20 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

This debut release from Matt Harries as Brennendes Gehirn is a veritable storm of turbulent noises, ranging from freeform sketches to the kind of almost-danceable rhythms that I would expect from classic albums from Scorn. Bleakly psychedelic sounds reverberate and bump off each other like living creatures as Harries builds a magnificent range of pieces from the sort of junk sounds that can easily be boring or clichéd in less skilled hands.

 

Ordo Pestilentia

The curtains of noise that form "Chorea Imagnativa Aestimativa" hide a number of items from us. What are those strange voices saying? What is that haunting bell-like vibration? Where are we and is it safe? Harries drops us into a fog of pure sound and the disorientation created by the piece sets the tone for the rest of Epidemics of the Modern Age. Forms emerge from the haze, insectoid and disturbing. "Over Man and Beast His Flaming Sword" continues this apocalyptic cacophony, intensifying and distilling the music into sheets of glorious and almost painful noise.

Suddenly, Harries’ almost impenetrable wall of sound shatters on "Annihilation (Awakens New Life)" to reveal a soothing but slightly unnerving loop of strummed harp and percussion. The surprise use of melody and structure after the amorphous pieces that come earlier in the album reinforces the power of both approaches. While a whole album of in-the-red volume is always welcome, Harries has made something far stronger than just another noise album. He pushes further with "Elegie für Clemens Scheitz," which sounds like someone in an empty car park playing a Tricky album slowed down to an oily, grimy funk. Shimmers of feedback cut through the sluggish, bass-heavy rhythm as queer voices seem to emerge from the air. It is a terrific track to say the least.

Harries returns to a more harsh noise aesthetic for "Chorea Sancti Viti." The longest piece of the album delves into the depths excavated many years ago by Lustmord. I cannot say it is my favorite piece on Epidemics of the Modern Age but I much prefer it to most of that dark ambient malarkey that gets released, possibly because Harries does not allow it to remain too ambient and actively gets me by the ears and forces me to listen to his work. A metallic ringing, like the resonance of a huge drill, comes out of the speakers in waves. The shimmering sound creates a claustrophobic audio net and seems to get tighter and tighter as the piece progresses. It is a hell of a way to finish off, especially given the movement of some of the earlier pieces.

samples:

• Chorea Imagnativa Aestimativa
• Annihilation (Awakens New Life)
• Chorea Sancti Viti

 

20 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

Despite being one of the most visionary and iconoclastic artists to emerge from the early days of electronic music (as well as a rather fascinating and enigmatic person), Daphne Oram has only recently (and posthumously) begun to get the recognition she deserves.  Unlike the similarly wonderful and massive Oramics compilation from 2010, The Oram Tapes is comprised of largely unheard work from Daphne's mountainous tape archive that is currently being sifted through at Goldsmiths College.  That naturally means a tendency towards sketches and excepts, but it also means that it is sometimes alternately weirder, harsher, better, and more intimate than its predecessor.

Young Americans/Modern Love

Interestingly, Daphne is most famous for co-founding the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, which used innovative technology and methods to create striking, otherworldly sound effects for shows like Dr. Who.  In fact, all of the pictures included in this release seem to be taken there, as they show Oram in a laboratory-esque environment surrounded by serious-looking men in suits.  Now here is the twist: Oram actually left both the BBC and financial stability behind in 1959 (less than a year after the Workshop was founded) due to her frustration with her employers' lack of understanding regarding her work's potential.  She set up her own studio in a hop kiln, surrounded herself with self-built and modified equipment, and quixotically managed to make a modest living making exactly the kind of strange and innovative music she wanted.  (Incidentally, my other favorite thing about Oram is an apocryphal story about how two of The Beatles visited her at her studio once and how she had absolutely no idea who they were, nor did she particularly care once she found out.)

