Mike Shiflet - Opening Act [905 tapes]

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I had no idea how old this tape was until I received some more recent 905 releases all of which numbered in the 70s, this one is 19. So I guess it’s as good as gone from all distros now, and Mr. Shiflet has probably moved on too, but what the hell.

As suggested by the title the tape contains two live sets from 2008 opening for Astro and TV Pow in St. Louis on the A-side then for Michael Johnsen and Jack Wright in Cleveland on the flip. Both sets are recorded from the desk, so there’s no room acoustics or crowd mutterings getting in the way, and no applause. I’m guessing what we have here is edits of the whole though as both are squeezed onto a C20. The St.Louis show excerpt plunges straight into an obliterated tone cutting in and out and clipping like an overdriven speaker hanging from a loose connected thread. The whole set is equally destroyed, not a clean tone in sight, every frequency is sent through the Shiflet mincer, as if Shiflet is putting his whole rig through Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag technique, a contact mic tail rattling across various textures of gravel and tarmac.

My favourite of the two though is definitely the Cleveland show. The rough, grainy texture of the previous side still dominates, though here not shredding the tones so much as just roughing up their edges. The timbres on offer here are more varied and their progression into and out of one another managed by a series of careful segues leading the listener along through the blasted hues of Shifletian meltdown. This tape is a far cry from attentive tone combinations exhibited on the split with Ryan Jewell (reviewed below) but where the attentiveness shines through it hits the spot.

905 tapes

Sun Stabbed - The World Upside Down [peasant magik]

Sun Stabbed are a guitar wielding French duo that I first came across due to a lovely little screen printed 7” released by Doubtful Sounds a little while back. Other than that single and this tape I’m not aware of any other releases. The two tracks have similar and opposite titles: The False is a Moment of the True and The True is a Moment of the False respectively, and the music of each is equally similar, if not containing the same inverted logic . The first kicks off with a low-passed guitar feedback drone not dissimilar to latter-day Yellow Swans or Double Leopards, or if you prefer the wails of lost souls resonating in underground caverns. It pendulums back and forth through a regular phase, with gentle chirrups of cracked circuitry and other buzzing interferences occasionally tossed on top. When the drone bed recedes to the background, barely audible the pair fleck the resulting space with a variety of drips, drizzles and splurges. Here, letting go of the constancy that dominates the tape is to my mind its strongest moment as they slowly ramp up the energy with an interplay continually on the brink of collapse. This is the most event-heavy section, making nice use of the dynamic range from abusive blurts to diminutive shrieks. The gradual wind down works a treat, making the impact of stomped boxes and struck strings that brings in the final section all the greater, eventually bringing us full circle to much the same territory of the opening. Really nice piece.

Side B works with much the same palette, with the notable addition of regonisable guitar plucks scattered around. The whole track is pinned together firmly with a mid-range surge whose swelling and shrinking defines the energy of the piece. Again this is offset with occasional more gestural actions. The form is also alike to the A-side, with a quiet section in the middle - this time populated by some almost Keith Rowe-ish scrabbles alongside a remaining wisp of feedback. It’s difficult to say why when the contents are so similar this side is much less satisfying, possibly it’s the flatness of the central tone. Although when this is dispensed with, the energy produced by the great playing around it, vanishes and the closing third drifts past fairly featurelessly.

peasant magik

Damion Romero - Missing Link [hanson]

Yesterday I pulled the Music from the Once Festival box-set off the shelf intending to attempt to submerge myself in all five discs in one day, as it happened that project failed when I got stuck playing a Donald Scavarda track from the 1962 festival over and over (fans of Axel Dorner’s trumpetings should check out Matrix for Clarinet, prescient stuff). But the point of bringing that up is that it made me notice that the festival venue was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where now resides Hanson Records. I haven’t got a clue just how ‘backwater’ a place Ann Arbor is but it strikes me as an unlikely locale to be weighing into the history of experimental noise music twice in under half a century. Apologies for the pointless digression.

Having written up Romero’s I Know! I Know! a few days ago, I thought I should try to tackle something a bit more typical of his output. I have now listened to Missing Link in several different scenarios and have been pretty alarmed by how different it sounds in each. Romero has rightly gained a solid reputation for his ability to sculpt bass and this tape is all about the low end, so although one of my listens – on a portable boombox – left it feeling rather rather empty, it did reveal the grating metal scrapes that pepper one side and are all but concealed on a decent pair of monitors by the lurching swoops of bass. Romero’s music sets the crockery on my draining board rattling and even vibrates the lampshades, leaving me to wonder what his studio must look like with every object ratchet strapped to the desktop. Even his coffee mug must be metallic so he can sit it on a magnet while he lets rip.

That wasn’t really a review was it? Um.. Two tsunamis of bass collecting all the debris in their path and never losing momentum, but probably not his best.

Hanson

Emaciator - Secondary [rare youth]

Another week, another Emaciator tape. I just never tire of hearing this guy’s work. This one appears on Geoff Mullen’s Rare Youth imprint and was recorded “in daylight” we are told. As you would expect from Borges (circa april 2008) both sides have a warm and cosy core, but neither maintains the happy healing vibes of, say, Treetops stuff, opting instead for the path of desolate surge and gradual accretion. Smooth sines are tempered with buzzing saws penduluming about one another, threatening to clash but always dipping and swinging alongside back into lulling balance.

Borges just lets seems to take his hands off the reins, letting his tones roll down a few circuit-alleys to see what grime they pick up on the way, which sounds as if I’m not crediting him with any compositional control or musicianship – not the case. The music here just seems to grow and shift of its own accord, rather than being pushed, pulled, tweaked and tinkered. There’s not an ounce of over-worked, brow-sweated material, everything’s kept simple and it all just glides, a real pleasure to listen to - it’s been around and around in the deck for the last week and I could happily go on playing it for another.

Rare Youth

Eli Keszler - Wolver [rel]

Last year I had Eli Keszler tipped as about the hottest new thing in experimental music that I’d come across, a percussionist very much in the Chris Corsano/Alex Neilson vein who sounds like he must have four arms and follows firmly in the tradition of drummer as an autonomous improviser. Unlike some of his elder peers in that realm, Le Quan Ninh springs to mind, rhythm is not wholly absent from his work. Although he spends as much time bowing cymbals and crotales as flailing sticks, he isn’t averse to the rock drummer connotations, often embracing them by incorporating the guitar into his percussive arsenal.

The three tracks here showcase the variety of Keszler’s playing abilities, all titled by their instrumentation. Side A consists of Solo Crotales: a long, tense, fragile buzz of high pitched mist blows slowly through the whole side, eerily quiet, keenly focused. Occasional taps of wood and metal pierce the sheets of whistling tone as they gently flap and bounce off one another. The piece is clearly an overdub free improvisation, the sustained pitches a balance of applied pressure and straightforward chance.

Side B kicks off with Drums Guitar. God only knows how Keslzer manages to find a limb to activate his guitar while his hands enact the signature epileptic clatter upon a collection of small sounding objects. Still, the guitar hums fairly consistently, possibly shaken under one foot, and occasionally plucked by a pinkie – who knows? Keszler works up a frenzy, bells skittering across drumheads, before letting things die down and coaxing them up a-jangle again, the low-end rumble of slackened strings carrying us through. The final piece, Nail Violin, is far and away the most surprising, consisting of minimal but solid subsonic waves, with only the slightest hint of anything above 300 hertz, the warm cousin to the cold crotales opener.

