KONTAKT DER JÜNGLINGE – MAKROPHONIE I (CD by Die Stadt) *
ASHLAR – ST JAMES’ GARDENS (CD by Hibernation) *
LE MOORS – MULTI-FILAMENT (3″CDR by Hibernation/Postcard) *
FRANCISCO LOPEZ & MICHAEL ESPOSITO – JAALJTH (CD by Geraeuschmanufaktur)
VOMIR – QUEST, NO CONQUEST (cassette by Geraeuschmanufaktur)
PIETRO RIPARBELLI – SORTIE (cassette by Geraeuschmanufaktur
SPOELSTRA – SPORTS AND FINANCE (LP by Narrominded)
INSECT ARK – LONG ARMS (10″ by Geweih Ritual Documents)
K2 – AUDIO PATHOLOGY ARCHIVES VOL. 1:THE BRAIN TUMORS (CDR by Kinky Musik Institute)
ANDREAS BRANDAL – SEANCE (CDR by Twice Removed) *
ANDREI MACHADO – CATARSE (CDR by Twice Removed) *
ROMVELOPE – MOUNTAINS OF MAYONNAISE (CDR by Adaadat) *
OMMM – SOUND ART (CDR by Adaadat) *
DJ TOPGEAR – PSS4 (CDR by Adaadat) *
DISTEL – ULTRA 2012 (cassette by Beläten) *
LE SCRAMBLED DEBUTANTE – DEVILS IN HEAVY SYRUP (cassette by Attenuation Circuit)
(D)(B)(H) – BEYOND ANTIBIOTICS (cassette by Human Conduct Records)
RICK WEAVER – BLACK MEDICINE (cassette by More Records)
HB – THE END OF NEW BEGINNINGS (cassette by Monoblaster)
ARNO BRUIL – LA MORT.AVI (cassette by Tanzprocesz)
KONTAKT DER JÜNGLINGE – MAKROPHONIE I (CD by Die Stadt)
It has been quiet for some years for Kontakt der Jünglinge, the duo of Thomas Köner and Asmus Tietchens. But after a bit of music on a compilation CD in 2007 it was all silent, and their main bulk of releases was already from 2001-2003. I don’t assume there has been a band fight, but as these things go: people meet up, do something and do something with much interest for a while, but then get torn apart for whatever reason, usually other work somewhere else. I am sure that’s what happened here, as nor herr Tietchens, nor herr Köner are persons to put up a band fight. Two of gentlest, kindest Germans I know. And two of the best in their respective fields. Closely linked perhaps, but also a bit different. Tietchens is the man who brings out musique concrete into the field of the unacademic composers, self-trained, and explorer of the terra incognita of the studio. It can take many forms. Köner does the same but much of his work is more spaced out, more drone like; the arch father of Isolationist music – to some. Their duo is named after a pun on two works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and so is the title of their latest work, ‘Makrophonie 1’. That may all seem rather playful, but the music isn’t that playful, and actually more serious. These thirty-seven minutes are filled by the darkest of drones, but not ‘long fade in, and stay there for a long time, short fade out’ (the cigar shape, as some one once noted), but we are transported through various moods and textures, ranging from the very soft, and not so outspoken ones, to the more louder passages of unearthy low drone sounds (Köner) and high clicks and beeps (Tietchens). At one point, around twenty-five minutes, I had the impression that this was live recording, as the feedback beeps that sound here are of a varying length and interval. Maybe it’s intentional, I am not sure – the press text says this is a studio recording. They don’t seem to be men who who make ‘mistakes’. The balance moves like a ticking clock between these two opposites, the dark drone rumble of Köner and the more precise tinkling sounds of Tietchens, best exampled at the very end of this release. A work of powerful beauty of a very dark nature. Soundtrack music which is no need of a movie. I think it’s a great work, but I am the first to admit I’m very biased. Recently I was going through lots and lots of CDs I have, and I decided to keep all of Tietchens works, including the previous releases by Kontakt der Jünglinge, and that means something to me. Not a single release I didn’t like, and I can proudly add ‘Makrophone 1’ to my collection. As dark as the cover it comes in, but what a beauty. (FdW)
Address: http://www.diestadtmusik.de
ASHLAR – ST JAMES’ GARDENS (CD by Hibernation)
LE MOORS – MULTI-FILAMENT (3″CDR by Hibernation/Postcard)
