LOGOPLASM – SUBLIME CAOS NEL CUORE (CDR by S’Agita Records)
PHIL THOMSON – SACN (CDR by S’Agita Records)
LOREN CHASSE – FANTASY APPARITION (CDR by S’Agita Records)
MBD – MP3 SINGLE (MP3 by Null Spenn Records)
EDWARD RUCHALSKI – RADIO JOURNAL (CD-R by the artist)
ANDREA NEUMANN – INNENKLAVIER (3″ CD by A Bruit Secret)
ANNETTE KREBS – GUITAR (3″ CD by A Bruit Secret)
THE SHADOW RING – LINDUS (LP by Swill Radio)
THE NEW BLOCKADERS/ORGANUM – DER GRABEN (7″ by Die Stadt)
MICHEAL PRIME – REQUIEM (LP by Die Stadt)
SELFLOW (CD compilation by Ooze Bap)
HERRMANN & KLEINE – OUR NOISE (CD by Morr Music)
BIFFPLEX – NOUN (CDR by Peatt)
HONS – FERNER LIEFEN (CD by Ferner Liefen Records)
ERNESTO DIAZ INFANTE & ANDERS OSTBERG – COLLABORATION (CDR by Pax)
plus announcements
LOGOPLASM – SUBLIME CAOS NEL CUORE (CDR by S’Agita Records)
PHIL THOMSON – SACN (CDR by S’Agita Records)
LOREN CHASSE – FANTASY APPARITION (CDR by S’Agita Records)
More releases from S’Agita records, which kicks off with a release
from the people that run the label. They are a duo called Logoplasm
and on the cover they describe what they do per track, which is
always fun when you play the music. The majority of the sounds they
use (although I believe there is no hierarchy when they are listed
here) stem from the environment. From underground trains to door
creacking to a helicopter flying over a vast valley. Everything done
with simple recorders and cheap microphones. Maybe that’s a pity,
because with a slightly better microphone and say a minidisc or DAT
recorder, things would have sounded better. Now the sounds are, at
times muddy and hard to differentiate from the others. So after they
collected all of these on tape (multitrack) they built a nice collage
out of these and add, where necessary some synthesizer or a “battery
operated motor bowing contact miked acoustic guitar strings”.
Logoplasm offer interesting collage music, with enough interesting
sound elements, but which could have been recorded a little better.
One Phil Thomson scans computer data into music, just make life
easier for myself and not quote the entire ramble on the cover. This
results in a highly synthesized sound which at it’s best is nice for
a few minutes, but maybe it’s all too much high end noise and
crackles to be enjoyed for the full of 70 minutes. I guess that the
more adventurous sound hacker can find a few sounds in here to built
his own music from.
Loren Chasse was a name that surfaced some years ago, but of whom I
haven’t heard anything lately. He returns here with a disc full of
processed environment recordings and instruments played by motors.
Other then the Logoplasm disc, Chasse goes for the long fields,
rather then the small cut up sounds. So with some pieces you feel you
for minutes you are in a forest, listening to the bird calls. Quite
minimal recording, but (maybe therefore) a great ambient release.
(FdW)
Address: www.sagitarecordings.dot.nu
MBD – MP3 SINGLE (MP3 by Null Spenn Records)
MBD is a live collaboration of Michael Francis Duch, Lasse Marhaug
and Tore HonorÈ Be. The first track starts as a pretty classic
improv piece with regular instruments, but steadily electronics are
taking over, pushing aside percussion and piano. In the end one can
hear a cell phone ring, which seems to be a good end…..There seems
to be a new way for improvisation music, because more and more it
starts including electronics, which I think is a great development.
Track two proves this point: noises generated by the players blend
without any problem into each other and create a rich texture. (MR)
Address: www.kunst.no/origami/null/mbd
EDWARD RUCHALSKI – RADIO JOURNAL (CD-R by the artist)
Mr. Ruchalski is an artist of the new breed: dividing his attention
to many different activities, but all of them related to sound. He
makes sound installations, creates his own instruments and
collaborates with other artists. and then of course, he makes music.
This CD contains several pieces, based on these activities:
recordings of self made instruments, collaborations with others and
his own compositions. The first impression I got from this work is
one of care and detail. Sounds are well put together and create a
tender tension. This is partly due to the minimal melodic lines and
poetic texts appearing every now and then. All of this together
creates a gentle dreamworld without false sentiments. (MR)
Address: rchlsk@aol.com
ANDREA NEUMANN – INNENKLAVIER (3″ CD by A Bruit Secret)
ANNETTE KREBS – GUITAR (3″ CD by A Bruit Secret)
To review these two mini CDs is of course they are released at the
same time on the same label, but also because these two ladies work
together playing their music live. Andrea Nuemann goes inside the
piano (the literal translation of ‘Innenklavier’). You may have
experienced that if you hold something against your ear (say a piece
of paper) and rustle it, it sounds different then if you ear it from
a distance. All of the sounds used on this mini disc may come from
inside the piano – but none can be recognized as such. Although it’s
listed as its instruments ‘inside piano and mixing desk’, I believe
more was used. A laptop? A sampler? Tons of sound effects? who knows?
