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Besides running the prolific Crouton label, Jason Mueller has also been extremely busy working on his own music this year (this is his eighth release on Table of the Elements this year, that says quite a bit!). This collaborative release with Jason Kahn shows both artists heavily affecting their percussion far beyond what it originally sounded like, in addition to a bit of cassette tape and analog synth.
Xeric/Table of the Elements/Crouton
Considering how prolific he is, most are probably familiar with the fact that when Jon Mueller performs percussion, it is rarely recognizable as that. On Topography, occasionally there are elements that sound like a hailstorm on massive pieces of sheet metal (most notably on "New York 2"), but that is the only sort of situation where the percussion actually sounds percussive. For the most part this takes on more the tone of a noise album than anything else. The processed percussion is molded and shaped into heavy walls of midrange noise.
The noise elements cover all five tracks like a thick white blanket of snow, similar to the beautiful subtle artwork on the sleeve. I think this is the greatest shortcoming of the disc, however, in that it gives a monotone snowblindness to the disc that makes the individual tracks harder to discern and causes it to simply blend in with records of a similar ilk. The subtleties of the tracks that set them apart are noteworthy though: the sound which could only be described as a feedbacking vacuum cleaner alongside hollow percussion and a warm analog fuzz.
The first New York track and "Boston" lean towards the more open, atmospheric vibe of noise in that it is not dense, but is more vast and wide open in its sound. The former has a field recording quality, like the noisier elements were recorded from a distance: the mechanical hum and rough textures seem to be coming from somewhere just out of sight. The latter has a slower development that builds from a spacious opening to a dense, filtered closing, all the time having some wonderfully interesting crunchy static throughout.
Topography is an extremely accomplished release, which is unsurprising coming from Mueller and Kahn. The problem is that it doesn't stand out on its own amongst other similar releases. Both artists are clearly well established, and the fact that most of this release is sourced from the sound of percussion is certainly impressive, but on the whole it doesn't sound drastically different on this release than other artists of this ilk. It is enjoyable, but it feels all too familiar.
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The opening "Colby Contrast" sounds like it could be a lost Sebadoh or Pavement demo someone found in a closet, and then decided to play back with an obscene amount of clipping and distortion. The overall sound is very much noise, yet it's not hard to hear the conventional rock structure of the track buried among the muck. "Conduct Case" and "Good Job" follow a similar structure, though with more of a punk edge to them. Even something vaguely industrial rears its head in "Transistor Radios + the Fuckin' Beeline" in which the drum machine is set to a much faster tempo and, mixed with the noise, could be an EXTREMELY lo-fi take on Land of Rape and Honey era Ministry.
Oddly enough, the noise is stripped away on "USS ADD" to allow fort he more musical elements to seep in, which are good enough on their own to not have to always be buried in the noise elements. The three tracks closing the EP, "Just Talk Talk," "Bachelor," and "Try Again, Punk" are a distinctly noise take on hardcore punk, which is unsurprising from their brief durations. Imagine someone’s broken boom-box blasting out random selections from the Minor Threat discography and that's a good description.
For a first, limited release, this is a pretty self-assured and focused disc that varies itself enough to not sound as if it is relying on one gimmick too long, and thus is infinitely more interesting than it could have been.
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Given that the band has maintained a staunchly absurdist and secretive presence online, matched with the typically useless but nonetheless entertaining blurb on the Load Records website, it's hard to know anything about these guys other than a: they obviously have a sense of humor and b: they also love loud noisy rhythms.
The opening track is, unfortunately, the album's greatest misstep, which almost caused me to write it off entirely as not worth my time. Admittedly a great title, "Biggest Cock in Christendom" unfortunately chugs along for nearly 16 minutes on the same drum loop run through various filters and distortions. While it could be interesting, for that length it is more of an endurance test than anything else. Perhaps that was their intent, who knows.
The remainder fares much better, I am happy to say. "The Germans Call it a Swimming Head" follows the same blueprint as the opener, but with a greater amount of variety and a sub-five minute duration it works much better. "The Side of the Road" also relies on a drum machine run through a bank of effects, but with some additional noises here and there and some buried, muffled vocals to add more variety.