Aside from indirectly providing sound effects for a show I despise and being super-humanly disinterested in pop culture, Daphne is also notable for being the first woman to ever design and build an electronic instrument: the Oramics machine, which converted drawings to sounds.  It is unclear how many of these recordings actually employ that technology, as she did not start using it to compose until 1968 and many of these recordings are undated.  Also, they all sound bizarre enough to have originated in any number of ways...and they did.  The most extreme example is probably her work for The Innocents, which is built from African field recordings.This is arguably the most extreme foray musically too, as the included excerpt culminates in an explosion of distorted and frightening animal howls (amusingly followed immediately by a very pleasant music box-like recording for a butter commercial).  Another commercial piece, "Anacin Components," unexpectedly turns out to be one of the album's most weirdly compelling moments, as it features Oram discussing how toothaches should sound in a very cheery and prim British way.

Aside from those rare glimpses into what Oram was actually like, my favorite pieces are the ones that still sound improbably contemporary.  "Illustrations," in particular, sounds like it could have easily emerged from the cassette underground last week (Oram unwittingly embraced tape hiss and analog synth textures way before they were cool).  Some of the other stand-out pieces are bit less musical though, as Daphne's murky and unsettling score for Hamlet sometimes sounds like a proto-Throbbing Gristle.  The Hamlet score is not a fluke either: despite her polite, square-seeming demeanor, she certainly did not shy away from catharsis, cacophony, ugliness, and industrial rumbles and shudders when it fit a piece.

There are also quite a few pieces of historical interest here, as The Oram Tapes features alternate versions and fragments of one of Daphne's major works, "Pulse Persephone."  Also, there are two pieces taken from tapes enigmatically labeled "2001," which may or may not have wound up in Kubrick's film.  That wasn't especially exciting for me (I was far more interested in finding out how toothaches sound), but it is certainly a notable inclusion.  Naturally, a double album of early electronic music (particularly one composed of mostly fragments) holds limited entertainment value for most people, as it is not an epoch that has aged particularly well.  However, as a history lesson and a portrait of a brilliant, complex, and uncompromising artist, this collection is pretty exceptional. The fact that some of the pieces still sound great is certainly nice, but being introduced to the artist eclipses the actual art (in a good way, of course).  While Oram's relative obscurity (until recently) makes it unlikely that she was a direct influence on many of today's artists, she certainly anticipated many elements of trends that hit decades later and did it on her own, in a very male-dominated milieu, and built her own goddamn instruments to do it.  If that is not inspiring, I do not know what is.

Samples:

• Just For You (Excerpt Two)
• Illustrations (Fireworks, Ardwich High School)
• Speech Test

 

20 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

Special 5-CD box-set edition of the Broken Flag Retrospective originally released on vinyl in 2007. A compilation and retrospective of one of the most important and influential British noise and power electronics-labels led by Gary Mundy of Ramleh.

This edition was made to coincide with the Never Say When event organised by Second Layer and Harbinger Sound. Includes classic material spanning 1982-85 from Sutcliffe Jugend, Consumer Electronics, Un-Kommuniti, Maurizio Bianchi, Controlled Bleeding, Ramleh, Male Rape Group (Mundy/Best), Kleistwahr, TOLL, New Blockaders, Mauthausen Orchestra, Falx Cerebri, Giancarlo Toniutti, Vortex Campaign and many more. All material is the same as the out-of-print vinyl edition. Also comes with a booklet featuring extensive notes by Gary Mundy.

More information is available here.

20 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

SEMA was an 80's experimental-project by Robert Haigh who became well-known in the '90s for his ambient Drum & Bass-project Omni Trio.

In 1980, Robert formed the industrial/avant-funk bands Truth Club and Fote as well as his own label Le Rey Records.

Between 1982 and 1984 he released 4 LPs under the name SEMA on his own Le Rey label: Notes from Underground, Theme from Hunger, Extract from Rosa Silber and Three Seasons Only - which can be found in this box set release.

He also contributed to several Nurse With Wound (United Dairies) projects. Those recordings are provided as bonus tracks on this box set in addition to the 4LPs.

The music of SEMA integrates pianos, orchestral instruments and experimental techniques in a neo-classical and minimalist approach.

