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