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In some cases musical projects where the musicians exchange sounds through the mail or over the Internet are lacking in a feeling of immediacy; not so with Beehatch. The sense of organic development within these songs is quite palpable. These artists are so at home in the studio, their mere separation by an ocean becomes irrelevant. Connecting over the fiber optic, joined together in a union of the third mind, they forge seamless electronic soundscapes despite the physical distance separating them.
“Edison Medicine” opens the disc in a surrealistic bubble bath of inane mechanical rumbling, hiss and slurred voices that eventually give way to the bright melodic arpeggiations of “I Forgot to Mention,” a piece that ebbs, swirls, and flows like insect swarms watched from a distance. “Du Du Horn” is a short piece in which a voice says, “we dream together,” ushering us into a cyclonic fanfare of regurgitated horns, twittering drums, and partially digested voices. The overall mood of these songs is one of darkness: the kind conducive to a bad psychedelic trip. Snippets of ecstatic beats, showing hints of pop sensibility, emerge briefly here and there, only to disappear moments later, leaving an unsettled feeling of dislocation in their wake, an experience intensified when listening on headphones.
Joining forces, Mark Spybey and Phil Western have created a psychotronic world of alternately menacing and amusing surreality. This is partially due to the density of layers contained within each song, stacking sound on top of sound. A dozen or more listens on and I’m still noticing new things: subtly attenuated pieces of broken melody, the spacey oscillations of mutant synthesizers, havoc wreaked with warble and buzz, samples that might have otherwise decayed if they hadn’t been given a place to live. This is the albums strength.
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This release, Kowalsky’s second for Kranky, is actually the third release in the Tape Chants series. However, the other two were released on smaller labels and are long out of print, so this will be most people’s first exposure to Gregg’s ingenious and inspired analog vision. The premise is quite simple: Tape Chants uses tape loops as the primary source of material. When performing live, Kowalsky sets up a number of cassette players around the room (all tuned to one another and playing separate loops), then manipulates their volume to create a shifting psychoacoustic installation that each audience member hears slightly differently.
The first real track on the album, “I-IV,” begins with a two wavering drones (one high and one low) that are gradually enhanced by other swelling tones, a distant melodic shimmer, and some sort of weird crackling or scraping. It hypnotically ebbs and flows in this vein for about 20 minutes, although some heartbeat-like percussion drifts in for while. It is extremely difficult to tell which instruments most of the sounds originate from, as all of the loops blend together into a formless, quavering soup. Each piece is constructed with tuned sine waves as the foundation and they are generally the most conspicuous element. Kowalsky also employs gongs, percussion, a shruti box, feedback, and some field recordings, but they are generally used both sparingly and subtly.
All of the pieces on Tape Chants are very similar in tone. Or rather, the absence of tone, as Kowalsky seems very intent on omitting any sharp edges or melodic movement. The most notable exception to this aesthetic is the extremely brief “V,” which takes a rather foreboding tone with a slow motion gong ominously keeping time over a dark, throbbing bass drone. “IX” departs from the floating, weirdly amniotic stasis as well, as its crackling static drone is colored by some murky minor key piano chords. Generally, however, the more successful tracks are the lengthier ones (regardless of their atmosphere): Kowalsky is quite skilled at what he does, so it is easy to become enveloped when he allows a piece to stretch out. The submerged-sounding sadness of “X-XI” stands out as particularly excellent though, partially because there is more textural variation than usual.
My opinion of this album is a bit complex. On one hand, Kowalsky has made a solid, creative, and immersive drone album. The subtle interplay between the shifting, quivering loops is often quite mesmerizing (particularly when listened to at a suitably high volume). However, drone music constructed from sine waves is inherently rather faceless and exclusively cerebral. I suspect both of these issues become moot, however, when Kowalsky performs Tape Chants live (I will find out next week). While a CD may not be the perfect medium for appreciating this experiment, it makes for an engrossing listen nonetheless.
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Chihei has an anachronistic aversion to electronic instrumentation (although clearly not to heavy sound processing). Saunter is constructed largely from almost unrecognizable piano but there are occasional contributions from vibraphones and field recordings as well. The opening “Treads Echoing Far Away From Sea Coast” is built around what sounds like backwards, heavily reverbed piano and texturally calls to mind Harold Budd. However, Hatakeyama’s compositions are much more abstract than Budd’s: there is very little in the way of rhythm or structured chord progressions here. Each song on Saunter is essentially a melodically static, soft-focus cloud of shimmering drones and swells. They are surprisingly vibrant clouds though: clear notes continually burst forth from the quavering aural fog and demand attention like a splash of color across a black and white photograph. That said, “Treads” is a very representative microcosm, as the rest of the album falls very firmly in the same vein, Occasionally, however, other elements (such as the acoustic guitars in “A Stone Inside The Box” and the closer “Landscape On a Hill”) find their way into the mix. Generally, the album is a series of endlessly drifting, blurry, impressionist swaths of sound.