These legendary recordings employ a wide palette of light and shade, emotion, texture and atmosphere to produce a sound that is unique in its form and expression.

More information is available here.

16 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

Nad Spiro has a new album project out this month : Atomic Spy.
Released in a limited run of 101 copies, is the debut album on the new GaSaG
imprint within the GEOMETRIK RECORDS family with a focus on different
formats and unpublished gems.

Official distribution from www.GEOMETRIKRECORDS.com (launch date: 22 may)
Also via Bandcamp artist channel : listen to Atomic Spy >>
http://gasag.bandcamp.com
First copies will be available @ Arte-Oído festival in Madrid, 18 may (+
People Like Us) http://on.fb.me/KV40rh

- - - - - -
In Atomic Spy, Nad Spiro explores further her world of shadows and uncovers
hidden and twisted sounds, electronic spells that occupy your attention.

Her sound-fiction evokes secret accidents and carpark conspiracies, body
invasions and auditory hallucinations... like ghost transmissions and melodies
from a lost city.

The art work of the cd is by master of photomontage Josep Renau
(1907-1982), an image in tune with the Atomic Spy's Electricity Zone

Rosa Arruti has worked for many years under the alias NAD  SPIRO -a solo
venture where complex processed guitars are built into a world of electronic
textures- and her recordings are released on the pioneer Spanish experimental label GEOMETRIK  RECORDS .
Member of some of Barcelona's cult underground bands (Tendre Tembles, Mohochemie...) she has collaborated with other experimentalist as My Cat is an Alien or Kim Cascone.

www.spiro-mess-age.com  
youtube http://bit.ly/Ka9Vax

... GaSaG tunnel records

16 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

The exquisitely curated 12k label has always had a diverse roster, but Gareth Dickson may be the most "out there" artist to be working with the label. In this case, it is because his acoustic guitar and vocal work is so much more along the lines of conventional singer-songwriter when placed aside the label's otherwise more electronic and abstract catalogue. However, Dickson's work has an understated complexity and depth that makes it a perfect fit for the label. And furthermore, this is another excellent work from this Scottish artist.

12k

At first, Dickson's work seems like standard acoustic folk music, though very well done.On the surface, it has shades of Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen, though the former more in vocals and the latter in actual guitar playing.On a song like "Snag With The Language," his rapid guitar plucking is reminiscent of Cohen’s first few albums, but the Glasgowian accented singing is distinctly different, coming across very Drake-like on the darker "The Hinge of the Year."

More attentive listening, however, reveals so many more layers to be heard, and expertly produced and mastered.The intimacy of opener "Two Halfs" (featuring Vashti Bunyan on both additional instrumentation and backing vocals) makes this immediately apparent.Other departures are more drastic:for example, his unexpected use of backing vocals (by Celine Brooks) on "The Big Lie" results in an even richer, more nuanced approach that features him doing quite a lot with intentionally little.

As someone whose appreciation for music of this style is mostly limited to the aforementioned Leonard Cohen, it is Dickson's subtle accents and treatments to the music that made this a captivating album for me.On the previously mentioned "Snag With the Language," he generates a great sense of space around the guitar, and there is a particularly impressive mood shift to an even darker sound as it goes on, a variation made all the more noticeable by a more rhythmic playing style and the introduction of actual percussion into the mix.

There is a greater sense of electronic instrumentation on instrumental "The Solid World," with Dickson creating an expansive ambient space, simultaneously understated and delicate.The electronics remain the focus, with the guitar acting in more of an accent capacity, but even with that somewhat drastic shift in style, the song fits in perfectly with the remainder of the album.

The album closes on a cover of Joy Division's "Atmosphere," which is a fitting choice given the original song’s blending of electronic and traditional elements, as well as a distinctly depressive mood.Dickson does not tinker with the formula too dramatically:his overall approach to music remains faithful to the original, but keeps the song from ending up in the cliché "acoustic cover of familiar song" bin of boredom by putting his own distinct stamp on it.