All-round tip-top tape, an excellent gateway to Keszler’s world, though if you want to take a deeper plunge the full lengths both on Rel and Rare Youth, as well as the duo LP Red Horse are all outstanding. Also keep an eye out for Eli playing live with Geoff Mullen – I look forward to the recorded fruit that project bears.

rel

Bee Mask - Shimmering Braid [deception island]

When I had the dubious pleasure of living as a lodger an erstwhile landlady used to often say that the music which emanted from my room reminded her of a lighthouse at night, its beam scanning out across calm waves. I think Tim Hecker’s Mirages album was the one that rocked her boat most. But that reported image returns to my mind now, listening to this, the latest Bee Mask tape. Both sides seem to contain the same cyclic lilt, a long slow arc which inevitably turns back on itself like the orbit of a satellite, stuck in a self-determining cycle. Which is not to say the music is boring or even really repetitive, within the overarching lasso of lengthy phase, tones rise and fall, all obediently drifting to the fore as the boomerang passes close by and sinking to the back as it disappears from view. Only the subsonics occasionally stray from this lapping motion, pulsing at their own, related rhythm. Another fairly immaculate slice of glassine ebb from Bee Mask.

If Madak really does control his circuits with little LEDs and torches then I am reminded of a David Behrman piece Runthroughs performed by the Sonic Arts Union in its heyday. The spatialisation of the sounds was controlled by two players using photosensitive circuits. By swirling their torches over the control panel, the outputs could be made to pan in identical fashion. I don’t suppose I’m ever likely to see a Bee Mask gig, but I’d love to hear this music being flung around my head.

deception island

Damion Romero - I Know! I Know! [banned production]

Does knowledge obstruct enjoyment? Does knowing, and more importantly understanding, how something was made ruin the pleasure that is found in its consumption. I tend to think not, neither in the case of fine cuisine, nor music. I bring this up as I would likely have passed on this particular release had I not read about it’s contents and how exactly they came into being.

In essence what we have here is a field recording made with two geophones attached to separate branches of an avocado tree. The original night-long (6 hour 45 minute) recording has then been “compacted” into 90 minutes (and split across the two sides of the tape) and further compacted into 45 minutes (and split across the two business card cds). Further post-production work has ensured these drastic reductions of duration have not altered the pitch. Packing all of the branch clattering and passing traffic of nearly seven, apparently windy, hours down to one and a half, makes for pretty action-packed bit of field recording, which I guess you expect from someone whose aesthetic is more maximal than reductionist. Nevertheless the piece retains a sense of reality and credibility as a field recording. For the most part sounds are recognisable, though the Aeolian branches could easily at times be a cauldron of boiling oil or the shifting of subterranean lava, at times it seems like we can even hear the tree drinking, water being drawn through its capiliaries.

Working only within the timecode, Romero turns a gentle breeze into a howling gail, recalling the more buffeted moments of Francisco Lopez’s Wind (Patagonia), without impinging on the musicality of his source material: the wind hits occasional howling notes amid the bass rumble and percussive taps and rattles still stand out amid the predominant clattering. This tape is a prime example of why the ghettoisation of music into increasingly small boxes is completely absurd. The contents of this tape would doubtless appeal to fans of Toshiya Tsunoda or Seth Nehil and the like but as Damion Romero’s name only holds sway among noise-fans many of them will probably never hear it.

You can never really fault banned production for the effort that goes into their releases. Annoyingly though I can’t listen to the two business card cds yet, as they contain AAC files and are only playable on computers, and mine is a slot-loader. This comes packaged in a neat sliding-box assembled from tasty thick green paper, the tape itself is translucent green to boot and the only ‘artwork’ consists of ring-shaped green stickers on all the media parts.

banned production

Duane Pitre - For Loud/For Quiet [nna tapes]

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Duane Pitre seemed to rocket to recognition last year, thanks largely to the release of a single LP of drone compositions: Organized Pitches Occuring in Time, which came across as the bastard child of the Theater of Eternal Music and the guitar orchestrations of Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham. The music thereon was played by a medium sized ensemble running the full range of acoustic, electric and electronic instrumentation. I was interested therefore to hear what Pitre would do on this ‘solo’ tape, without the big band effect of his composed works.

The A-side: Motorized Music for Electric Guitar No.1 is fairly self explanatory. The ‘motorised guitar’ now has a fairly daunting and distinguished, albeit somewhat esoteric, history. It’s proponents have notably included Keith Rowe, Remko Scha, Paul Panhuysen and Kevin Drumm. Commited fans of either the former or latter would be well advised to steer clear of this tape however, the guitar(s) here remain entirely unprocessed – the harsh electronic edge which snakes between Rowe and Drumm’s strings is not to be seen here. Of Pitre’s precursors he comes in closest to the Maciunas Ensemble’s A Wide White World. Thanks to the joys of multi-tracking Pitre here achieves the full big band impact, after beginning with a faint trail of high pitched whine, a large ensemble of strings are gradually brought, one by one, into the fray. Although the careful choices exhibited on the LP are not as evident here there remains a deft composer’s hand at work: repetitive motifs are distinguishable among the swarm of vibrating strings, and the combination of pitches give rise to an amazing flock of chiming harmonics swooping about over the sustained notes. A shock and disappointment then that it was deemed ok to simply cut the piece of at the end of the side.

Everyone, it seems these days, has their little outlet for field recordings. 29 Hours (sound collage) contains a bit of Pitre’s. It opens with the chirp of some crickets, interrupted by the occasional passing car, accompanied by some light auto-harp strummings. We are then faded into a birdsong-heavy woodland where the strummings grow deeper. Crickets return, now joined by a piano, which plonks out a slightly melancholy tune before becoming subsumed beneath an organ chord, which drones us out to the close. In a post-Jewelled Antler world this sort of tepid, whimsical attempt at pairing acoustic instruments with pastoral soundscapes just comes across as naïve.

NNA Tapes

God Willing - On Dishless Days [breaking world records]

Two short blasts of mangled electronics released last year, but still a few copies floating around it seems. This one starts out where many a rock band of my youth would have seen fit to end a gig, shrieks of feedback stabbing through scrabble-heavy distortion textures, sounding like a contact mic clattering about on the speaker cone it’s been sent to. The frantic scrabbling soon dies away leaving us with a solid wall of about 300 hertz which is given an extended workout – to continue the metaphor, the piezo is now offered towards the vibrating diaphragm, so that the slightest tickle disperses sandy particles of fuzz across the fundamental tone. The sandstorm gathers pace until the mic is cast again into the furnace. Side B is awash with similar textures, tones are minced and grated and given the occasional shock of a pressure hose. It’s definitely the attention to texture which works on this cassette, the aural equivalent to leaning in close to an analogue photograph to see the detail and instead starting to pick out the grain in the chemicals, becoming drawn into the patterns, until you lose sight of the image and just start to see flecks of gradated greys. Yum.

Breaking World Records

Mike Shiflet / Ryan Jewell - Split [teen action]

The noise community is a funny thing, happily embracing harsh masters and delicate droners and even the occasional pop record. Dino Felipe’s No Fun Demo was a case in point, outlandishly catchy but put out by Carlos Giffoni nevertheless, not that this is bad thing by any means, on the contrary it’s something that should be encouraged. Now neither Shiflet nor Jewell stick out all that far but they don’t exactly fit into noise-shaped brackets all that easily either.