Hatakeyama has undeniably crafted an intriguing and enjoyable album and has done many unusual things with space, structure, and instrumentation. Saunter is too polite and tranquil for me, however, to take in large doses. I suspect that Hatakeyama will always be an artist that I respect, but not an artist that I actually listen to regularly (unless I somehow achieve a Zen-like calm and supernaturally heightened appreciation of nuance).
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There is now an entire industry comprised of bands working metal's gloom and doom ambience without resorting to sketchy pentagrams and bloody axes on their album covers. For a long time, it was hard to find records this heavy without the trappings of metal's old scrawled-on-trapper-keeper aesthetic. There are plenty of bands still milking that too, but I'm glad that acts like Pelican can make heavy rock music without screeching vocals.
Ephemeral is perhaps little more than a prelude to a full length for Southern Lord, but it's a handy package of three great pieces that bring plenty of gutteral chug without the need for fancy pants orchestration or weepy synthesizer patches. What I love most about the record are those moments where the band slips into riff mode. The hard driving but steady rhythm that inspires simple head nodding through most of the songs gives way to full tilt devil horn pumping for mere seconds and it's in those moments that I'm glad that Pelican have not left the metal behind.
I grew up wanting to like metal because of its visceral attitude and combative disposition. I quickly found that most metal was too silly to take with a straight face, and that those bands who ground out slow, instrumental doom were perfect for shoe-gazing but not much else. Pelican sits happily inbetween—not quite beholden to the doom and drone, but not so enamored with acrobatic guitar solos as to seem trite and self-absorbed. Ephemeral features two new tracks and a cover of the Earth song "The Geometry of Murder" on which Earth songwriter Dylan Carlson sits in. I'm amped for the full length.
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Jason Kahn
"Vanishing Point"
23five CD
The American sound-artist Jason Kahn is an exacting technician when it comes to the principles of noise. However, his application of noise in composition is not that of Merzbow or Masonna, with teeth-gnashing explosions of distortion, feedback, and volume; rather, Kahn’s psychoacoustic techniques employ the specific frequencies of white, pink, brown, and blue noise in works that reflect the ideals of minimalism. These are sounds that regularly occur through the constant vibration of machinery; and Kahn is more than happy to appropriate such events through field recording. He also generates complementary noises through systems that involve the rattling architecture of a drum kit or through his trusted analog synthesizer.
Vanishing Point is a 47 minute composition, which Kahn has dedicated to his daughter who died shortly before Kahn began working on this piece in 2007. For all of the phenomenological studies and stoic mesmerism attributed to much of his catalogue, Vanishing Point is a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned colored noises. Soon into the piece, Kahn introduces a flickered ghost of melody whose luminous tones manifest ever so slightly against his contrails of noise. The upper register hiss and statics of these layered noises slowly drop in pitch and frequency over the duration of the piece, revealing subharmonic rumblings and an oceanic current that tugs at the agitated textures of Kahn’s surface noises. This glacial, minimalist shift renders Vanishing Point elegant and meditative.
In Kahn’s own words, “At first I thought of the title in reference to Louise’s passing, that point where she vanished from our lives, but on further reflection I came to see the compostion as dealing with other vanishing points. I address the idea of one’s sense of time vanishing, being immersed in sound and entering a place of timelessness. There is also the idea of boundaries between electronic and acoustic sound vanishing, as in this piece I draw on both sources. And finally, in the sense of aural perspective extending to the point where we imagine it ending, as the compostion stretches on towards its vista, slowly vanishing.”
http://jasonkahn.net
http://23five.org
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The track that opens the album, the sprawling "Temporarius Delerium" is some 11 plus minutes of slow development: a dramatic opening of processed loops, deep bass pulses and angelic layered voices starkly contrast the second half of sharp breakbeats and darker synth pulses that come later, mixing the beautiful with the raw. The beat leans into that distorted overdriven sound that is consistent with other Hymen/Ant-Zen artists, but never goes too far, instead tastefully mixing the dissonant textures with more conventional rhythms.
