13 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This is Thielemans' first full-length for Miasmah as a solo artist, but he has previously turned up on the label as a guest on Kreng's debut album, which provides a fairly accurate window into the milieu from which he is coming: the darker, weirder fringes of Belgium's theater/improv/art scene. Unlike his fellow shadowy avant-garde eccentrics, however, Eric is primarily a drummer and Sprang is composed almost entirely of unusual percussion experiments. Needless to say, that is some rather niche territory to occupy in an already very niche scene, but this is quite a remarkably fascinating album for a one-man tour de force of skittering, plinking percussion.

Miasmah

Despite Eric's long history as a drummer (a jazz drummer even), it is quite difficult to find much on Sprang that sounds like it came from an actual drum kit.A few pieces, such as onomatopoetically titled "Sprrrrrrr," admittedly feature some subtle mallet- or brush-driven drum rhythms, but such touches are rarely (if ever) the focus.Rather, the bulk of Sprang sounds like the work of a whimsically deranged inventor who has created an arsenal of clattering, plinking, plonking, and rattling wind-up mechanical devices, which is certainly a hell of a lot cooler than a 40-minute drum solo would have been.The overall feel is definitely an understated, small-scale, fragile, and cinematic one, like something that might be playing during a Quay Brothers film.That rickety, dreamlike illusion is further enhanced by a number of small touches throughout the album, particularly on "Garden," which features a bittersweet whistled melody and a stumbling, disjointed glockenspiel motif.

While almost the entire album maintains a deliciously forlorn "wounded toy" aesthetic, the individual pieces cover an impressive amount of stylistic ground.  "Tptptptp," for example, sounds like a crazily virtuosic drum solo performed entirely with spoons and things lying around a kitchen, while "Kkkkrrrrr" sounds like someone playing an empty oil drum with a violin bow inside the violently creaking hull of a sinking ship.  And then there is "River," which resembles nothing less than a room full of malfunctioning, out-of-control antique clocks.

Conversely, the lengthiest (and perhaps best) piece on Sprang almost sounds conventionally musical, as "Post Soldiers' Hymn" combines an oddly lurching, stumbling beat with a humming, quavering drone.  In fact, there are even chord changes at one point, though Thielemans mostly uses his glockenspiel to create a hanging, oscillating haze of overtones.  Despite being the most "straight" piece on the album, it perversely manages to highlight just how ingenious Eric is, as even his concessions to things like beats and melodies manage to sound quite broken and unique.  I suppose drifting within shouting distance of normalcy probably provided me with the necessary context for appreciating the full aberrance and otherworldliness of Thielemans’ vision, which I ultimately appreciated immensely.  I guess that makes Sprang a minor masterpiece of sorts and an inspiring one at that, as it feels like a secret and surreal handmade thing that seems totally detached from the time and place that birthed it.

Samples:

• Tptptptp
• Post Soldiers' Hymn
• River

 

11 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Hey.

Denovali Swingfest London 2014 starts on April 18th. We've just compiled a free download sampler for this year's event. 15 tracks of the 11 artists performing at the festival. Their sets will as always be as long as a proper club show (around an hour).

More information on both the event and the sampler can be found here.

Tracklist:

01. PIANO INTERRUPTED - Emoticon

from The Unified Field (Denovali Records)

02. ULRICH SCHNAUSS - A Ritual in Time and Death

from A Long Way To Fall (Scripted Realities / Domino)

03. HIDDEN ORCHESTRA - Dust

from Night Walks (Tru Thoughts / Denovali Records)

04. ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF - Mountains Crave

05. ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF - Epitaph of Theodor

from Ceremony (City Slang / Kning Disk / Other Music Recording Co.)

