Week 30

PAUL SCHÜTZE – TOPOLOGY OF A QUANTUM CITY (CD by Auf Abwegen) *
JARL – NEUROTRANSMITTERS-SPHERE-MUSIC (CD by Reverse Alignment) *
T.E.F. – LIVE 2022-2023 (CD by DaDa Drumming) *
400 LONELY THINGS – THE NEW TWILIGHT (CD by Cold Spring Records) *
MOOR & WARELIS – ESCAPE (CD by Relative Pitch Records) *
MIRCO BALLABENE & MASSIMILIANO FURIA – EKPYROTIC (CD by Dissipatio) *
FILIPPO MAZZEI – LOVE SONGS IN GRAMS PER SECOND (CD by Dissipatio) *
HUNTING LODGE – NOMAD SOULS 40TH ANNIVERSARY (3LP by S/M Operations/Winter Hill Recordings)
SMEGMA & L’AUTOPSIE A RÉVÉLÉ QUE LA MORT ETAIT DUE A L’AUTOPSIE – TRANSMISSIONS DES FLUIDES (LP by L’eau des Fleurs) *
RAVI SHARDJA – QUATRE SOLILOQUES (LP by L’eau des Fleurs) *
KINVER POND – M00NRISE OVER LEGEDNS GYM (CDR by Chocolate Monk) *
PSANCK – III (CDR by Chocolate Monk) *
MEADOW ARGUS (CDR by Chocolate Monk) *
FORREST FRIENDS – UNTITLED (CDR by Chocolate Monk) *
JOHNNY SCARR – ETUDE IN BLACK (CDR by Chocolate Monk) *
ERIC LUNDE – EAT THE COPY! (3CDR, 2 Books by Ballast/kanshiketsu!) *
RAF MILK – QUICKSAND BOX (cassette by Barreuh Records) *
KINZOISHERE / ABSTRACT HOUSEHOLD WARFARE / GOH LEE KWANG X JACKIE TRISTE – UNSIGNED 3​-​WAY SPLIT SERIES VOLUME II (cassette by Unsigned Records)

PAUL SCHÜTZE – TOPOLOGY OF A QUANTUM CITY (CD by Auf Abwegen)

A name I hadn’t thought about for a long time: Paul Schütze. Recently, his name came up in the Album Years podcast by Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson, and that was a reminder to play some of his earlier band, Laughing Hands and some of his later solo music. One of the albums I heard was ‘New Maps Of Hell’, but I think I didn’t listen to it until the end, as I found it too jazzy for my standards. I forgot which others I heard, and probably would have forgotten this little listening exercise had it not today’s mail bringing Schütze’s ‘Topology Of A Quantum City’, which he created using the session for that 1992 album. As per the information, which is always enlightening, I read that the original album came from his love for 1970s krautrock and electric jazz from the same period (Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock). Unlike, as far as I know, much of his other solo work, he has players here, adding drums, bass, guitar and trombone, all in one studio in Melbourne. These days, players can sit anywhere in the world, record their bit through the internet, and a composer can put them together. Recently, Schütze found a rhythm track from the original sessions and sent it to new players so he could construct a new version of that piece. Cue in Daniel Pennie (guitars), Dirk Wachtelaer (drums), Bill Macdonald ()bass) and Philip Brophy (drums, a different piece than Wachtelaer is on). I went back to ‘New Maps Of Hell’ again to check how different they are, and they sure are. They both share that they wildly played improvised jazzy music with extensive use of electronics. This is the case in the extended version of the title track, which is a more dynamic affair than the original, which rattles on and on in the two new pieces. In these, the starting point might be one of the other players, and the rest add their particular blend. Schütze takes on the role of the composer by mixing the individual parts and spraying his particular ambient over these pieces. The music has that strong jazzy and improvised feeling and fits (as far as I know these things) the krautrock and electric jazz, but Schütze knows very well how to make it something that is all his doing; it’s instantly recognisable as his music. Not necessarily to my taste, but it’s all done with great care and love for detail, which I can appreciate very much. (FdW)
––– Address: https://aufabwegen.bandcamp.com/

JARL – NEUROTRANSMITTERS-SPHERE-MUSIC (CD by Reverse Alignment)

