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For this album the Magic Carpathians have played many roles: field guides, sonic scouts, and acoustic archaeologists investigating the musical heritage of the land they call their home. They have been applying the varnish to some improvised sessions recorded over a nearly sleepless two day period high up in a mountain lodge back in 2008. The results are like the whorls in a piece of wood picked up off the forest floor: fractal like, mesmerizing and endlessly intricate.
Besides being fine musicians the Magic Carpathians are also adept ethnomusicologists. Marek Styczynski has had a long standing interest in preserving musical instruments from the Carpathian Mountain region, which forms a long arc stretching across Central and Eastern Europe. Some of these, like the gajdica–a unique clarinet from Slovakia–can be heard on Acousmatic Psychogeography. Marek is interested in preserving these instruments not only as artifacts, but by bringing them into modern and electronic musical scenarios he extends their cultural reach, sustaining them longer in time; in doing this important work he finds a new audience for their sounds.
The album opens with long player "Detournament." Marek sings "faces of passing people," which forms a kind of refrain, evoking images of the flaneur. Anna Nacher further elaborates the theme, singing of "wasting time endlessly, roaming the streets, circling around, looking down." The music is perfect for the idle lounging and rambling she describes. Lazy guitar lines, fed with a bit of drive from the tube amps, meander over a thin sheet of watery loops, gradually building in distortion. The hallucinatory improv set climaxes with sounds of frayed analog fire.
"Derive" is a psychedelic sand box of open source synthesis. Slide guitars start the affair, before graduating onwards with heavy strains on the wah-wah pedal. The flubbering bass line gels together the other musical elements, which form a kind of ad hoc bricolage. This song along with "Drifting," faithfully evince the Situationist concept of the drift. Sputtering like a late night basement session, the songs create new maps out of old territory, psychically manipulating familiar psych-rock terrains, molding and shaping it into new contours. This is accomplished not only by the inclusion of instruments like the gajdica, mentioned earlier, but also the uchiwa-daiko, a type of Japanese fan drum, dulcimer, pistiala and other unusual sound devices.
The final song, "Ley Lines," picks up where "Drifting" left off, using vocal loops and ethnic wind instruments. The trajectory moves sideways from what is typically expected of a song, just as the old straight tracks, affectionately known as leylines among various seekers investigating Earth mysteries, allegedly connect sacred geographical sites, without recourse to modern notions of urban planning. The energy of the album is concentrated in the middle, making this closer a pleasant departure, as the last swirls of a dream moving from the unknown back into the known.
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There's a lot of electronic music out there that either plain bores or annoys the absolute piss out of me. So much of it sounds the same, and what it sounds like is something so pedestrian that it was all created using standard ACID loop libraries. That's why it's so refreshing when something like loscil comes around. "Triple Point" is a fantastic release just based upon the rather unique palette of sounds here. But there's so much more going on in the mix. Sampled sounds so buried you really only hear them faintly, and treated keyboards that sound hollow and distant have such an eerie effect. Each track starts of easy enough, but builds to amazing heights as more sounds are added and volume increases. Scott Morgan, who is loscil, has an amazing ear, as these songs are dense and droned-out but you never lose sense of this music and Morgan never lets you stray from the path long. "Triple Point" is reportedly based on the concepts of thermodynamics, and that couldn't be a more appropriate analogy for the effect this music has on the listener. It soothes, it relaxes, it resonates with a warmth that almost defies description, and it propels you in the same instant, willing you to create or submit to its will. Never has an artist's debut on a label impressed me more. loscil has obviously just begun, and there's great promise for the future.
Samples can be found here.
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It has been three years since the last Amp (proper) full-lengther, the phenomenal 'Stenorette' release on Kranky (produced by Robert Hampson of Main). Since then, there have been a couple releases as A.M.P. Studio (but don't ask me to describe the distinction between entities). While the world awaits another full-length masterpiece, the group has decided to collect recordings made on the road during their 1998/99 European tour, from in-studio performances at AJZ radio in Switzerland and the famed VPRO in the Netherlands.
Of the ten songs included, four I can recognize from both 'Stenorette' and 1997's 'Astralmoonbeamprojections'. In addition to the older tunes, the group has provided somewhat of a rough blueprint for the next recordings.
Amp's sound has always been rather difficult to categorize, whether they're making an attempt at dreampop, a blissful wall of sound, or gritty and abrasive guitar wash with samples. While the group are considerably limited to both gear and production due to the nature of these recordings, it's no easier to sum up the sounds. Common characteristics include earth-rumbling bass, disconnected looping drums and heavily distorted guitars underneath the caustic vocals of miss Karine Charff. From a low rumble to blood curdling shrieks, it's almost puzzling how dark and almost goth-like this can get while incorporating old sounds of primitive gear and effects — think early 1970s Pink Floyd noodle-roni — while their main crowd tends to be the more peculiar indie rock kids.
Have they played at Terrastock yet? Tom the Fish is calling this the best record of the year, while I'm now salivating for the next fully realized Amp (studio) album.
