24 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the '70s.

La Monte Young, widely acknowledged as the father of musical minimalism, is one of the most influential contemporary composers. Yet he has strictly monitored his own discography and his music is rarely heard. Born in a log cabin in rural Idaho in 1935, Young became a key figure in the New York underground art scene of the early 1960s. He made vital contributions to the Fluxus movement and initiated the use of lofts as performance venues. Most important of all, his exploration of sustained tones, unorthodox tuning, high volume and long duration changed the course of twentieth-century music and ushered in new ways of listening.

This LP, initially issued on the French Shandar label in 1973, is a crucial document, preserving two manifestations of Young’s pioneering creative imagination. Each side stretches out to the standard length of an entire long-playing record. Listening to the sounds captured in each groove you are lifted out of routine temporality into a prolonged and personal here and now, an intimate kind of time that no clocks can measure.

On the first side is a performance by the Theatre of Eternal Music, the group which Young formed specifically to realise his radical musical conception. The name was coined in February 1965 to indicate that this ecstatic droning music had neither beginning nor end, that it came from and returned to a state of silence, where it lingers in its full potential until some musicians play its component tones once again. The group’s line-up, which changed over the years but always featured Young and his partner Marian Zazeela, boasted such luminaries of new music as Tony Conrad, Terry Riley and John Cale. Cale carried lessons learnt from Young into his work with the Velvet Underground, and through that seminal group to new generations of indie rockers and noise experimentalists.

On this recording the voices of Young and Zazeela are combined with the trombone of Garrett List and the trumpet of Jon Hassell, now more widely known through his work with Brian Eno. Although the immediate impression created by the music is that it changes little, close listening reveals intricate activity in the high harmonics where unexpected patterns and phantom melodies skitter across the surface of the music’s enveloping drone. Young and Zazeela developed their vocal technique through intensive study with North Indian singing master Pandit Pran Nath, and traces of that influence can be heard in their subtle ornamentation of the sustained tones.

Sine waves provide the basic threads that hold together The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys. Sine waves unadorned form the Drift Study on the second side of the LP. Such pieces were conceived as continuous sound environments. Since 1962 Young has nurtured the notion of a Dream House, in which such work might be installed, playing continuously and taking on a life of its own. To a seated listener this Drift Study appears a very pure form of minimalist musical drone, but move around the space in which the piece is playing and you will hear dramatic variation in the loudness of different frequencies, while your movement will itself alter the structure of air molecules in the room, affecting the way the piece is heard. It’s a fascinating probe into the nature of sound, hearing and spatial awareness.

The Shandar label, under the musical direction of French musicologist Daniel Caux, produced a small but select  catalogue. It includes recordings by Albert Ayler, Terry Riley, Sun Ra, Philip Glass, Cecil Taylor, Steve Reich and Charlemagne Palestine. During the early 1970s this was the cutting edge of new music, and today these recordings are still challenging, uplifting and revelatory. This reissue preserves the original artwork, an integral part of that special Shandar magic but also a fine example of the design sense and calligraphic grace that Marian Zazeela has brought to the presentation of La Monte Young’s singular music.

"My own feeling is that if people aren’t carried away to heaven I’m failing," -La Monte Young in 1966

More information can be found here.

24 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

One of downsides to living in the United States is that it is hard to keep up with all of the great limited-release or self-released albums that are continually emerging from the fringes of the UK’s experimental music underground.  While it is not terribly difficult to keep tabs on more established artists like Cyclobe, Nurse With Wound, Richard Skelton, or Current 93, it is very easy for an artist like, say, Áine O'Dwyer to remain under my radar for far longer than I would have liked.  Yet another fine example is this deeply inspired and beautiful homage to Jhonn Balance from early last year recorded by Phil Legard (Ashtray Navigations, Xenis Emputae Travelling Band) and his wife Layla.  While it predictably has some Coil-esque attributes (subtly hallucinatory electronics, a healthy interest in paganism), the Legards admirably transcend those nods by mingling them with their own passions for traditional/early music, yielding a unique strain of ritualistic-sounding rural psychedelia (and one of 2015's most slept-on great albums).

