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.