The two other epic length tracks on here, "Toilet Door Tits" and "Preventions Arise" also manage to completely go in different directions than the opener and are all the better for it. The former also features drums overdriven to the point of becoming just a wall of noise in addition to odd electronic whistles and whirrs, raging vocals deep in the mix, and what even resembles a guitar in the mix. Unlike "Biggest Cock…" the structure and mix changes throughout, so the 14 minute duration is perfectly acceptable. "Preventions Arise" is a more restrained piece built around deep, bass heavy percussion, odd noises here and there, and oddly enough a quiet, but audible spoken word narrative.
Obviously the boys of Shit and Shine like metal too, and it shows up on "Taking Robe Off" and "Mr. and Mrs. Gingerbread Hawaii," both being appropriately muffled cluster bombs of distorted grindcore thrash. Sort of like a neighbor a few doors down blasting Napalm Death's Scum and not having the common courtesy to invite other people over to enjoy it. The title track is a slower paced piece of near conventional metal that closes out the album, but with just as much fuzz and grime as the preceding tracks.
This is definitely a fun album to listen to, but it is unfortunately easy to just consider Shit and Shine another 'Load band' because they do walk a similar path that bands like Lightening Bolt and The USA is a Monster do. It's entertaining, but not groundbreaking or overly unique, and it doesn't really need to be.
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There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that had not Death In June come along way back in the '80s, then today's martial/neo-folk scene would never have existed, spawning as it has numerous similar-sounding acts since that time; the same could probably be said of Boyd Rice in the 'industrial' scene, both as himself and NON. Plowing much the same furrow then it was perhaps inevitable that these two would eventually collaborate and indeed this they did back in 1996 along with John Murphy and others, recording as Scorpion Wind—and back then this album was released with the title Heaven Sent. Now, 12 years later, NERUS, the American division of the New European Recordings label, has seen fit to re-issue a remastered and renamed version of the album.
Here is 13 songs of heroism, war, the decay of civilization, grief and sorrow, and the death of heroes and gods—in fact, if one were to be unkind, the sole and only pre-occupations of the genre as a whole and not just of Death in June and Boyd Rice in particular. The difference, though, between this and a million copycat albums that have had their birth in the last nigh-on three decades since the emergence of Death In June, is that this is a document soaked in melancholy and a deep sense of the past, of a harking back to a time when things were very different and perhaps much more straightforward, when men's hearts were strong and true, and their limbs and sinews were of iron and steel. In some respects this is a rose-tinted vision (and version) of the past, but one which is nevertheless heartfelt and strongly delineated—and in that sense the conviction elucidated is genuine and is keenly felt.
All these attributes are broadcast through songs built up and sculpted out of strummed guitar backed with martial percussion, stirring strings and soaring brass, and a vocal delivery evoking the war-weary hero, returned once more to the land of his fathers and finding it irrevocably changed in his absence, bringing with it a sense of loss perhaps greater and deeper than that inflicted by the physical wounds and death of strife and warfare. It is not hard to imagine these as just more polished versions of songs sung around campfires on the night prior to engaging the enemy, or the battle-hymns of marching armies. Moreover, a peculiarity of this album is that its atmosphere seems to be firmly rooted in notions of old Europa; I had visions of massed ranks of uniformed soldiers on the roads of France and Belgium, or the roads leading to Rome, soldiers fighting on nothing more than a vision of freedom and a sense of country and destiny.
I could, of course (and I suspect that this might be the case), may be way off course in my assessment here and they could be having us all on. Witness, for instance, the cover of this album: a woodcut of a devil bending over, looking between his legs, and farting prolifically. Inside, there are more clues maybe: photos of Douglas P and Rice clutching koalas (the album was recorded in Australia), but certainly this isn't the species of behavior I would associate with an album of this kind. It is almost as if they are asking us, after listening to the songs, whether we out here think they're being serious or not. This is just one of the things I like about DIJ's music—that uncertainty regarding just how seriously they take what they're singing about, and whether indeed there is a deeper message behind it all, or that these two have a hugely mischievous sense of humor.
