TREE (CD by Musica Moderna) *
CLAUDIO ROCCHETTI – THE FALL OF CHROME (book + cassette by Musica Moderna)
EMMANUEL ALLARD – NOUVELLES UPANISHADS DU YOGA (CD by Baskaru) *
TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA & KEN IKEDA & TOMOYOSHI DATE – GREEN HEIGHTS (CD by Baskaru) *
LETHE – CATASTROPHE POINT #9 & #10 (2CD by Oral) *
MOUNTAIN BLACK – CLOSING IN (CD by Moozak) *
GUIDO MOBIUS – THROUGH THE DARKNESS GATHERS – SPIRITUALS BY GUIDO MOBIUS REMIXED (CD by Karaoke Kalk)
CELER – RADISH (CD by Commune Disc) *
TOBIAS HELLKVIST – TURQUOISE (CD by Small Fragments Recordings) *
OH, YOKO – I LOVE YOU (CD by Normal Cookie) *
LIGHTS DIM WITH GALLERY SIX – BETWEEN SPACES (CD by Kaico) *
MARINA FAGES – MADERA METAL (CD by Panai) *
NICK HENNIES – DUETS FOR SOLO SNARE DRUM (CD by Weighter Recordings) *
D’INCISE – (ARAL) (CD by Mystery Sea) *
DISTANT CORRESPONDENT – SHATTER/BADLANDS (7″ by Static Caravan)
WALL TO WALL CARPETING – PILLIAD ECHONS (CDR by Orila) *
ANTIDRÖM (CDR by The Association For Depth Sound Recordings) *
KAJKYT – II (CDR by God Records) *
RISHIN SINGH – THREE WEEVILS (CDR by Avant Whatever) *
JLIAT – SEIN UND ZEIT (CDR, private) *
JUSTIN MARC LLOYD – ANXIETY FLOOD CONT. (cassette by Rainbow Bridge)
VERTONEN – BLIND VENTRILOQUIST (cassette by Rainbow Bridge)
SOUP OF FREAK (cassette by Rainbow Bridge)
TREE (CD by Musica Moderna)
CLAUDIO ROCCHETTI – THE FALL OF CHROME (book + cassette by Musica Moderna)
Two releases on a label from Berlin, which is run by Claudio Rocchetti. It’s my first encounter with this label, and the first one is a trio disc recorded ‘on a rainy winter’s day in Berlin’. It has two long improvised pieces by Chris Abrahams (DX7, analog synth on track one and pump organ on track two), Burkhard Beins (percussion, objects, zither (1), analog synth, live electronics (2)) and Andrea Ermke (samples, field recordings). If there is one word that applies here, I’d say that’s the word ‘careful’. In each of these two pieces time seems to be moving very slow, or at least it gives us this impression. There is not really a sense of direction here, as it seems that they intend and succeed to play long form sounds, without a strict being or end. That doesn’t mean things stay on the same level all the time. The whole thing is rather moving, buzzing and vibrating and every time you play this you will discover something new. Careful doesn’t necessarily equal quiet here either. It just means that all the sounds are played with great care. This is quite unusual minimalist improvisation music, which is all about long sustaining sounds and less about collages, cut-ups and stop-motion techniques. It’s wonderfully unified work of drone like improvisation, but then with a lot more happening inside. Excellent release.
