MICHEL CHION – MUSIQUE CONCRETES 1970-71 (CD by Brocoli) *
MICHEL DONEDA – EVERYBODY DIGS (CD by Relative Pitch) *
SPOILS & RELICS – EMBED AND THEN FORGET (CD by Portaaaa) *
JASMINE GUFFOND – YELLOW BELL (CD by Sonic Pieces) *
TAAVI TULEV – KUKU! (miniCD, private) *
NECRO DEATHMORT – EP2 (12″ by Distraction Records) *
MICHAEL ESPOSITO & CM VON HAUSWOLFF – THE FINAL REPOSE OF JOAN VOLMER BURROUGHS (flexi disc by Phantom Plastics/Geräuschmanufaktur)
DIATRIBES – A NEW CASTLE (CDR by Caduc) *
CHRIS STRICKLAND – ANIMAL EXPERT (CDR by Caduc) *
LUNACYBOT – COGITO ERGO SUM (CDR by Ressonus) *
DANIELLE LEMAIRE – KILL YOUR DARLINGS… NOT! (cassette by Barreuh Records)
AMEN TMA – INSECT PHONETICS RESEARCH (cassette by Lom)
RINUS VAN ALEBEEK – RANCH (cassette by Lonktaar)
BLACK WILLIAM/LITÜUS (cassette by Notice Recordings)
RYAN JEWELL – RADIO: VOL. 2 (cassette by Notice Recordings)
TANNER GARZA – FRAGILE HONESTY (cassette by Geräuschmanufaktur)
THE DEAD MAURIACS – A VISIT TO PROVIDENCE (cassette by Geräuschmanufaktur)
PIETRO RIPARBELLI & ALESSIO BALLERINI – BECOMING SOUND (cassette by Geräuschmanufaktur)
MICHEL CHION – MUSIQUE CONCRETES 1970-71 (CD by Brocoli)
French composer Michel Chion was born in 1947 and studied literature and music and worked as an assistant to Pierre Schaeffer at the French radio and television in 1970 and he was a member of the Groupe de Researches Musicales from 1971 to 1976. On the CD that French imprint Brocoli just released we find his earliest compositions in the field of musique concrete, from 1970 and 1971. These early pieces are not yet the more narrative and dramatic pieces of his later work, but it has to have some nice crude take on musique concrete. Maybe this is due to the fact that equipment wasn’t as refined as it later became or maybe Chion deliberately recorded them this way, but it works well. I quite enjoyed these pieces, even his ‘Habanera’. It sounds a bit silly, not unlike something that is quite humorous, but with its abrupt ending (no more recording tape?), and it’s brief character it works well. Two pieces, among which is the thirty-three minute piece ‘Train De Pianos’, use improvisations on a prepared piano, collaged and cut around. Here we have some excellent loop techniques, and speed change techniques, which sound like early Nurse With Wound (who sound like early Chion then!). In ‘Blanche’, Chion sets acoustic sounds (piano, guitar maybe, voices) against electronic sounds, with the use of delay machines. Here he cuts rapidly from one section into the next, so that the piece seems to consist of smaller pieces, and you never know where the ending is. ‘Le Ciel Tremble’ is a piece that uses a voice telling a story and with treated piano sounds, it may sound like an early dramatic piece. Here too one can recognize early Nurse With Wound. As said, there is great sense of crudeness in these pieces and that’s something I particular enjoyed with this release. Flaws in compositions are something I didn’t care much about: it sounded great as it was. (FdW)
Address: http://www.brocoli.org
MICHEL DONEDA – EVERYBODY DIGS (CD by Relative Pitch)
This year French soprano saxophone player Michel Doneda will turn 60 and US label Relative Pitch celebrates the occasion by releasing this forty five minute disc of a recording from last year at La Chapelle De Las Planques in Tanus, France. No doubt picked up with multiple microphones, and later on edited into the seven pieces we find on this disc. Doneda is a master of deception. In this chapel his saxophone sound like saxophone – very occasionally, such as in ‘Skeleton Key’, but most of the times it sounds like something completely different. Just what that ‘difference’ is, is a bit harder to define. Doneda’s saxophone has this fine electro acoustic sound. For all you know, or, in case, you wouldn’t know what is going on, it sounds like the scraping of a piece of styrofoam on the floor in a reverberant space or, in the case of ‘Plan Objectif’ it sounds like electronic music, maybe a modular synthesizer, captured in an empty hall. Doneda also leaves a lot of space between the tones he plays. There is a lot of air being used to actually produce a lot less music. You hear him breath and air is blown into the horn but it doesn’t always add up to ‘music from a saxophone’ per se. This is all quite minimal music, not in a repetitive sense but within the given amount of music, even it also never seems to be completely silent. I am never fond of any saxophone, which sounds like a saxophone, but I love anybody who makes it sound like something else. Doneda belongs to the fine masters of the instrument. His colleagues agree, one can read on the cover of this release. (FdW)