Xenis Emputae Travelling Band

The initial idea (and namesake) for this apparent one-off project originates in Ian Johnstone’s Jhonn Balance memorial, located near a hawthorn tree by Bassenthwaite Lake in Cumbria (the place where Jhonn’s ashes were spread).  Appropriately, work on the album began during the Summer Solstice back in 2014, a decision that Coil certainly would have approved of.  Balance and Peter Christopherson probably would have also appreciated the Legards' penchant for twilit ambiance and eerie, hallucinatory electronic textures, as well as the Legard's use of some deeply unconventional instrumentation (like a fox skull and a spiricom).  In nearly all other respects, however, Hawthonn diverge quite dramatically from Coil’s influence, which is (of course) what makes this album so compelling.  For the most part, these six pieces are built from little more than simple accordion or harmonium chords and Layla's beautifully somnambulant-sounding "ancient Druid priestess" vocals.  The overall feeling is a uniquely languorous, sensual, timeless, and ceremonial one that seems like half-dream, half-distant field recording of a pre-Christian ritual in some Stonehenge-like clearing on a hillside.

While pieces such as "Aura" unquestionably boast lovely half-ghostly/half-angelic melodies, Hawthonn's primary appeal lies in their ability to cast and maintain such a haunting and otherworldly spell.  They also do an absolutely superb job of blurring the lines between structure and abstraction, real versus unreal, and natural versus unnatural.  The opening "Foxglove," for example, opens with untreated field recordings of bird songs before transforming into a simple, lovely vocal melody…that floats above a bed of loud insectoid clacking and chittering.  Also, while Layla's melody remains relatively constant, the surrounding music restlessly shifts between being virtually absent altogether and cohering into ominous swells of dark chords.  Additionally, the vocals themselves eventually dissolve into distant soft-focus dreaminess before ultimately resurfacing in their natural state. There is no real terra firma that can be reliably expected to stick around.  Later on the album, "Ghost" seems to revisit a similar  vocal melody, but it is initially only heard in vaporous fragments amidst a bleary haze of rippling accordion chords, electronic hums, and deep exhalations, though it eventually coheres into something resembling an actual song (albeit one buffeted by spacey electronics).  Throughout the album, Layla acts as kind of a benevolent Siren, guiding me through a fog of buzzing drones, sputtering electronics, and an endlessly shifting landscape of collapsing, dissolving, stretching, and coalescing structures.

As far as faults are concerned, I am hard-pressed to think of anywhere where Phil and Layla made anything resembling a misstep, though there are plenty of unusual sequencing and structural choices that could be viewed that way by listeners with different perspectives than my own.  For example, Hawthonn have a definite tendency towards burying their strongest material in extremely lengthy songs, as both "Foxglove" and "Thanatopsis" clock in at over 16 minutes.  I tend to view that as a wise tendency to ensure that the longer, more ambitious pieces have enough of a melodic hook to keep them compelling for their entire duration though.  It is great that the Legards have such a knack for writing timeless neo-folk melodies, but they are definitely not the endgame or Hawthonn’s real raison d’être.  Rather, they are merely the most immediately graspable facet of a much larger, stranger, and more iconoclastic vision.  Another possible critique is that the album is somewhat amorphous and that all the songs sort of blur together without any real stand-out or real culmination.  Again, however, that is completely by design.  In fact, the album is intended to he heard as one constantly shifting, ebbing, and flowing whole rather than a series of discrete works.  In order to work as well as it does, this album absolutely required a light touch and an unwavering willingness to eschew the sharp edges of reality in favor of a beautifully drifting and flickering reverie.  Layla and Phil succeeded admirably in those regards.  As a result, Hawthonn have achieved the rarest of rarities: a homage that reaches heights similar to its inspiration.

• Foxglove
• Aura
• Ghosts

 

 

24 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

This collaborative EP with violinist Anne Bakker is a unique entry in Rutger Zuyderveldt’s vast discography, as it is a 26-minute tour de force of nerve-jangling tension and sliding dissonance.  Deining (translating as "heave" or "commotion") definitely falls quite unambiguously and unapologetically into the "this is art, not entertainment" category.  That probably will make it a hard sell for most people (Rutger himself understatedly observed that the piece is "a tad bitter"), but it is nevertheless quite a fascinating piece for those of us with an appreciation (and high tolerance) for shifting, uncomfortably close harmonies (there are a lot of those here).  Also, it is very hard not to admire the beautiful symmetry and simplicity of this uncompromising experiment.

