughter’ record the sound is more continuous and sustaining, but in difference with Lyoto Music also more dynamic. Zoppo allows more lower end sounds, continuous blocks of keys pressed down on an organ and amplified with quite some feedback. High end meets low end. In some respect ‘Necrofellatio’ sounds a bit less, I think. I enjoyed ‘From Homicide To Slaughter’ for the sheer minimalism and slow movements, and ‘Necrofellatio’ had shorter pieces (although all untitled), screaming vocals through feedback, which sounded too much like a Whitehouse imitation recorded not too well. Whitehouse recorded in a proper studio and Mauthausen Orchestra straight to cassette; that doesn’t hold the extreme frequencies that Zoppo was after, I guess. But in general I liked both of these – hell, all four of these – manifestations of power electronics a lot. (FdW)
Address: http://urashima.it/
LE SCRAMBLED DEBUTANTE – DELICIOUS TROGLODYTE (CDR by Attenuation Circuit)
David Bowie’s comeback album ‘The Next Day’ showed his old cover ‘Heroes’ recycled. Le Scrambled Debutante does something with the cover of their latest release, ‘Delicious Troglodyte’, which is a similar black square on the cover of their previous release, ‘Art Lessons’ (see Vital Weekly 926). Le Scrambled Debutante has a floating membership, around Allan Zane and this time it’s no less than nine musician, among which we recognize the name of Mike Honeycutt, erstwhile of Mystery Hearsay and a main player of the 80s cassette scene. There is just one piece here, but it lasts seventy-one minutes, which might be one of their longest releases. Like before it’s never easy to say what this is all about, or what this band does. Much like ‘Art Lessons’ there are a lot of randomized sound events here. Think a good old-fashioned 8-track reel-to-reel tape filled with random sounds, mostly from spinning records forward, backwards, different speeds. Science fiction sounds, spoken word, old electronica records but nothing leaps out, no ‘I want to be a registered nurse’, or ‘number 9, number 9’; One could think this leads to seventy-one minutes of chaos, but it doesn’t; at least not always. Somewhere between minute twenty and thirty, things becomes quite and more coherent, almost song-like with tape-loops of rhythm and sampled voices eating celery in the background. Post mark minute forty-five it also starts building up after a lengthy passage of chaos. This music is not something to be analysed over and over but rather something one should be taking in like a pill: all at once and see what the effects will be. If you are lucky you will be sucked into this barrage of sounds and it will have a profound psychedelic effect on you. Again it’s all considerable lo-fi, but that’s the fun of it, I should think. Psychedelic music of a different kind – no guitars, just collages. Excellent stuff. (FdW)
Address: http://www.attenuationcircuit.de
DEAD EDITS – LEBERGE VARIATIONS/POLAR VORTEXTS (cassette by Fluxus MT)
JASON SOLIDAY/PETR J. WOODS – ANOTHER FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (cassette by Fluxus MT)
It has been quiet for Dead Edits for some time, following their two CDR albums on band member Blake Edwards Crippled Intellect Productions label (see Vital Weekly 852 and 885). The other half of Dead Edits is Eric Lunde. Unlike their two CDR releases it seems that this tape deals a bit more text, using Lunde’s characteristic voice, which is slowly fed into their machines and becomes a long slur of voices, a mass if you will. The text that comes with this suggests that this was recorded outside, taping sounds and voices in the snow. It seems that some of these pieces flow right into each other, despite the fact that the cover lists several titles for them. Besides the multitude of texts used, it also seems that this particular Dead Edits release is more Lunde than Edwards. The way the voice is processed, the feedback, and the low resolution of the sound, the decay: it’s all trademark Lunde, rather some of the more recent Blake Edwards noise/drone/musique concrete exercises. It is quite an enjoyable release however; quite noisy at times, and finely poetic in itself with Lunde’s voice. Erosion and decay are ever so present.
Jason Soliday and Peter J. Woods give each other instructions, do’s and don’t. ‘Only use instruments you are unfamiliar with’, ‘must include at least 2 unaffected samples from children’s cartoons’, ‘no sound should be allowed to extend more than 15 seconds without changing’; that kind of thing. Soliday has six pieces (‘no tracks longer than two minutes and thirty seconds’) and I must admit I didn’t find it easy to recognize the self-inflicted rules they set out. Soliday’s six miniature pieces show is ever-lasting love for all thing noisy and collage-like. Scratchy, cut up, collage, a bit noisy and a bit bumpy, this is some fine raw shaped electro-acoustic music.