Unlike other parts of the world, winter did not really come to The Netherlands (yet). Very mild, lots of sunshine: my kind of weather really. But today is rainy and windy, and yet I won’t complain: it’s not icey and cold and the postman delivered some fine soundtrack to go with this weather. Music from the label Hibernate is always something to look forward to. It’s not the most avant-garde label in the world, as many of their releases explore a similar field: that of ambient, drones and field recordings – ‘We Like Ambient’ is their motto. Here we have the project of Wil Bolton and Phil Edwards, known as Ashlar. They met when Wil lived in Liverpool for a while. He recorded two previous albums for Hibernate and also for Home Normal, Time Released Sound, Rural Colours and Cathedral Transmissions, whereas Edwards works as PJE and has releases on Cathedral Transmissions as well as U-Cover and Twisted Tree Line. This is their second release as Ashlar. This new album uses sounds recorded in St James’ Gardens in Liverpool, a ‘long, narrow park and cemetery nestles below ground level behind Liverpool Cathedral’ and Bolton’s nearby studio they improvised with acoustic and electric guitars, electric piano and analogue synthesizer using guitar pedals, loopers and laptop. Extensively spaced out music in which we hear those field recordings, rather untreated it seems, wind, birds, far away traffic, and on top as well as on the bottom we hear spacious tunes played on their instruments. Slow, minimal and majestic, as statuesque as possible in ‘Monuments’ (well chosen title). That’s the shortest piece. The other two are much longer and more open in approach. Here the improvised form is very clear, and ‘mistakes’ (could they be called as such?) are not edited out, but left in. That makes this album a very human album, of very personal music. You don’t discover something new in here, but that’s not what you were looking for anyway, I think. Great mood music.
The other new release is on Hibernation Postcard Series: a series of 3″CDR releases, with the cover of a postcard size, in an edition of 100 copies. Behind Le Moors we also find Wil Bolton, but now together with Jeff Stonehouse, and they recorded their almost twenty-four minute piece ‘Multi-Filament’ in April 2012. It seems to me a duet for guitar and piano, and lots and lots of electronics. Primarerly the loop devices they use to create that hot bed of warm drones of endless sustaining sounds, which they use to play their music on top over. A free strum on the guitar, with a fall out of time stretched sounds, and the piano playing chords. All of this comes with extra delay and other synthesis, which makes this slightly more rough edged than the Ashlar release, although both of them seem rather to be loosely improvised rather than strictly composed, and Le Moors more than Ashlar. Very minimal in development, it meanders and meanders, until the very end, in which only a few piano notes are left behind. It’s still raining outside, it’s still winter and it’s still warm inside the house. We like ambient too. (FdW)
Address: http://www.hibernate-recs.co.uk
FRANCISCO LOPEZ & MICHAEL ESPOSITO – JAALJTH (CD by Geraeuschmanufaktur)
VOMIR – QUEST, NO CONQUEST (cassette by Geraeuschmanufaktur)
PIETRO RIPARBELLI – SORTIE (cassette by Geraeuschmanufaktur
By now the name Michael Esposito should be connected, straight away, with EVP, the electronic voice phenomena, also known as voices from beyond. I recently received some of these from him, the raw data, and it sounds very much like the eight short pieces that open up ‘Jaaljth’, his collaborative work with Francisco Lopez, and judging by the titles they are the same. This is followed by eight processed pieces by Lopez, called ‘Jaaljth’, although individual pieces refer to the original sources, then a piece by Esposito, which is much longer than the source pieces and an even longer processed version thereof. Multiple pieces! That seems to be a rare thing in the CD world of Lopez (but it happens!). It’s not easy to follow the routes he takes into the source material and detect any of that in these pieces. It’s however great to hear him operate in a short time frame for this pieces. Once he goes all silent, in ‘I’m Freezing’, but in the other pieces we are able to follow the computer processing that takes place. More so than on his older work, it seems to me that Lopez is now extensively using computer technology (max/mps, pure data, audiomulch, who knows?) to transform what he calls sound matter. Time stretching plays an important role, and so does granular synthesis. Nice! In the longer Esposito piece there is more a balance between the original EVP recordings and what seems to be synthesizer/electronics/computer processing, which are gradually taking over the piece. Very nice. In the Lopez version of this, it gradually dies out in static crackles and marks a fine ending to a great release.