As someone who is very selective about what I like in this style of music, Orwell Court is an exemplary example of acoustic-centric music.The album speaks volumes as to his ability and adeptness in not only writing and performing songs, but his overall expertise in contributing greatly to a style that is so intentionally minimalist.The additional effects and instrumentation Gareth Dickson has employed here go a long way in fleshing out the sound, but never upsetting the delicate nature of the music, staying understated yet amazing from beginning to end.

samples:

• The Big Lie
• Snag With the Language
• The Solid World

 

14 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

Recorded live at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2010, Slugfield is a trio of Lasse Marhaug, Maja S.K. Ratkje, and Paal Nilssen-Love, three artists who would rarely have the "j" genre applied to them.  The five tracks that make up this improvisation aren't jazzy in the traditional sense, but instead channel that combination of chaotic sonic freedom and moments where the artists lock together as a singular, three headed noise making beast.

PNL Records

It's Nilssen-Love's drumming throughout these songs that keep it in league free jazz the most.  From the shambolic, kitchen sink freakouts of "Get Out The Traps" to the alternating sparse rhythms and rapid blast beats of "Bring 'Em On," he provides energetic propulsion.  However, he's not afraid to lock into a traditional rhythm on the latter, or to step back completely to allow Marhaug and Ratkje's electronics breathe on their own.

Ratkje's contribution that is the most easily identifiable is her vocalisms, which to some extent could be labeled as jazz scat singing, but comes across far less human or even identifiable.  Occasionally an obviously human guttural chirp or shrill squeak gets through, but it mostly becomes another abstract textural piece of the puzzle.  It shows up sparingly, and I would imagine human physiology has a lot to do with that, given the physicality of her performance.

The third component of this trio, Lasse Marhaug, contributes mostly electronic outbursts and occasional turntable scraping, most notably on "Bring 'Em On," where it sounds like he is spinning (and scratching) a record of farm animal noises on top of elongated electronics and weird loops.  His electronics though are far more sparse and less abrasive than his solo noise work, and instead are often a pleasant study of textures, sometimes reduced to the occasional crackle or looped bit of static.

The best moments are when the focus shifts from sparse micro-sounds to more harsh noise, like the departure from traditional rhythms and tasteful electronics to full on screams and feedback, on "Slugs for Lunch."  The balance is struck throughout the album, but here it is the most obvious and overt.

While it was performed at a jazz festival, the genre is more insinuated than obvious here.  Slugfield embrace the dynamic improvisation of free jazz, but give it a sheen of electro-acoustic experimentation and occasional harsh noise indulgence.  The result is captivating in its lighter moments, and completely thrilling in its more disjointed ones, coming together almost perfectly as a singular work.

samples:

• Get Out The Traps
• Slugs for Lunch
• Bring 'Em On

14 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

Aaron Turner and Faith Coloccia's more esoteric, less traditionally "metal" side label Sige has been responsible for some unexpected, but brilliant pieces of dark sonic exploration in recent years, but with this LP, the most unexpected is simply how normal it sounds. Although lyrically it is as dark and sinister as any metal album, the airy feminine vocals of bassist Sera Timms and drummer Kelly Johnston enshroud it with a certain gauzy bliss that belies its dark content.

Sige

Opener "The Vessel & The Stake" and "Slain in Spirit" sit clearly within the darker end of the spectrum, with almost black metal guitar riffs and militaristic drums opening the former. Everything eventually slows down into a doomy lurch, however.With a meandering shuffle propelling them, the vocals strike that tenuous balance between being overly feminine and over the top abrasive in tone, a combination which sadly does not happen often.Both of these show a clear alternating between faster and slower tempos, speeding up to a more classic rock pace, then slowing down to that doom trudge.

On "Starless Midnight" the trio seem to move a bit lighter, and with a subtle guitar twang leads into some common ground with the recent Earth albums.The parallel is even clearer with its adherence to a droning, repetitive structure compared to the other, more dynamic and heavier tracks."Austrian Windows" also pretty much avoids the traditionalist doom metal trappings, with a guitar/vocal pairing that comes across as Judas Priest putting out a 4AD album, but its marching rhythms give it a distinctly different flavor of darkness.