Machinefabriek Bandcamp

When I first heard Deining, I had not yet read anything about it and was somewhat mystified by the seemingly minimal role played by Machinefabriek.  Aside from the subtle pulse of a sine wave, the piece seems to be entirely about Bakker and her violin.  Which it definitely is, in one way.  In a much more significant way, however, this is very much Rutger Zuyderveldt's experiment, as his concept and behind-the-scenes machinations are why Deining is such a singular entity rather than any kind of expected or "normal" collaboration.  The project is rooted in a very simple idea: Zuyderveldt asked Bakker to slowly slide from the lowest note to the highest note for five minutes on each string of her violin.  She gamely obliged and also threw in some corresponding downward slides as a bonus.  Structurally, Deining is little more than five minutes of Bakker slowly sliding up the lowest string of her violin, a brief resolution into a pleasant drone, Bakker slowly sliding up the second lowest string of her violin, another brief resolution, and so on.  There is not any larger compositional arc other than a series of four increasingly high-pitched, uncomfortable, and painfully slow slides up the neck of a violin interspersed with a few welcome oases of calm.

While such a nakedly segmented, time-based, and purposely restricted composition does not yield much in the way of a cumulative reward, there is quite a lot of pleasure to be found in the details (if "pleasure" is the right word).  Zuyderveldt did quite an expert and impressively nuanced job of layering multiple tracks together to evoke a constantly escalating intensity and pitch even while other tracks are sliding downwards.  Also, the two opposing sliding pitches, coupled with the underlying sine wave tone, yield a vibrant and constantly shifting world of complex harmonies and oscillations.  As an experiment in sustaining simmering, squirm-inducing tension for an uncomfortable period of time, Deining is quite an unqualified success.  Also, the structure of escalating, sharpening plateaus of unease is a clever and effective way of presenting such an (almost) unrelentingly dissonant theme.

There are also few other tricks and enhancements happening in the background of Deining, like the fact that Rutger’s sine waves manually follow the pitch of the violin, then freeze into a drone when they reach the same pitch (always at the midpoint of a section).  The piece is not nearly as aggressively minimal as it initially seems.  I also enjoyed the transitional moments when the warmly beautiful passages of interstitial calm suddenly blossom into a fresh surge of quavering upward glissando.  The real show, however, remains the rich and wonderfully textural plunge into almost half an hour of shifting dissonance and close harmonies.  All of the conceptual and structural underpinnings are neat, but they are primarily intellectual pleasures that pale beside the far more visceral and immediate power of the piece itself.  There is certainly no shortage of harsh music in the world, but it truly rare for anyone to achieve that end through harmony alone and to do it so immersively and so effectively (especially outside the realm of modern classical music).  Obviously, a release like Deining is fundamentally destined to appeal to a very limited audience, but it is hard to imagine any way in which Rutger could have achieved his objective any more perfectly than he did here.  Deining fills a niche that almost never gets explored and does it masterfully.

• Excerpt One
• Excerpt Two
• Excerpt Three

 

24 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

Perpetual frontrunners Natural Snow Buildings and My Cat is an Alien aside, the single most unique and transcendental album of 2015 was this full-length debut from Würzburg-based experimental folk duo Brannten Schnüre.  While previous releases were primarily focused upon crackling, ritualistic-sounding, and eerily beautiful abstract collages, Sommer im Pfirsichhain (Summer in Peach Grove) takes Christian Schoppik's "German hauntology" aesthetic to a whole new plane, sounding like nothing less than the ghost of a lovesick Weimar Republic busker who happened upon an accordion, an out-of-tune violin, and a battered four-track in the spirit world and somehow managed to mail the resultant album to the Aguirre office in Belgium.  As if that were not enough, Sommer improves upon that already appealing description by balancing its more macabre and experimental tendencies with an unexpected warmth, sweetness, and innocence.

Aguirre

Christian Schoppik's Brannten Schnüre project first surfaced with a now impossible to find split release in 2011 on Germany’s SicSic cassette label.  The excellent Aprilnacht tape then appeared on the same label in 2014 and earned Schoppik a bit more well-deserved attention, as his surreal loop collages of weathered traditional folk and classical music samples, melancholy accordion, enigmatic dialogue, and lilting, half-sung German vocals were both beautifully constructed, wonderfully otherworldly, and completely unstuck in time.  It seemed like a perfect and fully formed aesthetic, so his decision to expand into a duo with vocalist Katie Rich and transition from loop-based soundscapes into actual songs for this latest album was quite an unexpected and bold one.  It seems to have worked brilliantly, however, as everything that made Aprilnacht so singular is still more or less intact, but Schoppik has found a way to transform that vision into something a bit more melodic, tender, and memorable.