The other release is by Rocchetti himself. We know his work with audio cassettes, but a while he realized that “after many years experimenting with tapes — alone or in collaborations with others — I started to feel lost; like I had exhausted the subject and all ideas. Perhaps I was too influenced by the new wave of cassette culture. Pretentious thoughts started coming to mind.” His research/doubt if you will brought him in contact with a few people that also use cassettes, either as a means of sound production or as a label boss, and he brought his questions to them: how important is the cassette? He got quite a number of responses and this we find in very nice booklet. Texts, images, drawings by key players of cassettes then and now: Kam Hassah, Brendan Murray, Ralf Wehowsky, Guillaume Siffert, Riccardo Benassi, Howard Stelzer, Daniela Cascella, Mattin & Ray Brassier, Marcel Turkowsky, Yan Jun, Jérôme Noetinger, Joseph Hammer, Lionel Marchetti, John Olson, Massimiliano Bomba, Harold Schellinx, Rinus Van Aleebeck, Maurizio Bianchi, Francesco Cavaliere, to give the complete list. I always the story part more than the visual side. It’s good to read that Stelzer actually doesn’t like cassettes. Great story. And perhaps also timely with the 50th birthday of the cassette, celebrating this year – long live Lou Ottens, the Phillips engineer who made this possible – and the compact disc twenty years later. This man needs a statue in Eindhoven, I’d say. The book is great, nice retro black and white design, just like you had them in the 80s. When working on this book (90 pages), Rocchetti collected a large quantity of tapes, found on the street and used them for a three hour composition. This was then copied back to the tapes, of which each book has one. The music is very soft, almost inaudible, but if you decide to play it loud enough, there is a whole new sound spectrum opening up for you. I have no idea if these sounds are taken from cassettes, but if they are, Rocchetti must have done some mighty fine analogue processing to this material, as it sounds all highly obscure. This piece, how long does it last I was wondering!, is a great piece, very deceiving, rising from hiss and going back to hiss. Another excellent production this book and cassette. (FdW)
Address: http://www.musica-moderna.org/
EMMANUEL ALLARD – NOUVELLES UPANISHADS DU YOGA (CD by Baskaru)
TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA & KEN IKEDA & TOMOYOSHI DATE – GREEN HEIGHTS (CD by Baskaru)
Lots of the music discussed in these pages is a of more radical nature, but it depends, I guess, who is the listener. If you never heard any music of this kind, then all might be radical; and if you hear a lot of the same thing, it might be less radical. Harsh noise walls, for me, is about the most boring, regular music I can imagine. Radicalness can lie in sonic approaches, and that can be very soft or very loud; or perhaps even something that is quite easy. Here for instance we have one Emmanuel Allard, who started to make electronic and digital music in the late 90s, did a release in 2003 as Fabriquedecouleurs, and now releases ‘Nouvelles Upanishads Du Yoga’. He has changed his approach entirely and only uses a ‘hybrid analog-digital modular system, the Buchla 200e’. These tones bang against each other, are noisy, a utterly dry, fed through effects – inside the machine I assume – or stand solo as a wave form or a block form. This is quite radical music, I think, in all its simpleness and highly direct approach. The sounds are pressed on this disc very loud and very clear and beat right into your eardrum. I am reminded me here, in all its sheer minimalism, of the work of Kozo Inada, but Allard applies a bit more abrupt cut-up techniques to the plate, and perhaps occasionally reaches for some real noise (more than Inada did), such as the white noise in ‘Adelphi Wave (Pythian Walks)’. High and mighty radical music this release, an excellent discovery.