A while ago someone was telling me that noise works better on cassette, because you could crank everything into the ‘red’ and still have not a lot of distortion. I was thinking about that when I was playing this Vomir tape. I know, Vomir, is harsh noise wall (did I ever mention that I am not blown away by this terminology? I did now) and that means probably that I should leave it to Jliat. But maybe I wanted to test that theory about noise and cassettes and decided to play this tape. On the labels website it says for this one ‘no vocals. no changes. A blast of harsh electronic distorted noise Ambient Doom!’. And that reminded me of someone, a long long time ago, who said ‘Merzbow is ambient, if you don’t turn up the volume’, but I argued that a low volume makes everything probably ambient. Indeed no changes here, but also not really loud, I was thinking. A very consistent wall of sound/noise, and perhaps, indeed, a bit ambient. I must say, honestly, it’s not something I would play every day, but I quite like the consistent, conceptual approach here. Very minimal indeed – no changes as advertised – and that’s for thirty minutes quite alright.
More musical, I guess, is the release by Pietro Riparbelli, whom we also know as K11. His cassette is a bit longer, thirty four minutes, and on the website we read: “SORTIE – arises from a conceptual idea based on the dichotomy between the emergency exits which are situated everywhere in the small city of Nanterre (Paris) and the motorway that is running below, into a sonic soundscape evolved out of sources from field recordings and radio signals.” I am not sure what the difference is between K11 and Riparbelli working under his own name. It seems to be starting out with some pure field recordings, church bells in a small square and when that ends – rather quickly – it moves over into an extended piece of heavily processed field recordings. Think those sort of empty space recording being heavily processed into a glacial like drone scape, gradually becoming more and more silent and disappearing. Very occasionally you may hear a bit of the original sounds, the street sounds, certainly towards the end of side B, like a circle being completed. Church goes into abstraction goes into street sounds. Excellent work, very mysterious and quite powerful. (FdW)
Address: http://geraeuschmanufaktur.de
SPOELSTRA – SPORTS AND FINANCE (LP by Narrominded)
This is the fourth release by Spoelstra, a musician from The Hague, The Netherlands. Two of which were reviewed in Vital Weekly, ‘The Almighty Internet’ (Vital Weekly 715) and ‘Pallets’ (Vital Weekly 778). They were quite different. The first one was kind of electro inspired and the second more lo-fi and improvised on the guitar. I preferred the first over the latter, but was curious to see what his next move would be. Maybe I’m not surprised, but its a combination of both. Spoelstra doesn’t hide the fact that he has a background as a guitar player, for such bands as Boutros Bubba, De Reizende Verkoper, Gone Bald, Quarles van Ufford en CSMD, and he loves his guitar parts to be difficult. Math rock is an option for him. But then set to beats. I got off on the wrong foot. I didn’t notice the record played the first piece at 45 rpm, which I really enjoyed and I had some trouble adjusting to the slower tempo. This is not an easy record, I think. Entirely instrumental, with complex songs, all eight of them. You may recognize something in here that you could loosely describe as rock music, be it through the use of instruments (guitar, drums, bass, synthesizer) or how they are being played or programmed. Maybe like a rock song, like a bit of techno, but it’s never really techno, or rock, or even both. These complex songs owe much more to the world of math rock, progressive rock, the one man band that could be King Crimson (actually that’s perhaps the entire point of reference I can make to this world of progressive rock). Not something for your average dance party, nor your rock fest. I must admit I thought this was all rather nice, but not something that I found easily to be digested. I’m hearing Spoelstra live in some weeks, and based on this record this is something I look forward to. What’s the sound of an one man math rock band? (FdW)
Address: http://www.narrominded.com
INSECT ARK – LONG ARMS (10″ by Geweih Ritual Documents)
