13 December 2015

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Albums and Singles

Illinois trio Oakeater has been active for the past decade, but Aquarius is only their second full length release, with most of their other work being splits, collaborations, and mini-album releases. This diverse array of release have allowed them to hone a distinctively dark, yet diverse array of sounds that draw from most of the expected places (metal, noise, dark ambient, etc.), work those elements in their own way to create a unique, if bleak, suite of songs.

SIGE

The band, consisting of Alex Barnett, Jeremiah Fisher, and Seth Sher, are all rather well known for their other projects:Barnett as a solo artist and frequent collaborator with Faith Coloccia, Fisher as part of Panicsville, and Sher as a member of Coughs.Their work together as Oakeater stands entirely on its own, however, and is decidedly different as a sum of its parts.

Opener "Wishful Beginnings" presents the project’s influences rather clearly.The distant unsettling rhythms and slowly shuffling malignance instantly calls to mind the more ambient moments of SPK’s Leichenschrei with a bit of TG's "Hamburger Lady" to ensure the creep factor is off the charts.The short "Hatchet" sounds like it is built around a rhythm created from clattering aluminum cans, but with an exceptionally dark cello-like bass drone to increase tension.

"Maps" is another piece of dark, creaking ambience and low, lurking rumbles that would not be out of place on a horror film score.Expanding synthesizer passages and occasional outbursts of heavily processed voice flesh out the piece, coming together with an undeniable, but hard to pin down sense of eeriness."All that is Sacred" would be the closest the trio comes to pure noise on Aquarius.Sweeping layers of electronics and subtle percussion are mixed with shimmering cymbals and odd found sounds.With the inhuman voices added in, the trio pushes the piece brilliantly between space and dense dissonance.

The album closes on a strong pairing of songs, ones that capture the Oakeater sound exceptionally well."Aquarius" immediately stands out with its oddly treated, multifaceted rhythm that propels the piece throughout.Swells of darkness are weaved in and out by the trio, as screamed, almost black metal styled vocals cut through like a dull, rusty knife.The song builds tension brilliantly, with the band adding more percussion and soaring guitar towards its dramatic conclusion."Respite", however, ends the album on a restrained, yet menacing note.Bizarre percussion and distant metallic bashing pierce through the funeral synthesizers.Eventually the synthetic rhythms become more aggressive and rapid-fire, leading to an abrupt and jarring end to the record.

One of Aquarius' strongest assets is the fact that it sounds like no one else in recent memory.The touchstones are rather clear:the chaos of harsh noise, the bleak darkness of early industrial, and the pained, inhuman vocals of heavy metal, but Oakeater use these standard features in anything but standard ways.It makes for an impenetrably bleak, yet not at all cliché record of sinister music, with a healthy dose of ambiguity that contributes to an unsettling, at times uncomfortable, but always powerful piece of music.

samples:

• Wishful Beginnings
• Maps
• Aquarius

 

13 December 2015

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Albums and Singles

Composed as part of a 2012 installation at a former East German prison, it should come as no surprise that Isolation is at times an intentionally off-putting, disturbing, and unpleasant piece of music. The prison, housing political prisoners and using more than questionable methods of interrogation, was in operation from 1956 to 1989, and stands as a testament to the darkness that pervaded Eastern Germany during the Cold War. Bretschneider’s work is an attempt to capture the sense of isolation and disorientation caused by the prison in audio form, and it is a resounding success.

LINE

Bretschneider utilizes a variety of compositional techniques in these five pieces to symbolize the multitude of experiences that lengthy incarceration and state sponsored "enhanced interrogations" could generate.On the opening to "White Light," he does this via extreme frequencies and their associated psycho-acoustic properties.The first few minutes are a tinnitus-like buzz that could induce migraines at a loud enough volume, and mixed with a low frequency rumble that gives just the right amount of uncomfortable physical vibration.

"Cycle/Circle" also features extreme sub bass that, on a loudspeaker set-up are more easily felt than heard, and via headphones lead to an odd sensation that is almost akin to dizziness.But I should be clear that, even though Bretschneider is using these heavy frequencies to convey physical sensations, these are still pieces that bear the mark of a true composer.Even though "Cycle/Circle" is all heavy vibrations and physical sensations, he weaves in understated tones and sounds that add a distinctly cold and austere sense of beauty.