06. ORIGAMIBIRO - Odham's Standard

from Odham's Standard (Denovali Records)

07. THE HAXAN CLOAK - Dieu

from Excavation (Tri Angle)

08. PORTER RICKS - Nautical Dub

from Biokinetics (Type)

09. WITXES - Through Abraxas III

from A Fabric of Beliefs (Denovali Records)

10. PETRELS - Giulio's Throat

11. PETRELS - Canute

from Onkalo & Haeligewielle (Denovali Records)

12. ORIGAMIBIRO - Ada Deane

from Odham's Standard (Denovali Records)

13. PIANO INTERRUPTED - Cross Hands

from The Unified Field (Denovali Records)

14. JOHN LEMKE - Ivory Nights

from People Do (Denovali Records)

15. THOMAS KÖNER - Nuuk (Air)

from Nuuk (Mille Plateux)

11 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Big Blood – Fight for Your Dinner Vol. I – CD-R/Cassette (coming Soon) DTTR 041

Recordings from 1986-2014, Songs from comps, old family recordings,

alternate versions, new and unreleased songs all under one roof.

Hand made and screen printed. (17 songs, 53 minutes)

More information can be found here.

11 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Form Themselves Into Streams

Fourth in the Archival Series of Richard Skelton’s work, Form Themselves Into Streams was originally conceived and recorded during 2007 and 2008, at the same time as his Marking Time album.

The album was revisited in late 2013, during which some new elements were added. Originally conceived as one long recording, there are now five distinct, yet connected, pieces.

1. Carr (06.32)

2. Burn (04.35)

3. The Black Water (07.18)

4. Burning (06.28)

5. The Black Dub (07.58)

Total Running Time : 33m 23s

Ridgelines (Volume One)

Recordings made for two hills: 'Black Combe' in Cumbria, UK, and 'Ceapaigh an Bhaile' (Anglicised as 'Cappanawalla') in County Clare, Ireland.

Ridgelines (Volume One) consolidates two previous releases, Black Combe (2011) and Ridgelines (2012). It adds three previously unreleased versions of "Cappanawalla."

1. Black Combe (26:11)

2. Cappanawalla (05:18)

3. Cappanawalla (05:49)

4. Cappanawalla (12:47)

5. Black Combe (15:40)

6. Cappanawalla (15:16)

Total Running Time : 1.3hrs

Dyad

Originally released as a limited edition 'bonus disc' on the 9th of February, 2010, to accompany the reissue of Crow Autumn on Tompkins Square Records.

First released as Dyad (SRL19) as part of the *Skura boxed collection, on the 2nd of February, 2011.

1. A Broken Consort - Severance (05:20)

2. Saddleback - Gerroa Thursday (Richard Skelton Version) (06:14)

3. Heidika - Limn (Original Version) (03:10)

4. The Shape Leaves (Early Version) (06:53)

5. Heidika - Limn (Reworked) (03:15)

6. Machinefabriek & Richard Skelton - Daas (07:42)

Total Running Time : 32m 34s

More information can be found here.

11 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Comprised of eight tracks in 30 min, Periscope Blues is the culmination of a mission gone wrong. Music for the stranded, the lost, those backed into a corner with nowhere to go, or maybe a reflection of sad individuals panicking on a tropical vacation gone awry.

Somber yet very tense drifting off radar machine electronics that feel like a blistering sun beating down on decaying beach remains as time crawls on. That or the equivalent to working the grill summers at Jones Beach and stealing from the register just to get a little more...

More information can be found here.

11 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

I Shall Die Here is the fourth full-length album by The Body. Sharing their moribund vision for I Shall Die Here with Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak), the tried and true sound of The Body is cut to pieces, mutilated by process and re-animated in a spectral state by the newly minted partnership.

The Body's brutal musical approach, engraved by drummer Lee Buford's colossal beats and Chip King's mad howl and bass-bladed guitar dirge, becomes something even more terrifying with Krlic's post-mortem ambiences serving as both baseline and outer limit. I Shall Die Here sonically serrates the remains of metal's already unidentifiable corpse and splays it amid tormented voices in shadow.

