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Originally available only as 10", now in special-sleeved compact disc, No Sign comes from artists with a bit more exposure than Sedimental is used to; the music, also, occupies austere and familiar realms, making it less the shock-to-the-head I've come to expect from the label, however deep listening turns over a complex and powerful piece.
Sedimental
The pin-prick-on-paper sleeve design is a nice foreshadow of the sound inside, reassuring too, as I've certainly used prickly adjectives to describe microtonal music with a significantly more maximalist approach than this. No Sign's punctures are spaced to produce a decorative, even conservative aesthetic that comes through sonically as well. Kyle Bruckmann and Ernst Karel play wind instruments arranged through forcefields of analog electronic noise. Though fully engrained, their horns are nonetheless distinct and often plaintive, pooling as they do around the open spaces and between scratches of mechanical interference. The word may be "restraint," but that implies an interest in suggesting an instrument's extremes, or at least a dialogic structure in the music, neither of which are present. With EKG, texture and transition feel extra tight, precise as a cube of pin-prickings, a quality that gets reinforced by the track titles, each a time interval, traveling from "Years" down to "Seconds." As with Murray's Places, the focus here seems to be overlappings of sound decay rather than an emphasis on particular lushness or complexity of concrète sound environments, something closer to the work of Axel Dörner whose prolific appearances preceded EKG's in both the Sedimental and Locust catalogs. The supreme breathlessness of Karel and Bruckmann's horns gathers everything into a groaning wheeze of descent rather than the crackling of surface play that defines most else in the closest-checkable genre. No Sign's uniqueness is a product of these visions of closely-structured time lapse coming together with the improvisational intentions and microscopic attentions of a thousand small sounds.
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Sedimental
A northeastern American sax player bent on packing his unique and extreme vision into an unassuming, highly personal statement, David Gross might as well be poster boy for the Sedimental label. His first for solo alto saxophone, Things I Have Found To Be True follows fellow Bostonian James Coleman's tremendous solo theremin recording Zuihitsu and Performing Tonight, a collection of baffling sax/voice duets from Gross and Liz Tonne. Gross' 15-year history of instrument discovery stops here in an indecipherable tome to childhood and personal history. Gross has made statements about dismantling completely his concept of looking for new niches within a history of jazz etc, and these ideas are completely supported from minute #1 of this disc. The artist's style is probably derivative of someone else; more appropriately it is entirely derivative of the saxophone as an inert vessel of forces, ideas at the core of any history of free music, but Things I Have Found makes clear that these matter not. By covering the disc with personal referents, including Gross' grandmother's beautiful cover painting of the artist and his brother as children, he creates a mythology that is more than simple juxtaposition of abstract sound and subjective information. The first track, "Partially Buried Woodshed," becomes obscure childhood memory, plea for the abstract expressionist credo of emotion-through-basic-gesture, and a brut simulation technique all flooding at once with Gross struggling to keep his breath within the spaces. Others have described the artist's style as "sculptural," a perfect term that hones in on the physicality of the playing and sounds played, while leaving room for projected spaces within the saxophone itself and divergent, imaginary realms created. A woodshed of breath, brass, earth, flesh, and…wood creates itself, outside of history, outside of temporal concerns, a bound diary of suspended moments, whittled down to a purity of expression without a purity of intent. The surprises come when things even remotely close to traditional (read: human) sax sounds creep through, as if by accident. "Dystonia" is a numbing human-voice-through-saxophone-bell piece whose guttural meanderings have surely been done-over countless times but enter the mythology of the record in a refreshing way here: comfort and assurance in, yes indeed, a human presence and abject terror at how the presence asserts itself. Gross' playing is more sparse on this release than any of the other documents I've heard, though these are his most complex compositions; the intimacy with which he approaches the saxophone, each screw in each latch, every fiber in the reed, every pad or valve, and all the negative space in between, is simply astounding.