The female choir sounds from this long opening reappear on "Of Those Great Walls," where they are looped in a spacious mix with warm synths and clicking rhythms. "Fluorescence" has a similar vast mix, though utilizing more raw mechanical beats with the slow and warm synth tracks. Both "Peripheral Movement" and "Watching From Here" lean more into the techno world, with the former opening with an 808 rhythm right out of "Planet Rock" and backwards keyboard tones while the latter focuses on reverb drenched piano pieces. Both have a steady and pounding beat to them, yet there is a wide variety of sounds between the rhythms that are just as compelling.
A few of the tracks, at least to these ears, drift into instrumental techno pop with the occasional industrial edge to keep things interesting. "In The Far" opens with twinkling ringtone like melodies before segueing into a solid 4/4 kick rhythm and slower electro bass sequences. The structure of the track is reminiscent of some very well done techno pop tracks that are as catchy as they are technically impressive. The lush synths and mechanical polyrhythms of "The Source (Album Edit)" and "Breaking Down", when mixed with the concrete rhythms and dialog samples, come across as being not far removed from 1990s industrial with a hint of pop sensibilities. Since the Tonikom Myspace lists Front Line Assembly as an influence, I’m going to assume that it is no accident that I was reminded of some of that band’s late '90s output.
Conceptually the disc closes somewhat like it started: "Look But Never Touch" is the only beat-less track here, mixing dark synths with an almost music box type melody, contrasting the natural and beautiful again with the synthetic and dark. While it could definitely be an album to shake your ass to, it thankfully lacks the dull repetition and simplicity of so many techno records, yet it never lurches into the "lets see how random we can make our beats" territory of many so-called IDM bands. It straddles that narrow line, and it does so quite well.
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My first sampling of this disc reminded me of the mid 1990s ambient/isolationist dub scene that produced a number of short lived but excellent projects that peaked too early: Techno Animal’s Re-Entry and Scorn’s Evanescence rank within my all time favorite albums, yet soon after their releases the former began to lean too heavily on various distortion plugins and the latter became content to simply layer a hip-hop beat over basic abstract sounds. My comparison isn’t to say Unconfirmed Reports sounds dated, because it doesn’t, instead it takes the best elements of that period and sustains them with enough modern technique and technology to sound fresh. The mostly dense, chaotic mixes somewhat parallel the likes of Meat Beat Manifesto or the Bomb Squad’s production work with Public Enemy, but replacing the funk elements in both with dark industrial bleakness.
Album opener "Friend for Hire" uses the dub scene’s love of deep reverbed bass to keep the dark atmospherics going, but layers a variety of synth tracks on top and a rhythm right off of the best electro records keep the song flowing, and though it does lock into a minimalist repetition, there is enough change and variation to keep it from growing stagnant. The following "Pragmatism" is more dynamic, but still retains a definite structure, letting fragments of electric guitar and voice samples into the otherwise synthetic sounds. To me it sounds like it could have been a stand-out track on either of the landmark Macro Dub Infection compilations that surveyed dub influenced electronica of the day.
While the elements are notable throughout, the traditionalist industrial vibe comes to the surface on "Cypher" and "The Sand Collector." The former takes synths that sound like feedback (or feedback that sounds like synths) into raw clipping territory, and replaces any drums with a precise bass sequence and heavily processed voices. Structurally and atmospherically it feels a lot like early Cabaret Voltaire (think Mix Up or before). "The Sand Collector" cranks up the distortion on the synths and rhythms to push it precariously close to harsh noise territory, but exercises enough restraint to remain in control. While "Cypher" was Cabaret Voltaire, this could be a 21st century take on SPK’s Information Overload Unit or Leichenschrei due to the raw, yet rhythmic elements. The feedback loop that is prevalent throughout the track actually sounds a whole lot like it could be a sample from "Ground Zero: Infinity Dose," but that could be just coincidence.
Other tracks aren’t as bleak, with "SSRI" throwing jazzy breakbeats and a hip-hop bass line together with slightly surf guitar. There is still the industrial/mechanical din in the distance, but is more upbeat and lighter in comparison to some of the aforementioned tracks. "Portable Pariah" has a more spacious mix and even with the noisy loops and textures, feels more airy and open, allowing greater access to the synths and the catchy beats. The closing "A Prior Disengagement" acts as an amalgamation of the entire disc, showcasing blown speaker hip-hop beats with almost acid synth sequences and shrieking noises and fragments of voice communication, combining the more musical elements of the album with the more harsh ones.
Unconfirmed Reports successfully extracts some of the best elements of 1990s electronic music and puts them in a modern, though dark, context. The disc comes lavishly packaged in an oversized envelope with large inserts, hand-cut newspaper clippings, and a bonus DVD-R of short films to three of the tracks, all of which combine the music with treated video of Japan that emphasizes the sense of alienation and disconnect that the music demonstrates.