Less radical I guess is the release by Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board), Ken Ikeda (SD404 (string decoder) and DX7 (synth) and Tomoyoshi Date (toy piano, pump organ, vibraphone, piano and field recording). Date is a member of Opitope, Illuha and Melodia and maybe that’s the reason that this release is less heavy on the frequencies than we expect from the Nakamura. His playing seems to be serving that of the others, and especially Date seems to be playing the soft card here. It’s of course not that Nakamura’s playing has disappeared, and is something dominant in the mix, such as in ‘Balcony I – beta’ or the start of ‘Balcony II’, but the soft, melodic touches brought forward by Date makes this a highly enjoyable release. I am not sure what Ken Ikeda brings on here, but I am sure it’s also part of that somewhat melodic touch, otherwise it wouldn’t be so nice, ‘sweet’ even. I quite enjoyed this odd pairing of noise, glitch and ambient. It works wonderfully well. Maybe in a sense of radicalism, one could think that’s the radical thing about it: the mixture that looks odd if you hear it described, but makes great sense when you hear it. Excellent release. (FdW)
Address: http://www.baskaru.com
LETHE – CATASTROPHE POINT #9 & #10 (2CD by Oral)
Rather than being a composer of music, or someone who does field recordings, or someone who builds installation pieces, Kiyoharu Kuwayama, also known as Lethe, is a man who creates site specific music. For him the space in which he is to create music is as important as anything else. Well, perhaps besides having a pair great microphones. But drag Lethe into an abandoned industrial site, an empty metro station, tunnels or something equally cavernous, and he will produce some music. I gather he takes very little with him in terms of tools, but a bow or two might surely one of them. In June 2012 he was in Montreal and performed on two different locations. The first is at Silo no. 5 where we find a permanent installation by Emmanuel Madan (of The User) in the harbor of Montreal, where Lethe choose to play the upper floor. The microphone is somewhere so we hear the large reverb of this space. The sound sources were found on the spot, and consist of metal sheets and rubber detritus. Number ten of the Catastrophe Series was recorded in a tunnel, built in 1931, but closed since long. It was, despite the hot weather, very cold inside. It’s not clear what he plays here. In both of these pieces (#9 consists of two parts) we hear the large reverb of the spaces, and Lethe playing around with sound proportions of these places, by using waste material. It may sound like there is a fair portion of reverb used, but such is not the case. It’s hard to classify this as field recordings, I think. Perhaps, in a way, it is field recordings, but of course it’s someone playing sounds in a large hall, so perhaps ‘music’ is a better word. If nothing would happen in these spaces, then surely not much have been recorded? So, sound art perhaps, acoustic space research? I would rather think of this in musical terms: here we have two pieces, of around forty-five minutes, which sound great. Highly mysterious, almost like the soundtrack of a horror movie (especially in ‘Catastrophe Point #10’), and moving very slowly around the place, but never leaps into mere repeating of sounds. Very much like a continuous stream this, and maybe its a cliche, but also very zen like. Excellent release, once again. (FdW)
Address: http://www.oral.cq.ca
MOUNTAIN BLACK – CLOSING IN (CD by Moozak)
Martin Kay from Melbourne is the man behind Mountain Black and ‘Closing In’ is his debut album. He is a sound recordist, artist and designer predominantly working with environmental field recordings (is there something as ‘non-environmental field recordings’, I wondered) and found sounds and his current interests are ‘centered on capturing the unheard acoustic characteristics and sonic phenomena of an object from unusual and/or often impossible perspectives”. He uses ‘cross-synthesis processing techniques and digital editing programs’. If I understood this well, he sticks a microphone in the air and sees what he captures and treat that on the computer – but that’s perhaps a gross exaggeration of what it is. The ten pieces on his album are somewhere between thirty-four seconds and twelve minutes. Judging what I hear it seems that Kay processes single blocks of sounds, and then mixes these various processed versions together. If not, then it might be one particular event is on top of the rest and thus becomes the main voice of a piece. Each piece has its own voice, and the origins of these field recordings can’t be traced back easily. Maybe wind sounds, insects, water shores? His music works best when there is something happening, as in ‘Messin’, with its swift and rapid changes that occur a few times in the piece. When things are static and minimal, such as in ‘Diegetic’, one could all too easily think this is just another field recording processed, but without much variation. Overall, I think, this release was alright. Nothing great, nothing spectacular, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing new in the world of processed field recordings. But, as said, for what it is, Mountain Black did a fine job. It’s made with some mighty fine ear to the ground of sound scape productions. (FdW)