Maybe who cares? Andrea Neumann has created a whole range of sounds
and works with those those to create three fascinating pieces of
music, in which the piano may not be recognizable very much, but
which are neverhteless great pieces of electro-acoustic music. Very
nicely done.
Her partner Annette Krebs plays guitar and her three pieces were
recorded in real time. That I believe. The first and the last track
here are very present in the sound spectrum, and track two (all three
are untitled) is very soft. She plays the guitar with various
objects, like a ventilator, a bow and creates at times a droney
affair, and at other times a more noisy pattern. The second track
here is a bit of an odd ball, because it seems to consist of crackles
only and surfaces way beneath the level of audibility… That makes
this into a very varied disc displaying some great skills improvising
on the guitar. (FdW)
Address: m_henritzi@club-internet.fr
THE SHADOW RING – LINDUS (LP by Swill Radio)
Another record from the Shadow Ring, which left me puzzling before
(Vital Weekly 198). Here they are limited to four persons, playing a
variety of keyboards, flute, guitar, tapes and vocals. Again they
play this strange mixture of sounds in an improvised manner, with
kinda like spoken word of somebody who speaks very closely to the
microphone. I really don’t know what to think of this. The Shadow
Ring certainly have something appealing in their playing and their
approach to music, which is kinda unusual, even for trained
experimental ears. But the question: is it good? is it enjoyable?
Maybe. Essential in its weirdness? Yes most definetly. Life not easy
here. (FdW)
Address: www.anti-naturals.org/swill
THE NEW BLOCKADERS/ORGANUM – DER GRABEN (7″ by Die Stadt)
You surely as I gave up on The New Blockaders and Organum. It seems
like every second of whatever these boys recorded has been released,
but new stuff always seems to pop up. This new (??) 7″ is almost
three minutes in length – and that’s a and b side together… what’s
next, the 1 minute 7″ (both sides)? ‘Der Graben’ holds trademark
pieces by these two bands. Scraping, scratching metal at a furious
volume level. Great, of course. But nothing new since I first their
‘Pulp’ 7″ and that is quite some time ago… Essential, mostly of
their fans. (FdW)
Address: www.diestadtmusik.de
MICHEAL PRIME – REQUIEM (LP by Die Stadt)
Micheal Prime is of all the members of Morphogenesis probably the one
that is most active when it comes to releasing solo works. I have no
idea why this is a requiem… it certainly has not much to do with a
standard sort of requiem, so no ‘Agnus Dei’ or ‘Sanctus’. There are
two pieces that make up his entire ‘Requiem’ and the sound sources
are improvisations by Negative Entropy (a band with Geert Feytons of
Noise Makers Fifes and Micheal Prime), a sound sculpture by Len Lye
and the voice of Miro. On the first side we find a densely layered
piece of sounds, which are all kinda hard to recognize what they are.
They most sound like wind blowing over a desert. A kind of a radical
ambient that is not aiming for relaxing and beauty, but a kind of
processed outdoor field recording at length. The other side open with
shorter sounds, in which may be an instrument can heard, but they
seem to be drenced in a bit of too much of reverb (which is actually
also present on the first side, but less annoying). Ultimately the
piece moves over to more ambient textures like on the first side. In
terms of processing sounds and presenting a piece, this new work by
Prime fits well into his past catalogue of sound, but on the other
hand seems also to be more minimal and that he uses lesser sounds to
achieve something with the same impact. Packed in a beautiful
gatefold sleeve (but that’s the sort of thing standard with Die
Stadt, I believe). (FdW)
Address: www.diestadtmusik.de
SELFLOW (CD compilation by Ooze Bap)
Let’s hope this will be not a new hype: release a CD with no cover
and tell the buyer to download the cover from a website… well,
cover… it’s just the tracklist. The Spanish label Ooze Bap offers
three artists on this compilation, two of them are well-known (of
course to some degree) and one is lesser known. The first one,
Artificial Memory Trace, consumes almost half of the CD with two
lengthy pieces. Blending together environmental sounds (wind, ducks
and others more difficult to recognize) with little bits of
electronic sounds he crafts together an excellent piece of musique
concrete and soundscaping. To me it seems like Artificial Memory
Trace puts less sounds in his pieces then before but that these
sounds work from within more then they used to do. More tension. The
next band is Antenna Farm, the known operators of laptop from London.