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Lisa Wants To Talk to You begins and ends with the rain, radio, and chaotic energy of "All Alone in Endicott," a reference to both Wilson's hometown and his never-ending quest for companionship and sexual gratification. Little more than collages of seemingly random sounds, these pieces bookend an album that is otherwise rife with the music of AM radio and nightmare lounge performances. At the center of it all is Wilson and his pleading, sometimes pathetic vocals. Throughout the record he daydreams about making out with his old crush Mary, reminisces about his past with Lisa and Linda, and bemoans the existence of Karen, who seems to haunt him and his conscience even more than Mary does.
Through it all Wilson is alone Endicott, all of his stories and fantasies just a strange blend of fiction and history playing out in his head. The drama and psychological nudity of Wilson's lyrics make for an awkward and sometimes embarrassing experience. It's tempting to reach out to Wilson and stop him from broadcasting his thoughts because, quite frankly, they are more than just a ltitle embarrassing and neurotic. For the most part the music does little to cure that feeling, but from a certain perspective there's as much humor on Lisa Wants To Talk to You as there is unnerving confession. Whether it is Wilson's unflinching directness, his off-key delivery, or the clash between his dream world and reality, there's something funny about this album that has nothing to do with its perversity or anachronistic musical style.
But from beginning to end there are some excellent songs shot through with solid grooves, fat bass lines, and layered melodies. Songs like "Come On Mary" and "You Are Still My Girlfriend" have incredibly catchy hooks and shed the lounge act sound just enough to appeal to more than just the kitschy side of my brain. "Karen Had A Secret," on the other hand, is dark enough to set off predator or stalker alarms in my head. Wilson's whispered vocals and the bitter subject matter are genuinely frightening, especially when contrasted with the record's otherwise bright aesthetic. If played by other bands, many of these songs might be one-dimensional odes bordering either on the too-serious or the too-indulgent, but Wilson injects his music with layers of ideas, moods, and feelings. The wonky keyboards, sleazy veneer, and elevator vibe might put some listeners off, but Lisa Wants To Talk to You will reward any patient listener willing to venture in Wilson's world.
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Let it be known though that these two do what they do extremely well. The seven tracks presented here each see the duo expanding the definition of blackness, seeking out its various manifestations and finding new examples lying between the cacophonic blood-boiling noise found on the first untitled track and the brooding and spare scrape soundscapes found on the second track, also untitled.
More or less everything else here falls somewhere in the middle of these two approaches, the duo always finding new ways to intermingle their gutteral vocals, oscillators, tapes, guitar and bass. "Genocide" finds a vocal bellow on par with some dinosaurs while high-end oscillators ring about in richly textured pools of mud. It may be harsh but the layers intermingle fabulously, and even the noise newcomer could find elements of interest to lose themselves in here. It is one of the finest demonstrations of the group's sound presented on the disc. "Maggot" crackles like coals sizzling in some lava pit in Sumatra while avalanches roll about above. The sound is certainly an ugly one, but ambient elements are present, and the sheer level of action keeps the piece on its toes throughout.
Whereas many of the tracks here feel like a compactor squishing various noise tactics into one another, the fifth untitled track is truly a dark ambient work, gliding along menacingly while wagon wheels and feedback shoot shards of color into the piece, if only momentarily. The patient control exhibited is one of the group's strengths, as they exhibit their interest in unified works rather than all out blow-you-away noise.
The centerpiece of the disc is no doubt found in the 17-plus minute "Borre Fen/Untitled." Beginning in a drifting netherworld of screeching tapes, the piece builds from musique concrete openings into a bleak post-apocalyptic portrait before descending into complete bone-sucking mayhem. The work moves through so many spaces that it is difficult to touch on all of them, though it does take the shape of a mini score of sorts, each scene represented with fine dexterity and finesse. The closing untitled track is a harsh high end palette cleanser, securing the group's position as dark noise practitioners of the highest degree, far more closely aligned to artists such as Cousins of Reggae or Spykes than Sunn 0))) or even Robedoor.
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These two sides present themselves right from the get-go with "Knives, Birds, Stones & Pyramids." Opening with a guitar power chord progression that would not be out of place in a more radio-friendly rock group like Incubus, grooving drums soon come in to accompany them as a menacing vocal repeats the title. While it feels a tad heavy-handed, this also appears to be a big part of the group's sound, and the overall effect is far more interesting than the average group working within these constraints.