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Unschooled Records
It seems that Caleb Mueller just can't decide what kind of musician he wants to be. As Decomposure, he pinballs between singing pop songs in his basement and using household items to create experimental electronica (not just in his basement but his living room and kitchen, too). Despite the ingenuity, Decomposure has had difficulty finding a base audience mostly because of Mueller's refusal to adhere to one musical style: when he sits behind a piano and tries (not entirely unsuccessfully) to croon he alienates the electronic demographic; and when he bangs on pots and pans and records his cordless phone's beeping to make insane and frenetic beat sequences he loses the verse-chorus-verse set. But where At Home and Unaffected falls short in clarity, it shines in sheer sonic novelty, aided by Mueller's obvious and unbridled passion for making music his way. For the open-eared listener Mueller has crafted an ambitious and impressively creative mixture of both styles, with some further forays into spoken word and slam poetry and even some singer-songwriter guitar work. Don't let the stylistic wanderings fool you, as Mueller does have a purpose: strictly adhering to a rigid guideline (included in the liner notes), Mueller made At Home and Unaffected using (with a few minor exceptions) only sounds found in his home, sequenced with computer but not otherwise electronically altered in any way. He uses real instruments as the situation desires—guitar, piano, drums and even melodeon; he also is able to make sound out of household stuff, ranging from strums on rubber bands to whatever percussion he could glean from bathroom items. The liner notes, while detailed, are insufficient in explaining Mueller's method and are thankfully supplemented on Decomposure's website: one can read the explanations behind the more baffling songs in detail, including what Mueller used to make the sounds as well as the inspiration for the songwriting. The latter isn't merely agreeable-sounding fluff, either—Mueller tackles post-modern alienation (Center of the World) and modern-day religious hypocrisy (Disconnect) with equal verve. But as an album, At Home and Unaffected is flighty and disjointed—the rapid fire beats and glitches don't mesh well with the more melodious fare, and the listener is hard pressed to not be driven away (or crazy). Worst, some will dismiss Mueller's work as a gimmicky rather than ingenious. In a way, it is: ultimately, the idea wins out over the end result, as it proves to be more interesting to hear about a song crafted using the sonic residue from a Trivial Pursuit game than it is to hear the finished product. Still, Mueller has more going for him than novelty. He wins significant style points for creativity and method, and At Home and Unaffected isn't at all doomed to be background noise—the album's pop nuggets can surprise and delight, and the more manic electronic moments will challenge and amuse, especially rewarding those few who will bother to spin it more than once.
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discos mariscos
There's only one way to view Applied Communications second release Uhhh Sort Of, and that is as a very crude slice of self-help therapy for a kid who never got over his mother's death. The specter of dead parents, fickle friends, and cheating girlfriends abounds here. Applied Communications' Max Woods repeats child-like mantras like "It was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream..." in his whiny, prepubescent snarl over tinny drum samples and toy instruments. On "It Bothers Me It Bothers You I Snore," Woods ascends to a anxiety-ridden peak, using distorted drums, wah-wah guitar samples, cow bell clicks, and his particular brand of, um, lyrical stylings ("I didn't mean to take off your clothes and throw you on my mattress!" he squeals at one point). The problem with Uhhh Sort Of comes from its unremitting angst. This is the record that results when the eighth grade geek makes a record, and it isn't a pretty picture. We're talking years of pent-up aggression here, touching on everything from sexual insecurity, boredom, pop culture detritus, and death. That Max Woods builds these awkward, and sometimes touching rants on top of fairly innocuous, though serviceable laptop bells and whistles makes this an even more perplexing record, one not easy to dismiss yet not easy to embrace either. The biggest albatross on Uhhh Sort Of though is the death of Max Woods' mother. He references her passing constantly in a way that is both ironically self effacing and emotionally naked, yelping on "DFK" over a simple drum loop "Please forgive me/ I love you mom/ don't die again!" In many ways, Max Woods' messy self-help sample pop most closely linked to the work of Daniel Johnston, an artist whose (often) inarticulate, scatter-shot musings could reveal much more than was expected of him. While Uhhh Sort Of is liable to scare off most listeners within the first thirty seconds, those who stick it out will find a record that, though often frustrating, is mesmerizing in its emotional honesty and willingness to be stripped bare for all to see.
