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.

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.

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