If there is to be any criticism at all to be levelled at this it is a relatively minor one, but one which some may find to be its main weakness; the songs do appear to be locked into a particular formula that spans the entire 13 songs, consisting of Rice's spoken word vocals set against the musical backing, meaning the whole only ends up sounding fairly samey. This is one of the reasons why I have such a love-hate relationship with the genre as a whole. There are times when its stirring echoes of times, philosophies, and wars gone by match my mood perfectly; conversely, that very same aesthetic and stylistic presentation irks me no end. This particular album will almost inevitably be subject to the vagaries of my moods no doubt, as others of this genre have been, but for the moment the winds of fortune blow in its favor; for now, indeed, this is spinning in the deck constantly.
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As part of Tzadik's ongoing Composer series, this album highlights the many sides to Maja Ratkje's approach to sound. Ranging from her vocal work to her manipulation of recorded sound and all the way up (or down depending on your views) to her writing for other musicians. The versatility and flair she employs throughout this album, and indeed her career, is staggering. Even within a piece she shows more originality than many composers in a lifetime.
River Mouth Echoes begins and ends with a saxophone piece; Ratkje takes a recording and processes it into oblivion. The first, "ØX," sounds somewhere between a dial-up modem and Albert Ayler. At first, it is impossible to tell that it is a saxophone being played but gradually some recognizable blasts of horn come through the ethereal electronic sound. As the piece progresses, it gets more and more rambunctious; the modem is having trouble connecting and the computer is on fire. The second of the saxophone pieces, "Sinus Seduction (Moods Two)," is in a similar vein but with more unprocessed sax.
The only piece where Ratkje performs everything herself is the beautiful and sometimes disorientating "Wintergarden." Here she layers her voice; singing, screaming and talking to create a mesmerising atmosphere. It is at times sublime but shifts to being utterly dissonant, a sonic version of a sucker punch to the stomach. It was Ratkje's vocal work that I was first exposed to and it is the one thing I always look for when I see a release of hers. This is not to say I do not enjoy her other styles but there is something unique about her use of voice that hits me hard.
The remainder of the pieces are written for other musicians, catering for small ensembles to the Oslo Sinfonietta. The title track, composed for the strings of the group Fretwork, is the most straightforward piece on the album. The long, droning tones from the four viola de gamba capture the same gorgeous dissonance that Ratkje achieves with her voice, although if played on its own I do not know if I would recognise it as Ratkje. "Waves IIB" for the Oslo Sinfonietta is very reminiscent of Gyorgy Ligeti, the drama and depth of the composition being impressive to say the least. The Sinfonietta play wonderfully and the recording is superbly captured; it is fantastic to hear such a piece being executed with such care.
River Mouth Echoes is a great release, so many elements of Ratkje's skill coming together to form a very strong album. Despite it all being new music (or at the very least unreleased until now), this sounds almost like a greatest hits; it covers such a range of ideas that it is strange that it actually works as an album. Like a greatest hits collection, those unfamiliar with Ratkje might find this an ideal place to start as it gives such a good and positive view of her work.
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The span of this Irish composer's recorded works encompasses 30 odd years, having released something on the order of 25 albums (including an LP, Rapid Eye Movements, on Steven Stapleton's United Dairies in 1981), in addition to creating scores of commissioned works for theater (Doyle is a co-founder, along with Olwen Fouere, of the Operating Theatre group) and others. The Ninth Set is the third and final volume in his major work Passades, which Doyle worked on between the years 2002 and 2007, composed as an accompaniment to a wordless Operating Theatre production with the music performing the role of the text.
I've had this CD for some while now, and during that time I have been trying to settle satisfactorily on an appropriate approach to it. Undeniably, there are many elements of the exotic and alien orbiting around the five parts of this release, ranging from the deeply unsettling to the haunting and to the reflective even, the whole shot through with a deep sense of melancholy and longing. In addition, a vein of sadness bubbles just below the surface which is only just being held in check, and which also ultimately threatens to overwhelm the dam at any moment and explode in torrents.
The one overwhelming emotion I take from this is immensely deep loss. Concomitant to that the one thing that kept running through my mind while listening was the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and this is indeed a species of that myth—the lovers being unwillingly torn apart through death: one to remain in the world of sunlight and the other being confined to the underworld; and consequent to that the heroes' quest to rescue his love from the clutches of the kingdom of the dead by undergoing the arduous subterranean journey necessary to effect his ambition. Setting the tone, the introductory first part, with its long ringing sections of strings and choir-like voices building and stacking, stutteringly broken up here and there, and on occasion interspersed with the odd screeching of an exotic avian perhaps, establishes the main mood of the piece—that of longing and despair, and frustration even. Following on from this, the second part delves headlong into the subterranean regions, with all its attendant terrors and filled with the sounds of strange creatures and the ejaculations of lost souls.