I don’t know how many works I have reviewed over the years from the Swedish musician Erik Jarl, and even when I could look it up, I was not bothered by it. I like his music and am always keen to hear something new. “Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that help nerve cells communicate with each other”, Jarl says on Bandcamp, and I like to see this as a metaphor for how he creates his music. Even when I am unsure, he makes his music using an extensive modular setup. The cables connecting them are like chemical messengers and help the modules to communicate with each other. Maybe I am all wrong. Two of the four pieces are seven minutes long, and the others are 24 and 25 minutes long. There may be a conceptual edge I may not understand, and perhaps if there is, I may not care about it. Not being too bothered about counting and edges has to the mid-summer, Saturday and relatively humid circumstances, which is all draining energy. As always, I don’t mind listening to music, but to drag me from the easy chair to the workbench, all of less than 2 metres apart, committing words to the computer, is a challenging task and yet a task to do. Jarl does an excellent job if I am right about the title being a metaphor for the music creation here. As always, his music moves slowly, going to different places and creating different textures. In these four pieces, there is always the drone aspect, but this time, there is also more emphasis on the rhythmic elements of the music. Not in forceful, brutal ways but as elegantly as possible, ticking, pushing and bleeping away. If there is an effect created by the neurotransmitters in this head, I am not aware of it. But that’s something I could easily say about all the music I hear, so it doesn’t count. The music has a process-like notion and could go on for hours (maybe an avenue to explore for Jarl?), but I am also happy with the 64 minutes of this CD. There’s always so much more to hear! (FdW)
––– Address: https://reversealignment.bandcamp.com/

T.E.F. – LIVE 2022-2023 (CD by DaDa Drumming)

My first encounter with Texan Kevin Novak, a.k.a. T.E.F., was a split album with Bastard Noise. And that exact album is still among my favourite noise albums. Please don’t ask me why and how someone can have a favourite noise album, but that one is a CD I regularly grab out of the stack and re-visit. And as said: Don’t ask me why because appreciating noise and even honestly liking it doesn’t happen from one day to another. You have to put in a little effort in many cases, while in other cases, it’s a kind of ‘love at first noise’ thing. Through development, T.E.F. became a name that, when I see it, always rings the bell of remembering that one beautiful split album.
So when I got to review this new release on DaDa Drumming from Texas, I said ‘yes, please’ because I knew I was in for a treat. And yes, I was. Not because of the same reasons I love other releases, but because this album tells a beautiful story of Kevin Novak on the Road, maybe subtitled a masterclass on how to use your machines without getting boring or repetitive. I’ll explain: The eight tracks are all live recordings relatively close to each other (October 7 & 9 and July 7, 8, 12, 14, 15 & 17), so there is a high probability these live shows were created with (approximately) the identical setups (October and July) and Kevin recorded the shows on the tour, making this album. Now, some noise artists have the same stuff for a few shows and do a sort of the same set by choice of sounds, flow and performance. Let me tell you, Kevin doesn’t, and that makes this album so amazingly interesting.
Sure, if you’re not into noise and listen to this superficially, it’s a fucked up thing, and you won’t understand it at all. But suppose you listen with a musician’s ear and try to follow the chosen steps and structures from the October and July series. In that case, you hear that you’re dealing with a great artist who might be noisy as hell but who is excellent in what he’s doing and original at all moments. And maybe that was the magic that triggered my mind when listening to that split from 2005 (yes, almost 20 years old). Perhaps I was already receptive to recognizing quality. Who knows.
––– Address: https://dadadrumming.org/