Apart from the 10″s released by Drone Records, we don’t see a lot of these around. ‘It’s the format of doom, half way between a 7″ and 12″, you never know what it is’, a friend of mine always proclaims. It’s a pity, I always quite enjoy these. Here, on 45 rpm, we have the music of Insect Ark, the solo project of Dana Schester, whom you may know for her work with Bee And Flower and Michael Gira’s Angels Of Light. It’s one woman, armed with a sampler, a bass, a lapsteel and a keyboard. This is heavy music, maybe Swans influenced, I was thinking, of dark, not too fast rock beats – from a machine, rather than a drummer – which bang like pneumatic drills and on top, Schester waves together a string – excuse le mot – of sounds from whatever she can move around, before (!) touching her bass. That’s the top of the iceberg. A slow, hypnotic sound, almost like a dub instrumental in a rock context, with spacious loops on top, and Schester playing her bass. These three pieces here last less than twenty minutes and it made me think. They seem closely linked, so perhaps that is also enough? More would, perhaps, some of the surprise away? What would be the variation in this, I wondered. How would a full length (forty minute) album sound like? That’s something I am curious about. I totally liked this one. It’s powerful, it’s hypnotic, and perhaps all of that, because it’s limited to these three tracks. I’d be curious to know if I’m wrong. If you like the Scorn of the 90s, then this would be certainly something to try! (FdW)
Address: http://insectark.bandcamp.com/
K2 – AUDIO PATHOLOGY ARCHIVES VOL. 1:THE BRAIN TUMORS (CDR by Kinky Musik Institute)
This is the first release of a planned series by the legendary K2. Here are three tracks using KORG instruments, volca beats, volca bass, volca keys, Monotribe, MS-20 mini, together with Roland SH-2, junk electronics, Sleepdrone 5 & MIR….. The saying “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” is not apt, not apt here, whist many seem to only ‘toy’ with noise or twist it into Power Electronic angst, Dr. Kimihide Kusafuka, a.k.a. K2 revealsjust why Japnoise in its pure abstractness of noise – even noise as noisemusic – has the skill and confidence to – well ‘just dot it!’ Abstract sounds which might be regarded in many different ways but here are just that – played with a confidence which is why K2 is more a God than an Angel, if we want to use such metaphors. I regard the advent of ‘Noise Music’ as a very significant and important development in recent music and art history, and continue to attempt to theorize on its consequences and significance. I regard the ‘origins’ of this ‘music’ in the so called ‘Japnoise’ of the 1980s/90s as the actual ‘philosophical’ origin of the noise ‘genre’ and of course K2 was one of the seminal projects of this. (for sure recent noise music can be related to many other sources, Russolo, Metal Machine et. al. – but it is in my theory more significantly a product of the Japanese noise scene that developed what we now hear, and as is called ‘noise’). Abstract noise which is pure- despite this sounding odd with relation to noise, in that it serves no elaborated purpose or ulterior propaganda. I know insufficient of Japanese culture to comment with any degree of knowledge but it seems to me such decisiveness can be related to that culture, the exquisite art of the samurai, perfection of the tea ceremony, the same beautiful minimal precision of the haiku is here rendered in noise, using oscillator and filter as opposed to brush and ink or sword. The beauty of the piece is a stunning piece of sound. Others hesitate, a fatal move or lack – in art as in combat, and worse mask such hesitation in the idea of ‘experimentation’ and yet if a mark is to be made even using electronics it should be decisive unless it becomes mere ordinary. Here there is no hesitation, just pure blocks of abstract sound are directed straight into the medium. Genius denotes the originality of creation, this is the work of genius. (jliat)
Address: http://www.myspace.com/K2noise
ANDREAS BRANDAL – SEANCE (CDR by Twice Removed)
ANDREI MACHADO – CATARSE (CDR by Twice Removed)
Despite his career starting in the late 80s, the name Andreas Brandal doesn’t come up much in Vital Weekly. He worked with Larmoyant, Nullpluss and The Western Gloom, and has played with Merzbow, John Hegre, Maja Ratkje and Karkowski and recorded for labels such as Smalltown Supersound, Basses Frequencies, Stunned, Sweat Lodge Guru and many more, and sometimes has a solo release. Here’s one which sees him playing a keyboard. Or two. But basically that’s it. Just maybe, maybe, also a guitar. Two keyboards playing moody, yet melodic tunes. No doubt the title is a bit of a pointer, towards science fiction movies, maybe a bit of horror. Brandal plays imaginary soundtracks for such movies. Not just the background score, the eerie sounds, the spooky stuff, but also leading themes, of swirling notes, fine melodies and all of that, such as in ‘Progress’, recorded directly in your face. That may not land him a film deal in Hollywood, I was thinking. The rather simple recording techniques might be a bit too simple for that. A spooky tune like ‘Communicating’ might be more like it, but lacks the leading theme. It’s all quite dark stuff, and perhaps nothing we haven’t heard before, but I must admit I rather like it. It’s non pretentious, nice music, with no deeper meaning than to pleasantly scare people. Like a good science fiction movie does: entertainment (although, yes, some of these movies may have a message, I know). This is rather nice.