According to the band themselves, they sought to create something wholly experimental with I Shall Die Here. In the course of its creation and recreation, they have attained that rare artistic goal: an album with few precedents and a paradigm shift richly realized. Bobby Krlic's downcast electronic visions laces seamlessly into The Body's already volatile mix of fissured doom metal and fused verbal spaces. The onset of a new music emerges with I Shall Die Here, and in its shifts, shadows, and reeling voices, the darkest possible formulation of electronic music has been realized.

More information can be found here.

07 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Robot Records’ three-CD retrospective of Jacques Lejeune’s music from the early 1970s and 1980s contains over three hours of heady electronic noise, surreal acoustic transformations, deconstructed field recordings, and disorienting aural splutter. It is a collection that spans 14 years and six electroacoustic compositions: one composed for ballet and inspired by Snow White, another inspired by the myth of Icarus, and others by landscapes, symphonic form, and cyclical movement, among other things. They flash with theatrical flair, jump unpredictably through minute variations, and churn chaotically, tossing fabricated scree and instrumental slag into the air. A 28 page bilingual booklet filled with photographs, drawings, and program notes accompanies the set, along with a 32 page booklet of interpretive poetry. In them, Lejeune, Alain Morin, and Yak Rivais offer up remarkably precise interpretations for each of the pieces, but the writing works much better as a rough guide to the visually evocative clamor of Lejeune’s electric transmissions.

Robot

Jacques Lejeune’s musical career began auspiciously, at the famous Schola Cantorum de Paris, a private music school in the city’s Latin Quarter whose alumni include Edgard Varèse and Erik Satie. From there, he moved to the Conservatoire National Supérieur, where Adolphe Sax had once taught and where Igor Wakhévitch would eventually study, and labored under the tutelage of Pierre Schaeffer. He finished his education with François Bayle at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, then joined the GRM in 1968 and became director of the Cellue de la Musique pour L’Image, or The Department of Music for Images, responsible for the production of sound and music for both theater and television.

By 1971 he had finished his first major composition, Cri, which premiered at the Royan Festival in 1972. It was Lejuene’s introduction to France and the first indication that his stint in the Images Department at the GRM had been as formative as the rest of his education.

Early on, Cri delivers brief, sometimes confounding glimpses of particular places and circumstances. Those images are held in focus just long enough to be recognized and then swept away: a marching band stomps through a busy street in the first movement, then disappears into the sound of French horns warming up before a performance; frogs croak in concert with crickets as sheets of tape noise flutter by imitating the sound of water; people laugh and conversations crash against bursting radio signals and gusts of analog distortion. In the second movement entire sentences survive, accompanied by reverse audio and a small gaggle of test tones. Exclamations leap out of the commotion and a radio transmission about Pakistan and the United States floats smoothly by, like a small town seen from the window of a passing train.

Lejeune introduces the skull-pounding sounds of a construction site later in the piece, but not before dampening the mood with desperate cries, rushing sirens, and the sinister crack of jackboots on concrete. The final movement is similarly ominous, though not as visually striking. Synthetic tones and surface noises replace the recognizable audio of the previous movements, and these become louder and gain more and more momentum until, near the finale, they crescendo in one long animal-like groan. The final minutes are calmer and more reflective, like a single wide-angle shot of the entire composition. The camera holds its gaze as people walk obliviously through the frame, and then the shot fades to a quiet, contemplative black.

Pieces like Parages, finished two years later, and Symphonie au bord d’un paysage, completed in 1981, also contain familiar worldly fragments, but in both works Lejeune so thoroughly transfigures his sounds that the familiar in them disappears. The focus shifts from the presentation of images to their transformation. Seagulls mix with squawking machines and squeaky hinges during one small section of Parages, calling our attention to the quiet pleasure of household noises. Moments later a series of sine waves and a brief flute passage swallow an entire church organ whole. Symphonie moves through several such transformations too: turntables start and stop, loose floorboards bend and creak under the weight of someone’s shoes, and numerous electronic reverberations zip like lightning through the mix. A few such reverberations repeat themselves, but most erupt in seemingly improvised and unrepeatable fits. Parages is particularly varied, moving at such a pace and with such variation that getting lost among its many mutations is inevitable.