Address: http://www.relativepitchrecords.com
SPOILS & RELICS – EMBED AND THEN FORGET (CD by Portaaaa)
There is really not a lot of information on this cover; nothing more than the band name, title and name of the label. The website is likewise sparse: the only thing we learn is that Spoils & Relics is a trio of musicians, being Gary Myles, Kieron Piercy, and Johnny Scarr. I don’t think I heard of them before, nor would I be easily to tell what they do. But based upon hearing this release, with one piece of just over thirty-one minutes, seems rather short, I would think they use all sorts of (cracked?) electronics, speakers, electro-acoustics (amplifying objects with contact microphones) and such like. Perhaps not too different from what Vasco Alves – who acts as label boss here – does with his own trio VA AA LR. The louder edges of improvised music, jumping around with loud crackles, high end, feedback like sounds, and sometimes continuous drone like sounds. Sometimes it sounds like it has been recorded coming from speakers well below the ground, and sometimes it’s right in your ear, piercing, loud. And sometimes not at all and it’s introspective and quiet. This is music I quite enjoy a lot as it reminds me of indeed of VA AA LR, BMB con or Kapotte Muziek – that more exciting end of improvised electro acoustic music combined with noise, silence, electronics and electrics. Spoils & Relics play some intense music at that, keeping a keen ear for swift changes, slightly more extended passages and such like; it forms a very vibrant piece of music. The only sad thing seems to be that it’s all a bit too brief for my taste. (FdW)
Address: http://portaaaa.com
JASMINE GUFFOND – YELLOW BELL (CD by Sonic Pieces)
It’s been quite a while since I first heard Jasmine Guffond perform as Minit – probably in the late nineties. Later on, in the same venue, she played again with an absolute stunning set, when Minit released their ‘Now Right Here’. Later on I saw her play as Jasmina Maschina, which I believe was more song oriented, but it was a hazy dark night. In all her work there is always an element of minimalism and drone, as well as a sense of pop tunes, even when it’s a buried down. This new work, which is now under the guise of Jasmine Guffond – maybe her real name? – is as such not different. Here too we have these drone like sounds, but it seems to me a bit more lighter and more spacious than before, not doom and gloom, ambient if you want, with vocals being picked up from somewhere else, the next room, down the hall, the floor below. And there is a guitar, perhaps, somewhere in here, equally lost it seems, carefully strummed (although strummed might implicate a chord or two, and that’s not the case I think) to add an additional layer to the music, more space to the copious amount of space already present in this music. The final piece, ‘RR Variation’ is the most song like thing here, but its long build-up effectively destroys it from becoming a song per se. This is a fine album with some great music, even when it doesn’t seem to hold many new insights into the sound world of Guffond. (FdW)
Address: http://sonicpieces.com
TAAVI TULEV – KUKU! (miniCD, private)
From Estonia hails Taavi Tulev, who is an electronic musician as well as a field recordist. I never heard his work before but apparently he has been working since 2000, releasing a few albums and creating installations in museums, exhibitions and soundtracks to films; recently he expanded his interest into field recordings. One beautiful springtime day he walked out of his house, into the woods switched on his recording device and recorded twenty minutes of field recordings, mainly of birds. I am not sure if this is how this worked, but it sounds like it could have been. It sounds great, especially on a cold and rainy autumn day in The Netherlands. While listening to this, and I suggest you listen to this on repeat actually, you can create your own cover: a bunch of stickers are delivered which you stuck on the front and create your own landscape. It looks a bit childlike, but all of this, music and artwork together, oozes sunshine! Positive thinking! Holidays! I was thinking, when this stopped after nineteen minutes, why didn’t he stay out in the woods for a full hour? I wouldn’t have minded this artificial bit of nature in my house these days. (FdW)