Another technique he utilizes to great effect is passages of silence or near silence that enhance the titular sense of isolation, such as the hushed first half of "Neon Night" that, while not empty, it is extremely sparse.The 11-minute "Vertical Time" conjures the timeless monotony of incarceration via subtle hums and mechanical drones that result in an intentionally mundane, yet complex bit of repeated tones and vibrations.The concluding "Oscillation/Feedback" is completely descriptive in its title, with the first half being shimmering oscillations of high-pitched noise similar to that of "White Light".The concluding minute and a half, however, is a blast of pure digital noise that sputters apart brilliantly, akin to the final moments of insanity that could precede this sort of solitude.

Frank Bretschneider's Isolation is intended to be a disquieting, at times disturbing, piece of sonic art, and he accomplishes this wonderfully.Not in the sense of being a harsh noise endurance test, but something far more conceptual and composed.When listening (as recommended) via headphones, the work does an exceptional job at conveying the unpleasant experiences of a lengthy incarceration via repetition and unpleasant frequencies, at least as well as a CD possibly could.

samples:

• White Light
• Cycle/Circle
• Oscillation/Feedback

 

13 December 2015

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Albums and Singles

Sound sculptures and gongs by Harry Bertoia unite the sides of this split LP from Tara Jane O'Neil and Eleh. Packaged in deluxe letterpress printed jackets in an edition of 800. The first 300 copies are on metallic gold vinyl.

O'Neil's composition was commissioned by Venessa Renwick for her Medusa Smack video installation (originally screened in 2012 at the Oregon Biennial). The piece is partially comprised of sounds recorded by Harry Bertoia on his own Sonambient sound sculptures, as well as a recording Tara made of Athanasius Kircher's Bell Wheel at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Eleh's side consists of 100 gongs synthesized on a Serge modular system to honor the centennial of Bertoia's birth in 2015.

More information can be found here.

13 December 2015

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Albums and Singles

This has been a very perplexing and curious year for the historically prolific Dots, as they have maintained a constant stream of updates about new releases without ever quite releasing anything substantial–just an endless flow of live vault releases, outtakes, cryptic collaborations, cryptic solo albums, digital-only holiday surprises, teasers for upcoming albums, and a few extremely limited (and instantly vanished) records on small European labels.  It was starting to feel a lot like I was receiving ghost transmissions from a dead planet, but before I became completely convinced that the Dots were either dead or had never actually existed in the first place, they unexpectedly produced the deeply abstract, surreal, and fragmented Five Days.  While a bit too amorphous and diffuse to rank among their best work, it is certainly complex and hallucinatory enough to temporarily sate my hunger for new material.

Self-Released

To my credit, I am not nearly obsessive enough of an LPD fan to try to figure out if there is any link between Five Days and 1990’s Four Days, though the link could easily be something as simple as just another prosaic statement about how long it took to record.  I am also not obsessive enough to try to figure out if the narrative thread that runs throughout this album ties into any other albums within the multifarious Edward Ka-Spel-verse, but I am absolutely certain that the storyline is enough of a kaleidoscopic fever dream that it would not matter at all if it did.  While it is ostensibly a concept album with plot and characters, those elements seem to exist primarily just to give some structure to an otherwise totally disorienting and lysergic trip down the rabbit hole of Ka-Spel's mind. In fact, I wonder how knowingly involved the rest of the band even was (there are no credits), as Five Days sounds like it could easily be a mountain of unrelated studio scraps weaved together as the backdrop for a phantasmagoric, fitfully narrated plunge into abstract experimentation to fill the time between more substantial projects.

Regardless of how Five Days was created, there is no denying that Ka-Spel knows how to collage together an impressively crafted and distinctive vision.  This album is basically a mirage built on shifting sands, as I am never quite clear what is happening nor do I ever fully remember what has happened before, as there are no hooks, grooves, or noticeable recurring themes (or much in the way of human warmth or recognizable instruments): the only real thread holding all of the endlessly morphing electronic fantasia together is Ka-Spel’s voice.  Almost everything else seems completely fleeting and illusory.  The beauty of that approach, however, is that occasionally strong themes surface to surprise and captivate me, most notably Ka-Spel's languorously sing-song and menacing pronouncements in "In Search of the Golden Crest" ("Bad news, friend: you failed the test").  Another highlight is the brief interlude in "Shades of Sorrow/The Oxygen Tent" where the piece briefly blossoms into a chattering hum of overlapping voices.  I also quite enjoyed the blearily queasy poetry of "Thou Shalt Not Grow Old," and the drugged and hazy chamber music of "The First World Flag."