It is an impressive and dynamic piece, but Robot could have easily named the collection after 1975’s Blanche-Neige, Lejeune’s incredible production for Fantasmes, ou l’histoire de Blanche-Neige, a ballet adapted from the Grimm Brothers’ version of Snow White by Yves Boudier and Catherine Escarret. Instead of simply composing music for the ballet, Lejeune creates an entirely self-sufficient audio version of the fairytale, using vocal snippets, sounds effects, and collaged motifs to represent the characters, places, and actions in the story. We can hear birds crying in the forest and monsters walking secretly in the dark during "Solitude of Snow White in the Nocturnal Forest," and Snow White, made wholly present by the inclusion of just a few fragmented sounds, gasps through every four tense minutes of it, panicking in response to the insects and night creatures that crawl by. Lejeune plunges into Snow White’s head and makes the tightness in her chest palpable one small detail at a time.

"The Hunter’s Race Dragging Snow White," on the other hand, gallops along quickly, pitched forward by vocal samples clipped so short they read as street percussion. Pots and pans and buckets belch muted vowels and abbreviated exclamations to the tune of sine waves and low, agitated drones. It is a frightening sequence, effective because all of its elements—the horse, the hunter, the sudden movements, Snow White’s confusion, and the gnarled forest path—are all depicted with perfect clarity.

Lejeune’s touch is delicate enough to handle light, color, and humor too. He takes pianos, harps, random stringed instruments, and bells to the chopping block, and then turns them into wavy, dream-like apparitions. During Snow White’s funeral, he uses awkward, honking voices to represent the dwarfs’ lamentations, rather than the usual melancholic singing. In place of the expected solemn dirge we get a line of mechanical toys bleating a lost and tuneless song. It’s a small bit of comedic relief, but a welcome one. Later, as the evil queen approaches her death, Lejeune cuts triumphant drums against operatic vocals modified to portray screams. It’s the sound of the queen protesting on the way to her execution, histrionic and larger than life. That spectacle carries through to the conclusion, where echoes of the prince’s earlier scenes are married to sounds used during Snow White’s solo appearances. The ballet ends happily, with birds singing and the happy couple riding off into a wobbly, harp-filled sunset—it’s a perfect storybook ending to a piece of music that, more than anything else, behaves like a story.

For that reason, nothing else in the set sounds quite like Blanche-Neige. As with Parages and Symphonie, Les palpitations de la forêt, from 1985, includes several recognizable snippets among its battery of vibrations, but all the drama consists in the way those snippets are transformed, not in what they represent. The same can be said of 1979’s Entre terre et ciel. In these shorter pieces (still almost half an hour long) Lejeune steps out of the role of director and into the role of scientist. He places his material under a microscope, analyses the forces at play, then smashes everything to atoms, stretching some sounds to oblivion and restoring others to a semi-familiar state. The crux of the music consists in the elemental features revealed by this process: space, time, density, frequency, repetition, variation, volume, and memory all come to the fore; representation, melody, and narrative recede into the background. The landscapes and human references are still present—small streams, duck calls, muted fireworks, and so on—but they’re at the service of these building blocks.

Other composers from the GRM have used similar techniques in their work, as the recent glut of GRM reissues can attest. Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, Jean-Claude Risset, and many others experimented with pre-recorded and acousmatic sounds, using them to play with form and to extend their musical vocabulary to regions far beyond the reach of acoustic instruments and traditional notation. In that sense, Jacques Lejeune’s music is part of an experimental tradition that took root in France during the 1940s. He learned his craft from the musicians and inventors responsible for its development and, to some degree, carried their interests and concerns into his own work. But his treatment of images and his focus on the theatrical and dramatic potential of musique concrète make him unique.