Hades is indeed an unwholesome and unwelcoming place. Doyle paints a picture as descriptive, and as disturbing, as any painting by Hieronymous Bosch. Having intimated that though, let it be said that Doyle isn't as crass as to employ clichés in building up these sound-pictures. Instead, it is amply demonstrated through the use of animalistic sounds, of blasts of freezing icy winds and howls, along with a distinct air of hollowness, which allied to disembodied, placeless noises and scratchings, and mechanical creakings, is suggestive of deep, cold, and darkly suffocating subterranean spaces dripping with mold and ichor. In addition, these spaces Doyle is picturing for us are vastly cavernous, and harrowingly impersonal; warmth is noticeable by its absence here, and even the ghosts whose destiny it is to walk here cannot escape the cold’s bone-numbing clutches. Despair is ever the companion of those who call this their home.
There is a denouement of sorts, which although superficially calm and restful is also pregnant with a subtext of sorrow gestating within it, as if to say that no matter how much light there is in our lives darkness will inevitably follow and tinge our lives. In even this it is reflecting the Greek myth alluded to above—after leading his love back to the world of light, warmth, and vibrant nature, Orpheus is still destined to part with her for six months of the year, at the time when all is dead or asleep. This is what we are left with in the aftermath of The Ninth Set, that despite the hardships endured and the struggles overcome, that is not the end of it. This is 67 minutes of unnervingly dark and oppressive, yet strangely moving music, capturing within it the essence perhaps of life, love, and its consequences.
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The Cryptic Corporation continues its reissue campaign on Mute records with two classic releases from the late '70s. Not only that but Ralph have also released a compilation of outtakes from the group's "storyteller" output. Needless to say, the Mute reissues are absolutely essential (and they are beautiful in the hardback book format that is now standard for Residents releases on Mute) and the Ralph compilation is great but maybe not as much interest to casual Residents fans.
Eskimo (along with The Third Reich 'n Roll) is the definitive Residents album. It may not be typical in terms of musical style (but there is no typical in their world) but all the vital ingredients are here: an avant garde approach to sound, big ideas, humour and eyeballs. Presented as both a document of Inuit culture and a commentary on how they are perceived in the south, this album is best taken with a liberal pinch of salt. The allegedly authentic Eskimo folk songs included here sound suspect to say the least (especially with the hilarious photo of The Residents on a fact finding mission to the arctic) but this is part of the magic of The Residents; pulling together disparate concepts and augmenting them to suit their own agenda.
Eskimo remains as strange today as it always has been, it is not an accurate portrayal of Inuit culture but it never seriously set out to be that. Instead The Residents have created their own idea of what this culture might sound like based on the written facts they have found. Many of these facts are given in the sleeve notes, making the whole experience all the more bewildering: What to believe and what not to believe? It's an apt question considering these are a group of artists who have made a career out of being a myth.
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I was a bit worried when Mute made no mention of Buster & Glen when announcing the reissue of Duck Stab!. I was afraid that this would just be a reissue of the original Duck Stab! EP minus the extra songs later added to it under the Duck Stab!/ Buster & Glen title. Thankfully all the tracks have been included and The Residents have only shortened the title for the sake of convenience. Under any title, this release is astonishing. With its Beefheartian anti-songs from the edge of sanity, it is a far cry from the calculated approach to Eskimo (which was originally released only a few months after Duck Stab!).
Despite the sheer oddness of the songs, Duck Stab! is one of The Residents' most listenable albums. The brilliant "Constantinople," "Blue Rosebuds," and "Weight Lifting Lulu" are all toe-tapping fun at its strangest. I always think of this as their sole concession to normal rock music (in the vein of the aforementioned Captain Beefheart via Suicide). The Commercial Album may have been their idea of a pop album but this is still the closest they have come to being a traditional band. They could have easily pulled it off but fame and fortune were obviously not on the cards.
