BIOSPHERE – CIRQUE (CD by TOUCH)
RADBOUD MENS – CL;CK (CD by Noise Museum)
NICOLAS DESMARCELIER & OLIVIER TOULEMONDE (3″CD by Collectif Ishtar)
JEFF PEARCE – TO THE SHORES OF HEAVEN (CD by Hypnos)
RUMORI ALLA ROTONDA (CD by Alga Marghen)
ROBERT ASHLEY – STRING QUARTETT (CD by Alga Marghen)
BIOSPHERE – CIRQUE (CD by TOUCH)
This is Geir Jenssen’s first release in three years, and it is a perfect
reminder that perhaps brevity and quality are inextricably linked. Not
enough of a good thing is far more preferable than an excess of mediocrity,
after all. Cirque is partly inspired by the story of Chris McCandless, who
hitchhiked to Alaska in April 1992, went walkabout in the wilderness and,
due to an error in his food supply, was found four months later, quite
dead. The music is cinematic, even symphonic in structure. Single sounds
occur throughout as thematic elements, delicately punctuating the melodic
theme with the precision of a snowflake. There are acres of space: sounds
heap up in harmonic order like conscious clouds assuming formation.
Geo-thermal yawns and glacial rumbles close winters grate. Boreas, barely
able to hold his breath, exhales soft, frosty clouds, and melting ice
coruscates as cold slowly shuts its snap. Faraway floes turn turtle. The
swing of spring music retunes the sky. Drops drip like Ligeti’s metronomes,
unwinding with each step the sun takes up its northern tropical staircase.
The primordes awake – algae bubbles like the witches’ sulphuric soup and
lichen creeps like grey fingers up stony spines. Biology stirs in sleeping
stumps, ‘splaying green smudges. Hoof-smears, bird-chitter, morning stars.
No trudge across the winterbound tundra, this. Rather a journey across
unknown surfaces, some sheer, some sweet, all fierce and full of fight to
guard their frailty.
Perfectly packaged with photographs as evocative of silence and space as
the music itself. (MP)
Address: <touch@touch.demon.co.uk>
RADBOUD MENS – CL;CK (CD by Noise Museum)
Radboud Mens may be known through a handful of obscure vinyls, CDRs but
that may be over: here is his first real CDunder his own name (some may
remember his work as/with Hyware and Technoise). Of course, the title of
this CD is it’s programm: Mens, who, besides other jobs, edits music is a
studio using the latest technology, saved the bad data, the click noise.
The rotten data that is usually thrown away. He produces ‘click
electronica’ (as the lads at Mille Plateaux would call it, and I can
imagine they would have wanted to release this). Mens takes these clicks
and samples them. Some are strecthed to make it into the bass rhythm, and
the rest pops along with eachother. What seems to be starting out of sync,
eventually during the piece will result in a steady beat, to which your
foot will tap along. Also, there is an remarkable amount of breaks to be
noted. Added that, unlike some of Mens’ contemporaries like Noto or Ikeda,
his music uses the full dynamic range (inc. mid-frequencies, which are left
off by the others), Mens’ music is much regular, much more danceable, and
maybe much more appealling to a wider audience. And that is the great
strength of this: using the same language as all the other microwavers and
clickworkers, but arriving a deceivingly ‘normal’ music. This might be one
of those groundbreaking albums, that bridges the gaps between styles, or
the gaps between underground obscuratism and overground acceptance. (FdW)
Address: <noise.museum@wanadoo.fr>
NICOLAS DESMARCELIER & OLIVIER TOULEMONDE (3″CD by Collectif Ishtar)
Two names that at least I never heard before, presenting the duet of guitar
and treatments on a 3″ CD. Listening to this, I assumed these ‘treatments’
are realtime lap-top doodlings, as there is too some extent these kind of
cracklings and popnoises from the world of Mego. The guitar is, in all this
treating, still a recognizable feature. Nicolas strums, plucks and prepares
his strings and remains a similar voice to the world of electronics. What
else can be said? This is a solid piece of improvised music, using the
latest technology in combination the best known instrument from rock n
roll. Think Mego with guitars that you can identify. (FdW)
Address: <ishtarco@infonie.fr>
JEFF PEARCE – TO THE SHORES OF HEAVEN (CD by Hypnos)
As the more careful readers will know, I love guitar music, in its many
facets. Either drony, noisy, glitchy (Zammutto!!) or like this on the new
Hypnos CD. Jeff Pearce’s fourth CD is one of simple, very simple beauty!