The transformation was not a complete one, however, as Rich's haunting ballads are still interspersed with a number of more drone-based pieces that would not have been at all out of place on Aprilnacht.  Schoppik excels equally at the two veins and they balance each other nicely, even if the vocal pieces tend to be the ones that stick in my head a bit longer.  Among the instrumental pieces, the opening "Vom Baum im Hof" probably stands out the most, as a languorous melody unfolds over a sensuous bed of churning and bleary strings as floating synth tones flutter and bleed together in the periphery.  It is followed by one of Rich's lovely and melancholy accordion ballads ("Schweiβ"), which is ingeniously made surreal and ghostly with the addition of quivering string stabs and deep, bleary, and ominous horns.  "Feldweg," on the other hand, is such a perfectly eerie song that it does not need much more than a simple guitar arpeggio and Rich's vocals to cast a sublimely, mesmerizing spell (though it does benefit from some nice additional touches, like a bittersweet accordion melody, washes of guitar shimmer, and high-pitched backing vocals that sound like a chorus of ghost puppets).  Later in the album, "Brüderchen und Schwesterchen" manages to hit the wonderful place where the two strains of Schoppik's vision intersect, as corroded loops of undulating accordion arpeggios steadily grow in power while Rich seems to be distractedly half-singing by herself in another reality altogether.  The rattling and undulating beauty of "Nachmittagsschwüle" is likely the album's zenith, however, sounding like an epic tour de force of heartache, mourning, and occult nocturnal ritual condensed into just three perfect minutes.

There is an enormous amount to like about Sommer, so it is difficult to think of any real flaws other than the inclusion of a few instrumentals that are not quite as strong as the material surrounding them ("Lichter am Weiher" and "Mithra im Jardin Botanique").  That minor quibble ("why isn’t the album absolutely perfect?!?") is naturally eclipsed by the many ways in which Sommer is truly wonderful and utterly mesmerizing.  Great melodies and excellent songwriting aside, Brannten Schüre excel the most at the more intangible and fundamental things, such as lightness of touch, use of space, dynamics, sequencing, and texture.  In particular, I was most struck by how effectively Rich and Schoppik maintained a spell of bittersweet, mysterious beauty without ever erring into oppressive sadness.  Schoppik's talent for texture deserves a special mention as well, as Sommer's half-dream/half-nightmare spell would not be nearly as effective if the various instruments were not all frayed, rusted, submerged, or shrouded in audio fog. Sommer im Pfirsichhein so effectively creates its own little dream world that it feels like gazing into an extremely lovely and elaborate version of whatever the summer equivalent of a snowglobe would be, then noticing all kinds of disconcerting little details amidst all the beautiful seaside houses and picturesque tree-lined streets, like menacing shadows; a haunted-looking, hollow-eyed child; a body hanging from a tree; or a large rotting animal carcass on a perfectly manicured lawn.  In short, exactly the sort of thing that I love.  This album is absolutely stellar.

• Schwei√ü
• Feldweg
• Br√ºderchen und Schwesterchen

 

17 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

At this point, it is quite clear that The Inward Circles project is the home for Richard Skelton’s darker impulses, dealing primarily in brooding ambiance, churning violence, and grinding horror.  The big difference between Skelton and similar artists, however, lies in his scope and intensity.  This latest EP, a soundtrack to Skelton’s short film Beyond the Fell Wall, does not disappoint in those regards, as Skelton essentially creates an melancholy and spectral world, then ferociously rips it apart.  Unfortunately, it does not quite scale the heights of either The Inward Circles' debut or Skelton's amazing previous soundtrack (Memorious Earth), being a bit too short, bombastic, and single-minded to offer much more than a satisfyingly heavy catharsis.  It is still a solid and worthy release, but it is not quite "Richard Skelton" good.

Aeolian/Corbel Stone Press

The film Beyond the Fell Wall is haunting series of black and white images of desolate landscapes, stones, and trees accompanying a portentous naturalist fable that describes how rivers built the world and how the power of the rivers and their successors was eventually usurped by men (who are now, of course, dismantling the world).  In that context, I suppose I have heard a music works fairly well, providing the voice of Don McCorkindale with an eerie backdrop of deep, menacing drones and ghostly, melancholy snatches of melody.  Essentially, the film is an elegy and a tour of desolation and ruin, despite its reminiscences of singing rivers and happy birds, so the unrelentingly dark tone is appropriate (if laid on a bit too thick).  Taken by itself, however, I have heard a music is a bit too heavy-handed, back-loaded, and monochromatic to stand with Skelton's better work.