400 LONELY THINGS – THE NEW TWILIGHT (CD by Cold Spring Records)

This last year, 400 Lonely Things was reviewed twice in Vital Weekly. Frans reviewed ‘Apophrenia’ just a few months ago (VW 1434), and about a year ago (VW 1391), I had the pleasure of reviewing the previous release on Cold Spring, which was ‘Mother Moon’. In that review, I used the words ‘[Mother Moon] is an absolute beauty. Almost 80 minutes, with deep drones, minimal melodic lines, scarce structural sounds (no rhythms), ambience and, on occasion, a mesmerizing voice preaching solitude and melancholia.’ The ultra-conceptual conception was only slightly off-putting, so I was curious about what Craig Varian did this time.
The album counts 11 tracks with a total playing time of 77 minutes. The concept this time is to create an album based on sounds found in and meticulously plundered from 70’s and 80’s horror movies. The rust is a loopy and dreamy ambience with very dark undertones. Sometimes, it has a few words, a melody line (“VHS-MI55”), and the closing track, “Take Me To Your Secret World Again,” is almost a song with guitars and works, Reminding me a bit of the 1974 track ‘May Rain’ by Sand. It’s hard to capture that particular atmosphere, but 400 Lonely Things does it well.
I can’t tell you how the titles relate to possible sources; probably, there is no one-on-one connection, but that’s all in the artist’s mind. Going towards 60 myself, I must admit I’ve seen my fair share of 70s and 80s horror flicks over the years. And so, for me, this album is more about atmospheres than it is about, for example, the creepiness of FX or storylines that those movies are famous for.
One of my favourites from that era is the ’81 release ‘The Beyond’ by Lucio Fulci. People at that time labelled it a zombie-flic, but it was way, way more than that. Despite having a bit of everything like zombies, ‘general’ gore, satanism, science and more, it was so powerful that it wouldn’t fit any particular genre except for the obvious “Horror”. The piano melody from that movie still plays for free in my head. I still don’t like giant spiders, and I honestly think it still is a really, really good movie.
‘The New Twilight’ is the best I’ve heard from 400 Lonely Things and a great example of what you will find when combining dark ambient, experimental electronics, psychedelic, drone, soundtrack and plunderphonics. As with a horror movie, don’t restrict yourself to one thing; you’ll get bored. The many layers on this album will keep you occupied for more than one listening. The tagline from ‘The Beyond’ fits this release perfectly: ‘And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored.’ (BW)
––– Address: https://coldspring.co.uk/

MOOR & WARELIS – ESCAPE (CD by Relative Pitch Records)

Andy Moor is the guitarist, not the DJ, although Andy does have a DJ alias, DJ Andy Ex, with an excellent show called Blueprints for a Blackout on Echobox. He also collaborated with DJ /rupture. Look for a track called Sometimes It Can Be Hard to Breathe. It’s on freemusicarchive.org, and a CD called ‘Patches’ is available on The Ex mailorder. Most people will know Moor of Dog Faced Hermans and, after his move to Amsterdam as guitarist of the Ex, who are working on new material after their excellent record of ’27 passports’. While most music by the EX and his collaboration with DJ /Rupture can be pretty bombastic, and rightly so, his quieter side comes to light in a multitude of other collaborations. Special mention is given here for Heretics by Anne-James Chaton, Andy Moor, and Thurston Moore. This current record with Marta Warelis is a fine example. Warelis is a member of omawi, a trio with Wilbert de Joode and Onno Govaert and the Xavier Pamplona Septet. Last week, you could read on these pages about her CD with Tobias Klein and Frank Rosaly, which features stunning chamber jazz. Relative Pitch Records released this record after shelving it for two years. And I’m glad this saw the light of day. There’s no escaping this music. Seven pieces, all improvised and played at the infamous Zaal 100 in Amsterdam. Now, I could go into depth into each track. I won’t do that. You can listen for yourself on the Bandcamp page. The musicianship displayed here is beyond apprehension. They listen to each other and create sonic worlds with shards of melody or implied chord progressions, or angular hooks on both instruments, the strings being harnassed by a wooden cage or a wooden plank. In ‘Highway Trajectory’, Moor utilizes a glissando scordatura, which is the term for a string instrument, by playing a string and simultaneously detuning the string by slowly turning the tuning peg. Marta preludes upon it at the beginning of the track: she does the same with a piano string but with a different technique. Needless to say, this is highly recommended. I was in awe the whole time. They recorded and mixed this themselves. Enrico Mangione and Luca Martegani did the mastering at Laboratorio di Sperimentazione Sonora Nitön in Barasso, Italy. They all did an outstanding job. This could easily have been one blurry mess. But no: every single frequency (range) can be heard clearly. The same goes for every small gesture on both string instruments. As this was recorded at the tail-end of all the COVID-19 crises and measures, the record is aptly called ESCAPE, with a beautiful picture made by Moor on the cover. (MDS)
––– Address: https://relativepitchrecords.bandcamp.com/