The Shiflet side of this split, tilted Study in Choreography (1-9), is far too carefully assembled and quiet to fit the noise stereotype. Nine miniatures each of which eeks out a considered tone combination, undulating lows paired with ringing highs: little in between. It sounds like a condensed version of Bryan Eubanks sprawling 3CD Desired Climate Works which Shiflet released last year as the final throw of his Gameboy dice. The electronic ‘etudes’ here don’t share Eubanks’ unfaltering stasis: tones are added, scrutinised, modulated ever so gently and stripped away. The word experimental is bandied about rather too much, but these tracks actually feel like experiments, as if Shiflet is hunched over a small pile of electrical test equipment searching for the precise combination of frequencies that will create a difference tone to destructively interfere with his tinnitus. For all the piercing cold of the individual pieces, the cumulative effect of the nine pieces is rather beautiful.

The acoustic counterpart to Shiflet’s electronics is provided on the flip by Ryan Jewell’s The Trees R Just Passing Through. A solo drum improvisation, but not a purely acoustic one it’s dominated by a single sine-tone fired, I imagine into the hull of a drum, around and on top of which Jewell sets to work with bow, cymbal and sundry extended percussion tools. Minimal, delicate and not all that noisy once again. For much of the first half Jewell’s action are barely audible - subdued taps set off fluttering beats in the sine wave, which otherwise draws a straight line through the entire duration. Jewell then sets to work above and below this line gently wobbling a drum skin beneath it and pealing out metallic friction on top.

An excellently paired split release.
Teen action

Family Battle Snake - Arabian Knights [goaty tapes]

So, I thought this was two firsts for me, the first Family Battle Snake release and Goaty Tape I’d heard, and it is, except that I have seen Bill Kouligas (whose name adorns the inlay) play live as part of The 8 Hour Drone People event at Café Oto, put together by Skull Defekter Joachim Nordwall and Sound 323 shopkeeper Mark Wastell, so no wonder then that this tape contains two more slabs of drone.

The first side (actually I have no idea if it is actually the first) maintains a tonal float throughout, initially happily dotted with morse blips and drop-out-ish pops which would just about manage to keep this off the shelves of the local meditation cassette peddler. The synth timbres here do lean towards the cheesy however, particularly about two thirds of the way through when the drone is washed away by glistening electronic chimings underscored by wave-stroked shingle recalling the more depressing tail-end of a few Krautrock careers. Decidedly pretty stuff. The flipside is more rewarding, firing up with deeper throaty tones which regularly careen off up through the spectrum, certainly more Cluster than Schulz. This is joined by a wavering tone soaked in cathedral reverb, all of which eventually dissipates into descending blurts of laser blasts. Pleasant enough I guess, but far from riveting.

Goaty Tapes, also in stock here

Our Love Will Destroy the World - Broken Spine Fantasia [tape drift]

Our Love Will Destroy the World is the new project of Campbell Kneale, previously of Birchville Cat Motel fame, runner of Celebrate Psi Phenomenon and probably the leading light of the Antipodean noise underground. Under that previous moniker Kneale released an inordinate number of discs over many a year, only a few of which I know well. In spite of normally being lumped among the droners, the variety of the Birchville Cat Motel releases stretched from gentle tonal drone to abrasive noise onslaught, occasionally even gifting us slabs of frenetic improvisation recorded from the room next door. So why the need for a new name? I would guess this is supposed to mark a venture into new territory, and though in some ways it does, it’s still not a million miles from his previous output.

The tape contains two single-track live shows, with no information as to where or when they were recorded, and nothing to tell the sides apart. The room-fidelity is palpable, but it does add a visceral gritty edge to the experience. Kneale’s playing is freer than I’ve heard it in a long while, it’s nigh on impossible to make out any recognisable instrumentation, though in my mind he is strangling a guitar with one pair of hands and working the knobs of a fx-pedal array with all ten toes. It took me a few listens to get into this tape, but the more it spins, the more it grows on me. Sonically it comes in extremely close to the more recent recordings of Matthew Bower’s Sunroof! outfit or possibly an Ashtray Navigations live set: shifting tectonic strata of skree, fuzz, wail and feedback all melded into a perpetual shower of blazing psychedlia. There’s also an LP out on Dekorder, which I might just have to pick up too, considering how well this is slipping down my cochlea.

Tape Drift

Chris Benedetto Madak - Bees Removed [deception island]

Madak is better known as Bee Mask, and runs Deception Island, which is apparently also a real place, just off the Antartic. This is his first release (as far as I’m aware) using his real name, and is a real departure from the electronic drones of his Bee Mask project. The material here is, for a start, all acoustic and was recorded “al fresco” on a found piano left by the roadside in the neighbourhood, an approach that reminds me of Organum’s Vacant Lights. Sadly though the fragile musicality of that LP is not to be had here. Scrabbles predominate, objects rattle about on (mostly) dampened strings and wooden frame while traffic buzzes, trains rattle and lorries reverse nearby. The background noise never really becomes anything more than incidental, not seeming to impact upon Madak’s rustles and taps of the instrument at all, car horns would seem to be gift’s to the solo roadside improviser, a chance to respond or to allow them to punctuate the piece, but they go unobserved. The playing itself doesn’t take off either, coming across more as a couple of casual explorative sessions of piano preparation than a piece of music, and possibly that's the aesthetic he's after, but it doesn't work for me. The gestures are busy and frustratingly repetitive, similar clacks and clatters come and go without much awareness of what came before or how to progress. Nice moments of objects forced between strings become lost in the general melee of activity rather than juxtaposed with a different approach. Madak has chosen a tough path here, taking on the most fetishised and over-prepared instrument in history on a street-corner in a happenstance manner, which with art-historical terms of found-object, site-specificity and locational improvisation I respect a great deal. Unfortunately the music here just doesn’t match the motives.

Deception Island

Devillock - Righteous Blood/Dead Cult [chondritic sound]

I have no idea if there are any regular readers lurking here, but if so then apologies for the unannounced absence. Last week I was busy with other things, and needed a break from this, partly because my descriptive faculties were straining at the tape-a-day rate, not to mention my bank account. Anyhow back on track now and should be posting a review most days for next couple of weeks.

Double C32 cassette (whose fragile double-width box seems to fall apart every time I so much as look as it) with nice collaged artwork of gothic illuminations and tombstone rubbings. Devillock and Hive Mind have been inextricable in my mind since both putting out records on Tone Filth a couple of years back that both touched the same nerve. Four more sides of eerie analogue synth abuse await us here. The A side of Righteous Blood is a particularly haunted house, poltergeist-activated doors creak, and furniture is dragged and thrown while wisps of shrill feedback ring out piercingly, echoing slowly through rooms and out into the ether. Unruly spirits shriek replies and the cold wind drifts by, causing the chimney pots to hum gently. Each event seems to rattle around the empty house, before finding a nook or alcove to vanish into. It’s a empty and inhuman scene, but a subtly handled composition, with a deft application of dynamics throughout. The B side is a more straightforward drone affair, tones rising and falling, leaping out of control and wrenched back under.