The main problem is just that there is not any real beauty to be found, as it is essentially built upon little more than a hollow and ominous loop that gradually snowballs from "dark ambient" territory into a fearsome apocalypse.  To borrow the grammar of film criticism, the stakes are simply not high at all here, so the gathering storm does not elicit any emotion from me nor does it feel all that threatening.  Skelton just quickly transitions from melancholy brooding to an eruption of demonic fury.  While I certainly appreciated the eruption, I did not miss the brooding at all.  The least bit of beauty, tenderness, or fragility could have made that climax considerably more meaningful.  Thankfully, there is a consolation prize: it is still quite a spectacular show of nightmarish force, as well as an impressive bit of sound design.  When I have heard a music breaks open, it sounds like hell itself has opened up to consume the world with infernal entropy.  The 8-minute mark is especially horrific, evoking nothing less than the creeping approach of giant, grinding rusty blades.

To its credit, the few issues that I have with I have heard a music are somewhat unusual and relative ones.  For one, it feels weirdly condensed and rushed at only 19 minutes.  I like what it ultimately becomes, but it feels like it gets there too quickly to amass the necessary tension.  Also, it feels curiously undecided about whether it wants to be a soundtrack or not.  The first third is very minimal and all atmosphere, serving as a very effective backdrop for a film, but not quite compelling enough to be satisfying on its own.  The rest of the piece, however, would easily overpower any film (and consequently is mostly omitted from said film).  It feels like Skelton reworked the musical component of a more ambitious multimedia statement (there is also a "Beyond the Fell Wall" book) in hopes of creating something that could stand on its own and only succeeded partially.  I have heard a music is also the victim of its timing: had it come out five years ago, I probably would have loved it.  Instead, however, it is released in the wake of several career-defining triumphs, so my expectations have been considerably jacked-up by this point and I am quite a bit harder to impress.  Skelton fans will still undoubtedly enjoy this EP, as it showcases his rarely surfacing "grinding cosmic horror" side and offers some rewarding headphone listening, but it is ultimately a fairly minor release within his discography.

• excerpt one
• excerpt two
• excerpt three

 

17 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

This drab duo first emerged a few years back as bloodless hipster darlings, their aptly-titled 2013 Matador debut Impersonator overflowing with the sort of sentiments one might encounter in the first half of an Abilify commercial. Given frontman Devon Welsh’s incidental familial connection to the world of Twin Peaks, it’s mildly amusing how much of his gloomy music with Matthew Otto recalls Julee Cruise’s songs, albeit ones hastily covered by Coldplay.

Matador

Still, Majical Cloudz successfully toe-tapped into the zeitgeist, endearing themselves to conflicted millennial souls who casually brand themselves online with depressive viral non sequiturs and pseudo-sadness hashtags. Their fanbase has grown with critical acclaim and related benefaction, leading to key festival placements, studio time with Grimes, and some opening tour dates with fellow melodrama marauder Lorde. On the eve of a new North American tour, they took a commercial cue from fellow Canuck Drake and dropped Wait & See, a brief odds-and-sods set of studio outtakes from the sessions for last year’s Are You Alone?. Why these tracks didn’t make the cut the first time around is beyond me, though a shrewd marketer understands the importance of leaving fans wanting more--and then selling it to them.

As has become unsettlingly par for the course, Majical Cloudz remain thoroughly mired in microcosmic bringdown. Neither Otto not Welsh demonstrate their value as songwriters or sound designers here, whether listlessly miming Joy Division on "Heaven" or limping through the emotional gauntlet of "Pretty." Placed four songs in, the latter contains a couple of prodding lyrical gotchas for those who hadn’t drifted off to sleep just yet. For a group credited by some with conveying such complex emotions, Welsh’s words mostly come across spartan and simplistic, something that proves ever more detrimental when he presents them in a sappy sing-song manner. Case in point, the title track betrays the intended heady conceit of Otto’s backwards-replayed strings by Welsh’s facile vocal delivery. An attempt at sanguinity, closer "My Heart Soaks Up Every Drop Of Your Blood" showcases just how closely Walsh can mimic Chris Martin. Taking a backseat, Otto accents a fairly basic and muted drone with a rote piano motif, permitting his cohort to croon away in his apparently limited register.

By the very end of Wait & See, their pop aspirations become painfully evident, and in turn, downright embarrassing. At best, Majical Cloudz remain a karaoke-level lounge act deceived into thinking their originals are anything more than tearjerking folly. Their bargain basement Adele schtick would be a lot more convincing if any of it felt honest. And honestly, none of it does.