If Five Days has any serious faults, the primary one is that it is just not a memorable album, though that is at least partially by design.  The other is the omnipresent brooding synths and half-spoken/half-sung storytelling sounds extremely familiar at this point.  It is not entirely fair to critique Legendary Pink Dots for sounding exactly like themselves, but they have already recorded a mountain of material in a very similar vein, so the only parts that make my ears perk up at this point are those that depart somewhat from business-as-usual.  There is admittedly a healthy amount of such moments strewn throughout Five Days, but it is still not quite enough to warrant excitement on my end.  There is quite a lot of water-treading happening here–not exactly filler, but nevertheless a lot of waiting for something transcendent to emerge from the numbing familiarity.  While I personally prefer this abstract/experimental side of LPD's aesthetic to their more song-based material, it has definitely been better done elsewhere (and often), so this will probably not be an album that I go back to very often.  Given that Ka-Spel and his bandmates have been treading this territory for more than 30 years now, it is hardly a surprise that they occasionally find themselves in a holding pattern rather than in the midst of a major creative breakthrough.  Completists and die-hard fans will probably still find plenty to enjoy, I imagine, but Five Days is at best a solid and mostly unexceptional entry into the LPD oeuvre.

Note: Curiously, there is an instrumental companion EP available for this already mostly instrumental album (Five Days - The Instrumentals).  It feels mostly like additional material that was not quite good enough to make the proper album rather than like anything resembling alternate versions.  It is far from essential, though the 16-minute centerpiece "Weekend" has some impressive flashes of inspiration near the end.

• All About Control
• In Search of the Golden Crest
• The First World Flag

 

13 December 2015

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Albums and Singles

I have to admit that I was quite a bit apprehensive about the idea of a Volcano The Bear boxed set, as few bands are less synonymous with consistency or quality control than Leicester's erstwhile free-form experimentalists and I was never a big fan at all, despite admiring a good portion of Daniel Padden’s non-VTB work.  It was easy for me to envision Commencing as over four hours of migraine-inducing absurdist theater, random gibbering and clattering, kazoo solos, and/or someone chasing around a duck with a microphone or dropping a pumpkin into a toilet.  Or possibly all of those things within the same song.  Thankfully, I was mostly (and spectacularly) wrong, as Commencing makes a very strong case that VTB was actually one of the most inventive and compelling bands of the last two decades.  Granted, there is certainly some wince-inducing juvenilia scattered amidst all the gems, but Miasmah has done an amazing job at filtering, presenting, and contextualizing VTB's vast body of work in a form that enables a skeptic like me to finally understand why someone would want to put out a Volcano The Bear box set in the first place.

Miasmah

In the book that accompanies Commencing, Miasmah head Erik K. Skodvin recounts how he first discovered Volcano The Bear while flipping through records at Staalplaat on a school trip to Berlin back in 2004.  His eye was caught by the artwork for The Idea of Wood ("it looked like some bizarre nightmare dreamt up by a mental institution inmate"), so he decided to give the album a chance and was pleased to discover that the music within was every bit as unique and deranged as the cover.  After witnessing a few similarly bizarre and memorable performances by various incarnations of the band, Erik eventually struck up a friendship with Aaron Moore and half-jokingly suggested a VTB retrospective box set.  That quixotic idea became an earnest endeavor about six months later and the next two years or so were then devoted to the Herculean task of shifting through VTB's sprawling discography of cassettes and CD-Rs and distilling it into a coherent overview of one of the most uncategorizable and restlessly shape-shifting bands around.

Amusingly, the Volcano The Bear story starts out almost exactly as I would have expected it to: Aaron Moore was frustrated with the band he was in and decided to start an anti-band with his flatmate Nick Mott.  There were drugs involved.  They enlisted a handful of their weirder friends.  One had a bunch of studio equipment that was set-up in their parents’ house, which also happened to be near an extremely cool record store.  That mixture of unlimited home studio time, a constant influx of strange new records, a disdain for anything conventional, and a willingness to try absolutely anything laid the perfect groundwork for a truly strange band.  Admittedly, they often sounded exactly like a bunch of stoners with too much free time and a singular zeal (and patience) for messing around with speeds on a dictaphone, but there were some moments of true inspiration early on as well, such as the slurred, melancholy sea-shanty "Yak Folks Y’Are" or the pummeling and obsessive tape experiment "Pretty Flower" (both from 1995).  Those early years are best (and most amusingly) summarized by a set list included in the book.  One song is described vaguely as "play guitar nick – I will play along – Loz says he’ll do something."  Yet another potential hit is broken down as "toothbrush/thumb piano solo?  out of which Dan starts a fight with…6+ minutes??"  In short, Volcano The Bear started off sounding a lot like art students that I would want to hurl a bottle at.

