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]

[image to follow]

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

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