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samples:
- Guerilla Priest (with Lee "Scratch" Pery)
- Hail the Day
- Bitch Slapped
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Mark Nelson (Pan American), Frank Bretschneider (Komet) and Joe Kingman (Fisherofgold) are given only one restriction for this project: approximately 15 minutes apiece to subjectively express themselves. I wonder why only 48 minutes total when most discs and players can accommodate 75-80? That question aside, volume 1 of this artist friendly series from Quatermass is a solid collection of complementary tracks.Pan American's "Train Station" and "The Passage" continue laying track beyond last year's delicious "East Coast Bugs" 12" on BSI. The latter in particular builds up a strong, pulsating head of dub steam with no time to pick up passengers 'til the end of the line. Komet specializes in economic titles, sounds and structures. His 3 tracks - "Stab", "Eist" and "Pass" - repetitively but progressively pop, click, boom and hiss, much like the digital 'pop' of his own "Rand" and "Curve" discs on Mille Plateaux. Fisherofgold uses nearly all of his allotted time for a single track. "Lapis Lazuli" (a semiprecious gemstone in varying shades of blue) evokes more of a golden than blue feel for me. Tiny ball bearings tumble around in a cement mixer as delicate rips and tears of audio are smeared about and a 7 note bass line loops. A languorous trip hop beat kicks in but is snuffed out within a few minutes. By the 9th minute it has slipped into a very comfortable and pretty groove adding a strummed accompaniment. And in the remaining time Kingman carefully strips away the elements 'til it comes to a sudden stop. I bought this disc for the Pan American and Komet but the Fisherofgold is best, though only marginally so as they're all quite pleasant. Now I wonder who will be on volume 2 ...
samples:
- Pan American - The Passage
- Komet - Pass
- Fishertogold - Lapis Lazuli
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The sixth album in his Selbstportrait series, this is one of the best. Hans-Joachim Roedelius created this mini-masterpiece during the mid '70s, drawing on various recordings from his career at that time and building on them with added instrumentation and a wider selection of tones, structures and styles. The end result is a dazzling mix of old and new material (well it is all old at this stage considering the age of the album) which gives Roedelius’ talent the spotlight it deserves.
While not a break from the dreamy textures of his more famous works with Cluster and Harmonia (not surprising considering he recycles a lot of studio debris from various album sessions), the pieces that make up The Diary of the Unforgotten show a more intimate side to Roedelius’ musical personality. The rolling rhythms of "Frohgemut" conjure up images of a babbling brook where the water has been replaced with a rainbow; the playful side of Roedelius’ work that peeps through the starker aspects of his music in evidence here. In contrast, the almost classical piano of "Du," which immediately follows "Frohgemut," has more in common with Popol Vuh or even Debussy. The beautiful piano playing is stark naked in comparison to the synthesizers that populate the rest of The Diary of the Unforgotten.
A large proportion of The Diary of the Unforgotten is given over to "Hommage à Forst," a labyrinthine exploration of beats and rhythms that should be instantly recognizable to any student of Krautrock. Many of these backing tracks are taken directly from Cluster and Harmonia pieces and it is hard not to start humming or singing the absent but familiar melodies. Roedelius uses these backing tracks as a springboard for some studio jamming, even bringing in the most unusual instrument of all (for him): an electric guitar. A wobbly echo effect transmutates the loose guitar playing into a strange, organic counterpart to the mechanical rhythms.
The Diary of the Unforgotten is certainly one of Roedelius’ finer solo releases. It is Roedelius’ experiments with his approach to composing and playing around these familiar elements which make the album and the bits lifted from Cluster and Harmonia songs are the least exciting parts here. The idea of this being an audio self-portrait is most apt as Roedelius’ character shines through with a brilliance that is almost blinding.
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Recorded live as a duet between turntables and keyboards (with editing and overdubbing bass added later), the main track here is a slow, dramatic piece, with the flip side conjuring the best moments of electronic dub.
While artists who specialize in the use of a turntable as an instrument are a dime a dozen, no one else really uses the device as creatively or as intensely as Jeck.Truly "playing" it, rather than just using it as a way to sample or scratch records, he coaxes sound out of the players that bear little or no resemblance to the source material."London Tenderberry" is a piece of slow drama that has no overt "record" sounds in it:shimmering synth pads, reverberated bangs and crashes, and a gurgling bass pulse meet to create a flowing river of opaque sound.The flip side, "Tenderberries Version" is not an ironic title at all, cutting the mix from the previous side up into throbbing bass and electronic synth pulses, leading to a complex variety of tone and rhythm, but with an intense dub sensibility that stands with the best of the genre.
Within the confines of a 7-inch record, I must admit that this is a case where less isn’t more.Sometimes a project or specific work is best kept within a sub-12 minute space, where it is able to make its statement without becoming stagnant or repetitive, but that's not this record.The complex nuances of the A side and the electro-like bass heavy flip just left me wanting more.Which is, I assume, the best compliment I could give.
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