If the first slice of Righteous Blood evoked a Hammer Horror castle then side C, the opening of Dead Cult is all ghost-in-the-machine. Starting out with spooked ground hum, and blips of licked circuits. If anyone’s seen the YouTube video of open-circuit worms, then this is the sound of an octopus let loose of a considerably more beefy bit of circuitry. The synth sounds as if it’s guts have been poured onto the table and is being worked by wet tentacles. When the ground hum evaporates, space opens up leaving hollow tones to wail over a scattering of loose connections which fizz and crackle gently. From here the piece swerves through sudden scattershot moments of epileptic electronics and semi-harsh ground hum before fizzling out. The final side begins across similar territory albeit in a heavier vein, an added lick of fuzz to the preceedings of the previous side, Just before halfway the actions recede and are merged into a dissonant drone, which growls on as sharp edged tones are flung into the mix. When these are suddenly cut out the vacuum is filled with a soft warm chord, around which one of the best sections of the whole pack groups, as dynamically satisfying as the A side, and with perhaps more timbral variation, there’s an unpredictability here which is great, no single trick is allowed to dominate, some sounds are modulated gently, others chopped in and out roughly.

With an hour of music across the two tapes this is definitely worth the asking price, if you can still find it, and if not you can always nick it from here.

Rale - Twelve hours of the Night [ekhein]

Rale is the moniker of William Hutson who runs Accidie Records and works largely with an analog synthesizer. His myspace bears the amusing and astute inscription “newage rhymed with sewage” in the hope of evading comparisons with New Age drone, aligning himself instead with the swathe of post-industrial noise/drone practitioners. The title of the double C20 pack makes me think of Jim O’Rourke’s Long Night which finally saw the light of day last year. Whether the tapes here were recorded over said twelve hours is unknown, but that O’Rourke disc isn’t such a bad touchstone for some of the music here either.

The first side is dominated soft tones, which if I didn’t know better I could have sworn had been sent bouncing around the walls in some enormous underground cavern as with the site specific recordings of Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster, although ‘deep listening’ is probably awkwardly close to new age as a reference point for Hutson. Nevertheless, notes hang in the air, receding and returning, cohering and colliding. In the background what could be the gentle purr of an oscillating fan conflicts with this impression, conjuring images of a hot and sticky summer night, Hutson hunched over the his equipment. This gentle whir bleeds over onto the second side, but the warmth of the cavern is replaced with the cool enclosure of a large fishbowl, lending a glassine edge to the wavering tones.

The second cassette shifts the reverberation timbre once again, apparently inhabiting a long section of piping, along whose length standing waves come and go. The gentle background fan whir has morphed into a subtlely more percussive rhythmic chirrup as if the condenser mic has been replaced with a piezo. The least static of the pieces thus far, it’s tonal quality seems to vanish, snaking around a bend, and reappear without any explicit addition or subtraction of sounds throughout. Turning the tape over I have to admit I double-took, checking that I hadn’t in fact put a Scott Reber tape in instead. This side contains what seems to be a field recording of a busy restaurant as heard from the air-conditioning ducting. Air rushes past, resonating through the tubing, barely masking conversation and the momentary clatters of plates and cutlery. Perhaps after ten hours hard grind over the synth inside, Hutson decided he needed some food and shot down to the local diner for the last two hours. The microphones seems to navigate through the space as the track progresses, coming out of the ducting the low resonance dissipates replaced by overbearing echoes of crockery noise, occasional recalling a murky environmental take on Xenakis’ Bohor. As the microphone gradually circles down from the ceiling snatches of conversation drift uncomfortably close and the attacks of waiters clearing table become sharp, and here Hutson leaves us, in a crowded musicless place.

Really excellent work, I now can’t wait for the forthcoming LP on Arbor, track this one down if you can.

Emaciator - Appease [hanson]

There’s no information on the emaciated-children-adorned inlay to tell us when this was recorded but judging by the trajectory that Jon Borges’ Emaciator project has been on (as discussed in my previous Emaciator post) I would say the music on here is a fair bit older than other recent releases: this might be the harshest episode yet in my personal encounters with the project. The whole of the first side is pinned solidly to the ground with a ton of low frequency quake, seeming to set off a tumbling cascade of rubble in the right speaker, while electro-shock therapy is intermittently administered to a robot in the left channel. I’m not sure if it’s my aging dusty hifi kit making it sound like this, but with the exception of the smothering mattress of bass, there’s some pretty hard panning of the other sounds: shrieks to the left, crumblings to the right; which I’m really liking. Great to hear this excellent rough-edged side of Borges’ drone work, amid his increasingly ‘pleasant’ ouput. The other side is a considerably less engrossing mid-range grind, a continual pulsating whirl of helicopter blades chopping through sheets of sandpaper which persists in wall-like fashion throughout. Unrelentless but fairly uninteresting, which is a shame as for me it kind of lets the tape down a bit.

Available from Hanson

Bee Mask - No Mutant Enemy [pizza night]

This is the first material I’ve heard from Bee Mask, who seems to have broken out of local obscurity in recent months thanks to a fairly frantic release schedule including his vinyl debut on Weird Forest which I am yet to hear. He apparently uses homemade photosensitive circuits, controlled by moving small lights around over them. If you think that might end up sounding like a collaboration between Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler then think again. There’s not a bleep in sight on this tape, instead we are treated to a single piece of spacious drift split over the two sides, conjoined by some distinctly non-electronic chime and clatter.

Side A opens out with hollow, low passed tones, contented emptiness, patient calm, waves seem to lap against rocks in the distance. This half sounds much like Brendan Walls Outposts LP, or Asher’s Distances piece for homophoni, until joined by a fragile phasing loops of bells and chimes, which blend over onto the second side. The remainder of the side rolls out in sustained tones again, slightly less passive than previously, though far from an onslaught. A really beautiful tape, thoroughly effective in spite of its apparent effortless simplicity.

Available from Bee Mask

Work/Death - From an Inescapable Circle [three songs of Lenin]

This one isn’t actually the latest offering from TSOL, but number eight. At 44 minutes in total it’s considerably longer than the other tapes on the label. It contains what Reber refers to as two harsh noise wall realisations of Alvin Lucier’s piece I am sitting in a room, plunging straight into the process several takes through. Build this together documents an electronics workshop led by Jessica Rylan and Victoria O’Hanlon in assembling their own Flower Electronics synth, while Isolated and Demoralised is simply noted as “sounds of AS220 sounding in AS220”. Assuming this to be something of an anomaly in Reber’s musical process, it’s surprising how much it bears the characteristics of his other work. On side one we hear the traits of Reber’s field recorded contributions in Ten Thousand Things. Mutters accrue echo upon echo unfurling against the walls and ceiling, pounding back into the microphone, filling it with subsonic flutter and fierce crackle. And on side two (the more successful piece in my estimation) the overloaded signal deterioration, shapeless bass pummel and resonant tonal drone which mark out his Work/Death project are all here. Here Reber even manages to eschew the noise wall sensibility, achieving compositional development by gradually filtering sound through acoustics. A very worthwhile recontextualisation of a classic process piece, yielding entirely different results and demonstrating it’s continued relevance to a new generation of noisemongers.