By gathering of all these pieces into one place, Robot has emphasized that uniqueness in a way that a single LP release, or even a triple gatefold deluxe LP release, couldn’t. The chronological presentation of Lejeune’s work, in combination with the remastered audio and uninterrupted playback, makes approaching and appreciating the music easier. The book of poetry and the program notes, despite their sometimes labyrinthine and overwrought language, do the same. The result is a smartly presented, perfectly focused snapshot of one of the GRM’s lesser known members, one that has long deserved such a considerate, thorough, and excellent retrospective.

samples:

• "The Icarus Cycle," from Parages
• "The Hunter's Race Dragging Snow White," from Blanche-Neige
• "Animated," from Symphonie au bord d'un paysage

 

07 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Christopher King, the artist behind Symbol, has been prolific for a number of years, as the founding member and guitarist for This Will Destroy You, creating film scores, and spending time in other local Austin bands. Online Architecture, however, is his first truly solo release. Across six compositions juxtaposing lush electronics with decaying analog media, the album has a familiar warmth while never shaking the feeling of something sinister just beneath the surface.

Holodeck

King intentionally dubbed his recordings from modular synthesizers and effects onto decaying 1/4" and 1/2" inch magnetic tape, utilizing the fragmenting sound as an instrument unto itself, a natural form of post-production that no software plug-in could fully approximate.Inevitably there are some parallels to be drawn to William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, but the two are completely distinct and separate entities that happen to use a similar technique.

The opening piece, "Tracer," is probably the lightest one.What sounds like it could almost be guitar is mixed with keyboards and covered in a sun-baked, crumbling layer of reverb.Both due to its instrumentation and its decrepit source material, it feels like revisiting a collection faded memories from the late 1970s.Beyond that things start to get a bit more unsettling.

"Shadow Harvesting" sits amid a lo-fi ambience, crackling tape and mechanical sounds covering an organ-like repeating synth pattern.Compared to "Tracer," it is a bit more skeletal, and because of this it brings a sort of insinuated creepiness that reappears throughout the album."New China" comes together similarly, with sad synth tones forming the foundation with almost rhythmic loops defining the rest of the piece.

Things do slip more into dissonance once "Syn Cron" hits its stride: a noisy, almost guitar like sound leads the way, with other, more gentle layers lightly drifting from channel to channel.The more ragged sounds hide low in the mix on "Clear Passage," beneath shimmering, string-like tones and soft electronic passages.The long closing piece, "Lineage," initially has a more malignant feel through some sinister synth pulses at its introduction, but later drifts into a sad, yet hazy and hallucinogenic outro.

King’s first release as Symbol is hard to consider a debut given his involvement in many other bands and projects, and the influence of those projects resonate in Online Architecture.Complex, moody, and fascinating, it is the use of analog decay and damage that give this album its distinct identity, and help it to stand out brilliantly amongst so many other synth heavy records.

samples:

• Tracer
• Syn Cron
• Lineage

 

07 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Andrew Lagowski's S.E.T.I. project has been constructing dark ambient dramas with an extra-terrestrial sensibility for over 20 years, blending unidentifiable electronic passages with moments of identifiable synthesizers or samples, and Final Trajectory is the culmination of that. Culled from 30 years of recordings, this album drifts from fascinating to terrifying, much like massive expanse of the universe that influenced it.

Power & Steel

Consisting of a single, nearly hour long piece, the album first begins with dramatic sweeps of electronics; lush synthesizer pads clashing with chirpy, modular electronic noises that prevent the music from ever becoming too calm.Just as the backing layers begin to drift off into a soft, pensive bit of spaciousness, the erratic outbursts cut through like static on a distant radio transmission.

Between these dissonant moments, the remainder builds to a cold ambience that vacillates between peaceful and bleak, blending the quiet keyboards with fuzzy waves of electronics.As the piece goes on, the calmer moments are broken up not by abrupt electronics but by heavily processed voice samples that sound simultaneously human and alien, either heavily effected by interference or the sound of another organism entirely.

This cycle of dramatic, yet sparse electronics with sharp, dissonant outbursts is the recurring motif of Final Trajectory.Synth strings build to a quiet, yet tense level to be interrupted by heavily processed samples, electronic blips, or stuttering, digital glitches.At times, even without the interruptions, the more traditional keyboard passages take on a darker, more aggressive direction.