MIRCO BALLABENE & MASSIMILIANO FURIA – EKPYROTIC (CD by Dissipatio)
FILIPPO MAZZEI – LOVE SONGS IN GRAMS PER SECOND (CD by Dissipatio)

It’s been three weeks since I wrote about the Italian label Dissipatio, and their releases are always on the edges of improvisation and a firm addition of all things atmospheric. Here are two further examples. The first is by Mirco Ballabene on double bass and electronics and Massimiliano Furia on percussion. The third ingredient in their music is max/MSP guiding “the path of the musicians who, in turn, determine its breathing and dynamics in real-time through a midi foot controller managed by Mirco”. I am unsure how that works, and listening to the music, I don’t know much more than that. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t sound like work involving a lot of laptop processing; for all I know, it’s there and not there. Also, I am the first to admit I only know a little about these things, so what sounds like a double bass may not be one. For now, the music seems to have a few ‘weird’ sounds. It also makes this music entirely improvised and much less atmospheric, even when the double bass gives that low-end atmospheric feeling. Their techniques to play the instrument are a combination of traditional ones (i.e. we recognise both instruments) and more extended techniques in which they approach the instruments as objects. Throughout, this is a pretty exciting disc, especially in those moments when the computer is on an equal level with the other players, where it becomes that third instrument, such as in the final piece, ‘D-brane’.
Another worthy note is Dissipatio’s love to present musicians I have never heard of; sadly, there’s not a lot of information available. Filippo Mazzei is such a musician, and while this CD is not yet on Bandcamp and has no additional information on the cover, I can only guess he’s a guitarist, along with some sound effects and amplification. He may also play other instruments, maybe bass or cello, and organ. “these sounds whisper for Marina, Lorenzo, Cecelia’, it says on the cover and, along with the title, we could see these six pieces as love songs, which is not necessarily my first thought when I heard these. Granted, the first one, ‘Sinsitra’, perhaps could be a love song, with its open guitar notes, bowing, and gentle layering of various guitar parts. ‘Sallee’, however, is a piece of bursting and cracking bowed cello sounds, dark and ominous, and, maybe, a lot less of a love song. There is more of that on this album, of deep, heavy-weight sounds set against those lighter guitar sounds. Mazzei takes his time to play the pieces, which last between seven and eleven minutes. That is sometimes too long. Each piece has a set of sounds to be used and a single idea of the composition, but that’s only sometimes enough to continue for nine or ten minutes. There isn’t always the tension a piece needs for such a length, and it’s not spacious enough to let it flow like ambient or drone music, where, maybe, such things are of less importance. Mazzei plays superficially atmospheric music but also requires active listening, and some of the shortcomings become more apparent. Still, it’s also an album with an exciting combination of improvisational qualities, atmospheric approaches and an exciting handling of instruments. Here, conventional methods are also mixed with techniques that are best qualified as ‘way more experimental’. (FdW)
––– Address: https://dissipatio.bandcamp.com/

HUNTING LODGE – NOMAD SOULS 40TH ANNIVERSARY (3LP by S/M Operations/Winter Hill Recordings)