17 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

On this new tape, the prolific Evans draws from the styles he has worked in heavily before: noise, electro-acoustic, and ambient, but Brittle bears the mark of all without sounding like any one in particular. The two lengthy pieces cover a significant amount of sonic territory, and he makes remarkably diverse and complex compositions from a world of unidentifiable sound.

Helen Scarsdale Agency

The first half of the cassette, "Pills in the Reptile House," opens with Evans employing a loop of rattling sounds almost resembling a microcassette recorder left in a running washing machine.The sound is rhythmic, yet processed to have a hollow, strange quality to it as additional textures and processed noises are worked in.Evans eventually strips the mix back, retaining the scraping but in a more open space, blended with reverberating strings that could be either piano or guitar and shrill, harsher electronics.

The composition as a whole has a clear sense of structure and organization to it, even if the sounds Evans utilizes are anything but conventional.Sounds become shimmering, metallic, and a bit dissonant at one point, before the piece overall becomes softer and is largely characterized around gentle electronics.Changes are subtler toward the conclusion, the sense of structure is lessened, and the piece concludes on stuttering, digital-like vibrations.

On the other side of the tape, Evans opens "Lineage" with a more familiar bit of overdriven noise crunch.Paired with a passage of metallic banging noises, the sound is not far removed from the likes of classic Macronympha, but the harshness is short lived as he quickly shakes things up to a more spacious sound.Besides dropping the distortion, Grant introduces birdsong recordings and subtle loops of noise.The composition eventually takes on a futuristic, but pleasant quality to the sound, without a lot of change but still complex, tightly woven layers that vary.What initially has a sci-fi, futuristic quality to it eventually is shifted away into the cold, empty expanse of deep space.

Brittle’s name is a bit misleading, because I would characterize the sounds Grant Evans generates as being closer to mud and muck as far as tactile metaphors go.It is sticky, gritty, and at times ugly sounding, but that is exactly what makes it compelling.I have no idea how he made these sounds, since almost nothing is identifiable, but I am rather glad that he did.

samples:

• Pills in the Reptile House (Excerpt 1)
• Pills in the Reptile House (Excerpt 2)
• Lineage

 

17 January 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Scale, repetition, and variation have a way of bringing Morton Feldman to mind whether or not Feldman has anything to do with the matter at hand. The matter in this case is Mike Majkowski’s Bright Astonishment of the Night, the second of two full-length albums he released in 2015. The other, Neighbouring Objects, focused on the sympathetic resonances between instruments like piano, chimes, and double bass. This one focuses exclusively on the double bass over two long tracks, one of which, titled "Sleep and Oblivion," runs for over 48 minutes. Majkowski spends much of that time cycling through a series of techniques that emphasize the weight and extent of his instrument: the way it travels through the room, the way it melds into the walls at low frequencies and cuts through the air at higher ones, and the way those extremes relate. Resonance is still the subject of his work, but in this case it’s cast against a play of repetition and variation that holds equal weight.

Bocian

Time was an important concept for Morton Feldman in the latter part of his career, from 1983 until his death in 1987. It was during those four years that he completed pieces like String Quartet No. 2, For Philip Guston, and For Christian Wolff, all of which challenge performers to concentrate on exceedingly tricky scores for anywhere between two and six hours, depending on the tempo the group chooses. Mike Majkowski doesn’t make that kind of demand on his audience or on himself, but like Feldman he utilizes long periods of time to get at ideas and sounds that other musical elements aren’t as well-equipped to produce. Chief among these are the shape of sound and the shape of time.

The bulk of "Sleep and Oblivion" is composed of double bass figures that either pop and resound or flash in straight, short lines, like beams of light. The contrasting high and low tones create a gaping space between, which is filled in as each passage slows down and drifts toward silence. Just as inertia seems poised to take over, the sudden pop and large low tone that started the last section springs back and the music resumes its slow crawl forward. Majkowski returns to figures like these throughout the piece. Sometimes they sound like near exact reproductions of sections that have come before, other times they are clearly variations with different melodies or rhythms. For the most part, however, the music cleaves to the same tonal center—minor, dark and maybe a little gloomy—so what melodic variation there is is a matter of small movements up and down. The durations and rhythms are much easier to pick out and much easier to remember as iteration after iteration falls into the past.