Work/Death - Accepting Irrepable Mechanisms [three songs of Lenin]

You’ve got to hand it Scott Reber, he does come up with some great and fitting titles. The inlay for this cassette, as with many others on TSOL, has an epitaph emblazoned on it in the stock Crass-esque stencil font reading: “Many blessings heaped upon the head of the child. Dog begets dog. Though the names are the same little else ever connects them. Garbage in. Garbage out.” There’s clearly a lot of not solely musical thought going in with his work, nice to see evidence of, but I’m not going to try to unpick it here.

One piece per side, the first, Sterling Departed begins in signature territory of tonal float buried beneath overdriven signals, clipping speakers and general audio undesirables. It’s pretty clear that this isn’t the work of a off-the-shelf distortion, there’s a rich grain of fine dust peppered with larger chunks of ballast. Side Two: All Lost Jewellery Finds Home is a highly suitable title once again for what is probably Reber’s smoothest (dare I say ‘most ambient’) side I’ve ever heard. The normal roles are reversed, the rolling chords allowed to wash into the foreground for the duration, masking subdued disruption beneath.

The curious should drop in here and pick up both this and the Ordinary Machinery tape I wrote up yesterday, together they make for an excellent introduction to this man’s work. I'm taking a day off tomorrow, the final Three Songs of Lenin post should be here by Monday evening (UK time).

Ordinary Machinery - Accumulate and Acclimatize [three songs of Lenin]

My suspicion about this being Reber’s field recording project is confirmed here, recorded one year later than Stand While Fields Pass “in and around one building… inch by inch scrutiny”. As if as proof that a lot can be accomplished in a year, this is world’s apart from the previous Ordinary Machinery offering, despite using much the same methodology. The attention to detail is magnificent, giving a sense of Reber stalking his material intently and patiently, the detail may be grit, grime, groan and hiss but it is captured lovingly. Given the nature of the sounds, one lazily imagines the source to be a factory, though with some clever microphone placement, this could all equally have been captured in and around a domestic building. The composition is a class act too: splutters and crackles amass and disperse into a drone punctuated by happenstance voices, drips and background clanking, while a child drives his remote-control car in loops on top of the whole proceedings.

The second side starts out in simple, throbbing stasis, enhanced by the gentle, swelling overtones of resonating metal and a subtle guttural rattle. Most of this material seems sourced from the same driving vibration, recorded from numerous positions: layers creep in, pace and intensity build, pitch rises. But the piece isn’t only about flow. The ebb takes up at least half the side picking up with a close-up shot of the same vent that could be heard rattling earlier, now a crazed metallic pitter-patter from which point Reber draws back: a long pull-out shot swings outwards across the local rooftops, hints of the earlier sounds echoing back into view. A beautifully constructed response to a place, whatever that place may be.

Work/Death - Excuse me but I think you dropped something [three songs of Lenin]

Listening through this, my third Work/Death tape of the last three weeks, I suddenly realised I have no idea what his ‘main instrument’ is. I guess it’s probably the inevitable synth, although I actually prefer the image of him sat behind a Bontempi Chord organ, reel to reel player and the mandatory tangle of stomp boxes. In fact, if I were to really follow my imagination then Reber would be the sort of person who trawls around the English countryside in search of empty churches on uninhabited hillsides, and when finding one would switch on the Organ, wire up several microphones in acoustically perverse positions ) in and around the building: a couple inside the bass pipes, one in the guttering outside, and one at the far wall of the church, so close that the refectling sound waves cause grinding distortion. Then wait for the wind to howl, and let blast a heavy, ecstatic dirge of taped down keys and drawbar manipulation, all the while monitoring and mixing the levels of the various microphones, and cutting and running before the Verger gets a phone call. The sound of several giant harmonicas strapped to a jet engine in flight, which gives him an idea for his next tape. But I guess he’s using a synth, eh?

Ordinary Machinery - Stand While Fields Pass [three songs of Lenin]

This one is TSOL No. Six. Judging from the project’s name and the contents of this tape, I’d hazard a guess that Ordinary Machinery is the moniker Reber uses to denote his field recording based output, though the clichés of that genre are pretty absent here, no birdsong or trickling water to be heard. The inlay states “recorded while others slept, at work, under highways, near electricity and refridgeration”. It’s a single piece spread across both sides which conveys the image of a kitchen hooked up to audio gear: microphones dangling over frying pans, pickups in the fridge, contact mics on the plumbing. It opens with a spluttering crackle (something cooking?) which sadly the murkiness of cassette fidelity fails to render in sharp focus, over which distant traffic soon rumbles. Much of the first side is then dominated by an incessantly rhythmic factory-line-machine sample, thankfully silenced beneath a loud drone of electro-magnetic interference, punctuated by the background patter of loose concrete slats echoing beneath flyovers.

The second half fares a little better, the same electrical field subsuding into non-decript rumble, and the distant chatter of a few friends gathered for drinks, filtered through some humming appliance. I’ve spent much of this week listening to Lee Patterson’s debut solo cd on Shadazz, and though Reber clearly isn’t interested in the clarity of field recorded detail that can be found in Patterson’s work, seen in that light Stand While Fields Pass comes across as little more than a collection of second rate microphone experiments.

Ten Thousand Things - Flat Bed Wreckers [three songs of lenin]

Two more sides from the duo of Scott Reber and Geoff Mullen, recorded back in 2007 on “new years eve eve day”. Day Off Clocked In is a solid block of guitar and electronics, entirely unsurprising but thoroughly satisfying nonetheless. Having spent the last couple of days with the devastatingly bleak musings on Turgid Animal, I have to admit that this side began to restore my optimism in life: it’s a rich broth of soaring, edgeless riff clouds, only just held down to the ground by the occasional clicks of flicked equipment switches. While this approach to the drone form is somewhat common these days, the track still stands out in this field, and doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

After an initial rustle of delayed strings, side B’s guitar action is much more subdued. The focus of Sidewalk Point of View is an urban field recording, a train station submerged in reverberant electronics. The guitar (Geoff?) providing a smooth stream of background tone over which mechanical rumbles and rattles are lost in a vast acoustic space. Good stuff once again from this duo, I hope they get together a record a full-length disc at some point so more people can hear them.

Three Songs Of Lenin

The next six posts will be the promised write-ups of the six Three Songs of Lenin tapes that I have been waiting to get stuck into for about a week now. There have been ten releases on the label as yet, most coming from label owner Scott Reber, under his various guises: Work/Death, Ordinary Machinery and Ten Thousand Things (with Geoff Mullen). The artwork on these things is just phenomenal: three fold inlays with two colour screenprints, to which I will try to do scanning justice. Scott seems to be running two musical projects and a label without any internet presence and stock in just one shop, but then I live on the wrong side of the pond for this stuff, so what do I know. Here’s a taster of the artwork and a link to the label page at mimaroglu. Normal write-up service resumes tomorrow.

Fordell Research Unit / Erases - Split [turgid animal]

These Turgid Animal tapes really keep the 80s DIY aesthetic alive and well. Even the shoddyness of Hanson’s photocopied inlays is outdone here. The artwork looks like a tenth generation Xerox with the machine set to maximum contrast at each stage, and the original placed at a jaunty angle on the glass, all reproduced on super thin paper.

Fordell Research Unit are from Scotland, and that’s about all I can glean without taking my laptop down the stairs to leech the neighbours’ wireless. Their side is two minimal drones entitled The Dead Astronaut. The first part A Question of Re-Entry (isn’t there a label called that?) is a low, brooding and virtually changeless affair which bizarrely enough reminds me more of one of Toshiya Tsunoda’s field recordings than anything from the noise scene, it could quite easily be a study of the resonance of a metallic interior, activated by a stationary engine or low pitched sine wave: near static rumble. The far too brief second piece News From The Sun is suitably more glowing but has already ended, been rewound and ended again while I try to think of what to write about it.