In Vital Weekly 1367, I reviewed a 3CD set by Hunting Lodge, which covered their earliest works as a band. I wrote that after these releases, band member “Karl Nordstrom left, and percussionist Helmut Robison joined, significantly changing the Hunting Lodge sound. After that, it all became much more rhythmic. Not bad at all, but different; maybe a story for another day.” That day, this massive re-issue project of ‘Nomad Souls’ and related material arrived, surpassing the previous re-issues and repressings (on Side Effects and Dark Vinyl). This package contains the original LP, the second LP contains the ‘Tribal Warning Shot’ 12″, plus pieces from compilations and previously unreleased pieces, and the third album contains two live recordings from that time, 1984, some of which were released on ‘The Harvest’, a cassette release by Inner X in 1985. If the group was experimenting with metallic percussion from the start, they got their inspiration from Einsturzende Neubauten and Test Dept. In their next phase, starting with ‘Nomad Souls’, the rhythms became more prominent, got more tribal, and used two drummers on many pieces. The rhythm machine plays no longer a role, or at least not an obvious one. There’s a fascinating documentary about the group on YouTube (link below), with members recounting their history, and it is a must-watch if you have yet to hear of this group. It’s easy to see the appeal of Hunting Lodge’s music at that time. Heavy on using rhythms, tribalistic and forceful, there’s still that old-school industrial feeling to the music. Rattling synthesiser drones, voices from band members singing/chanting mixed with voices from radio and TV and occasionally a guitar playing odd tunes and no chords. Although I am sure not many people have been dancing to this alternative disco music from that time, stylistically, they were on the same course as SPK was for a while (think of ‘Metal Dance’). Although after 40 years, the music sounds a bit dated and very much of its time, I immensely enjoyed this set due to the technology used by the group. The younger me was more interested in the group’s first phase, the slightly more industrial one, but these days, I prefer this more than pure industrial music. It could have been due to having heard too much old-school industrial music or changing tastes.
This set comes with a lovelyly designed booklet with a historical booklet reprint and new information, and it tops off an excellent re-issue project. (FdW)
––– Address: https://fourthdimensionrecords.bigcartel.com/
––– Address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrxGqQS9E78

SMEGMA & L’AUTOPSIE A RÉVÉLÉ QUE LA MORT ETAIT DUE A L’AUTOPSIE – TRANSMISSIONS DES FLUIDES (LP by L’eau des Fleurs)
RAVI SHARDJA – QUATRE SOLILOQUES (LP by L’eau des Fleurs)

In all those years writing about music, I never ‘understood’ Smegma, the Portland-based group, very well. What they are about and such like. What didn’t help is that I never reviewed much of their music, so there seems never a need to ‘dig’ in a lot more. In some way, they are a free-range noise improvisation group with both conventional instruments and less conventional electronics. Sometimes, there may be some post-production or editing, but it may only sometimes be so. In the fluid line-up for this record, we find old and new members, Ace Farren Ford, Mars Ford, Amy DeWolfe, D.K., Dennis Duck, John Wiese, Oblivia, Ju Suk Reet Meat, of which Wiese’s presence may seem the biggest surprise. They work together with a likewise obscure group from France, who calls themselves a boy band, L’autopsie A Révélé Que La Mort Etait Due A L’autopsie (which means, ‘The autopsy revealed that the death was due to the autopsy’), which line-up is less fluid, and includes Aka_Bondage, Alan Courtis, Frank de Quengo, Ogrob. To mention each musician’s background, one could quickly fill a book, and it would reveal many connections. Maybe, to keep the mystery intact, there is no mention of how the music on this album was recorded. Still, maybe the “transatlantic triangle transmissions (Argentina, France, United States)” are all we need to know (Courtis being from Argentina, the rest of his group from France, and all of Smegma from the USA). Each musician delivered something for this pot, and someone cooked up into ten transmissions. The music is not your typical noise record, nor your typical free improvised noise variation thereof. It has that, too, but it’s a lot more. There is tape manipulation, the rockist agenda, downright doodling on percussive objects and synthesiser freakouts. Given the number of people involved, it is great to see the overall coherent approach of the music here. Whoever mixed this did a great job. It may not provide any more straightforward ideas behind either band, not even when combined, but it enhances the mystery even further, so it’s a job well done.
The next record I approached without any background information. I glanced at the cover briefly; none of the names meant much to me, so I decided to listen first. I did and scratched my head, and returned to the information, expecting to read something about modular synthesisers and such. Still, much to my surprise, the album was made with three instruments: a lap steel guitar, an electric stanza, and a bass guitar. Ravi Shardja, whom I had never heard before, also writes, “Three instruments for four soliloquies, as there is no numerical logic here. The bass guitar plays twice on side S, and that’s how it is. Speech is banned. ‘Four soliloquies’ without voice or words: I admit the title may seem paradoxical. However, it took no less than four instrumental attempts to try and translate the thread of my emotions and intellect.” My thinking didn’t go that far with voices and soliloquies as I was wondering about the number four. The way I heard the music, I heard way more than four pieces or one long one of 35 minutes divided into many different sections. From the records I have listened to on this French label, this new one fits quite well with what they do: offering some disturbing combinations of free music and improvised noise while being rooted in the world of musique concrète. It is not one thing or the other all the time; the music here quickly travels from something tranquil to something quite loud. It all has the impression of a rather long collage of sounds and ideas, some of which work quite well and others don’t. But overall, it is an excellent record, whatever it is about. (FdW)
––– Address: https://eaudesfleurs.bandcamp.com/