Buried between these repetitions are some surprising tangents: the combination of bowed and plucked strings at minute 23, a long low drone that never comes back at minute 32, a unique series of percussive tones struck with only three minutes left. Folded up inside the well-established patterns and seemingly constant cycles of "Sleep and Oblivion" are these unpredictable and otherwise unrelated intervals. Majkowski spends a lot of time lulling the ears into submission, conditioning them to expect another recognizable series or another recognizable technique. This is where time and its shape become a factor. Given enough space, time obscures, hides, or otherwise erases, makes identification and remembering a task, not because it must be that way, but because the content of the music, the way it is shaped, works to the same end. The shapes of time and sound are related just like the length of a sine wave and its tone are, except that, at large distances and over long periods, the effect is the dissolution of patterns and structures. There are many places, some of them dramatic, where Majkowski could have stopped his piece, but he chooses to continue with the process instead, thereby eliminating the feeling of completion associated with resolution, whether melodic, rhythmic, or otherwise.

In light of that disjunction, "Ultramarine" is a surprise. An 18-minute coda that sticks to quickly bowed drones, it neither completes nor resolves the tension of "Sleep and Oblivion" and, because of its shorter duration, ultimately disappears into the shadow of that piece. Similar ideas are at work—the same rapid bowing is used to produce a bright harmonic glow up and down the neck for the entire piece—but the subject is more melodic and more colorful, less preoccupied with structure. Duration still matters, but in this case it serves the contradiction between the short quick movements of Majkowski’s hands and the resonant luminescence of the strings, like watching an old film on a hand-cranked projector. In any case, "Ultramarine" is more of a departure than a continuation of "Sleep and Oblivion" and probably should have been given more space than is provided. That sequencing decision is the only hiccup on an otherwise deliberate and challenging record.

samples:

• Sleep and Oblivion (1)
• Sleep and Oblivion (2)
• Ultramarine

 

17 January 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Following up 2014's Der Totenkopf and last year’s reissue of The New Crimes, Moreno Daldosso’s newest album draws from both his past and present works, resulting in a dark and disturbing record that largely manages to achieve Daldosso’s artistic vision, with the exception of a few missteps along the way.

Menstrual Recordings

Nekro is essentially, like many Murder Corporation records, a concept album based around sexual sadism and homicide.These themes are well-trodden staples of the noise/power electronics/death industrial constellation of genres, so I am always skeptical whenever I see them so overtly used by an artist.But like his previous works, Daldosso's approach to this manages to work well.For the most part, Nekro does not come off as insincere juvenile shock tactics that have been overused for the better part of the past 30 plus years, nor do they feel like the ramblings of an actually disturbed individual.Instead, and I know I have used this metaphor before, but the sound is more fitting that of an exploitive horror movie:it is over the topic and teeters on the edge of ridiculous, yet feels self-aware enough to be enjoyable for what it is.

Of the seven pieces that make up this album, the instrumental ones work the best.The opening and ending songs are perhaps the most effective, with the short "Intro" beginning the album appropriately sinister.Hollow electronics underscore what sounds like slightly processed field recordings, with hints of synth noise punctuating a wet sound akin to slogging through a flooded basement.The concluding "Dark Places" is quite literally titled, with a more musical sense of ambience to it.Bleak and awash in echoes, it closes the album on an understated, yet unsettling note.

The middle portions of the album are where the more synth and noise based sounds feature most heavily."Death Race" leads off instantly with brittle, sharp analog noises that shift in volume, with Daldosso pulling the levels back to just come back more intensely.With its minimal structure that magnifies the tiny changes in electronic pitch and rhythms, the piece channels another master of the style, Atrax Morgue, extremely well.The album's lengthy centerpiece, "Roleplay" is 13 uninterrupted minutes of surging, somewhat rhythmic electronic loops that never relent for a second.Even though repetition is the name of the game, that unyielding approach to noise just works extremely well without becoming dull.

The parts where the album does not work as well for me, however, are the similarly structured "Nekro" and "Torture Chamber".Both function more as audio set pieces than actual compositions, with the former overlaying exasperated voices and grunts that could be either of pain or pleasure, while the latter if focused on dialog which I assume was ripped from a simulated torture porn video.I assume this not only because I would not really relish the idea of listening to actual crime audio, but also the "acting" of the male performer is not all that convincing.These two are just a bit too literal for the topic, and Daldosso has proven his ability to set such uncomfortable moods by sound alone, so I feel using dialog is a bit too easy.