Address: http://www.moozak.org
GUIDO MOBIUS – THROUGH THE DARKNESS GATHERS – SPIRITUALS BY GUIDO MOBIUS REMIXED (CD by Karaoke Kalk)
A sympathetic mensch, our Guido Mobius. He’s a musician, but also a promoter of new releases, so when he announced that there was going to be a remix CD of his ‘Spirituals’ (see also Vital Weekly 838), I wrote him and kindly asked him to send me one, since I don’t like remix CDs of this type, nor compilations. But the label, Karaoke Kalk, did, so there I am. What I miss in press releases that come along with releases like this, is the good ol’ question: ‘why is this released’? I wrote extensively on this subject before, about the fact that I can think of good reason to have Junkie XL remix Presley, or The Orb doing U2, crossing markets and all that, but do the fans of say Senking, Rotaphon, Gangpol & Mit, Jason Forrest, Candie Hank, Mesak, Sick Girls and Daniel Padden, rush out to get all of the Mobius releases so far? Or in fact, this remix compilation? I can’t imagine this happening. Or that Mobius fans will hear such names as Candie Hank or Senking for the first time, but will that bring them new fans based on a track? I doubt all of that. I played this CD with great interest, I even enjoyed most of it, to hear once, but I really preferred the original spirit of ‘Spirituals’. (FdW)
Address: http://www.karaokekalk.de
CELER – RADISH (CD by Commune Disc)
TOBIAS HELLKVIST – TURQUOISE (CD by Small Fragments Recordings)
OH, YOKO – I LOVE YOU (CD by Normal Cookie)
“Radish was created as a daydream. Each track was made of different layers of instruments, field recordings, television and discarded objects. The tracks were mixed without specific structure and instead in an almost blind and directionless form, to later be processed together for a flowing, pure and imaginative sequence of memories”, says Will Long on the cover. Celer is, since his wife passed away, his solo project and it has an impressive catalogue of released works. For a while I thought Long was no longer using the name Celer, but apparently I am wrong. The name Celer is a household name by now in the world of drone music, so I can imagine continuing that. Having said that, and adding that I always enjoy the music of Celer, I can’t help noticing that many of the music by Celer is quite similar. A friend of mine calls it the ‘cigar compositions’, because of the way these pieces look like on a computer screen. Slow fade in, a similar volume for the entire duration, quick fade out. Celer on ‘Radish’ has nineteen tracks and some of these pieces seem to flow into another, but by and large it has such a build up. The power however of this release lies in the fact that these pieces are relatively short and consist of sounds which not always seem to fit together, a slight dissonance in the world of drone. The sustaining, orchestral samples make sometimes some what uneven pairings, but overall this release works quite well for me. But then, obviously, I like drone music and especially when it’s not as standard, and ‘Radish’ clearly isn’t. This is one of the nicer releases by Celer I heard in some time.
I usually don’t like to lump releases together, but the CD by Tobias Hellkvist is also on a Japanese label and arrived on the same day. I don’t think I heard his music before, but apparently he has some works on Home Normal. According to the information he plays ‘a guitar, a organ, candlesticks and more instruments […] recording to reel to reel’ – which is something one doesn’t necessarily hear, I think. The drone music of Hellkvist is, following the album I just heard by Celer, fine but rather of a more regular nature, with the rising of tones, the slow, minimal shifts of the sound material and the amorphous sound approach, in which we don’t hear a guitar, organ or candlesticks per se. Everything is transformed into a giant singing mass of sounds, heavily layered but still singing and ringing. In the title piece I was thinking of voices, and more so those of 10CC “I’m Not In Love”. The music of Hellkvist is well made, but not the most original around. It’s fine release, well produced and somewhat mainstream ambient/drone. That’s not bad at all.
