This seemed like an unexpected return toform until I checked the liner notes and discovered that these pieceswere, in fact, recorded from 1993 to 1995. To anyone familiar with thework of the duo from this period, the sounds on this LP will be veryfamiliar. Beequeen have always been extraordinarily good at creatingdusty, low-fidelity machine drones that have a grainy, organicresonance in which one can hear all manner of buried and obscuredmelodies. Their textures have a distinctly antiquated feel to them,like the penetrating buzz of a sodium streetlamp on an Amsterdam streetcorner in the late-1800s. On many of these pieces, Freek and Frans takeadvantage of the substance of tape itself, building pieces from therhythms produced by a slowly queuing cassette tape, or using thefundamental technical limitations of magnetic tape to intensify thelived-in, archival feel of much of this material. Even the name of thealbum conjured images of a long-neglected psychiatric hospital archive,full of disintegrating reel-to-reel tapes of long-forgottensignificance. "I'm Searching For Field Character" is the perfectsoundtrack to an Orwellian Room 101: a distorted voice with the weightytone of a Soviet social engineer reads aloud a block of text meant toreprogram us with revolutionary propaganda. All the while the clockticks loudly and distant air raid sirens blare. It has the effect of afrightening Cold War radio drama pulled into near-total abstraction.With interest I've tuned into the current wave of heavily hyped NewWeird American drone artists like Double Leopards and Dredd Foole, butthis brief LP by Beequeen comprised of material more than a decade oldseems fresher and more adventurous by far. Beequeen are careful not tostray too far from theme, mood and substance, so their work is alwaysenriched by the myriad symbolic associations that each listener bringsto the experience. The same cannot be said of the aforementionedartists, who often prefer to just play the same tone as loud as theycan for over an hour, as if endurance alone could prove the merit oftheir work. Aughton is a refreshing antidote to this kind ofamateurish noodling, and I highly recommend it to any who have foundthemselves disappointed by this sort of thing in the past. samples:
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