Address: http://taavitulev.bandcamp.com/album/kuku
NECRO DEATHMORT – EP2 (12″ by Distraction Records)
The follow-up to ‘EP1’ is of course called ‘EP2’ and AJ Cookson and Matthew Rozeik, the duo who form Necro Deathmort have been around for a couple of years now. Their doom roots of their start-up phase play no longer a defying role in their music, as they expanded their sound with the best of forty years of underground music. A song like ‘Aer’, which closes this record, starts with a bunch of synthesizers that reminds the listener of seventies cosmic music, before some heavy drum sound kicks in, slow but steady. Much of what Necro Deathmort do is based on the use of electronics, synthesizers and drum machines. These six pieces (thirty-four minutes; EP? LP!) are quite wide apart and sees slow core metal music in ‘Bleeding’ and ‘Mirus’, all doom and all headbanging, I would think, but ‘Channel Fever’ is a piece that could have been lifted from a Pan Sonic album from 10 years ago, with a great similar motorik drive to it. ‘Deadlight’ is their most ambient excursion here, and offers a great nightmarish horror soundtrack. The only piece I didn’t like was ‘Sundive’ with its somewhat hollow sounding drums and ditto echo machine. Quite a beast, this record and as ever: play loud for optimum result. (FdW)
Address: http://www.distractionrecords.com
MICHAEL ESPOSITO & CM VON HAUSWOLFF – THE FINAL REPOSE OF JOAN VOLMER BURROUGHS (flexi disc by Phantom Plastics/Geräuschmanufaktur)
Earlier in 2014 actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman died of an heroin overdose and everybody was sad that in this day and age somebody so talented uses this drug that is essentially an all round destroyer. A few days later many of those people in mourning – assuming they still were; in facebook land everything is rather quickly forgotten – they celebrated the 100th birthday of William Burroughs, himself no stranger to the same drug, and everybody was cheering him for doing much of the stuff he did on drugs. Odd world, I mused. This particular release deals with a grim period of Burroughs life; in 1951 he accidently shot his wife during ‘a heavily intoxicated game of William Tell Routine’, as Esposito puts it on the cover. Hauswolff went to the apartment in 2011 to record the hallway, outside the apartment, for the presence of any evil spirits (as they might have had a hand in the events) and Esposito examined these recordings for any EVPs, electronic voice phenomena, which he says are present in these recordings, but which might not something you can actually hear. The roughly five minute piece here on this flexi disc (complete with lots of information on Burroughs and his EVP research) is a haunting one. It could be from ‘just’ a hallway, but the whole thing has a spooky atmosphere, with chilling sounds dropping in and out of it (avoiding the word ‘mix’ here of course as I very much like to believe nothing has been altered here). Perfect horror music for those who believe in such matters. It was indeed the unexplained presence of something like that culminating in this tragedy in 1951. (FdW)
Address: http://geraeuschmanufaktur.bandcamp.com
DIATRIBES – A NEW CASTLE (CDR by Caduc)
CHRIS STRICKLAND – ANIMAL EXPERT (CDR by Caduc)
Canady’s Caduc label, run by Mathieu Ruhlmann has always a great professional presentation for their releases and these two new ones are not different: excellent presentation, even when limited to one hundred copies. First we have the Swiss duo of Diatribes, being Cyril Bondi and D’Incise, who play cymbals, bowls, objects and electronics, without any specification as to who did what here, so we assume they both had an equal share in the production of this music. It seems, but maybe I am wrong, that Diatribes is well aware of the music that Caduc usually releases: that of the more silent type, the highly improvised nature on objects and the sub-bass drone rumble. Music with its very slow space and pace, calmly evolving and emerging from point zero to point zero. It’s music that is not easy to digest; if you are not prepared to take it in and just listen casually, you might be annoyed by it’s slow pace, the minimalist development, the deep bass which takes your speakers apart, followed by that gap of sheer silence (or so it seems); it all seems to work if you fully open up and listen very concentrated, maybe with headphones and take it all in as it comes. You’ll be hearing some great music if you are ready for it.