The biggest shortcoming of this album is there is not a huge amount of variation from track to track, with most sharing similar sounding guitar and bass tones.Additionally, most either lock into more droning, repetitive structures or doom to rock and back again dynamics.There's nothing inherently wrong with that because it’s a unique sound, but whenever there is a more significant change, such as the more rhythmic opening and looser overall feeling of "Reaping Golden", the change stands out all the more.

Given that this is their first real album, with only a demo EP and split single previously, that sameness can be overlooked as a new band that are still finding their own sound.The combination of old school doom with lighter, almost ethereal guitars and vocals give Ides of Gemini a distinct sound in a crowded field, which goes a long way.I hope that future releases see the trio changing up the plans a bit more, but Constantinople is a strong opening statement.

samples:

• The Vessel & The Stake
• Starless Midnight
• Reaping Golden

 

13 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

Although my initial enthusiasm for this project has been dampened somewhat by Rachel Evans' deluge of similar-sounding releases, her ambitious and divergent debut for Editions Mego's Spectrum Spools imprint demonstrates that she still has some tricks up her sleeve.  While her characteristic layers of gauze-y, ethereal vocals have not vanished entirely, they are unexpectedly infrequent and rarely take center stage.  Instead, this sprawling double-album plunges headlong into burbling, drifting, and subtly hallucinatory synth-based psychedelia and stays there for a pleasantly long time.

Spectrum Spools/Editions Mego

I am certain that it was no arbitrary or casual decision to make this album self-titled, as it has the definite feel of an attempted magnum opus.  While I remain indecisive about whether or not this constitutes Evans' zenith, these are definitely the most massive, deliberate, and complex compositions that I have heard from her.  Well, aside from possibly the "compositions" part, as it is very hard to guess how these pieces originated.  It sure seems likely that there was a lot of improvisation, editing, and rearranging involved though.  That is not a critique–I merely mean that each of these four side-long (20+ minute) pieces is so shifting, vaporous, and amorphous that it seems impossible that Rachel could have fully envisioned and consciously executed the disorienting arc that each song ultimately follows.  While I myself certainly can't remember how most of these songs started by the time they eventually end, there are many oases of memorability and melody in between that sound very much planned, so some intelligent organization certainly occurred somewhere along the line. It is certainly an odd structure, but it works.  Also, it makes sense when I consider Evans' history of cassette releases, as some imagination is certainly required to avoid leaving blank stretches.

Because of the fluid, drifting nature of the pieces and the long running times, so much stylistic territory is covered that it is pretty hard to conclusively summarize or "like" an entire piece.  I could probably do without some of the bloopier, candy-colored, golden-years-of-analog-synthesizer-homage passages, but they are easily balanced out by the alternately dreamy, sublime, breathy, or otherworldly passages that surround them.  I was especially fond of the closing "One Perfect Moment," which begins beautifully with a cool twinkling synth hook that is slowly consumed by warm chord swells and a somewhat damaged-sounding chorus of vocal layers.  The fact that Evans' voice sounds somewhat distorted and broken-up was especially unexpected and welcome, as one of my primary hurdles with Motion Sickness has always been that it is generally too muted and mannered to hit me on an emotional level.  "Moment" corrects that and runs with it, morphing into a hazy drone stretch that becomes increasingly disrupted by washes of hiss and throbbing bass surges.  It eventually loses a little momentum, but I can't stress enough how much more moving Evans' music is when its angelic tendencies are buffeted by harsher and more unpredictable textures.  There are at least 10 perfect minutes in that song and that is a conservative estimate.