Something completely different is the music of Andrei Machado. He is from Brasilia, the capitol of Brazil and ‘Catarse’ is his third album. The first two, ‘Lacuna ‘ and ‘Etant’ were released by Sinewave net label, so this is his first physical release. Also eight tunes, all around three minutes, which makes this a rather short record but it’s a true beauty. Last week we had the release by Hideyuki Hashimoto, who played a detuned upright piano with the doors open, Machado plays piano (baby grand perhaps), tuned and with the doors closed. Here we have more of that neo classical music, along the lines of Nils Frahm or Peter Broderick. Thoughtful, nice tunes, gentle but intense piece, of sadness, lonelyness, despair, but also hope, joy, a sense of freedom. A short release, boohoo, a short release. I wouldn’t have minded a couple of more of these tunes, instead of having to put this on repeat straight away. Japanese labels looking out for more modern composers out there, take note. Andrei Machado is your man. (FdW)
Address: http://www.twiceremoved.storenvy.com
ROMVELOPE – MOUNTAINS OF MAYONNAISE (CDR by Adaadat)
OMMM – SOUND ART (CDR by Adaadat)
DJ TOPGEAR – PSS4 (CDR by Adaadat)
Its been quite a while since I last heard something from this label. I had to dig as deep as Vital Weekly 455 and 533 to find some of their releases. These three new releases come in the form of CDRs, but with a nice slick printed covers. I kicked of with Romvelope, the musical project of London based Bjørn Hatleskog. I have no idea who he is, but his album ‘Mountains Of Mayonnaise’ was already recorded in 2001, during which process a Behringer mixer (the Euroack MX1604A) was destroyed. I am not sure if that was due to the no-input mixing techniques Hatleskog borrowed from Toshimaru Nakamura, or perhaps something else. Here the music, nine pieces, fifty-three minutes, takes us to noise land. Loud and clear, sir. Chaotic, bouncing, jumping with very few moments of silence, but they are there, sparsely scattered. Not y’r usual wall of noise tactics but quite a vibrant release. It jumps around in a heavy collage cut-up way. Maybe, just maybe, a bit overlong for the amount of variation on offer. But that would be my only complaint. Sometimes less can be more.
Something entirely different is the music from also “London based lo-fi electronic musician and 4-track aficionado”, Edmund Davie who works as Ommm. He has some releases before, some of which are on Adaadat. Sometimes he works as Extractor Fan and DJ Negative Skills, both of which I haven’t heard before (either). It’s not easy to say what his music sounds like, except, indeed, one could say it all sounds rather lo-fi. Cheap samplers are used and maybe cheap keyboards as well. It’s not really noise based, but then also not really ambient either, or drone like, or cosmic. Not to mention a bunch of smaller roads on the electronic highway. I guess it’s a bit of everything: a bit of noise, a bit of plunderphonics (it seems like some sunspot recording from Disinformation found it’s way to the sample bank on more than one piece here). Ommm’s music is more sketch-like than a worked out composition; it touches upon ideas and sounds. In the longer pieces you see it doesn’t work very well, but in the shorter pieces it’s actually quite nice.