While it might have a clearly cyclic structure to it, there is an overarching progression to the piece that slowly builds its way into a noisier, crackling near apocalypse of sound to then lightly drift away peacefully in the darkness.The metaphor of space travel and the unknown is a recurring theme amongst many electronic artists, but only a handful manages to do it as well as Lagowski.The symbolism is overt, and at times the approach may lean into science fiction more than theoretical astrophysics, but those are the moments that keep Final Trajectory unique and compelling.

samples:

• Excerpt 1
• Excerpt 2
• Excerpt 3

 

06 April 2014

Administrator

Albums and Singles

I have noted in the past that few artists are quite as chameleonic as Barn Owl, an observation that Jon Porras seems to have taken as a challenge, as he has now gone and made a dub techno album.  While I do not think that he should necessarily quit his day job, the better moments of Light Divide make it seem like Porras has been doing this forever.  In particular, the opening, "Apeiron," is 7-minutes of warmly hissing greatness.  The rest of the album is not quite on the same level, but it is certainly a pleasant and well-executed stylistic departure nonetheless.

Thrill Jockey

As divergent as dub techno initially seems from Porras' drone-heavy past, the connecting threads are evident right from the very beginning of "Apeiron," as it is built primarily upon a single sustained synth chord.  The key difference is that Jon now leaves that backbone alone to quaver gently over a deep bass thump and echoing, processed percussion rather than using it as a foundation for more layers of guitars and synthesizers.  Porras' old melodic/harmonic sensibilities still remain as well: they are just a bit buried this time around–pleasantly so, actually.  By the time "Apeiron" finally ends, there is enough subtle darkness and complexity swirling in the warm and eerie haze that it ultimately sounds a lot more like Angelo Badalamenti than, say, Pole.

Jon does not quite keep that remarkable feat going for the remaining four songs, but he is not short of good ideas nor is he a slouch at executing them.  In fact, the sole flaw with Light Divide lies mostly with Porras' odd compositional choices, as every other piece takes some kind of momentum-sapping detour around its midpoint.  "Recollection," for example, is a bit more active melodically than its predecessor, weaving together a ghostly nimbus of drifting and shimmering synths.  Unexpectedly, however, Porras undercuts that with a cavernous thump and rumble that almost veers into singularly dancefloor-unfriendly Lustmord territory before the piece ultimately dissipates into a beat-less coda of woozily rippling synths, hissing swells, and reverberating chords.

The following "Divide" initially ditches the dark ambient tendencies to take another crack at the successful formula of "Apreiron," but abruptly dissolves into gloomy rumbling and clattering after about two minutes as well.  That disappointed me, though the piece is redeemed a bit by the gradual fade-in of some gently flanging and hallucinatory synth chords.  "New Monument," on the other hand, is a warmly drifting drone piece augmented by plenty of echoes, hisses, and buried shudders.  Unfortunately, Porras again decides to completely stop the song and changes motifs halfway through.  The problem is not that the new motif is particularly weak–it is just that it feels sudden and puzzling.  A five-minute song is probably too short for multiple movements unless an artist is a master at seamless, organic-feeling transitions, which is one skill that Jon cannot currently boast.

Light Divide concludes with the strong "Pleiades," which reprises the album's themes of echoing clatters, buried throbs, and quavering synths, but does it a bit better than some of the previous pieces.  I especially enjoy how overloaded the sub bass sounds.  Naturally, that theme does not last, but the pulsing drone that replaces it is perhaps even better.  Ultimately, that all adds up to a characteristically likable, but somewhat minor and exasperating effort from Porras.  I definitely wish the rest of Light Divide had lived up to the great promise of "Apeiron" or at least given its various grooves and themes more time to properly unfold, yet I suspect the drone-damaged, "fits-and-starts" nature of these pieces was an intentional move in order to do something distinctive rather than lapsing into mere dub techno pastiche.  I bet Light Divide could have been quite a great pastiche though.

Samples:

• Apeiron
• Recollection
• Pleiades