I did not expect to like this album nearly as much as I do, but it is weirdly endearing despite its bloat and occasional less-than-great stretches.  Rachel took some significant risks, stepped out of her comfort zone, and managed to sustain it all for a very lysergic and enveloping 90 minutes.  She even managed to paradoxically make bloat and inconsistency seem like virtues, as this album is best experienced as full immersion: were it any shorter, it wouldn't be nearly so absorbing and the odd dodgy patch only serves to heighten the unpredictability and make transitions into the better motifs even more striking.  This probably isn't the ideal first place to start for anyone new to Motion Sickness of Time Travel, as it is both massive and not particularly representative of her past aesthetic, but "One Perfect Moment" might be the single best piece she's ever recorded.  For current admirers, this is absolutely essential.  It has its flaws, but they are largely eclipsed by its vision, enormity, and otherness.

Samples:

• The Center
• Summer of the Cat's Eye
• One Perfect Moment

 

13 May 2012

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Albums and Singles

Kevin Doherty has long been one of the most quietly compelling artists working in the dark ambient field due to his unusual (and oft-alienating) themes and his inventive artistic purity in realizing them.  This release, which was commissioned by Cold Spring, is constructed entirely from recordings made during the maintenance of a B-2 Stealth Bomber.  While not as objectively impressive as wringing two full albums out of a three-minute recording of a broken heater (Dead Weather Machine) or as musical as his homage to the doomed spaceship in Alien (Nostromo), Stealth is fascinating in its own right and makes a worthy addition to a unique body of work.

Cold Spring

This is a rather challenging album for reasons that are not entirely intuitive or immediately obvious, but the bonus disk of "pre-mix" recordings is very effective in illustrating most of them.  The "original, unedited" sounds actually seem to be significantly processed, cleaned-up, and EQed, but that makes sense, given that Doherty is presenting them as a separate full-length album.  However, they are unmanipulated in the sense that they are not cut-up, composed, layered, or restructured.  More importantly, they already sound pretty great–it is easy to understand why this was commissioned.This turns out to be something of blessing and a curse though, as there is not much need for added artistry when the bomber itself is already providing a host of ominous hums, eerie crackles, lonely beeps, and garbled voice transmissions before Kevin even gets involved (though there is obviously some artistry involved in choosing which sounds to record and focus on).

Another issue stems from Doherty's thematically pure approach to his compositions.  He believes that there are limitless possibilities in manipulating existing recordings, so he doesn't add any instrumentation here.  In an abstract way, he is correct.  In the context of this album, however, the possibilities seem pretty damn limited, given Kevin's decision to leave everything in a relatively recognizable state.  Stealth is essentially an hour of endless rumble, hum, and buzz texturized by chattering electronic noises and static-heavy radio communications.  There isn't much of an long-term arc or sense of dynamic variation, which puts me in the absurd position of being frustrated that ambient music is too ambient: maintaining an unbroken, immersive mood free of jarring sounds or crescendos is essentially Doherty's very raison d'etre.  Unfortunately, there are already many, many albums of bleak rumbling out there, so I was hoping for more of a distinctive variation on that formula than some added radio transmissions (even though they are undeniably a nice touch).  I understand that a lot of Stealth's appeal is conceptual and process-based, but that does not entirely erase my expectations for how it should actually sound–I wanted "great" and I got "pretty good."

Another curious aspect of this album is that Kevin seems to have fully internalized the essence of Stealth bombers and attempted to replicate it within the album: Stealth is a very elusive, mysterious, and subtly unsettling batch of songs.  Nothing overt ever happens, but the simmering dread never, ever resolves.  The only exception is "Stealth3," in which the radio transmissions sound noticeably panicked and the accompanying whines become pronounced enough to seem somewhat menacing.  Aside from just sounding unnerving, it packs the added punch of making me wonder why a plane sitting in a hangar in England would be getting besieged with (garbled) transmissions that sound like pleas for help.  Moments like that show that Stealth can be a very rewarding listen if I meet it halfway with appropriate attention and focus, but it is much more of an unqualified success artistically than it is as a listening experience.  However, even though I find Doherty's earlier albums a bit more compelling at the moment, I have a nagging suspicion that that may someday change if I devote enough time to Stealth's sublime hums to fully unveil their secrets and nuances.

Samples:

• Stealth1
• Stealth2
• Source Material (#2)