Somehow along the way, however, they alchemically transformed into something much, much better.  Apparently, a policy of "everything we do is art and therefore of value" starts to yield significant dividends if it is adhered to long enough and with a rigorous enough aversion to the mundane.  While it is not chronologically arranged, Commencing reaches its zenith on the fourth LP, which is culled primarily from material spanning from 2004 to 2010, albeit with a few wonderful outliers thrown in (the tenderly warped piano interlude of 2001's "Curly Robot" is especially sublime).  Aside from the quality, the other most striking aspect of the later material is how effortlessly (yet distinctively) the band was able to transform from song to song.  For example, "Baltic" sounds like an avant-garde classical take on traditional folk music, while elsewhere VTB make nods to jazz, Faust, Zappa, Nurse With Wound, and probably like ten other cool bands that I have never heard of.  On the other hand, there is also some material from the same era included on the fifth LP that just sounds like someone shouting about biscuits while pounding a floor tom.  The bizarre and amazing thing is that it all sounds equally at home somehow.  No matter what Volcano did, they did it with a very endearingly ramshackle, organic, and anything-goes charm; an unwavering humanity; and an unrelentingly perverse (if sometimes impenetrable) sense of humor.

Commencing's lack of chronological order was an inspired move sequence-wise, as there are plenty of wonderful early songs seamlessly mixed in with the later pieces.  That nicely serves to illustrate that Volcano The Bear were fitfully always a great band–they just happened to be a wildly over-documented great band, cheerfully releasing every inside joke and misstep with the same importance as their genuine moments of great inspiration.  I am glad that some of the less-than-amazing material is included though, as it combines with the book to tell quite an inspiring and unlikely story: Volcano basically came from nowhere and devoted themselves wholeheartedly to amusing themselves and tirelessly pushing forward into new fringes of outsider expression and fresh vistas of lunacy.  They did not waste time worrying about whether something would find an audience or whether it was good enough, they just set about to do something different, unwaveringly stuck to that path for two decades, and it all worked out just fine: they found a discerning audience that values them and they are unlike any other band on the planet.  That is an improbably great legacy for a band this uncompromising, prickly, and fundamentally difificult to like.  I guess the lesson here is that you should wholeheartedly devote yourself to following your muse to whatever bizarre places it takes you and that if you do it long enough, someone will eventually realize that you are brilliant and heroically attempt to shape your messy, unwieldy oeuvre into something people can actually wrap their heads around.  Volcano The Bear were certainly hit-or-miss as a band, but their hits are essential listening and Commencing is the best overview of them that anyone could possible hope for.

• Pretty Flower
• Aflame
• Baltic

 

05 December 2015

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Albums and Singles

Four years in the making, in partnership with Teranga Beat (the current leading label for Senegalese music), Analog Africa proudly offer an insight into the musical adventures that were taking place in the major Senegalese cities during the '60s and '70s. This compilation reflects the unique fusions of Funk, Mbalax, Cuban Son and Mandigue guitar sounds that transformed Dakar into West Africa's most vibrant city.

It all started in 2009 when Adamantios Kafetzis travelled from Greece to Senegal with a brand new tape machine that he used to digitize the musical treasures he had discovered in the city of Thiés. These treasures took the form of reel tapes, and had been recorded by sound engineer Moussa Diallo, who had spent the previous four decades immortalising, onto magnetic tape, the bands that would perform in his club, the legendary Sangomar.

300 Senegalese songs that nobody had ever heard before were discovered - five of them were selected for this compilation.

Thanks to its history of outside influences, Senegal - the western point of Africa - had become a musical melting pot. Cuban and American sailors had brought Son Montuno from Cuba, Jazz from New Orleans and American soul tunes: sounds that were swiftly embraced and adopted by urban dance bands and intuitively merged with local music styles.