Spacy as hell (this should be heaven of course) giving that endless waving
of sand in the dessert. I imagine Jeff sitting on the Grand Canyon with a
cowboy hat, the sun hot in the air, and Jeff plucking is guitar. I know,
all of this is studio techniques, using the right amount of reverb and
other small devices to treat your music. But the careful readers will also
know that I really don’t care about technique nor do I wish to know
anything how it was made. I care how it sounds and what it creates sitting
for my speakers. The blurb raves about Jeff sitting next to Robert Fripp,
but I have lost track of our 21st Century Schizoid guitar player, so I
can’t argue about that. But should it be true, I should definetly dig for
Fripp, as Pearce’s work is simply hauntingly beautiful.
Address: <mgriffin@hypnos.com>
RUMORI ALLA ROTONDA (CD by Alga Marghen)
ROBERT ASHLEY – STRING QUARTETT (CD by Alga Marghen)
The historic avant-garde is well documented, well, at least in my opinion.
One of the more interesting omissions, again in my opinion, are the
electronic, electro-acoustic works by John Cage. Rather then another Mode
Records stringquartett CD, I’d love to hear his Cartridge Music on CD, for
instance. This CD documents a stormy night in 1959 when modern music was
performed, written by Cage, Morton Feldman, Juan Hidalgo, Walter Marchetti
and Leopoldo La Rosa. This concert ended in applauding and boo-ing.
Listening to this it’s hard to imagine. It’s very serious played music,
with pauzes of instruments, notes that are played seemingly random, and in
general of such a nature that it still might upset people who have never
heard this kind of music. But to those who witnessed, say Merzbow to just
mention one, this is just very kind music (of course Merzbow doesn’t play
the real concerthall – I am aware of this). This document is extremely well
covered with an extensive booklet, describing Cage and his Italian ‘tribe’
(as the others are called), including newspaper cuttings, which are
translated. Most of these cuttings are very negative about the whole
concert, so it’s controversy all along. For me the whole release is a nice
gem, a snapshot in history, but one that leaves me neutral. It’s nice to
hear and read, but nothing more. The controversy is no longer present, and
the snapshot is a frozen image from the history. If you are keen to find
out more about that, dig this. Meanwhile, I keep waiting for Cartridge
Music, Fontana Mix, Williams Mix and HPSCHD on CD.
Although more my thing is Robert Ashley’s CD. His string quartett was
written as the music to his opera ‘In Sara, Menken, Christ and Beethoven
There Were Men and Women’, but was at that time, 1972, too complicated to
perform, as it needed 42 sound producing modules. Violins produce sound and
through the 42 modules the sounds are changed. In this 1972 we hear a
pre-recorded violin on four track which is delayed through just one
network. If there is anybody out there who remembers the Japanese act
Agencement of the late 80s, this sounds like it. A stream of scraping and
plucking violins, minimalist but very hypnotising. To describe the
underlying ideas of the other two pieces on this CD, ‘How Can I Tell The
Difference?”, means to re-write the booklet, which I will not do. It’s
about sound, it’s reverberation and the sound coming back, a reversal of
the reverb. In the first version we hear the stringquartett piece and the
far away motorcycle in San Francisco Bay mountain tunnels. There is the
sound of the reverb in the tunnels, the far away sound and the ones nearby.
Altogether a strange effect, which comes off as too much grasping
seemingely unrelated sounds together. In the second version, this idea is
repeated, but seems, at least to me, a more clear balance, with the solo
violin being the leading voice. Even when one of the three pieces seems
redundant, I’d say that this is a very welcome historical release. (FdW)
Address: <algamarghen@iol.it>