KINVER POND – M00NRISE OVER LEGEDNS GYM (CDR by Chocolate Monk)
PSANCK – III (CDR by Chocolate Monk)
MEADOW ARGUS (CDR by Chocolate Monk)
FORREST FRIENDS – UNTITLED (CDR by Chocolate Monk)
JOHNNY SCARR – ETUDE IN BLACK (CDR by Chocolate Monk)

A bundle of five new releases by UK’s Chocolate Monk, and it’s five introductions this time. There is no strictly defined musical interest for this long-running UK label (and I only heard a fraction of their releases). One could safely say it helps if it’s weird, strange, alternative and non-conventional (these words might be synonyms, of course). The gradations of seriousness, as far as I can judge, maybe they are all very serious. In the consistently slower summer season, I played all five before committing any words to a review. I decided to rank them from ‘interesting’ to ‘pretty good’, which differs from the order at the top of this review.
The first one is from a group called Forrest Friends. I previously wrote about their music in Vital Weekly 1303, but I wholly forgot about this. Back then, there was little information on the cover—just ‘choc 616’ (which shows the vastness of this label’s catalogue). The monk says, “FILE UNDER: mystical bog karaoke/back-porch astral strum & pluck”, and you can make up as many terms as you want, of course, but it’s not always helpful. Just as before, there is “Percussion, rhythm machines, acoustic objects, voices, jam sessions, free folk and noise, demented pop music”, and this time, there is some place for reel-to-reel manipulation, chopping up tape; just as well, there might be some software manipulation. The lighter side, again, of Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase and Caroliner, plus some of Nurse With Wound’s more playful approaches. Last time, I said something about this being pop/not pop, and to some extent, that’s still the case, but the balance goes to ‘not pop’ this time. Interesting is the word that applies here, and it is one of those releases that made me wonder if it’s all serious or some serious joke. But nice enough either way.
Improvised music may not play a significant role in this label’s catalogue or a huge one if one looks at how much music is played and recorded. Psanck is a trio of Kev Nickells (violin, fretless guitar, voice), Chris Parfitt (horns, kalimbas, voice, small things) and At Strachan (cornet, electronics, samples, small things, voice). They recorded 13 tracks this year in two locations in Brighton, and these pieces are, par one, relatively short, over one minute going up to four. One is almost 13. This is one of the five new releases, most conventionally in terms of improvised music. The group played the music very controlled, with quite some room for silence and atmosphere. Instruments may only sometimes be recognised, but in general, they are. Psanck creates a delicate balance between the traditions of improvised music and a more abstract approach to sound and, at times, even has this slightly outsider feeling. Quite enjoyable, most of the time, but sometimes a bit too much inside the traditions, which is only sometimes something for me.
The next three are right up my alley regarding lo-fi ambient, improvised textures and gritty electronics. Scarr says about his album, “Some significant personal events occurred, and I made some inept “Faulk” music in response (so emo)”. Two long pieces, both over 31 minutes (maybe created for a cassette release?), and I believe Scarr plays the guitar, like any good ol’ blues man would do following some significant personal events, and he feeds these through a bunch of effects, crumbling and crippling the sound to substantial impact. The result is a sort of drone-like sound mass, slowly morphing when the music lasts. It says long enough in one place to be entertaining without coming too much of a repetition. Scarr knows when it’s time to change the tune. It’s not your typical ambient guitar work, as Scarr just as quickly goes for a bit of noise. Still, there is an excellent balance within both pieces, with loud fragments mixed with many quieter ones, and it does so with the right spacing.
Mike Holland is the man behind Kinver Pond; he’s also one-half of the Wellness Regime. Unlike many others on this label, he doesn’t mind mentioning his instruments; “recordings from walking around, noise guitar, sampling mangling, contact mic, voice, found cassettes, and loops”. Listening to the music, I wonder if Kinver Pond uses one (or more) of those old Casio SK1/SK5 samplers with low-resolution quality. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn if he has. Sometimes, his sampling and loops are rather simplistic, but they are saved by using collage techniques, cutting material up and adding voices from media sources, outdoor spoken words and some of his voice material. The latter adds a surprising sort of sound poetry element to the music. The overall result is very much a musique concrète sort of thing but of a highly lo-fi variety. Think of a marriage between Big City Orchestra and ZovietFrance, with the occasional deep mumble of Eric Lunde. They all meet in a studio environment and layer their recordings, occasionally putting in some scissors to material to create new insights, odd connections, and mixed metaphors. At 31 minutes, it is perhaps not a very long release; I wouldn’t have minded hearing some more, but it is a pretty strong album. I saved the best for the last: Meadow Argus, known as Tynan Krakoff, from Ohio. He uses “tape loops & other tape manipulation, organ, keyboard, autoharp, old personal recording and other mysteries”. I am told that the bulk of sounds were recorded during “a momentous summer 2009 trainhopping/hitchhiking trip around America’s West Coast with Tynan’s brother Max”. Meadow Argus has releases on his own DNT Records label, and also Flophouse, Hooker Vision, and Aural Canyon. Based on what I heard on ‘Arboreal Frippery’, there is more to explore. What Meadow Argus does isn’t new or innovative by a long stretch, but he pushes all the right buttons for a quiet ambient industrial music listening hour. Meadow Argus takes more than a few leaves from the ZovietFrance textbook and wrangles some great drones from processed tape loops, a long line of delay pedals, and some hard-to-decipher voices. ‘Every Person Contains A Universe’, the most extended piece here, sounds much like ‘Shamani Influence’ by Zoviet*France regarding voice treatment and compositional development but also new elements that make it sound more like his own. These voice sounds give the music a travelogue idea, as if we are going from one place to the next, which fits the whole concept with the sources being taped on the road. Like Kinver Pond, there is a loop effect going through all these pieces, but with Meadow Argus, it is a little less obvious because of a more extensive use of sound effects. As I said, this is a solid release, and I’d love to hear more. (FdW)
––– Address: https://chocolatemonk.co.uk/available.html