One band in particular excelled at this fusion. 1960 marks the formation of Star Band de Dakar, a milestone that left an indelible imprint on Dakar’s musical landscape. Indeed, the whole country was soon grooving to their intoxicating mixture of Afro Cuban rhythms and Wolof-language lyrics.

The 1970s brought a new generation of stellar bands; Le Sahel, Orchestre Laye Thiam, Number One de Dakar, Orchestra Baobab, Dieuf Dieul de Thies and Xalam1 who fused traditional Senegalese percussion instruments such Sabra, Tama and Bougarabou with organs and keyboards, giving birth to new hybrids. Merging the folkloric and the experimental, these sounds, embraced by the youth, took centre stage and gave the previously dominant Cuban music a run for its money.

With this burst of musical and artistic creativity, driven predominantly by the modern vision of President Senghor, Dakar began attracting international stars. The Jackson Five, James Brown, Tabou Combo (Haiti), Celia Cruz (Cuba) and an array of African stars like Tabu Ley Rochereau (Congo), Manu Dibango (Cameroon) and Bembeya Jazz (Guinée) joined in with the local scene, improvising jam sessions and bringing new flavours to a music scene that was always open to new inspirations and influences. Johnny Pacheco immortalized his passion for the city with a song called "Dakar, Punto Final."

The comprehensive booklet that comes with the CD - 44 pages and with the double LP - 12 pages LP size - is a precious document attesting to the decades of transformation that led to modern Senegalese music. Featuring biographies of music producers and a legendary record cover designer, as well as the life stories of all the groups represented here, the booklet also includes a fantastic selection of photos that have never seen before.

More information can be found here.

05 December 2015

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Albums and Singles

End of Summer captures Johann Johannsson's journey to the Antarctic Peninsula to discover the calm scenery of a landscape changing seasons, barely influenced or even noticed by humanity. The super 8 film is a comforting study of a peaceful setting in one of the most crucial and endangered areas of our planet.

Accompanied by rich and detailed field recordings of the surrounding this footage makes a perfect foundation for Johann's musical compositions, performed together with fellow musicians and friends Hildur Gudnadottir and Robert A. A. Lowe. The varying use of cello, voice, synthesizer and electronics creates a listening experience that reflects both the vast beauty of the quiet scenery and the necessary cautiousness of its inhabitants. As if gliding through the steep ice, its rough edges and the harmonious water movements, organic arrangements are patiently devolving into voice and electronic based ambience that adds warmth to the icy, artefact laden environment.

The soundtrack to End of Summer is an emotional, enduring listen and a compelling experience. Forming a soundscape as broad as the view it was inspired by yet equally heartwarming, devotion to the music will slow down time and provide a moment of harmony within times of change.

Watch the trailer here.

Find more information here.

30 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

Even with two amazing solo albums last year and a new Wire album with subsequent touring, Graham Lewis managed to reactivate Hox with Andreas Karperyd (with whom he has collaborated as He Said Omala). The music, as always, exceeds expectations, and the duo has created an album of engaging electronic pop with enough strangeness befitting Lewis' lengthy and consistently magnificent career.

Editions Mego

While 2014's All Over featured Lewis once again displaying his unparalleled ability to blend the experimental with the musical, on Duke of York with Karperyd those conventional sensibilities are even more placed on the forefront.This is clear from the first 30 seconds of "Anthracite":propelled by a moderate tempo beat, molten synth tones are shaped into bass lines and an engaging, catchy bit of music is constructed by the two.Weird sounds and crunchy electronics underscore the spoken word vocals, coming together as oddly treated yet rhythmically powerful pseudo-industrial song.

The chunky bass and what sounds like a looped guitar melody that open the first half of "Correct Co-ordinates," and the vocals that appear towards the second half make for an odd, sort of loose feeling.It is that unique brand of off-kilter electronic pop Lewis spearheaded in the 1980s incarnation of Wire and their limited period as Wir.Speaking of the latter, the more tense and chaotic "It's Too Much" is locked into a jumpy beat and layered vocal structure rather early, but what very much resembles a sample from the opening of "Big Glue Canal" contrast the lighter vocal portions exceptionally well.