"Waving" takes the psychedelic level up a notch with snaking vocal lines before a chorus not far removed from PiL's "Careering" presents the album's first moment of surprise. "Six Sixes" opens with a shimmering and quite well realized drone whose aimlessness serves as a welcome respite from the pummeling pulse of the first two tracks. As thudding, in-the-pocket drumming careens atop, the unit seems to have hit their stride, building a psychedelic stew of approaches into a sound that really grabs you from all sides and pulls in all directions at once. With nearly 12 minutes to stretch out here, the unit finally has the time to move, and they take it far beyond the stratos here with engaging synth play before exploding into truly cataclysmic material, pounding along and repeating the title as they stretch beyond any point they've achieved thus far.
With "Hydrophobic Baptism" however, the group return to their taut, post-metal song structures, and no matter how well conceived it may be, it still reads as a tad silly. And perhaps it's supposed to, but the group sometimes gets uncomfortably close to the sound of groups like System of a Down, despite their far more repetitive and unhindered approach. "Unholy Drums for Psychedelic Africa" is more or less what it sounds like, with multiple drums ripping along above subtle washes of background fuzz and drone that sound alright, but don't really serve to push the album forward much. Momentum is merely maintained once more.
The rush forward continues with "Habit," whose drum and guitar-heavy sound leaves it disappointingly indecipherable from much of the rest. Even when shards of guitar make their way in it still is rendered surprisingly stale by this point. Which, again, is frustrating—the group clearly has plenty of interesting ideas and a broad musical palette to choose from. It's just that with so little room to breathe it is hard to keep the album moving along as a whole. "Skull & Tongue" opens up a bit into some Amon Düül-style meanderings that see a group incredibly adept musically. Yet despite its decidedly less structured contents, the bass line feels like it could well be used on nearly any track here.
The album closes with "Urban Ritual," whose title seems to sum up the group's desired aesthetic. Its patient opening soon crumbles into a strange realm that lies somewhere between dub-step production and doom metal decay. It is a grim and unexpected end to an album whose overall effect is somehow more predictable than one might hope. The album also comes as a double LP which claims an extra album's worth of material. Supposedly this extra material is less focused and more drifting, which may be just what the album needs to live up to its promise. With this much focus however, it comes across as a tad stale, if riddled with intriguing moments and plenty of potential.
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This collection draws on a number of unreleased tracks from Emmanuel's most fertile period, offering an array of examples of his distinctive stylistic mastery. Ordered more or less sequentially, the disc offers a fine demonstration of the artist's trajectory. Opening with the placid and gentle drones of "Movement into Lightspeed," played on an organ with an Echoplex and reel deck, the work soon grows in complexity until the closing 22-minute track, "Changeling," featuring four synths at work. In between lies a body of work whose importance is far greater than its notoriety.
Emmanuel's main cue and most obvious influences lie in the minimalist composers. Much of his work has the distinct feel of greats like Steve Reich and Philip Glass as arpeggiated tones are gently modified through the consistent warmth of his synth tones. Yet it is likely Terry Riley's shadow which looms largest here, as Emmanuel displays a penchant for conjuring the spiritual strength in repetition. Swaying effortlessly, "Sunrise Over Galveston Bay" has synth lines drifting atop field recordings of waves, a tactic whose overuse is rendered obsolete here due to the piece's humble simplicity.
"7 Note Trance" is, as suspected, a pulsing body of arpeggiated tones (seven of them, I would believe...) that ebb and flow ceaselessly forward while the aptly titled "Grandioso" finds a medium tempo urging along a regal space age procession. Each use a highly different in approach but the feel is of a fully realized and unified musical voice. The stoned pitch modulations of "Through Inner Planes" may well be the least tangible work here, but it still manages to fit comfortably into the bigger picture presented here.
While some of Emmanuel's earliest experiments are present on Solid Dawn, they sound right at home next to more constructed works like "March of the Colossus," a patient and brooding space filled with austere lines that would find themselves fitting snuggly between Reich's "Four Organs" and Paul Bley's electronic keyboard work. "Whirlwind" takes off even further, pulsing outward in continuous lines of sensual colors.
Emmanuel's recent rediscovery has proved to be an important factor in the emergence of a burgeoning New Age aesthetic practiced by units such as Oneohtrix Point Never, Steve Hauschildt and countless others. His influence may yet reach its height and works such as these serve as important reminders of the links between much basement drone and minimalist composition. Emmanuel himself may well come to resurface as one of the most important bridges between them if albums of this quality continue to emerge.
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