It is a pity that, unlike many of the previous Mute reissues, extra material has not been included with either album. In the case of Duck Stab!, this is understandable as there is not any companion releases to add. However, Eskimo did have a sister release in the form of Diskomo that would have fit nicely with the original album (much like the inclusion of Intermission with Mark of the Mole). Failing that, inclusion of the 5.1 mix of Eskimo would have been nice. At the end of the day, these extras do not really matter but some icing on the cake is always appreciated.
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Smell My Picture is a limited edition compilation aimed at the more hardcore Residents fan. It is a mostly instrumental collection of outtakes from the Rivers of Crime, Tweedles and The Voice of Midnight sessions. The three albums were all quite different in terms of genre and style but somehow all the pieces here sound like they have come from the one soundtrack for a very strange film. As aforementioned, their recent storyteller releases have been a mixed bag, The Voice of Midnight being rather excellent and Tweedles being a bit crap. However, without the narratives taking the limelight the music here is quite strong. Indeed there are few, if any, tracks that stand out as being anything less than good. It is a far cry from the two Mute reissues listed above; although The Residents have certainly learned how to play their instruments in a more traditionally competent way, the spark of chaos that ran through their works from their earlier years is not as evident. Everything seems so much more controlled now, for better or for worse.
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UK Dubstep Producer The Bug brings his London Zoo to the US
Album of bass-heavy dub/UK Garage influences comes to the US via Ninja Tune 7/29.
For some, The Bug is a relatively new name. A producer, who as of late, has been associated with London's (and now internationally) vibrant Dub Step scene. However for a lot of others, it's the current state of mutation for rogue producer Kevin Martin, and his projects current association with Dub-Step is just a small and almost inconsequential detail in the greater lineage of his career, as his sound defies easy categorization and has been increasing in mass and imagination with each and every new decibel pumped recording.
In Gibson's Neuromancer, when Case & Molly meet the two surviving founders of Zion, there is talk of hearing a "mighty dub" in the Babel of tongues signaling the "final days". If indeed we're living in these 'end times', as many predict, then there can be no more of an appropriate soundtrack for the coming apocalypse than The Bug's "London Zoo".
The Bug, a producer who over the years has also been behind a diverse range of projects. He is part of Techno Animal / Ice / God (all with Justin Broadrick of Godflesh / Jesu), King Midas Sound, Razor X Productions (with The Rootsman), Pressure and Ladybug to name a few. Then there is the running of his Pathological Records label, collaborations with noise jazz outfit 16-17, Pete "Sonic Boom" Kemper's E.A.R project, John Zorn, Kevin Shields, El-P, Antipop Consortium. He has recorded for labels as diverse as Virgin, Rephlex, Position Chrome/Mille Plateaux, Word Sound, Hyperdub, City Slang, Tigerbeat 6, Grand Royal, and now Ninja Tune. He has been personally asked to remix Thom Yorke, Grace Jones, Einsturzende Neubauten and Primal Scream, and has compiled jazz & dub compilations for Virgin Records. The new album "London Zoo" is the fruition of all these activities...
"London Zoo" was born of three key moments. An introduction to the thriving Dub-Step scene (of which The Bug is very much a pioneer before it carried a name) and it's key producers (via Kode 9) where Kevin realized there was others on the same sonic trajectory as himself, an introduction to Warrior Queen via his work with Wayne Lonesome on the Razor X Productions project, and a Mary Anne Hobb's Breezeblock session which introduced him to Flowdan (Roll Deep), and Ricky Ranking. All three of which figure heavily in the end result and live presentation.
Although the obvious entry point to the album will be the Dub-Step tag, particularly after the success of the three lead up singles ('Jah War', 'Skeng', and 'Poison Dart' in that scene) it's a record that clearly reaches past and brings together/celebrates reference points from dancehall, grime, hip-hop, and noise onslaughts. A record that could have only come out of London sound-system culture but whose appeal spans past any singular city or scene.
From the opening strains of "Angry" (featuring reggae legend Tippa Irie) it's clear that the world has been served notice from the heart of the UK capital. A position further strengthened as Ricky Ranking (best known for his work with Roots Manuva), Flowdan, Warrior Queen, Spaceape, Roger Robinson, Killa P, and Aya step up to lay waste to the boombastic rhythms put before them, eventually culminating in "Judgement" where Ricky Ranking leaves us with a prophecy ... "so much people are losing their minds, because we're living in a serious time. I guess it come in like a judgement sign, the people have killing on their mind".... living in end times indeed. Best start building the Marcus Garvey tug now.