And there is more lumping in to do, as behind Oh Yoko, we find Will Long again, teaming up with Rie Mitsutake, who, as Miko, has released albums on Plop and Someone Good (the latter see Vital Weekly 753). Here they team up (they also have a record store and Normal Cookie is their label) to play some music together. We see Long drifting away from the pure drone music and play music that would perhaps fit Miko better. These are songs! Played with vintage electronic and acoustic instruments, toys and microphones and found sounds. Japanese styled pop which we find on such labels as Mego, Spekk and Someone Good. Introspective, folk like, pleasant, home brew pop music. Mitsutake is of course the one that is singing in her distinctive voice, part mumbling, part singing, and which is of course something one should like. The musical part of this is however right spot on, very lively, even when highly folky and introvert. Very Japanese, I should think, but it works very well. Very relaxing, very much like a post summer breeze. (FdW)
Address: http://communedisc.com
Address: http://smallfragments.tumblr.com
Address: http://www.normalcookie.com
LIGHTS DIM WITH GALLERY SIX – BETWEEN SPACES (CD by Kaico)
MARINA FAGES – MADERA METAL (CD by Panai)
Two releases from Japan, on different labels, but with the same distributor, and both of them with non Japanese artists. Behind Lights Dim we find one Marek Kaminski from Poland, who has previously released on Audio Gourmet, Preserved Sound and GV Sound. He works here together with Gallery Six, a friend from Hiroshima, whose real name is Hidekazu Imashige. Here we have an album of ambient music, plain and simple. These are the (grand-) sons of Brian Eno, armed with guitars, lots of them, looped and layered, piano, field recordings and a bit of samples. Ten pieces, forty-five minutes and it has that ambient guitar sound that is popular due to say Stars Of The Lid, or even more popular, Sigur Ros. Everything is set to ‘endless sustain’, but there is enough melodic touches to the pieces, to defy that simple, ‘oh another drone record’, which this is surely not. The space here is wide open, but the space here is on earth. Its easier to think of a highway crossing the dessert, than stars in the sky. More laid back slide guitar like, Ry Cooder anyone?, then the Tangerine Dreams of the cosmos. An excellent mellow album of humble tunes. You can easily wonder about such notions ‘avant-garde’, ‘innovation’, and none such being the case here. It’s not notions that these two musicians care about. They do what they think is best, and as such they a great job.
I am not sure why Argentinean musicians play such a big role – or so it seems – on the Panai label, unless I miss out something, but here we have an album by Marina Fages. She sings, plays guitar and the charango, a South American string instrument, along with the help of others on electric guitar, baritone sax, claron, clarinet, banjo and double bass. She has plays in El Tronador (‘a folky cloudy mountain experimental band’) and R353 (‘electroacoustic improvisation’) and Los Hnos Turdera (‘experimental pop’). The cover also holds a bunch of her drawings, so you bet she’s an allround artist. Her lyrics are about ‘transformation across intense, hard experiences and love’. Her music is quite poppy – very poppy even – but I can easily imagine that this is a bit too weird to enter the charts (do charts still exist? mmmm, don’t know really), but I thought of this as highly pop based. I don’t hear the hard experiences as such, but that’s perhaps because I think much of this music is very sweet. Maybe it’s the voice of Fages that is responsible for this, but this sounds all harmless, which is of course not bad. Lots of guitar and singing, sometimes with these other instruments, but usually without too much rhythm from drums etc. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I don’t understand what the lyrics are about, but which seem to be very important. That is perhaps nice, but puts the reviewer in a rather difficult position. I quite enjoyed this release, but throughout I think this is all too sweet and perhaps all a bit too similar. Still not bad, for a post summer’s day. (FdW)
Address: http://www.naturebliss.jp
NICK HENNIES – DUETS FOR SOLO SNARE DRUM (CD by Weighter Recordings)