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Jagjaguwar
The Wilderness' eponymous debut boasts a sound as expansive as their name suggests. Opening track, "Marginal Over," is the kind of song that is tailor made to achieve lift off. Colin McCann's guitar rings out, drenched in echo and late afternoon sunlight, while Brian Gossman and Will Goode's rhythmic attack keep at least one foot grounded here on Earth. While these and other such moments from Wilderness make this release a cut above other third-rate shoegazer hacks, there is also a fair share of less inspired moments. As a result, Wilderness isn't an out-of-nowhere revelation so much as it is a solid debut with much to build on for the band. Like "Marginal Over," songs like "Fly Further to See" and "Say Can You See" are built on foundations of beautifully rising and falling guitar lines, percolating beats, and the oddball singing (or is it announcing?) of James Johnson. When he isn't recalling the ghost of David Byrne past, he sounds like a more controlled John Lydon, spouting absurdist lines like "commerce your comment, comment your comment, standing as landing, living as giving." Though a good chunk of these songs mange to be engaging throughout, particularly "The End of Freedom" with its crisp tom hits and sturdy bass runs, there are a few moments that are not as striking. "Post Plethoric Rhetoric" for one takes too long to get off the ground, and once it does it fails to pack the punch of their shorter compositions. Another complaint that needs to be registered is the lyrics, which tend to follow the lead of the guitar and spout off random imagery and meandering thoughts. Fortunately, James Johnson's delivery is just affecting enough so as to keep things from becoming laughable. Wilderness, overall, is a record that desperately wants to break through (though to what I'll probably never know). While it seems clear that they are still in the test stages, there is still plenty of reason to look forward to hearing more from The Wilderness in the future.
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Infraction
The distant howl of a fog horn turned low and dead prowls through the underbelly of these three tracks. It's unsettling and nocturnal, the perfect musical score to accompany the artwork included with this album. It may be a bridge lit by high, bright lamps, but it could be a Russian winter scene, the details of a city lost in the haze of a Ukrainian nightmare come to life. Submissive, intricately tempered whispers, wails, and waterfalls slide through a maze of slowly turning passages, each crossing the next and producing a wall of silent deaths lost to the trees and mountains that seem to dot the landscape created in the textural sprawl of large, impressionistic strokes and dizzying, detuned growls. The only light is the deep blue color of the moon, it seems to emphasize the paths the cold takes as it digs into bone and slows blood down into an icy sludge. Thousand year old corpses line the inside of a long forgotten tomb marked by escape attempts made by the living unfortunate enough to be trapped there and the unholy scripture of a language long lost to history. Zimiamvian Night can be absolutely horrific, the manner through which their vision is presented implies a certain scope and attitude, namely that silence and softness can be just as heartbreaking and fear inducing as the onslaught so often presented through power, high volumes, and abrasive sounds. The whole of "Between Moments" is a suffocated draft beating through the heart of a sunken city buried below years of war, weather, and catastrophe. The quiet movements and subtle variations in volume and texture create an uneasy atmosphere that keep me guessing as to what might be around the next corner. The music is also strongly visual, painting broad pictures of empty, destroyed landscapes and scarred memories abound with still fright: the sight of an almost dead human crumbling away or the image of a hand protruding from cracked dirt. Thinking about what the last moments for that human must've been like is much like listening to this record. My imagination has taken wild turns while listening to this, often finding reason to be quite scared of the dark. Zimiamvian Night's approach to sound worlds is slow and dominant, allowing sounds to develop into silence before moving on. It's a panoramic piece of music that spirals slowly into insanity, like watching a final heartbeat throb away in the slowest of motions.
