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Maja S. K. Ratkje & Lasse Marhaug, "Music For Gardening"
As the fourth in their long standing domestic activity collaboration series, Marhaug’s harsh noise penchant meets Ratkje’s nuanced and bizarre collaborative techniques to create an album of random cutup sounds, occasional harsh noise blasts, and everything plus the kitchen sink instrumentation that rivals the absurdity of the Schimpfluch Gruppe crew in the best possible way.
The opening title track makes the intent of the album known immediately, with squawking cut up sounds, wheezing, feedback, and what could be balloons being rubbed together.Lasse’s noise penchant is present, though reigned in to focus more on the collage sounds."Complaints Won’t Help" begins with randomly dialing through an antenna-less radio, which becomes a rudimentary noise loop to provide the rhythm.Above this, a full chorus of meowing cats becomes the focus of the track, providing the complaints referenced in the title.I have yet to audition this track for my own two feline terrors, but I’m expecting some confused faces.
Not to be exclusionary, "Call In The Dogs" literally lets the canines have their say, constant barking over fragments of music, piano banging, and cartoon sound effects.The cartoon sense continues into "Merry Go Round Circus In Town", which throws in some cartoon jazz stuff while adding in ringing bells and random electronic chaos.
"Sound Check" makes more concessions to traditional music than anything else here, opening with what sounds like the lost theme song to some 1970s game show, mixed with junk loops and flatulent white noise blasts before ending with actual "music" while people have conversations over it.
Marhaug seems to seize the reigns for the latter two tracks, infusing both with a greater sense of the harsh noise he is known for. "Stuck In The Roundabout" showcases his electronic shards of sound far more than the prior ones, but still allowing pieces of melody and the random cutup here and there to come in to mediate things.The closer "Like A Prayer" ups the ante with shrill, piercing squeals and overdriven bass frequencies, moderated a bit with cut up music and burbling sounds before falling apart into pure noise hell.
Having not heard the previous volumes of this collaborative series, the spastic randomness of what I’ve heard here makes me want to track those down.It has the sheer Dada of Sudden Infant and Komissar Hjuler & Mama Bar down quite well, but with a greater sense of composition, in the loosest definition of the word.It also is more than happy to infuse a good dose of old fashion noise into the weirder parts of the proceedings, which is a good combination.
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