‘Leave the existential angst at home. Keep it festive’ is what Peter J. Woods also got in his set of instructions, which must not have been easy for him, but in his very vague piece of other door recordings, we hear just some rumble. It has two parts, of which the second is a ‘trumpet and voice solo’, which is the instrument he is unfamiliar with. Quite a curious piece, but something I quite enjoyed. It sounded like a piece of music that is not the usual Woods styled misanthropy. (FdW)
Address: <mattaggart@yahoo.com>
NAOTO YAMAGISHI & LAURI HYVARINEN – BONGOCHI (cassette by Rypistellyt Levyt)
Recorded in Japan, October last year this acoustic duet between two people I never heard of, Naoto Yamagishi and Lauri Hyvarinen. There are no instruments mentioned on the cover, but I think to have learned through the university of Google that Yamagishi is a percussionist/drummer and Hyvarinen is a guitar player. Both of them play acoustic, I think. The cassette as a medium is of course a great one, but one could wonder if it’s best one to present music like it is played here. These two players like to leave gaps in their playing, coming close to sheer silence, and one cassette some of the tension that comes along with that is perhaps a bit lost. None of their playing reminds the listener of the instruments used, save a few bits here and there, in which especially the drums roll. But otherwise there is lots of exploration of cymbals and strings with bows and objects, carefully examining various possibilities of sound. There is much richness implied but I don’t think it all comes alive very much. There is more in here that doesn’t seem to shine through, and I fear this is due to the medium of cassette. Not entirely flawless but nevertheless a great release of improvised music. (FdW)
Address: <hyvarinen.lauri@gmail.com>
SPYROS EMMANOUILIDIS & SAVVAS METAXAS/TURBO TEETH (split cassette by Granny Records)
A split release with an all-Greek line-up of musicians, all which seem new names to me. On one side it’s the duo of Spyros Emmanouilidis (prepared piano, synth, tapes) and Savvas Metaxas (modular synth, tapes and field recordings). I could have recognized their names from such bands Good Luck Mr Gorsky or V.I.A. Both sides of this cassette were recorded in concert in Athens in 2014 and this duo plays a more than excellent piece of drone like synth sounds and lots of electro-acoustic sounds. It seems that there is even an open microphone to pick any voice material coming from either or both players. It’s quite a beast (well two, as it’s apparently divided in two parts) of heavily dark synth material. The rumble goes way down into the pit of unknown depth. It’s quite a ‘violent’ piece; not as in a noisy piece, but one of lots and lots heavy sound material, operating on a highly dynamic level. On the other side we find Giorgos Axiotis’ new project Turbo Teeth. He is also known for working as Free Piece Of Tape, Bruised Lee, Holefold, Balinese Beast, Tom Cruisin’ and Wall To Wall Carpeting (and a guy with a sense of humour it seems). Under the latter banner he recorded a piece called ‘Pilliad Echons’, which is also what he plays here but then in a new version. The credits go out to sampler, feedback and voice, and the curious thing is, that a voice can hardly be heard here. In this piece the more ambient nature of the piece is explored, by beautiful free floating sounds, captured in what seems to a self-generative set of audio filters, transforming the piece on end, in ever changing colours. Great stuff. Professional release with great cover. (FdW)
Address: http://www.grannyrecords.org
RINUS VAN ALEBEEK – SUPER 8 (cassette, private)
One has to carefully cut open the paper cover, as otherwise one would loose the information that is on this cover, and nowhere. Maybe an example of destroying packages that made Staalplaat so well known? That could be but Rinus van Alebeek, these days the man behind the Staaltape label, tells me that this is a private release, in an edition of 18 copies, mainly because it’s all handmade/painted, and it comes with a small booklet of sorts/collages/texts. Both sides have one piece of music, one recorded for a local radio station in Valparaiso and one in Melbourne. In both descriptions it sounds like they were composed, rather than improvised. Van Alebeek is a man who loves the sound captured on cassettes and Dictaphones. His machines captures whatever obscure field recording, taped in wide-open spaces (outside, in a church, cages, mines) and it comes with quite some hiss because he needs to crank up the volume. Not entirely his own wound, perhaps, but it gives a distinct quality of it’s own. He uses pitch control and four-track (also cassette) to layer this events and to tell a story. It’s not too carefully planned, but has a rather open character: Van Alebeek doesn’t cut out imperfections. On the ‘dot side’ his piece stays rather on the soft side and on the ‘stripe side’, he uses also some force in his sounds, machines humming or such like. It cuts straight from parts to parts, rather than flowing these into each other. It’s quite a some story he tells here, perhaps not along strict narrative lines, but more abstract poetic lines. You recognize a sound, and sometimes you don’t and all along Van Alebeek transports you in a most curious coach trip. Think Luc Ferrari, but then much more lo-fi. (FdW)
Address: http://rinusvanalebeek.com/?page_id=34