I think Top Gear is something about cars and two things that really puts me off a conversation: cars and football (soccer for you). It’s a conversational dead end when you try that on me. A total blank stare. I am most likely not male. So I wouldn’t know why someone would call himself DJ Topgear, but it’s the Tokyo based Simon Petre who works as such. He also works as Auaua with Hikaru Tsunematsu and solo as Onthema. The title of his album stands for ‘protect short samples, a reference to a traumatising experience involving a hard drive’. Of these three releases on Adaadat this is probably the most varied one. Very noise based at times, but also heavy on the rhythm pieces, sometimes very loud on the ambient side of things, plundered beats and all such like. It’s a bit of everything really, and no doubt some people would like such a wild variety of styles on a release. It’s a bit like alternative radio perhaps? At least that’s what I felt about this. Maybe not the most coherent of releases but it bursts with undirected energy, which I guess is a good thing. (FdW)
Address: http://www.adaadat.co.uk
DISTEL – ULTRA 2012 (cassette by Beläten)
Two years ago The Netherlands had a short but intense revival of a musical movement from 1980-1981, called Ultra. The shortest description I can think of is ‘the Dutch answer to No New York’, but perhaps that’s not the complete picture, perhaps best exemplified by Mekanik Kommando; a Nijmegen group with two bass guitars, a synthesizer and rhythm machine, not your rocksteady line up. Part of the revival was that ‘young’ bands would in some way pay tribute to their old heroes, and, also Nijmegen based, Distel (the Dutch answer to Coil?) offered a tribute to Mekanik Kommando. I saw their concert, in the early hours on March 9th (and as documented on the excellent ‘Ultra Nijmegen 08.03.2012’ CD) in hazy mist of smoke machines (and copious amounts of alcohol), and it was hard to tell which Mekanik Kommando songs they played, or if in fact it was a tribute to the old masters. Odd, since those original Mekanik Kommando songs have been with me for almost thirty years, as their debut LP stands here a milestone (check the review of the CD re-issue in Vital Weekly 728). It’s partly a joyful, partly frightful album of electronic pop songs of a highly original nature. Distel has here five of them covered – I assume recorded in rehearsal for the event – and another new one piece. To call Distel’s music joyful is, I think, not the thing to do. They rather capture Mekanik Kommando’s more introspective moods and textures, songs like ‘Plants’, ‘Vortex’ and ‘White Soldier’ and remodel them into their own fine blend of what they call angst pop. You can’t always recognize the original. ‘Japanese Eyes’ is remodeled a lot, but ‘Plants’ sounds like the original, but more dark, more intense. Distel’s music is not something very new altogether, unlike Mekanik Kommando in it’s day, but a very fine translation from ‘then’ to ‘now’ (even when two years old). Economic, political, sociological: just in what way is our current society any different from the one from thirty years ago? Every generation gets it’s own angst pop, and Distel has the best sountrack for that. (FdW)
Address: http://www.belaten.se/
LE SCRAMBLED DEBUTANTE – DEVILS IN HEAVY SYRUP (cassette by Attenuation Circuit)
Although Le Scrambled Debutante exists since the 80s, as a project by Allan Zane, also known as Sir Bear Trapper, and Sid Redlin, both core members, here assisted by Ms Joey Pan Day and LCDN. Unlike their previous release, also on the same label, the music here is less of a collage and more of a continious drone like sound matter. It’s also a release that is much more recently recorded, in 2007, and the one thing I can’t get out of my head: it all sounds not unlike the good HNAS. Who remembers that? Tape-collage which is not unlike Nurse With Wound, but perhaps all a bit in a more crude vain. Let’s say one tape recorder and one microphone, instead of a cheap studio set-up as in the early NWW days. But it’s all less chopped up and transformed, and more continious than before. They do a nice job at that. It’s lo-fi and psychedelic, LSD – the band’s name of course refers to such things – music for the true underground. I imagine – romantic notion coming up – these boys and girls in their cold squat, sitting around a reel-to-reel recorder, producing noises on this long tape-loop thing, very slowly amassing more information and maybe whatever is cooked up in this dimly lit surrounding. Spacious, but dirty. Dirty, but very nice. I think I enjoyed this over their previous release, as it all sounded much more coherent, more structured and less chaotic. Just like how I like these noise things. (FdW)
Address: http://www.attenuationcircuit.de
(D)(B)(H) – BEYOND ANTIBIOTICS (cassette by Human Conduct Records)
RICK WEAVER – BLACK MEDICINE (cassette by More Records)
It has been quiet for (D)(B)(H), or at least, I haven’t seen any new release since their split with Tiny Music, back in Vital Weekly 794. It seems that of the three people who played on that cassette, only Justin Rhody is still present, but now in the line up we also find Marty Belcher, Daniel Wick, John McCormick, Joe Stone and Chris Rall. Instruments are mentioned on the cover, but not specified to any specific player, and include saxophones, piano, percussion, plastic balls, cymbals, harmonica, modified turntable, ring modulator, sampler, box fan, electronics, guitar, metal objects, trumpet and prepared cassette. That’s a whole lot of stuff to work with and I must say we mainly hear, quite distinctly, the sound of the saxophone. The other instruments are less present in the mix, and everything here is about free improvisation. In an endless stream, this all drops by, without to much dynamics, but more like an unconciousness flow of sounds, in which are all equally important, and random permutations take place; maybe there is even some sort of score present here, I was thinking, which has no relation to us listeners on the outside. It’s quite hardcore, these improvisations, but I quite enjoyed it.
