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

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

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