I am not sure if I ever heard from Chris Strickland before and I am not sure if playing this straight after the Diatribes is such a great idea (or vice versa for that matter, but in my case Diatribes was played first). The music here was composed in 2006-2007 and 2011-2013 in Montreal and the instruction on the cover is ‘please listen to this album a little louder than usual, there are moments that are meant to be barely present and get lost if the volume is too low. Please disengage the loudness button. This is very dynamic music’. That is all true I think (and I also thought: maybe albums like this should have 10 second test tone: set this so you still like it, and you’ll be fine for the rest of the album). Joda Clement delivered some field recordings. This is indeed dynamic stuff, and not unlike Diatribes, but Strickland uses a more radical collage approach. Whereas Diatribes takes time to set a sound for an amount of time, Strickland moves a bit quicker from the something very loud, to something very soft. The other difference seems to me that Strickland uses more defined purely electronic sounds (or processed acoustic sounds perhaps) and field recordings along with more pure acoustic sounds. This is more the field of musique concrete than improvised music, I think. The final piece, ‘Vaguely Human’ seems to me the most radically dynamic composition of the three. This too is not easy to digest, even though a bit easier, I think. It’s at some sixty minutes maybe a bit long to take in at once, certainly having just heard Diatribes, but in terms of current musique concrete this is a great disc. A fine release that sets new levels in dynamic approaches. (FdW)
Address: http://www.caduc.org
LUNACYBOT – COGITO ERGO SUM (CDR by Ressonus)
“I think, therefore I am” is the translation of the title, but you knew that already, as it’s one of those Latin things everybody knows – hopefully. It’s also the title of the album by Lunacybot, ‘Irish-born, Munich-based producer of electronic music. Makes music, writes about music, takes photos of things, scratches chin thoughtfully’. The title is split into three short abstract pieces off about one minute. The main menu are five longer pieces in which rhythm plays quite an important role, along with a set of dark ambient synthesizers. It’s the soundtrack for any post apocalyptic scenery in which computer data and cities play an important role. Chilling music that has no a lot of warmth, I think, but which sounds never the less quite all right. A bit doomy perhaps but it captures the speedy moody of the city quite well; it’s not that this is ‘fast’ music, but more mid tempo, pounding heavily. An oilfield drill perhaps? The final piece is ‘I Have No Mouth (pts 1-6)’ and uses a short text by Harlan Ellison and takes the dramatic narrative into a slightly different field. Here we no longer have to think of context but voice and sound support each other. Hard to follow what it is about as it is, it makes a no less doomy impression. While this would not be something I would play on a daily basis, I very much enjoyed this record. Forcefull and present music , bouncing with dark rhythm and likewise textures. Perfect for the early dark autumn evening. (FdW)
Address: http://www.ressonus.net
DANIELLE LEMAIRE – KILL YOUR DARLINGS… NOT! (cassette by Barreuh Records)
It’s not very often we review a cassette with no less than fifty-five songs on them, but here’s one, and each one is mentioned on the cover. In a way one could perhaps see this as a companion release to ‘The Vaults’, a double 10″ released by Danielle Lemaire and Jan van den Dobbelsteen (which was reviewed in Vital Weekly 949, and for which I got a mild slap on the wrist: I hadn’t mentioned the cover. The cover of that double 10″ looks great, printed by Knust in Nijmegen on their riso machines and has a great naive charm, which adds to the music), as these fifty-five pieces are from roughly 2003 to 2014 and are short, sketch like, with Danielle Lemaire mostly using her voice, telling stories, singing, whispering, moaning and whatever else; sometimes she plays her trademark percussion (xylophones mostly), organ and whatever she else can use. It’s all very ‘small’ and intimate music, almost like a poetry release. Obviously (?) I lost my way while playing this and looking at the track list; it acted in the end more as an endless, unconscious stream of sounds, words, music, and environments. Comes with a nice cover too! (FdW)
Address: http://toekomstmuziek.nu/barreuh/
AMEN TMA – INSECT PHONETICS RESEARCH (cassette by Lom)