In the same parcel, suggesting there is a relation, is the original soundtrack to ‘Black Medicine’ by Rick Weaver. He’s a member of Log, Dinner Music and New Flesh, all of which I haven’t heard (or maybe it’s one band?) and ‘Black Medicine’ is his own film, apparently. It’s a different kind of music. Much more electronic, of a lo-fi nature, with rusty synthesizers, tape-loops, voices and acoustic sounds. Maybe even pop related, I’d say. Especially when he plays little big melodies on his organ, synthesizer, keyboards, and has some wild drumming and likewise wild screaming to it. Maybe this is the sound of black medicine? And what is this black medicine anyway? It sounds like someone is on a cocktail of uppers to create some wildly disorganised pop music using improvisations being somewhat edited together. I don’t know. Something like that. It made me curious as to what this film is about, without, perhaps, the necessity to watch it. Maybe I would. Thirty years of weirdness in pop music pass you by here, post punk, The Residents, noise, plunderphonics and all with a fine, uncontrolled form of energy.
Address: http://www.humanconductrecords.blogspot.com
Address: http://www.morerecords.org
HB – THE END OF NEW BEGINNINGS (cassette by Monoblaster)
A short cassette – ten minutes only – but it comes in a nice overszied package. Here we have one HB, who calls himself ‘a pioneer in the Danish noise scene’, founder of Sweet Noise Studios in 1993 and Helicopter Records in 1996, co-founder of the sound art collective Normal Freaks in 1999. As far as I understand this, it’s all about analogue and digital. Music recorded on a cassette, and then mixed on a laptop, but mastered on a cassette; also the cover has something to do with a digital image versus hand letter press information. Maybe the b-side is all digital and the a-side is all analogue? It sounds like that. The a-side is a furious noise beast which harks back to good memories of Merzbow in the mid nineties, the area when he travelled the world with a bunch effect pedals and made chaotic sound configurations. The other side is more of a monolithic block of sound, minimal and a bit less loud, but still loud enough to cause trouble in early morning (untested). I thought it was quite nice, to have this on repeat for a while, but then, I also realized, why not all of this a bit longer. Next time thirty minutes, please, so we have a bit more input? (FdW)
Address: <monoblaster.kbh@gmail.com>
ARNO BRUIL – LA MORT.AVI (cassette by Tanzprocesz)
As the information on the cover is nothing more than ‘Arno Bruil’, ‘La Mort.avi’, ‘Montage: J’ and ‘Tanzprocesz 2014’, I looked this upon the oracle of our time, Discogs. I read here: “collection of traditionnal synthetic music from the future shapped as an artificial kaleidoscope. that’s all that needs to be said. and arno bruil is 1/3 of france sauvage and 1/2 of femme.” Which, to be honest, is also the information I found on the label’s website, so it must be true. It’s all a bit too low on the information side for me. On the risk of sounding like (a) granddaddy: in the 80s, at the height of the cassette culture, cassettes got a bad reputation because it contained boys recording the dishwasher or trying out a synth for an hour. That was the common mythology of the day, expressed by those who rather saw a bit of pop on their tapes. This tape lasts twenty four minutes – according to Discogs – and maybe is not unlike that ‘trying out a synth for an hour’, but with the main difference that these sections here are kept very short. We hear short(ish) phrases, and that’s it. The ‘experiments’ aren’t very long, which is probably the best thing about it. It would have been better if this was a CDR, or a download release, so any aspiring musician could re-assemble these sounds into a new piece of music. Not to improve it (you only make things worse, Cage would say), but as ‘another’ option. I thought all of this was quite alright. Not great, not bad, but a fine collection of what you could also market as ‘library of unsused sounds for Star Wars’. (FdW)
Address: http://tanzprocesz.free.fr/