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Hanson
Somewhere, in some dingy squat-house performance space, someone is flipping out over Hair Police. Totally loving that "shit man, they just don't give a fuck!" and that their craggy noise-scapes are probably pissing off the neighbors. When Hair Police are done he or she will light a cigarette and congratulate themself for being in on the cutting edge. Judging by the lack of anything captivating on Drawn Dead though, it would be a safe bet to say that the Louisville, KY trio is next in line to fall off said edge. Drawn Dead isn't so much a record that is out and out terrible, but suffers from the fact that I've heard this all before, generally from better bands. What makes this even more frustrating is that I know the kind of oral brutality Hair Police are capable of. Whereas albums like Obedience Cuts grabbed me by the nuts and flung me around the room in a PCP-fueled rage, Drawn Dead limps into action, taking a few half-assed swipes at me before deciding it would rather do something else. Despite this, there are some decent moments that save Hair Police. "Untitled 1" features garbage disposal gurgles that cut in and out along with what sounds like breaking piano strings, all of which slowly build for the songs eight minute duration. Throughout, ghostly guitar squiggles and distant whispers appear, furthering the tension. "Untitled 3" alternates between barrages of short-circuiting noise and almost ambient white noise, making it at least somewhat interesting. The band finally achieves something of a groove on the final minute and a half of "Untitled 4" where Mike Connelly's demented guitar squall and Robert Beatty's pissed off electronics shed more bile and blood then Jason Voorhees at summer camp. But small signs of light can't help Hair Police escape this dark night. As Jon Whitney correctly pointed out in his review of Wolf Eyes' Burned Mind, "People love beats and they love repetition." It's a spot-on assessment and is perhaps one way of explaining why Drawn Dead is so unsatisfying. While Hair Police are no more abrasive then Wolf Eyes or perhaps Throbbing Gristle, it's the fact that the songs on this release simply languish there—all noise and no swing—that makes them so frustrating. Never do the rhythms (of which there are little to none) rise above crawling, which makes me feel stuck in some sort of noisy fog that will never pass. While Hair Police are very abrasive and confrontational, that does not give them a free pass. Drawn Dead gives too little and demands too much, leaving me unsatisfied and annoyed. By the end, I couldn't be any less interested.
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It's been five years since the birth of Stefan "Pole" Betke's label,~scape, and in that time the artists he's chosen have had a bit of achore living outside of the shadow of Pole's near-genre definingversion of minimalist dub. Early ~scape releases were easily linked tothe "Pole sound" of clicky, spacious percussion, filtered melodies anddeep, dubwise basslines. With the Staedtism compilation series,Betke didn't help things at all by selecting artists and tracks thatwere more than happy to color inside the lines established by thegrowing roster of artists like Kit Clayton, Jan Jelinek, andDeadbeat—all of whom managed to spin Betke's sound into somethingunique, but certainly linked to the aesthetic. Now, with the fifthanniversary collection, ~scape appears to be making a decided breakfrom history, and a departure from the forumla that has thusfar guidedits sound. The results, as with most label comps, are mixed. It's easyfor laptop prodcers all over the world to grab onto frgments of hip hopculture and front like they are a part of that tradition, but it'sanother thing for them to successfully groove without sounding likethey are simply borrowing what is fashionable. David Byrne probably hadit right when he named his compilation "The Only Blip Hop CollectionYou Will Ever Need," as the sound has already worn out its welcome.Still, ~scape is moving in different directions, and with some amazingsuccesses. John Tejada's "And Many More" is the first truly memorabletrack on this disc, and it's a wiggly slab of melodic electro thatwouldn't sound out of place on a Bola record, but is somehow morefleshed out too. Triola's track "Neuland" is a bit too new agey for mytastes, but Jan Jelinek more than makes up for it with his brushedbroken jazz homage full of looping detuned guitars. Andrew Peckler alsoplays with the Jazz references, perhaps bridging the gap between fansof sample-based and improvised music even better than mid-1990s eraacid jazz. Deadbeat continues to shine as one of ~scape's most talentedartists, even if "We Like It Slow and Steady" is immediately familiaras "old school ~scape" with it's wandering synth stabs and filteredpercussion over dub backing. In Triosk, ~scape is even working with aband, Manitoba, and the sound is both warmer and more mature than manyof the tracks with a similar vibe that more obviously hatched out ofsomeone's hard drive. The ~scape version of pop music complete withvocals is less successful than it should be, but will likely find anaudience all the same. "But Then Again" shows a label willing to flexits stylistic muscle a bit, even if there are a few bumps and bruisesin doing so. With the number of good to great tracks here relative tothe duds, it's impossible to fault the effort.