It may seem a bit odd: a solo snare drum release which is called ‘Duets For Solo Snare Drum’. With whom is Nick Hennies playing, I wondered. The website of Weighter – which is actually Hennies’ own label – provides some insight. ‘A solo snare drum performer in duets with three non-performative musical elements’. Hennies performs three pieces here, one by John Cage, one by Peter Ablinger and one by himself, and the non-performative elements are, resp, silence, noise and tones. In his own piece he includes contributions from Henna Chou, Brent Faris and Vanessa Rossetto. It’s the piece that is also the longest in duration and the one that works best for me. The Cage piece is silent, but not with the absence of sound, just silent. It’s perhaps a piece that one could expect when thinking ‘Cage’, ‘silence’ and such like. The Ablinger piece is already way more interesting as here we are gently deceived by Hennies. On the surface it sounds like some static hiss, but somewhere in there we hear the snare drum moving. It has a slow, shifting phase to it. In his own piece things remain very minimal also, but here too we have this slow phasing of sounds, which over the course of the twenty three minutes this lasts grows in intensity, until other sounds (from other players? from Hennies himself?) drop in at say fifteen minutes and the whole thing gets more hectic and nervous. It makes a great piece. Great release also. I played this three times in a row, before even making up mind what I actually thought about it. I think it’s a powerful release, which keeps growing, but as a whole every time, but also in the release itself. The best is kept to the end. (FdW)
Address: http://www.weighterrecordings.com/
D’INCISE – (ARAL) (CD by Mystery Sea)
From the slowly growing empire of Mystery Sea and Unfathomless this week a new release on the first label by our man from Switzerland, D’Incise, behind which we find Laurent Peter, who has perhaps a likewise growing empire of releases. Other than his musical talent, he is also a designer, working for the Insubordinations labels and as an improviser he played with Cyril Bondi, Jason Kahn, Thomas Korber, Norbert Moslang and others. Looking back on his previous releases, I think there is an upwards curve in terms of sound treatment, production and composition. He seems, but that’s how I perceive things like this from the outside, more and more in control of his methods and creates some interesting computer music. No doubt there are a bunch of field recordings at the core of this, but none of them are easily be traced back to their origins. One should think sea sounds, sea shores and dunes, based on the crackles and sustaining sounds intertwining each other here. It works really well, and D’Incise uses the dynamic spectrum in an excellent way. Being very low end and very high end, and the whole forty some piece is clearly divided in various parts, each with its own character. Slow and peaceful but with some nasty undercurrent. Like the sea itself! (FdW)
Address: http://www.mysterysea.net
DISTANT CORRESPONDENT – SHATTER/BADLANDS (7″ by Static Caravan)
The pop end this week comes courtesy of Static Caravan, who always amaze me with new bands, here Distant Correspondent, the band around David Obuchowski (also known from Goes Cube), together with Emily Gray (from Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia), Michael Lengel, Edith Frost and Tyler Wilcox, although these pieces seem to be recorded through mail. A conventional band line up and conventional pop/rock tunes, but with a nice dark twist to it. Music that is called indie music – isn’t that all the music we are dealing with in these pages – which I usually call ‘man with beards’ music, but ignore me. These songs sound like something that could have as easily come from the early Factory Records (although Hannett would have perhaps done another production, I guess) or 4AD. Maybe a bit doomy, but ‘death is not an option I can afford’ is not the sunniest lyric I heard recently. Hold on, sun is gone, clouds are in place. Music as a self-fulfilling prophecy? Whatever, by the time this day is over, I’ll play this 7″ again, and probably be in a 7″ mood to play some of their older counterparts again. That makes me smile, any day! (FdW)
Address: http://www.staticcaravan.org
WALL TO WALL CARPETING – PILLIAD ECHONS (CDR by Orila)
One of the striking features of the Greek label Orila is their presentation, which is simple but it looks distinctly different and better than most releases on the same format. Here for instance we have a release which comes in a custom laminated cork case, with one-sixth of the image. The music is by Giorgos Aksiotis, who is a member of Free Piece Of Tape, Bruised Lee, Holefold, Balinese Beast, Tom Cruisin’ and solo, besides Wall To Wall Carpeting, as Turbo Teeth. ‘Pilliad Echons’ was already recorded in 2009, and I have no idea why it took so long to release it. There are five pieces here, all of them being over six and just over eight minutes long, and there is no mention of instruments. But it’s not difficult to guess this is the work of keyboards, loop devices and some acoustic sources, such as bells and flutes (clearly present in the opener ‘Burt Raiden’ – you can see where he gets his fun). I was thinking of zoviet*france here, for some odd reason, which I am not sure off myself, but the second piece is all about drones, with a bit of drum machines towards the end. Maybe a tad too simple I think, which can also be said of ‘Tarantuala’, the final piece of this release, even when that has a bit more percussion. In between also encountered two other pieces, which use a bit more variation in sound approach. Thumb piano’s being sampled, guitars and such like mix nicely with the underpinning drones. It’s all not too demanding, relative easy going music, nothing fancy or overtly abstract, and no new musical innovations. But it’s all performed with joy and care. That’s nice enough, sometimes. (FdW)