With the exception of those two overly blunt pieces, the remainder of Nekro is, like many slasher movies, predictable yet still compelling.I had a good idea of what this album would sound like just from the artist and artwork alone, but the bulk of it was so well executed that it made most of the shortcomings irrelevant.I always knew what to expect growing up from a Friday the 13th movie, too, but that never stopped me from enjoying most of them.

samples:

• Nekro
• Roleplay
• Dark Places

 

17 January 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The strongest Legendary Pink Dots album of 2015 snuck in just under the wire as a digital release, with a delayed vinyl version expected in a few months from new Spanish label Abstrakce.  Intended as a "secret" sister album to the earlier Five Days, Quantum Bleats sounds a lot more like the work of an actual band, though it is no less fragmented and hallucinatory.  Everything feels a lot more deliberate, melodic, fully formed, and evocative this time around: there are a number of beautifully orchestrated passages, snatches of playful cabaret, and muscular bass lines lurking amidst all of the usual free-form psychedelic sprawl.  While it probably focuses a bit too much on the ambiguous no-man's land between "song" and "abstract experimentation" to rank among the Dots' best work, it is nevertheless quite clear that most of Edward Ka-Spel’s more inspired recent ideas found their way here.

Abstrakce/Bandcamp

Curiously, Ka-Spel has described this album as "as far out as the Dots may have gone in their history."  In one way, that statement seems quite far from the mark, given the existence of truly bizarre past albums like The Creature That Tasted Sound or the Chemical Playschool series.  In another, however, Seismic Bleats is indeed a legitimately unhinged affair, so maybe the statement just warrants an asterisk with the qualification "at least, as far as song-based albums are concerned."  That, said "song-based" might also warrant an asterisk as well, as only one piece fully emerges from the kaleidoscopic fantasia to make a strong impression: the fun, lurching cabaret of "Checkpoint," which unexpectedly dissolves into a sample of an old waltz after only about two minutes.  The opening "Colonel Sanders" veers similarly close to being an instant classic, marrying a cool bass line with a strong vocal melody amidst spacey washes of synthesizers.  Again, however, things fail to progress in a conventionally satisfying linear fashion, as the song is warped and distended into near-unrecognizability around the 3-minute mark.  It feels a lot like Jamaican dub filtered through the prism of Edward Ka-Spel’s deviant mind, as recognizable bits keep surfacing from the original fully formed song, but everything else is generally replaced entirely or dissolves into vapor.

In general, the appeal of Seismic Bleats lies primarily in just waiting around to see what surfaces next from the bleary miasma of psychedelic wanderings.  Surprises definitely abound, as "Checkpoint" alone features chirping birds, wildly pitch-shifted vocals, something that sounds like a field recording from a Russian train platform, and the aforementioned foray into ballroom dance and none of it sounds at all out of place.  Soon after, a haunting tambura solo gradually dissolves into a thunderstorm, bringing the first side of the album to a close.  The second side then kicks off with a piece that initially sounds like a menacing twist on classic Pink Floyd ("Quantum Leap"), but that naturally collapses into a black void of howling cosmic horror and a deep, echoing mantra (which I believe is also being played backwards).  Once that happens, things basically stay that way: the first side of the album is devoted to far more tender, human fare and a cavalcade of small surprises, while the second side is almost entirely a dark, haunted, and sustained plunge into deep space, though it does feature an unexpected interlude of something resembling steel drums.  To their eternal credit, "Stanley Kubrick meets a resort vacation in Trinidad" is a description that I probably would not get to use for any other band besides the Dots.

Despite being quite different, there is a weird symmetry to the two sides of the album.  The first half feels like a wildly unpredictable and jumbled dream where each fresh batch of synapse firings takes me out of where I was and drops me somewhere else.  While undeniably dream-like in the extreme, it is definitely not a coherent one (even by dream logic's very loose standards).  The second half also feels like a dream, but like a dream that a broken computer in an abandoned space ship might be having.  Or perhaps one that a quantum sheep might be having.  It is hard to say.  The one thing for certain is that it is all spectacularly warped and that it all ends in brilliantly sublime fashion (with Ka-Spel repeatedly intoning "up the river…down the river" over a bed of burbling water and eerie electronic washes and drones).  This is definitely a very ambitious and intermittently fascinating work, albeit far from a perfect one.  That said, Seismic Bleats' faults seem to be completely by design: none of the best parts ever stick around long enough to be satisfying or leave a strong impression because everything is gleefully stretched, broken, pulled apart, or otherwise warped in service of Ka-Spel and company’s larger vision.  I just wish that the lulls between the best parts were a little more infrequent (and shorter).  Oh well.  I cannot complain all that much though, as I would much rather hear an inspired near-miss than anything familiar: this is a fine and deeply aberrant album and it is all the more enjoyable because it goes so far off the rails rather than merely revisiting well-worn LPD territory.

• Checkpoint
• Quantum Leap
• Love You Long Time