They have around seventeen minutes for four tracks, two lengthy and
two short. Antenna Farm have a more electronic style. Whatever they
have put into their laptops, it comes out distorted, time stretched
and heavily processed. Collage music is their style too, but in a
much more harsher way. Hit and run style. Gabriel Amato is the
unknown one around here, at least for me. Someway he is involved in
the Diskono posse. Sad to say that I found his tracks also least
interesting. Laptopian noise, but without anything of his own. Short
but rather ideas then worked out into anything. With the beauty of
Artificial Memory Trace and the power of Antenna Farm, it’s
difficult. (FdW)
Address: www.oozebap.org
HERRMANN & KLEINE – OUR NOISE (CD by Morr Music)
Herrmann & Kleine are both active workers in Berlin’s lively techno
scene, and their duo project is just one of them. This is, I believe,
their second CD and a step forward, although one needs to get through
the entire disc to hear this. The opening pieces are what we would
expect, but after ‘Her Tune’, things come in either real pop tunes,
such as in ‘Kissing You At 120 BPM’, with marimba sounds, or more
rock oriented in ‘Blue Flower’ complete with vocals and guitars and
ambient in ‘Catch A Snowflake’. Herrmann & Kleine show us that it’s
possible to create new pieces using the idiom of techno, but in new
paths. ‘Our Noise’ is a deceptive title; it may be their noise for
sure, but it’s not noise by the common definitions of noise. It’s
rather a nice, warm record that is varied in what it has to offer – a
bit of hip hop, eighties rhythms and guitar riffs. Great stuff. (FdW)
Address: www.morrmusic.com
BIFFPLEX – NOUN (CDR by Peatt)
Biffplex are a two piece group from Brisbane, Australia, who
carefully release this as their first CD (albeit a CDR). They say
they work on lw tech equipment and that the material was recorded in
a semi improvised way to four track and then mixed on a PC (why not
directly to a PC? I don’t know). The four pieces are titles by dots
(one for track one, two for track two etc) and are all lengthy
excursions in ambient, or rather in drones. Whatever it is that use,
probably some analogue gear and sound effects, they know damm well
how to create drone music that is fascinating to hear. It moves over
many layers, with lots and lots of sounds happening all over the
sound spectrum. It seems that every sound within each track has it’s
own place and that each is processed individually. Also all four
tracks flow into each other which makes it an even more relaxing
disc. Stuff like this would need a home on Hypnos or one of the
Amplexus labels and get the attention it deserves. I believe it’s
beyond the stage of a CDR. (FdW)
Address: <pleasingeveryone@yahoo.com>
HONS – FERNER LIEFEN (CD by Ferner Liefen Records)
Hons is a new on the scene musician from Austria, who releases his
‘Ferner Liefen’ on (probably his own) Ferner Liefen Records. It’s a
strange record. It seems to me that all the sounds on this record
were sampled from other records and pieced together in the wonderful
world of digitalia. So far so good, because aren’t we all thieves in
a way? But Hons ends up with thirteen tracks (well or eight… the
cover lists eight titles over thirteen tracks on the CD) which are a
hotchpotch of styles. It reaches from a powerful moment of ‘Mit Horn’
which has a lot of jazz samples, organs and lounge elements to the
chaotic singer song writer opening of ‘Molly’s Got A Rider’, with
blasts of guitar and noise. Furthermore he uses elements borrowed
from hip hop, avant-garde and maybe even far away techno bits. It’s
nice to get such a hotchpotch presented, but I found most of the
ideas rather mediocre and it seems that it’s never really worked out
into some sort of real composition. All the sounds used are presented
rather arbitarily and seem like they could easily be replaced by
anything else. At it’s best: an ok thing, but leaving you with an
unsatisfied feel. (FdW)
Address: www.hons.at
ERNESTO DIAZ INFANTE & ANDERS OSTBERG – COLLABORATION (CDR by Pax)
Ernesto Diaz Infante is a San Francisco based multi-instrumental
artist and Anders Ostberg hails from Eskilstuna, Sweden and is a
field recorder and “manipulator of sonic time and space”. I have no
idea whether these two teamed up together to record these 49 minutes
of sonic manipulations. I heard a bunch of radio and tv noises fed
through a couple of echo machines and extensive processed hiss.
That’s it for the entire 49 minutes. If experimental music is this
easy, I pass on. (FdW)
Address: www.paxrecordings.com