Address: http://www.orila.net
ANTIDRÖM (CDR by The Association For Depth Sound Recordings)
When Itunes opens up, so I can rip a song for the podcast, it already gives the titles and artist, and the genre listed is ‘dance & house’. I assume that Tim Bayley who is behind the artist named Antidröm did this as a joke. Or perhaps this is an altogether different form of house and dance. Bayley writes me that his music is produced ‘on various pieces of second-hand and home-made equipment, with an intentional avoidance of a computer as the source of the sound’. The result, the music we have here is not really regular dance and house, but it has a fair portion of rhythm to it. Sometimes this rhythm is merely a bunch of tics, repeated, the crackle of something being looped, an acoustic source perhaps, but then something there is a lot more to it, and the consecutive rhythm forms a more natural rhythm, which make your feet tap, rather than shaking those hips on the dance floor. Very occasionally there is a sample such as, no surprise, in ‘Holy Mountain’ from the film of the same name. A certain darkness looms over this music (perhaps another sign it’s not your average dance release), which is nice, but maybe the season is not yet right for doom & gloom? Also I was thinking that some of the longer pieces could be a bit shorter and that Bayley could have been a bit more selective with his pieces. Or maybe it’s just me who thinks fourteen tracks, over sixty minutes is a bit long. The mixture of the more abstract rhythmic material with something that is more straight forward is however quite nice. It won’t be easy selecting a representative piece for the weekly podcast, but I go for the more easy tunes of ‘Rashomon’, which I thought worked quite well as a foot tapper/head nodder. (FdW)
Address: http://depthsoundrecordings.co.uk
KAJKYT – II (CDR by God Records)
The latest release by Kajkyt, nom de artiste de Slobodan Kajkut from Serbia, comes on tape, CDR and double LP. I have here the CDR, hence listed as such. Kajkut is a ‘contemporary composer’, who writes pieces for small and large ensembles, but was also the drummer of The Striggles and contributed to Mizar, Porta Macedonia and Sleeping Dogs Wake. Kajkyt is his solo project and ‘KRST’ was in 2010 his first release as such, see Vital Weekly 735. That was a long piece in four parts, but this new work we should see as eight songs. Again, black is the favorite color here, both of the package and the music. While music wise not entirely the same, the approach surely is. Here in ‘II’, with track called ‘I’, ‘II’ etc the emphasis seems to more towards rhythm and voice, and less towards guitar and electronics. The rhythm also seems to be more heavy than before, yet it’s still slow and pounding. The electronics provide the ornaments of the pieces, which are sometimes underpinned with a bass guitar. If the lyrics are about anything, which was hard to tell, then I’m sure it wasn’t about ‘fun at the beach’, or ‘love me do’. The production is crisp and clear, and perhaps as such I should be glad its a CDR. Gothic is a term I could use for this, and perhaps I should. Maybe it’s some form of metal music I am not aware off, which is not strange as I have no idea about metal music anyway, but I mean this all rather positive. Like ‘KRST’, which arrived in the summer, this one arrives on a very post summer day and it might not fit this day well, but winter is coming! (FdW)
Address: http://www.godrec.com
RISHIN SINGH – THREE WEEVILS (CDR by Avant Whatever)
This is a release that confused me quite a bit. I quote most of the press release: “Three Weevils presents an artist exploring how he is part of his sonic environment, treating himself as soluble rather than individual. Instead of playing with the sounds around him Singh plays inside them, his voice gradually lost in the flood”, and about the artist we learn that he was born in Kuala Kumpur (1985), lives in Sydney and “makes music using the trombone, performance, text and scores”, but in the longest piece here, called ‘Vinyl’, which lasts twenty minutes, I think there is hardly a trombone. All static vinyl crackles, very soft. Maybe one of those USB players, which pick more signal from the room than you think? It’s a bit soft and it’s a bit long and uses something I don’t care lot for, vinyl. The two shorter pieces are louder, and ‘Kambah’ seems to be a field recordings piece near some waterfall, whereas ‘Ablute’, the shortest of all, is a piece for trombone. All three pieces are very minimal, and ‘Ablute’ is my favorite. It reminded me of Phil Niblock, but perhaps played in real time: minimal and dense, but with that lively feeling to it. See my reason for being confused? I have no idea what to make of this. You could hear me mumble: ‘yeah, it’s alright, that Singh release’ (FdW)