The Erases side seems to pick up where the tape I wrote up yesterday left off, hang on I’ve just checked and the title supports this, yesterday’s side B being Haunted Waters, today’s is Haunted Swamp. The increase in thickness: from water to swamp, is palpable. A dense and relentless pulsating industrial drone - circulating like the whirling blades of a large extractor fan - underpins the first half, wavering in tone slightly. Beneath this crisp, buckled sheets of metal are strung out to rust, a team of construction workers crackling into action upon them with grinders and welders. The fan eventually recedes leaving a light high-pitched whine hanging in the air and allowing distortion laden arcs of feedback to take the foreground.

Of the three tapes I picked up from Turgid Animal, this one is definitely the pick.
Fordell Research Unit.

Erases – Brooding Organs/Haunted Waters [turgid animal]

It’s grim up North, and this tape, recorded in Leeds in 2007, does little to break the stereotype. Erases are Lee Stokoe (Culver, Skullflower), George Proctor (Mutant Ape and honcho at Turgid Animal) and Dean Glaister. Here they offer us two sides of bleak and blackened drone: as desolate as England’s coal mines, as unforgiving its moors. There is little progression or development, just dogged grind, crackles and screech all getting lost in the turbulence. The lack of clarity - all sounding like it was recorded from the other end of an empty hangar - is, I’m sure, intentional, though at times it seems to take the teeth out of their material, dampening the impact of the occasional blurts that puncture the enveloping storm clouds. Things close in a bit part-way through the second side, gritty shrieks and malfunctioning machinery lurching into the foreground dragging all manner of damage and feedback with them, and suddenly it really gels, the cosy voyeuristic distance of the first half is blown away and the ear scratching detail prevails. It’s a magnificently evocative journey through a windswept post-industrial wasteland of crumbling masonry and rusted girders, coming in close to Bob Bellerue’s Redglaer project.

Turgid Animal

Spiral Joy Band - The Dreams of David Crosby [sloow tapes]

Two room recordings of gigs at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar in early 2007, both complete with audience mutterings and occasional clanking of furniture. Spiral Joy Band are apparently Mike Gangloff and Mickel Dimmick of Pelt fame though at times there are clearly more than four hands at work here and Amy and Nathan are also credited on the sleeve. The obvious touchstone for the side-long improvised string drone of Phantom Foundries I would be Tony Conrad, and while the playing takes a while to calm down from an agitatedly scratchy opening, it then settles down to satisfy the ears in a similar way. You can almost feel the players concentration focusing on the fluctuating harmonics; flitting about neatly between harmony and dissonance and perhaps most importantly all the intervallic possibilities between the two. Things get really gloopy as some harmonium or organ (?) tones are added, and then, all too soon the recording breaks off. The next track exhibits a more percussive approach reminiscent of Pelt’s Empty Bell Ringing in The Sky album, the organ (or whatever it is) forming the centre, while bells are scraped, clanked and dangled. The playing here is a little busy for my tastes and drifts off centre completely with a period of communal growl and howl at the end.

The second side really loses the plot as far as I’m concerned, filled with warbling whistles and annoying bongo beats, it all sounds like the thoughtless ramblings of a bunch of enthusiastic stoned audience members who have taken the stage after a Vibracathedral Orchestra gig hoping to emulate the band and free their ears. I’m sure some people will love the inept and unsubtle approach here, but as far as I’m concerned the less said about it the better. I never did like hippy drum circles.

sloow tapes

Raglani - Classically Sprained [arbor]

In spite of several recommendations from trusted opinions this is the first release by Joe Raglani that I’ve bought. Possibly it was the various mentions of voice, his singing on the releases that put me off. But one of the best things about cassette releases is you don’t need to invest in a limited edition vinyl-only release to test run an artist you’re intrigued about but not convinced by. (Have you never heard of downloads? I hear you cry).

I’m hard pushed to find illuminating comparisons for the music on this release, it is lazy, not even very fitting to compare Raglani with Emeralds but the one thing to be gained from doing this is to note that there is a density on this tape, an accretion layer upon layer of material generating as much sound as many a trio would do from a single pair of hands and without losing the cohesion. The first ten minutes of side A is pure synthesizer work-out, sounding much more like a lost early Cluster track than any contemporary players I can call to mind. Beginning with a gentle fizz, repeated fragments of melody shift in and out focus atop a tidal growl they float momentarily on the surface as the undercurrent grows, drags them under and they struggle up for air, becoming more frenetic and choppy as the side progresses, eventually washing us up on a sunny beach where an impromptu ensemble plays us out with slipping loops of melodica, sitar, bells and guitar.

Side B picks up with the same troop in more mournful mood, joined by Raglani’s echo-laden voice and catapulted synth tones descending overhead. My misgivings about his singing were misplaced. Here, forming the melodic centre of the piece for five-odd minutes it sits beautifully among the other sounds. Winding down into the most spacious part of the tape, we are left with drawn-out flickering fuzz and occasional plucked guitar all dissipating into a field recorded summer park scene of feet-crunched leaves, before quickly picking up into a maelstrom of synth gurglings and melodica. Although Joe Raglani tends to be associated with noise labels, that would seem to be less an apt description of his music that a sign that the noise clique is becoming increasingly dispersed across a much wider range of fringe music than has previously been the case, something to be applauded. I’d think.

Once again sold out at source, but available, for the time being, here or here.

Work/Death - Ruptural Strictures [arbor]

Two shortish pieces for piano (and electronics) on this tape from Scott Reber. Both of which are not really ‘noise’ as such. Even at their densest there’s a distinct lack of overload, an attention to dynamics and structure that makes it sound more like the work of contemporary a contemporary improvisor/composer than an out-and-out noisician. Side A is played inside the piano, Side B on the keys (with the assistance of Meagan Grundberg, Sakiko Mori and Geoff Mullen), both are treated in some sort of cumulative wash of processing. The perfect outline of clouds from below leaves the sustain pedal firmly down throughout, then adding seemingly interminable electronic decays to the natural reverberations of the piano. The gestural moves here wouldn’t sound out of place in a modernist prepared piano composition, at times even echoing David Tudor’s handling of the instrument’s guts. The electronic treatments Reber uses rarely transform these source actions: fingers sweep across whole sections of the piano, objects clatter against them and the occasional frame tap and struck key; but they do go to work after the fact. Though the use of delay is by no means a whitewash echoes do seem to return bounced off a distant wall and each new sound adding overtones to a low morass that wells up over the duration gathering into a dark and grainy cloud by the close.

By the end of May the Universe provide or not we are as close to noise territory as the tape gets, and a far cry from the beginning of the piece. A softly muttered “ok” is cut short at the start, flagging up the ‘liveness’ of this take for multiple pianos (or mutiple hands), there follows a short and fairly harmonious section of semi-random notes, like the most tonal possible outcome of two Cage number pieces being played simultaneously. As the brooding electronics (all square and sawtooth waved this time) begin to respond the notes become more interrupted: muted by a meddling hand on strings, only half played; and far more scattershot, quickly discarding their tonality. The electronic growl intensifies, all distorted snarling gradually overriding the attacks of the piano, though never obliterating it. A really excellent tape.