Tracklist:
1 : Angry (featuring Tippa Irie)
2 : Murder We (featuring Ricky Ranking)
3 : Skeng (featuring Killa P & Flowdan)
4 : Too Much Pain (featuring Ricky Ranking & Aya)
5 : Insane (featuring Warrior Queen)
6 : Jah War (featuring Flowdan)
7 : Fuckaz (featuring Spaceape)
8 : You & Me (featuring Roger Robinson)
9 : Freak Freak
10 : Warning (featuring Flowdan)
11 : Poison Dart (featuring Warrior Queen)
12 : Judgement (featuring Ricky Ranking)
Video: 'Poison Dart' ft. Warrior Queen Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aW7NFSGklM
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First in a series from Honest Jon's trawl through more than 150,000 78 rpm records stored in the EMI archive in Hayes. Originally exported to Africa, these musical letters home are exotic songs of pragmatism, resignation, warning and defiance.
Honest Jon's
The 23 tracks on Living is Hard are studio sessions recorded in Hayes, Middlesex, rather than out in some distant dusty field. The resulting clarity is pretty wonderful and there are some delightful breezy rhythms from such artists as George Williams Aingo and also by the Kumasi Trio. Their pieces tickle in a way that falls midway between highlife and one of my favorite of all musical styles: early calypso. Listening to mournful tones on other parts of the album, though, got me thinking about the immigrant experience. It is not hard to imagine the, shall we say, mixed response that these black-skinned people faced in their daily lives in Britain of the 1920s. Part of the appeal of this collection is that even today, 'difference' can draw unpredictable reactions. Presumably, kindness can always be found, but the risk of deadly violence, pure disdain, and being treated as a freakish curiosity is not uncommon.
I suspect sitting through this entire record might be a pretty dry experience for most people and I recommend dipping in and out—as a patient reader might explore a book of poetry. There is a sense of weary hardship in these grooves, but it never strays into either wallowing in self pity or succumbing to defeat. The songs have an elemental strength that brings the participants vividly to life, not least James Thomas (and his backing) who bring an intense call and response to "Jon Jo Ko." The West African Instrumental Quintet plays with a lightness and hotness not too many arrondisements from Django Reinhardt and all that gypsy jazz. On his sole track, John Mugat begins as if reading a limerick before he leads us on a percussive dance that (it’s easy to fantasize) might lead to waking with a dreadful hangover, broke and half-naked on the edge of a desert town. Perhaps most powerful of all the pieces is Ben Simmons' splendid vocal performance on his untitled track; a slightly feverish, unhinged, other-worldly excursion into the kind of rambling catharsis that the late Ernie K. Doe perfected during his radio DJ stints.
Honest Jon's will release similar compilations from the vault at Hayes focusing on, amongst others, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Eqypt, the Beligian Congo, and somewhere called Caucasia (the location of which I'm looking forward to learning).
samples:
- John Mugat - Bukay
- George Williams Aingo - Akkuo Nu Banto
- Ben Simmons - untitled
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Besides this Lithops solo project, Jan St. Werner spends time in Mouse on Mars, Microstoria, and Von Südenfed in addition to few other even more obscure monikers. While the aforementioned projects are "bands," perhaps in an unconventional sense, Lithops is his chance to act completely on his own and while traces of those other projects are evident, this is a wonderfully unmanageable beast all on its own.
While Microstoria and Mouse on Mars stayed closer to "conventional" electronic music, the more recent Von Südenfed project has shown a greater tendency for experimentation, but keeping within a still-danceable framework, even despite Mark E. Smith's trademark vocals on that project. With Lithops, however, St. Warner has gone balls out in experimentation: while he still isn't afraid to build a track around a crunchy electro beat, it is sonically much more all over the place. "Roctrum" and "Concretemess and Absaction" both have a steady recognizable beat behind them, but the other pieces of the tracks are all over the place, like a malfunctioning sampler spitting out its 16 bit death rattles throughout.