Address: http://www.avantwhatever.com
JLIAT – SEIN UND ZEIT (CDR, private)
Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit, 1927) is a book by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Although written quickly, and though Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, it remains his most important work and has profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, particularly existentialism, hermeneutics and deconstruction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Time if you care to know more. You could in the mean time, play the release by Jliat, which consists of a computer voice counting for four seconds, followed by fifty-six seconds of silence. I am not sure, but it may not be counting in a consecutive way, I might be wrong. I was trying to read that wikipedia link, had some other music going, and thinking about a word for ‘wordfeud’. There is never enough time to be and do all these things. Maybe I should find a pdf of the whole book and put this release on repeat while reading that. I just suspect it won’t be any time soon to do this. Maybe I’ll never understand anything. (FdW)
Address: http://www.jliat.com
JUSTIN MARC LLOYD – ANXIETY FLOOD CONT. (cassette by Rainbow Bridge)
VERTONEN – BLIND VENTRILOQUIST (cassette by Rainbow Bridge)
SOUP OF FREAK (cassette by Rainbow Bridge)
Justin Marc Lloyd is a US noise musician, an active one and also the proud owner of Rainbow Bridge, who just released a trio of new releases. I started with the boss himself. Much of his music is based on direct action you do stuff rather than sit down and think of the action. That has an element of hit and miss, which is fine of course. Much of his music finds its way into the world of small, limited releases. On a very small note – literally – we find the lyrics to the songs – which, even when I am not familiar with all the work Lloyd has recorded over the years, seems a bit odd. Oh hold on, there are no vocals here. This tape, thirty minutes, is a perfect showcase of what Lloyd does with music. It opens on the first side with something that could be called ‘dance’ music, but much cruder and perhaps not fit too dance, but evolves, morphs slowly into something more louder and more noisier, but the true noise is more apparent on the second side, which ends with total distortion. There is more happening here than on your average harsh noise wall release, and that’s the beauty, at least for me, of it. Here’s somebody doing noise who has a clue what he does.
Blake Edwards, also known as Vertonen, returns, it seems, to an old love, that of turntables. Last week I complained that fine art, well, a bit, but it seems over valued. On side A we find ‘Starring’, a minimalist soundscape of sounds from vinyl, sounds from run out grooves and the edges of records, in all speeds from 33 to 78 rpm, plus cable glitches. I kinda like the minimalism of this, even when it’s quite simple to do. On the other side we find ‘compositions from a second recording session, using similar techniques as side one, but adding hand-melted records and a distortion pedal to the source recordings’ – that adds a mild form of distortion to the proceedings, while the original sounds of rotation from side A simply continue on side B. Two variations on a simple theme. Actually I like the minimalism of it all, and the consistency of the execution of the whole thing. I don’t foresee a CD re-issue of this as part of ‘classics the world forgot about’.
And finally there is a compilation called ‘Soup Of Freak’, which lasts one hour and has sixty tracks. There is always something appealing to the old ‘one minute composition’ compilations – think Morgan Fischer’s “Miniatures” or Sound Cosmodell. I always think it’s more difficult to do an one minute composition than a two or three minute one, but who am I? On a cassette it’s even harder to decipher whose who, and pretty soon one is lost, which I guess is the whole idea of this, a soup of freaks perhaps. I name checked a few, such as Vertonen, Lloyd himself of course, Cock ESP, Lasse Marhaug, Dylan Nyoukis, Dave Phillips, Staplerfahrer, Government Alpha, The Tobacconists (hey!), GX Jupiter-Larsen, Richard Kamerman, and maybe a few more, but it was hard to sign along or shout out, ‘hey GX, great piece there’. If you know how to figure out whose responsible for which track, then I’d say you have a small encyclopedia of noise music at your disposal here. Should you not care about that, and still like noise, you will find this an excellent spicy soup. I enjoyed it a lot. The short piece approach made this a tiring, yet rewarding experience. (FdW)
Address: http://www.hellorainbowbridge.com