I have now got six tapes from Scott’s own Three Songs of Lenin imprint which I intend to write up here at some point. Though I’m kind of wishing I had left this one until last, as I don’t really feel any of them are likely to better it.

Sold out from arbor but a few stray copies left here.

Hive Mind - A Feast Within [gods of tundra]

Two more blasts of alien flightpath correspondence from the ever reliable Hive Mind on this tape. Side A scans across interference-laden airwaves in search of a signal, glimpsing eroded tones among a field of radio fuzz. Starting out with the regular purr of a possessed oscillator and accumulating more haunted electronics before vanishing into the ether. Much like the best of Skull Defekts early material there’s a sense of things taking on a life of their own. Trying to decipher the title scrawl on the spine I had assumed it read ‘A Beast Within’, I’m a little disappointed to find I’m wrong.

Side B is a less absorbing outing to my mind, dominated by what could be the spasmodic flutterings of a giant rubber band recorded at the other end of ten metres of plastic ducting. This sound is moulded throughout, becoming buried in Hive Mind’s trademark hovering craft hum and gentle abrasions as things progress.

gods of tundra discog.
get it here

Everyday Loneliness - Appropriation [callow god]

Appropriately titled, this double cassette release by Jon Borges (Pedestrian Deposit, Emaciator) is “a four part suite” using “tape manipulation only, no effects”. Borges takes what sound like loops snatched from the radio, and, well, he seems to just slows them down. There’s something about the simplicity of the approach which reminds me of Asher’s double album from earlier this year Miniatures, and even though there is a lot more gloomy murk here, it does (on the second tape in particular) have touches of that same lyricism. I suppose I should also note a fairly marked and pretty surprising similarity at points to the work of Philip Jeck, whose habit of slowing nigh-on everything down to 16rpm is echoed by Borges’ use of (at a guess) 3 3/4ips.

The short etudes here are at their strongest where the defects shine through, the pitch-shifts of tape slippage or the inclusion of radio interference. Borges is clearly the man with a razor blade too, we don’t hear his splices unless he wants us to, as on side 2 where the edit cuts through a rich piano note to silence. Not only is the title fitting, but the project name too: the feeling throughout is of glum abandonment. I can’t help wondering about Borges’ sources: whether they were in fact cheery ditties, upbeat waltzes and feel-good blasts of soundtrack strings that he has taken perverse pleasure in grouching down to depression pace. The rhythmic elements that are the focus of the first tape seem to force this misanthropic atmosphere a bit much, but the second tape, for all it’s brevity and simplicity is a gem, albeit a sullen one.

callow god discog.
available at arbor

Keith Fullerton Whitman - Taking Away [digitalis ltd.]

The two tracks on this cassette, titled Side 1 and Side A respectively are reworkings of recordings using Whitman’s ‘Playthroughs’ system, which he premiered on his debut album under his real name on the Kranky label back in 2002. The system took it’s input from an acoustic guitar fed this into his purpose-built Max patch which pitch read the guitar notes and produced sine or square waves of the same frequency subsequently feeding these through some sort of tape-delay emulation array, if my memory serves me correctly.

Here Whitman re-feeds this material through further processes, much as he did on the Track4(2waysuperimposed) ep on Room 40, only here the processes seem somewhat more complex and both involve his favourite tool of the now a modular analogue Doepfer synthesizer. Side 1, recorded in a mere hour and a quarter, bears the most resemblance to the original material of Playthroughs. It starts off with low smooth booming tones, spacious but sinister which gently accrete some square-wave surf and gradually sprout from the ditch dropping higher frequency blips and bloops (the random, accidental pitch readings of the original system?) in their path. This feels like Playthroughs era Whitman as seen through hundred-year-old glass, the purity of the digital sound clouded by the analogue processing. The fog rises and falls throughout, stripping away the busy detail to just rumbling bass before letting us catch a glimpse again. Obscure/reveal/obscure/reveal/obscure and then just when the pattern has become clear Whitman reveals the original source as subtle string plucks drift into reach.

Side A is an altogether different affair, Whitman seems to have opted again for the strategy of his first (I think) tape release (A Bogan Apocalypse) using two conflicting approaches to the same instrument. Here the source drone remains entirely absent until about twenty minutes in. The piece dominated instead by what for the time I will call bleeps, even (given their analogue character) era-bleeps. This description, however, does the track an enormous dis-service, this is bleepage at its most engrossing. How Whitman has wrought such variety of bleeps is beyond me. The length, but most importantly the timbre of these sounds seem for at least the first five minutes to never repeat themselves, initially each is granted the space in which to ring out fully, enhanced by great use of the stereo width. Not happy to rest in simple minimalia for long, the density grows until we are surrounded by dozens of buzzing insects, gurgling deep-sea cephalopods and numerous other organic phosphorescents. As the swarm amasses the creatures begin to interact in ways not possible in the spacious opening, setting off flickering chain reactions until the chattering begins to subside and the whole flock begins to circle as one into the inevitable drone section. The joy of this part is in the occasional miscreant, the bleep that refuses to be tamed, darting against the flow, but these too subside and drift off gently sunset-wards.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with drone music, even with harmony, and this is an excellent tape, certainly the best music to these ears that I’ve written up here as yet. I guess I would just really love to hear Whitman take the analogue overload in the other direction at the close of this second piece.

This is in plentiful stock at mimaroglu.

Emeralds & Dilloway - Under Pressure [hanson]

I’m guessing these guys will need no introductions for anyone reading. I’ve been following Emeralds since their Solar Bridge album from last year (also on Hanson and now available on vinyl as well). Having also snatched their follow up What Happened [nofun] and the vinyl repress of Allegory of Allergies [weird forest] which was originally a double tape of live recordings, I felt I had pretty much saturated my need for their particular brand of analogue synth meets guitar bliss, it has begun to feel all a bit too easy, easy for them and easy on me. Seeing them pair up (or rather quartet up) with ex-Wolf Eyes’ Aaron Dilloway seemed promising though, something to bring them down off their cloud into the mire for a while. Possibly.

Side A opens with kraut-influenced synth figures that are by now fairly signature Emeralds material and drifts along in exactly the typically lush vein you would expect from them, Dilloway’s input is barely noticable except for a little occasional click in my right ear suggesting he might be running some tape loops around. The next track has far less sheen, beginning with a bestial vocal loop from Dilloway which returns throughout the piece. This and his other more confrontational input seems to hold the Emeralds lads in check somewhat interrupting their usual flow, which is nice to hear as a change though I’m not actually sure it makes for better music. I don’t know if the copy I’ve got is defective but the third track on side A seems to start then cut out…fast forward, turn over…

The flips starts out with swoops of delayed electronische ton, gradually becoming peppered with further tonal gurglings and clusters of guitar, and this really is feeling like a straight Emeralds record again, not that there’s a problem with that I like their music, but can’t help feeling it’s just a bit safe now, when space opens up I am sat willing Dilloway to interject, but it doesn’t come and the piece builds, really rather nicely. Maybe all Dilloway is doing here (and in the first track) is working with tape manipulation of Emeralds’ sounds, adding to the thickness of the sound.