St. Warner does make some other bows to conventionality, mostly old school electro in the form of "Noo Non M Oon" and "Bleasure Pastique," the latter meshes the analog beats with subtle melodies and lo-fi Game Boy synth tones in a way that one could probably breakdance to it if they were so inclined (but they'd probably look like an ass doing so). The lo-fi electronic elements come up on the brief, bitcrushed passage of "Every Detail's Matter" and the ancient Atari engine revs of "Baliation" that mix quite well with the violent noise blasts and IDM synth elements.
Perhaps the most interesting are the tracks that come flying completely out of left field in terms of color and tone. The Allophons remix of "Mound Magnet Pt. 1" is stripped down to be 1940s era vocal samples layered with guitar loops that make for a much more controlled and mellow work than most of the preceding tracks. Both of the "Serendippo" tracks (4 and 5) diverge the most, with the former resembling a Middle Eastern melodic structure slapped on top of a waltz rhythm that somehow works, and the latter is a completely different work of disembodied voices swirling from another dimension over digital anvil percussion clanks and found sound collage.
In a genre that has been so heavily mined for experimentation due to the ability to utilize and exploit any and all technological innovations, Lithops’ has created something that, while not groundbreakingly new, takes a new and wildly flailing approach to the genre and style that is all over the map in terms of style and structure, but obviously being directed by the more than able hands of a true artist. Don't expect to dance to it down at the club, but listen intently and be rewarded.
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Mick Harris' latest release as Lull is a quiet and stately album, the sounds at times being barely above a whisper, a state of affairs entirely in keeping with the motivating philosophy behind the Italian label Glacial Movements i.e., making us aware of the paradoxically fragile strength and crystalline beauty of the polar regions before it’s too late.
The sussurating washes gently ebb and flow in frozen cadence, just like a floe-laden river in the Arctic, while simultaneously deep bass rumbles just on the edge of hearing run like submarine currents beneath the ice-bedecked surface. Riding the surface are the keening howls of biting winds and the hollow windings of tunnel-blown air. Those bass currents run fathoms deep while the frail ice above grinds and cracks between the walls of snow-bright chasms, reflecting pristine sunlight back into the cold depths of space. Just like the slow Arctic rivers too, this is in no particular hurry to get anywhere. Time in a place like this doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, where the accumulation of snow and ice forming the sculptural glaciers and cliffs took slow incremental millennia measured in millimeters, a place where an entire continent has the patience of geology. This is deep time, a time that bears no reference to the human; likewise its beauty, a quality forever beyond the reach of all but the most determined explorer, even in the 21st century. In perhaps an accidental coincidence (or perhaps, as is likely, a case of reading too much into things), each of the tracks gets progressively shorter and shorter, ranging from 14:33 down to 4:39, in a reflection perhaps of how the southern and northern continents, that have slowly evolved and remained practically static over the millennia are now, suddenly, due to our ignorance and ill-conceived environmental blindness, becoming compromised and fast disppearing—a slight conceit on my part maybe but nevertheless I feel it an observation worth pointing out.
Harris calls forth frozen atmospheres and ice-bound river and landscapes, shimmering reverberations trapped in water become clear glacial amber, and there to remain for untold years. Mirroring insects trapped in real amber, these are moments in time and slivers of the past, forever destined to play out their last moments in an endlessly abrupt memorial. These are both temporal and physical shards, meandering into the mysterious heart of inaccessibility; one gets the feeling that buried deep within the crystalline bosom of the polar continents is a similarly frozen secret, a deep secret that is known only to the ice and snow, and is whispered to the winds in the language of the slow rivers of ice. An icily haunting and ghostly ambience pervades each of these five pieces, almost akin to a physical presence that itself seems to hide secrets, ghosts endlessly wandering the wastes of the white desert searching for the frozen secret at the heart of a continent.
I have thoroughly enjoyed each of the five releases from Glacial Movements; label-owner Alessandro Tedeschi has a keen ear for the glacial and deeply icy in ambient music, and once again he has hit the spot with this CD from Harris. Yet again here is another imagining of the snowbound lands lying at the ends of the earth, and once again it succeeds in conjuring and evoking pristine images of mountainous bright eye-piercing white and over-arching azure blue, set amidst the foam-flecked lashings of the surrounding oceans. Deep ambience has always been my thing, and in my view it can't get any deeper than this: timeless frozen music for a timeless frozen place.
Samples:
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