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

Ten Thousand Things - Though Darkness Divides Us [ekhein]

I’ve not come across Ekhein yet, but this is apparently EK22, so who knows what nuggets I’ve missed. Ten Thousand Things is the collaborative project of Scott Reber, who works solo under the alias Work/Death and also runs the tape label Three Songs of Lenin and Geoff Mullen who runs Rare Youth and works solo under his real name. The tape opens with a brief blast of grit, giving way to submerged instrumentation and lost railway station announcements suggesting there an obscured field recording somewhere in the mix. The ensuing drone builds across the remainder of the side gradually picking up momentum before dissipating into the run-off. The flip is a more visceral offering, swirling sheets of guitar skree and sand-blast enveloping each other for the duration with occasional glimpses of string scrabble before unapologetically spluttering out. Good stuff.

Ekhein discography
in stock here and here