Thoroughly recommended to Emeralds lovers, but if you’re hoping for a departure from their well-trodden path, stay away.

available as a tape or CDr from hanson

P.S. This post got me to thinking. Is there’s really anything wrong with musicians doing what they do best? Should we constantly be expecting people to reinvent themselves, to take bold new steps? And at what point does doing what you do best become simply dull and formulaic?

Enrico Malatesta - Standard [presto!?]

The inlay lists this as six improvisations for classical bass drum recorded in the Teatro Valdoca in Cesena. It also proudly states in a manner typical of improv documents: “there are no overdubs on this record” and the recording certainly has a warts and all character about it. The track titles appear to be durations in minutes and seconds, the first on each side though reads 00’ 00”, so in practice we have four pieces varying in length between one and four minutes.

There are no notes on technique, either that of playing or recording, though I would guess from the amount of audible skin flutter beneath a large dose of hiss, that the microphones have been brought in extremely close over the drum and that it might even have been recorded to tape in the first place. The opening track is a constant rumble full of ringing overtones reminding me of some of Jon Mueller’s recent electroacoustic percussion treatments, It is difficult how to tell how Malatesta is generating these rising arcs of mid range, how he keep them swirling, from what at the beginning of the track sounded like the gentlest of drum rolls. There are some really striking timbral nuances in this piece which make it more fascinating than the straight drum-based drone it might have become. The second track is more familiar fare for a percussion based improviser. Starting out with a similar low rumble as previously, which breaks down into individual hits. There follows a busy array of cracks, clatters, rubs and scrapes let loose over the drum’s surface, at times sounding like a croupier is showing off his shuffling skill on the skin. This section is akin to the ‘environmental improvisations’ heard on Jeph Jerman and Greg Davis’s Ku album, and also to Patrick Farmer’s approach to snare drum improvisation.

After what I assume is the false start of 00’00”(*), The second side opens with 01’07” in which the drum is straightforwardly struck fourteen times. The note is far from clean however: there’s a certain crash in the attack of the sound suggesting it’s either being played with a non-traditional stick or a fairly heavy object has been left on the skin. I assume our attention is intended to be drawn to the subtle differences between each apparent repetition, the different pitches that rise in the decay. I find this sort of work wearisome when drawn out over long durations but here the brevity works fine. The final piece begins another rumble but when this subsides the instrumentation claims of the sleeve are called into doubt by the unmistakeable presence of a bowed cymbal. It is here that the low-fidelity of the recording throughout really shines, the high pitched keening tones and metallic washes coalescing beneath the tape hiss perfectly. After a couple of minutes the beautiful uncertainty of the shifting bowed tones is joined by spurts of deep resonance as the drum is intermittently struck. This lovely interplay between (I assume) left and right hand continues for five minutes according to my stopwatch, even though the track is titled 04’26”, and could as far as I was concerned have happily lasted twice as long.

Presto!?

Earn - Down The Well [monorail trespassing]

Having just read Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicles earlier this year. I can’t help but see the title as a reference to the protagonist’s long afternoons spent at the bottom a dried up well behind a deserted house a few doors down. The epigraph on this tape reads “tell a pitiful story”, so maybe I’m onto something. I’ve got no idea who is behind Earn, however and the only clue given here is that Scott Reber is close at hand, providing cello on the opening track.

Of the three this is the longest of these monorail tapes, with three tracks on each side. Thick swarms of deep string noise dominate the opener, which sounds like it was recorded inside the instruments: wolf tones abound. Although I’d like to think this is a simple multitrack of acoustic recordings in the vein of (a very short version of) La Monte Young’s Just Charles and the Cello in the Romantic Chord, I’m guessing there must have been some processing or pedals involved somewhere along the line. Please is the most distant track of the six, the oscillator left running for a few minutes while in the background someone bumps about in the kitchen in search of a final beer, fumbles with their keys and brushes against the microphone on their way back into the room, before remembering that the tape is still running and twisting a couple of knobs which plunge us into thick woven wriggling mesh of sound that characterises the next three tracks, and straddle onto the second side. Much of this portion bears strong resemblance to Axolotl’s output, in places even touching the heights that he achieved on Telesma. Excellent stuff, two long sides of this dense wail would have been the easy option, nice to hear a different approach. The final track revisits the juxtaposition of acoustic scrabble with cable recorded pedal spew, I could swear that in the background someone with a runny nose is trying to peel the tape off their contact mic and has left the pedals plugged up in a feedback matrix all the while. I'm still in the dark as to the who and how of Earn, but will be tracking down more stuff by him/her/them.

All in all three strong tapes. Apparently monorail are on the move and would appreciate orders sooner rather than later so they can lessen the cost of shipping their stock across the country. Go on, give them a hand why don’t you.

Emaciator - Appease [monorail trespassing]

The longer Jon Borges works under his Emaciator guise, the softer his recordings seem to get. Having sucked me in with Resentment, the CD he recorded for Alex Cobb’s Students of Decay label, he blew me away with last years Reflection, put out by William Hutson’s Accidie imprint. Both of those previous full-lengths fit neatly in harsh(ish)/drone territory, but in recent months the harsh edge of Borges’ output seems to have subsided. Coveting an LP from late last year on Not Not Fun was already demonstrating a preference for a smoother wave-shape and if there was any doubt as to the general direction then along came the release of a new album, titled Austere, by Borges’ flagship harsh noise project Pedestrian Deposit (also on monorail) which, while being richer in detail than most of the Emaciator material, also exhibits this shift towards “bliss / meditation / therapy “ (as Borges himself puts it). I imagine die-hard fans of the early Pedestrian Deposit material must be finding this progression a bitter pill. Even myself, having placed the Reflection 2LP squarely inside last year’s top ten was slightly disappointed to find the square-tooth edge of the Emaciator sound gradually filing itself back to tonality. With his general trajectory in mind, this 22 minute tape continues just as you would expect it to. Certainly the most tonal material I’ve heard yet from Emaciator. Two sides of sky-gazing drift, “to reach a state of peace”.

Considering the wealth of quality and not-so-quality drone musicians shimmering and glistening about in the underground at present it’s pretty hard to make your presence felt, but whether the thought of Borges’ permanently joining these ranks brings a smile or a frown, he’s clearly damn good at it. A strong tape, though if I had to recommend just one of this latest batch of monorails it would be his new Pedestrian Deposit album.

monorail trespassing

Work/Death - Contained in Proper Place Names [monorail trespassing]

Solo outing from Scott Reber on Jon Borges’ (Pedestrian Deposit, Emaciator) label. The sleeve bears a little three line text (haiku?) which ends “garbage in. garbage out”. I can’t work out if this is supposed to be a comment on the music or some sort of sideways snipe at capitalism, but anyway – on to the sound. There’s a semblance of melody trapped underneath the glass-shard landslide which dominates here. Sounding something like one of Terry Riley’s organ dervishes being forced through a wood chipper, ground to dust and scattered in the wind. Perhaps. On Side B the tonal bed is far more static, long chords are held just within audibility beneath a mass of disruption. It opens sounding like it could have been recorded on a clifftop blustery day or beneath the tarmac of a busy motorway, until about a third of the way in when it ducks into a tunnel for shelter allowing the warm tones to wrap around and the wind and traffic to blast past and here it hides for the rest of the side. There’s plenty more of Scott’s work on its way to me in the near future. This one has whetted my appetite nicely.

monorail trespassing