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.