ERIC LUNDE – EAT THE COPY! (3CDR, 2 Books by Ballast/kanshiketsu!)

From this extensive package, I only received the audio side. This package also has two books, one being ‘eat the copy! redux’, being a “textual and textual/visual rendering of elements of ‘somnium 3′”, which is the other book, and I sadly quote in full: “Series 3 follows the somnium template of 137 episodes of 137 words (think physics, not psychics….the significance being that in physics 137 was once believed to be the exact value of the fine-structure constant, a number which, according to Leon Lederman, “shows up naked all over the place.”) the series follows the author’s adventures in covid-induced hallucinations until arriving at the obvious conclusion: we are the virus! We are all copies of the virus! Eat the copy! It is a poetic rendering of the experience, hallucinatory and ultimately enlightening for Mr. Lunde.” All of this has to do with Lunde’s “experience through high-grade covid infection that landed him in the ICU for the first week of December 2023”. It all has to do with “reduplicative strategies long-employed by Eric Lunde”. I am never too sure of how that works. Still, I always imagined a process in which Lunde records something, in this case, his voice, on a lo-fi machine, a Dictaphone, for instance, and plays it back and holds a second Dictaphone to the speaker of the first and repeats that process on and on. Think of Alvin Lucier’s ‘I’m Sitting In A Room’, but without the refined equipment and total disrespect for the acoustics; Lunde is a noise musician.
I admit I found this a difficult one. Not having the books is one thing, but at the same time, I am sure I wouldn’t ‘know’ more if I read these. On the first disc, we find ‘The 137 Degradations’ by Eric Lunde, in which I didn’t recognise any voice but lots of noise, sharpish and lo-fi and, in various instances, only coming from one speaker. It is quite an extreme piece of high-frequency noise music, chopped up into tiny, almost rhythmic bits.
Label boss Blake Edwards takes disc two with “four-layered microcassette to microcassette recordings of layered readings of omnium 3 redlined and then mixed”. The title of his piece explains the process, “137 at 137 inches redline into mixer panned 37 left and right over four tracks tapering to center 3-19-24 copy”, or perhaps not. There is also noise from the higher end of the frequency range, but the rhythmic element is now gone, becoming a loud, dense mass of sound. It’s different from his Vertonen project, in which he occasionally explores noise music but is not as conceptual as he does here. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever heard from him.
The best work is on the third disc. Lunde enlisted the help of J Soliday, Blake Edwards, Karl Paloucek, and Jeph Jerman and had them ‘remix’ his work. These are selected readings from ‘Somnium 3’, thrown about with the remixes. In some of these remixes, the artists apply degrading techniques similar to those used by Lunde, which work very nicely along with the regular recordings of Lunde readings. Some of these pieces are pretty obscure, like the eight-second ‘battery death’ by Blake Edward, and I may not ‘get’ the stories, but I like the variety of approaches here. (FdW)
––– Address: https://ballastnvp.blogspot.com/