A duo of ::.: and acidmilk – and I am just copy-pasting from the website. It’s the successor of Angakkut, but different. I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t from either. I understand that Amen Tma is about “experimentation with combining composition techniques of electroacoustic music, Balinese gamelan and polymetric techno”, which frankly I didn’t hear. They worked three years on this album, and I always ask ‘is that really important to know’? Does it make the album better if I know they worked on it for three years or not? The album is pretty much the A-side of the tape and spans forty minutes. The B-side, of equal length (yes, that’s a lot of music for your money), has a live piece and remixes by Drakh, Loyu, Sion Orgon, Makkatu, Rentip, &apos, and other – but none of these rang any bells. The music is “a study in sibilant stridulation sounds, interwoven with messages preaching an ever approaching Eschaton”, also something I couldn’t tell from hearing this. The music is mostly electronic, and I think it’s being played on a few synthesizers and samples, all of a rather lo-fi sound. It’s never demanding, this music, but also not exactly ambient either. There is a loosely rhythmic feel to it, slowly moving about within the playing of the synthesizers, rather than the use of rhythm machines. It’s not unpleasant to hear and perhaps in the amount of music that is on this tape it also get a bit lost. There is a certainly uniformity about this, even in the remixes, in which elements of the rhythm are a bit more upfront. But, so I was thinking, maybe such is life of remixing? It’s actually the vast amount, oddly enough, of music here that saves it: you can simply use this as an endless stream of music – on repeat it works even better. (FdW)
Address: http://zvukolom.org/
RINUS VAN ALEBEEK – RANCH (cassette by Lonktaar)
Since getting back into the world of self-released cassettes, Rinus van Alebeek has made quite a name for himself as a musician as well as re-launching Staaltape, once the cassette division of Staalplaat, but in hibernation for many years. Many of the current releases are handmade and highly limited. One of those Van Alebeek tapes that was previously released in an edition of twenty copies is now re-issued in an edition of thirty. “Ranch” deals with stories from the West Coast, and has been recorded in California and Berlin. Van Alebeek not only releases cassettes, it’s also his main instrument of choice. Either cheap walkmans, old four track machines or the better (but older) models from years ago. These machines are fed with field recordings of his own making – traveling is something Van Alebeek always seems to do a lot – or cassettes he found on the street during these travels, or which were in the machines as he bought them in a thrift shop or simply cassettes given to him by friends. He combines all of these in quite an interesting collage of sound. Here on Side A it’s all the more vivid kind of stuff, with rapid cuts and changes, making this almost like lo-fi version of Nurse With Wound; field recordings, voices and chopped up music: it’s all to be found in here. The other side is more curious. Maybe also a collage of some kind, but most of the time very quiet, with very few sound information. It’s more alike a microphone picking up hardly any signals in an empty room. It’s more curious than great this side, but in the world of Van Alebeek it probably makes perfect sense: silence is a rhythm too. Probably Van Alebeek doesn’t call music but a narration. Quite rightly so, I think. (FdW)
Address: http://lonktaar.blogspot.it/
BLACK WILLIAM/LITÜUS (cassette by Notice Recordings)
RYAN JEWELL – RADIO: VOL. 2 (cassette by Notice Recordings)
Chicago’s Notice Recordings (also based in Portland, OR, which makes CEO board meetings not an easy thing, I’d say) always know how to find new, local talent. Black William is the lesser known of the two on the split with Litüus, the label tells me, although I haven’t heard of both before. Each musician offers one piece on their side. Black William has a rather minimal synth music piece here. It starts out in a more or less slow rhythmic mode, but one sound only, playing one curve, which then, over the course of the next fifteen minutes slowly gets slowed down and the curve becomes a steady drone, curves bending (blending?) into one curve only. It’s quite a nice piece even when the sound is a bit crude and it’s very minimal; it surely has a pleasant minimalist ring to it, and at fifteen minutes also the right length. Litüus is from Chicago (Black William perhaps too, but it’s not mentioned) and is also heavy on the synthesizer sounds, and also on the minimalist side, but also using a delay machine which expands the synthesizer a bit further, but things keep on the more ambient side, even when it’s all a bit crude; it’s also a bit too regular ‘synth + effect’ I thought. Not bad, but not great either.