The ending pair of "Goodbye" and "Frequency" close the album on quite a strong note.The former is a complex mass of polyrhythmic drum programming and a gripping bass.As usual, Lewis' vocal delivery is majestic and captivatingly melodic, and the way the duo pair the voice and warm keyboard leads with the more erratic background sounds is another testament to how well the obtuse and enjoyable can be blended perfectly."Frequency" ends the album with warm bass guitar melodies and a metric ton of processing on both the music and vocals.Even with the unconventional alien sensibility, there’s a comfort and familiarity to the sound that makes it especially endearing.

Other than his work with Wire, Duke of York might be Graham Lewis' most approachable and conventional work since He Said's Take Care.But even the most conventional music from him remains exceptionally depth and complex.Works such as this cement the role he served as the mediator between Colin Newman's love of pure pop music and Bruce Gilbert's penchant for chaos and noise during Wire's most well regarded eras.Likely because of this, his expertise at blending those two disparate approaches to music is exceptionally strong.This is something that shines through in his solo work, and also in his collaborations such as here with Andreas Karperyd, who's electronic contributions give the record a timeless, yet forward thinking sensibility.Duke of York is an amazingly robust record full of innovative electronic sounds and textures, but wrapped in the cloak of a catchy pop record:a masquerade that effortlessly succeeds in both of those very different realms.

samples:

• Anthracite
• Correct Co-Ordinates
• Goodbye

 

29 November 2015

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Listening to Amorphous Spores, it’s difficult not to think about sex. The title alone implies it. Spores are generally vehicles for asexual reproduction, and while that isn’t technically sex, it is at least related in that it is a method for securing growth and repetition over time. But Takahiro Kawaguchi and Utah Kawasaki chose to place mushroom caps on the cover of their album and many members of the Fungi kingdom can reproduce either asexually or sexually. The method utilized depends on the environment. In conditions favorable to a mushroom’s continued existence, spores are produced by mitosis. As genetic replicas of their parent, the spores simply germinate and continue the species over and over again, no partner required. When conditions aren’t so favorable, however, mushrooms go through a more complicated process involving cell fusion, the production of a zygote, and meiosis. It still doesn’t make sense to think of males and females (the gametes all look the same), but since the resulting spores are not clones of their parents, their offspring stand a better chance of surviving environmental changes. The newly mixed genetic material might, for instance, secure them a tolerance to drier climates. Though it would be a stretch to say that what they’re doing is sexual, Kawaguchi and Kawasaki also work with morphologically similar germs, "selfmade instruments" and "electronics" according to the slim liner notes. They begin as quantifiably distinct bodies, fuse, interact, and disperse, finally producing hybrid offspring. Although it’s a strange and unlikely symmetry, the structural and extra-musical content of the album point toward the similarities in fungal mating and creative collaboration.

Erstwhile

In getting to those similarities, it may be enough to point out that Amorphous Spores is shaped like a bell curve. The intensity, volume, and density of the record’s five parts can all be mapped to that form, expressing a movement from calm and stability to disturbance and volatility, then rapidly back to calm again. The circularity fits all of those reproductive graphs passed out in college biology classes and, appropriately, matches the shape of the mushrooms depicted on the album’s cover. Were the music a perfect representation of the progress from mycelia to basidiocarp and so on, each stage in the life cycle of the fungus, maybe the one in the artwork, would have an audible equivalent, and the whole project would be a representational work of art, a very strange translation of the procreative act to the realm of sound.

In all likelihood, that is not what Kawaguchi and Kawasaki had in mind when making their record. For one, the title is not Spores, but Amorphous Spores, suggesting shapeless and apparently unorganized elements colliding at random, not hyphae with cell walls and nuclei undergoing plasmogamy. Whether the duo hits the mark in that respect depends on which part of the music is supposed to be amorphous. Kawasaki’s electronic instruments and Kawaguchi’s homemade contraptions are all designed, and if they had wanted to they could have provided diagrams showing everyone how those instruments were built and how they function. For that reason, and because no such diagrams are present, they seem like poor candidates.

On a simple level, all of their sounds are also formal, vibrations of a particular size and shape, presented in a perfectly appreciable and ordered way, passing through a medium. That’s a murkier path to travel and probably just as unhelpful anyway. The obvious uncertainty at play is the interaction of the instruments and the noises, of the buzzing fan motors, synthetic bursts, and horn-like peals that spin and gurgle endlessly through the album’s middle portion, and of the heavy low-end drones Kawasaki lays down at the extremes, the seismic foundations for Kawaguchi’s curt interruptions. These interact, exchange properties, form structures, then fade away, recurring and resounding at the microscopic level from moment to moment, and at the generational level as the album loops back on itself in its final seconds, cutting a path toward its beginning.