RAF MILK – QUICKSAND BOX (cassette by Barreuh Records)

There hasn’t been a release by Eindhoven’s Barreuh Records on these pages in quite some time. Looking at their Bandcamp, I see they have been busy as usual. Raf Milk is Brazilian-Australian and the singer for the Melbourne-based band Milkpunch. He is inspired by Elliott Smith, Lou Barlow, Donovan and Burt Bacharach, which aren’t exactly the names I come across a lot when penning reviews, and maybe no one at Vital Weekly is an expert as such. Raf Milk plays the acoustic guitar and sings, and sometimes voice and guitar doubles; there is also sparse electronics. His recording device of choice is a four-track tape machine, which adds to the sparse character of the music. The whole thing has a rather 1960s feeling, and maybe it’s Donovan (again, a name mentioned a lot in that Bowness/Wilson podcast, so there is more to investigate). If you read my reviews regularly, you know that I don’t care about or listen to lyrics, and the voice is more ‘another’ instrument. So, I have no idea what Raf Milk’s lyrics are about. It was a short cassette with only five songs, clocking in at just over ten minutes, which was sad. I was getting into the music, and then it was over. I may not know much about this kind of music, or pop music in general, or write about it, but it doesn’t mean I don’t like pop music and enjoy it all the same. As such, these ten minutes went on repeat while I was doing a few chores around the house and picked up with ‘regular’ music again later on. It’s an excellent distraction! Hand sewn(FdW)
––– Address: https://barreuhrecords.bandcamp.com/

KINZOISHERE / ABSTRACT HOUSEHOLD WARFARE / GOH LEE KWANG X JACKIE TRISTE – UNSIGNED 3​-​WAY SPLIT SERIES VOLUME II (cassette by Unsigned Records)

It’s not exactly the most recent release of this week, as this was already released on January 1 2022. Only the name Goh Lee Kwang I recognised. His piece was recorded with Jackie Triste in concert in 2010. The two pieces by Abstract Household Warfare are also live recordings. The cassette starts with KINZOisHERE, a piece of radical electronics, deep bass sounds, intense drones and some rhythm, which towards the end sounds a bit like drum ‘n bass. It is a thunderous track, almost noise-like but not very traditional, with a lot of feedback and crashing noise, but more like violent dance music. And it never becomes dance music. Electronics also play a role in the two shorter (six minutes each) by Abstract Household Warfare; however, they are more experimental and less noise-based, discounting the feedback used. His sound is somewhat subdued, penetrates on a different level, and has an instead composed feeling. Different from the final track of this compilation, the 21 minutes of improvised feedback and turntable noise by Goh Lee Kwang and Jackie Triste, of whom I have no idea what the musical instrument used is. It sounds like what Goh Lee Kwang was doing at the time: chaotic improvisations with turntables and DJ mixers. As such, it is more of a document of sorts. (FdW)
––– Address: https://havizaj.bandcamp.com/