- Jan Jelinek - Western Mimickry
- John Tejada - And Many More
- Triosk - Tomorrowtoday
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Kilo is deconstructed techno made by two guitarists. This fact makestheir abstraction from and disregard for the rules of technoimmediately understandable, but it doesn't automatically explain howthey can craft such beautiful tracks out of so many fragments. Theguitar is the new laptop, I'm sure of that. For a while, almost everydisc that came across my stereo was obviously and proudly the productof a laptop or desktop computer, created by musicians flying in theface of traditional instruments and methods for composition. Now, asthe obvious and clumsy backlash, every indie electronic record comingout has some sort of guitar playing or sampling or abusing it, and it'sbecome almost a calling card of artists who want to be taken seriouslyas musicians rather than simply known as accomplished button-pushers.That's okay though, as records like this give the trend successes thatare worthy of the bandwagoning. The loops and pieces of guitar areeverywhere on Augarten and yet it sounds very much like anelectronic, synth-driven record. The rhythms are all minimalist technoconstructions, something I would have expected from a label that's tiedinto the Kompakt stable. The melodies, however, are tied to thatfamiliar six-stringed instrument that has grounded the majority of allpopular western music for decades. There are slivers of folk and rockand blues and even country twang woven in amongst the ribbons of deepbass and techno structures so that the record feels grounded intradition while still being completely fresh. Well, maybe completelyfresh is a bit of an exaggeration—Kilo don't stray tremendously farfrom the formula of clicks and pulses and thumps that drives most ofthe Kompakt, ~scape, and Ritornell rosters. Still, there is a warmth inthese songs owed to the guitar that makes them not only accessible topeople who might otherwise shrug off sparse electronics, but gives thema kind of time and place to call home. Other people are making clickyminmal techno, and others still are fracturing guitars throughsoftware, but I've not heard a recent attempt to bring the two togetherthat succeeds as well as this.
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This disc from Alejandra & Aeron is an ode to grandmothers,dedicated specifically to and featuring the voice of Bousha, Aeron'sgrandmother. I know this: if I had recorded a record like this andgiven it to my grandmother, she would not have known what to make of itother than to conclude that I was a little "Off." Sometimes, even musicwith the best intentions falls on deaf ears because there's a culturalor generational boundary that people are unwilling to cross. Bousha Blue Blazesis likely to make a lot more sense to young, forward-listening peoplewho are reflecting on their own relationships with grandparents than itwill to grandparents themselves. What Alejandra & Aeron havecreated is a delicate lattice of live room recordings, faintinstruments, and occassional voices that recalls the hazy sun-soakedafternoons I spent with my grandmother as a child. Bits of sound hanglike dust in the air as the pair play and process and record fragmentsand then arrange them into structures that are held together by onlythe finest filaments of melody. The record plays almost like ahand-written letter composed to Bousha that I might have discovered inan estate sale some decades after Bousha, Alejandra and Aeron were alllong gone. These songs are intimate, delicate, and they are at oncelighter than air and soaked with the weight of memories and personalconnections. I know my own grandmother wouldn't know what to make ofthis record, but life's erosion from time is here in every movement ofspliced ambiance and in every whisp of guitar. It's a lovely testamentto grandmothers everywhere, and even if they don't understand it, maybegrandmothers everywhere are listening to this record and smiling.
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