How these parts relate, what they produce, and ultimately where they lead all depends on how the sounds are received. Beyond the big picture of repetition and diversification the inexhaustible matter of translation awaits. That’s where the sexual activity promised by the album’s title enters the equation. Electronic vibrations and organic receptors fuse, interact, and disperse, setting off a chain reaction. The process can end there, in the pleasure of repeitition, or it can spin off in any direction whatsoever, germinating in the minds of others.

samples:

• 12:32
• 10:59
• 10:01

 

29 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

Perspective in film or literature is an easy enough concept to explain. Appeals to height and distance or attitude and intention help situate what it means for a director or author to have a view of something, even if the subject matter is abstract. Perspective in music requires a little more: more context, more imagination, more patience maybe. Program music utilizes narrative by design, but what about music that is supposed to have eliminated narrative, that is intended as sound and not as storytelling? What about an album like Coppice’s Matches? Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer’s second album this year is a puzzle box of rattling noise and growling materials, drawn from shruti boxes, pump organs, and sphygmomanometers. In that way, it is reminiscent of Cores/Eruct, a record that alternately divulged and concealed the architecture behind its construction, and which utilized music recorded and performed since 2009. Matches also incorporates music from the last six years: studio recordings and live performances from Texas, Illinois, and Iceland. It is set apart by its focus, by its cleaving to claustrophobic spaces, its tight framing, and its mechanical sequences, by the perspective it brings to Coppice’s corner of the musical cosmos. Cuéllar and Kramer have called Matches a "story with many holes." Whether they are presenting a tattered cloth or a series of missing pieces, and whether there is a difference between the two, is a question worth keeping in mind as the album folds, unfolds, and spins through its many configurations.

Category of Manifestation

The loud, long, and reedy drone that begins and continues throughout all six and a quarter minutes of "Bromine" implies that Noé and Joseph interpret the matter of musical perspective spatially. Shruti boxes and pump organs are mainstays in their repertoire, instruments they have portrayed from different vantage points over numerous full-lengths, EPs, cassettes, and CD-Rs, but this intense closeup, which produces a metallic, insect-like buzz, fills the song’s entire frame and is unique in its consistency and nakedness. The only accompaniment are a few squeaking noises, which might be from the bellows or the case of a shruti box, and a handful of mysterious overtones.

It resolves seamlessly into "Labile Form," the contents of which are more varied: a few convulsing melodies, more tactile noises like rattling springs and spinning tape heads, and a deep, satisfying bass tone. As it concludes, the track shakes and trembles like the mic has been dropped into a leather bag and let loose in a wind tunnel. Much of what happens during Matches seems to happen from the inside out, and that might be one way of thinking about the group’s insistence that this album be "handled from all sides."

Another way would be to think about how Cuéllar and Kramer recycle their previous work. "Held Cascade" and "Bramble" both employ Vinculum recordings, an archive of CD-Rs the band describes as "sonic artifacts." An album that uses previously recorded material could be seen as a tool for re-seeing and rethinking that material, either on its own or in relation to a bigger picture. It’s impossible to determine the origins for any of these parts in the first place, as the album is a kind of reconstructed compilation of previously recorded sounds. The "story with many holes" would be, in that case, a story composed of holes, of segments tied together to form the illusion of a whole. It's a kind of retrospective, but with the added twist that it’s a synthetic retrospective representative of nothing beyond itself. The organizational principle is partly intuitive and partly mechanical, a map of the way every part interacts, relates, and behaves.

Theoretical considerations about parts and wholes aside, the music is surprisingly cohesive. The sizzle of electrical systems, the crackle of distorted tapes, and the chunky rhythms of songs like "Bramble" and "Caper" are all heavy. They feel and sound like physical forces, not just loud and insistent noises. They’re broad and dense things made up of identifiable elements: wood, metal, rubber, magnetic film, pressurized air, each one of their audible instances matching their physical forms. Whether that is what Coppice means by naming their album Matches is questionable. They pair and blend musical sources on this record, but they also set them against one another, creating a music of conflict and agitation. Telling the two apart is, in the case, a matter of perspective.

samples:

• Bromine
• Discharge Form
• Bramble