Ryan Jewell is from Columbus, Ohio (a bit further south from Chicago, if I recall well) and is mainly a percussion player. He has had previous releases reviewed in Vital weekly before, under which is his solo record ‘Eschew Obfuscation; Espouse Elucidation’ (Vital Weekly 763), besides stuff he did with others, such as Mike Khoury (Vital Weekly 731) and The Rejuvenation Trio (Vital Weekly 770). His style is quite interesting. While I was first playing this I didn’t realize Jewell was actually a percussionist (the previous releases are from some time ago, so I may be excused for not immediately realizing this), but I was thinking along the lines of musique concrete, tape collage and electronics. After some time I realized it seemed all to be more about the use of acoustic objects being played, rubbed against each other and then I realized the historical component of his work. I started to hear this again and listened afresh. The recordings are a bit older, from 2009 and 2010, and both for radio programs (hence the title). Jewell plays some highly intense pieces of music, with that vague notion of things being rhythmical, but a lot of it could easily count for something noisy or drone like. There is some highly intense soundscaping going on in this release, with a high strong dynamic level. Excellent and extreme music: that’s how we like these best. (FdW)
Address: http://www.noticerecordings.com
TANNER GARZA – FRAGILE HONESTY (cassette by Geräuschmanufaktur)
THE DEAD MAURIACS – A VISIT TO PROVIDENCE (cassette by Geräuschmanufaktur)
PIETRO RIPARBELLI & ALESSIO BALLERINI – BECOMING SOUND (cassette by Geräuschmanufaktur)
Three new releases on Germany’s Geräuschmanufaktur and its not easy to choose where to begin, but for me it was Tanner Garza’s release. This is partly because despite being in contact with him for some time through social media, I haven’t heard a lot of his music. He’s a member of more noise-oriented groups such as Black Leather Jesus and Priest In Shit, as well as running his own Bookend Records and active on the ‘underground cassette scene’ (boy, I couldn’t believe in 1986 that such a thing would still exist in 2014, how wonderful is that?). His solo work is, I believe, a bit quieter and perhaps can be summed up as the darker, outer edges of ambient music. To that end he uses electronic sounds and electronic devices and plays these sounds through these devices, effectively stretching them out and adding various colours to them, all a bit dark and all highly atmospheric. It’s perhaps a pity that one of these sound effects used generates a tick with a bit of delay and it seems to be present in most of these pieces. It adds a sense of unity to these pieces, which doesn’t justify the single pieces here, I think. There is a bit more variation in that respect on side B. Garza uses a lot of effects and creates long pieces. He could be a bit briefer at times and slim down these pieces, unless of course the longitude is what he wants. I quite enjoyed this music, on this long and rainy afternoon: it was the perfect soundtrack.
A trip – to Providence – is also to be found on the cassette by The Dead Mauriacs, a changing line-up troupe, but always with Olivier Prieur, here to be on found on ‘wood stove, piano, audio cassettes, field recordings and audio files, computer’, while his wife Helene gets credit for ‘noises with metal walkway on the artificial island of Vassiviere’. Susan Matthews (a new name in the line-up) uses her voice to recite texts by H.P. Lovecraft. In the past I compared their work with that of Fennesz and Stephan Mathieu, but maybe also a bit more noisy and a bit more loosely structured. This new release is a major leap forward to something else. Maybe it’s the voice of Matthews – very English – reciting these texts every now and then, but it’s also her chant at the beginning of the first side, combined with the electro-acoustic noise Prieur is producing, combined with this collage like electronics, that we are reminded of the work of Nurse With Wound. Again, perhaps, more loosely structured, but then The Dead Mauriacs recorded this live in concert, but I really enjoyed this one; in fact, I could as easily go as far as to say that this is the strongest work by The Dead Mauriacs I heard so far. It’s full of tension, full on drama and has great radiophonic qualities. Sometimes the collage-like aspects are very present that is seems hard to believe it’s recorded live; maybe The Dead Mauriacs is simply a very good live band – it made me curious! This is an excellent release.
We end this trip with a live recording of Pietro Riparbelli and Alessio Ballarini. The inside cover shows us a mixing board, a laptop and maybe a keyboard and information wise it says that sound sources from “some churches of Prato (Chiesa di San Domenico, Cattedrale di Santo Stefano, Chiesa di San Francesco, Santa Maria dell Carceri), recorded during a workshop held at Nub Project Art Space”. We hear indeed this cavernous space that a church sometimes is, and the whispering that comes with being in a church; hollow footsteps in a hollow space. I am not sure if Riparbelli and Ballarini simply add sounds to this original material, or if they transform this on the spot. Somehow I think it’s a combination of both. The A-side seems rather short and quickly ends on a high note and it has blank tape and on the B-side it continues. Odd. Why not make a single sided thirty-minute or so tape, with the program repeated on both sides? Anyway, it is what it is, and in fine spirit of what we know from Riparbelli this is all very dark and moody stuff. All of this very drone like with endless sustain on all of these sounds used – whether they are processed field recordings or the additional electronics – all along those highly spacious empty church sounds of footsteps walking. Sturdy stuff; nothing new as such, but well executed. We wouldn’t expect any less from Riparbelli. (FdW)
Address: http://geraeuschmanufaktur.bandcamp.com