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The composer Daniel Smutny has dropped his first name for his debut album. Despite his avant garde leanings, Telehors is accessible and devoid of any scholastic tendencies. It is a nice album made up of abstract sounds and haunting melodies. It can get dull at times but overall Telehors is a highly enjoyable experience.
Once I got past the awful sleeve (which looks like it was designed for a school project rather than for an album) and pretentious titles I found Telehors to be full of interesting sounds and textures. Smutny has a knack of hiding sounds in the mix that only become apparent when he wants them to. He combines strong synth patterns with all sorts of recordings, some processed and some left natural. Rather than relying on programmed beats all the time, he uses real percussion to liven up the sound. There’s a strong emphasis on environmental sounds like sticks hitting off each other, gentle knocking and little snippets of nature. His use of electronics complements these organic sounds well; the electronics are fluid, seamless and got bucketfuls of warmth.
One of the better parts of the album comes early with “Archpealago,” which is based around a short loop of sampled music. Smutny then uses samples of water, soft static and what sounds like bowed cymbals in addition to his synths to make an elegant and rich piece of music. Everything is used sparingly which allows the various sounds to have their moment in the sun. Later on “Replay” and “Rayse” also stand out. The former is very smooth sounding and again has a very spacious feeling to it, allowing the different elements to breath. One thing I hate with this sort of music is clutter and Smutny avoids it completely. “Rayse” isn’t cluttered but it is busier sounding than the rest of Telehors, the clanging string sounds and almost animal-like electronics are a world away from the relaxed vibes found on the other tracks.
There are times when the pieces are less than exciting. Towards the middle of the album, Smutny seems to lose steam. There’s a track or two that really could have been left off the album which would have made the CD flow much better. “Atlantiscape” peters out midway through the piece and despite Smutny’s best efforts it never gets back on track. The following piece, “Sayls,” also adds little to the album. With these two duds in the centre of the album, they ruin the run that Smutny builds up and it takes a little while before I can get comfortably back into the music.
Telehors is a fine album, it may not be a stunning masterpiece but I certainly wouldn’t kick it out of bed in the morning. There’s a lot of room here for Smutny to explore new realms of sound, it would be a shame if rested on his laurels and produced more of the same. He shows significant promise, especially towards the end of the album, and I’d be interested to see how a follow up to this album would weigh up.
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Earth Covers Earth was the first Current 93 album I obsessed over. I acquired it not long after I found a copy of Emblems for $2.89 in a bargain bin at a record store where none of the clerks had ever heard of David Tibet or Current 93. It was a godsend. When I first heard Emblems it was like being drawn towards a black hole, and when I finally sealed my fate by listening to Earth Covers Earth I was pulled beyond the event horizon. One of the things I love about this album is the mixture of Tibet’s own lyrical songwriting, traditional tunes, and the obscure metaphysical poetry set to music. Pervaded by a vitriolic melancholy, I listen to it when I want to evoke the intermingled feelings of sadness, hope, futility, anger, joy and faith.
World Serpent, now defunct, distributed the disc that I have. Among the 12 songs collected are the six from the original LP release of Earth Covers Earth on United Dairies, as well as an additional version of “The Dilly Song.” The second song on the disc “Hourglass (for Diana)” immediately spoke to me on my first listen, and it still speaks to me today. Seventeenth century poet John Hall speaks through it across the centuries with David Tibet as his living mouthpiece. Simple but elegant guitar tracery forms the perfect propulsive backdrop for the quavering violin, at first just sliding out a slow line, a force that builds in tandem with Tibet’s impassioned recitation. When he sings the words, “how senseless are our wishes / yet how great! / with what toil we pursue them / with what sweat! / yet most times for our hurts / so small we see / like children crying for some mercurie” the song kicks in with the violinist sawing hasty circular notes across the strings, as Tibet continues to spit forth his lyrical invective against the works of mankind.
At the same time the words show compassion and understanding. I had a gut reaction to the paradoxical lyrics for the song, taken from the poem “On An Houre-Glasse” and my obsession led me to look further into the works of John Hall. Many were only available on microfiche in the rare book room at Cincinnati’s downtown library. The song is repeated on the sixth track as “Hourglass (for Rosy Abelisk)” and here it is even more haunting with a lisping child’s voice reading it nearly deadpan. Accompanied by an eerie accordion drone courtesy of Steve Stapleton, and echoing female screams placed low in the mix, it is very disconcerting to hear the young child read lines like “issuing in blood and sorrow from the wombe / crauling in tears of mourning to the tombe.” The same voice also sings the title track, which is beautiful in its simplicity as the piano and guitar meld together striking poignant chords. The lyrics are taken from Henry King and again grapple with mans impermanence and the transience of all his efforts and works, the dominant theme of this collection, and a recurring one throughout all of David’s work. “Time Tryeth Truth” is another setting for the same words. Here the boy, David, and Rose Macdowall sing joined by a pensive flute in the foreground.
While David’s lyrical performance on “Rome (for Douglas P.)” is probably my least favorite on the disc, the song does have a nice murmuring drone coupled with guitar distortion that recurs with the chorus. The theme of Rome as a corrupt spiritual Imperium overlaying this world is characteristic of Tibet’s work. His visionary conception of Rome, while highly personal and idiosyncratic, also puts him in league with other cultural heroes of mine like William Blake, who believed that Roman art was destructive to the natural imagination, and Philip K. Dick who believed that history stopped in the first century A.D. the Roman Empire never having ended. Though less refined on this song, the motif finds its apogee on Black Ships Ate the Sky from 2006 where his conjuration of Caesar as Antichrist reaches tangible perfection.
The disc also brings four songs recorded in Tokyo and originally intended for release on a Japanese album that was never completed. In my opinion the lyrics for “At the Blue Gates of Death” are where David began to tap into his authentic voice as a poet, though the first version of the song is cluttered and suffers from the extra noise. The children singing in the background are interesting but his penchants for using their voices is used to a more satisfying effect on All The Pretty Little Horses. The bass guitar, played backwards, is what muddles up the mix, taking attention away from the words, which are the songs strength. His voice is also less sure of itself than it seems on “At the Blue Gates of Death (Before and Beyond Them).” In the second when he sings along to a simpler accompaniment of guitar and Rose’s vocal harmonies he is at his most vulnerable, and his most durable, which makes it all the more endearing. It is a song that I have returned to again and again over the years. The symbolism and allegory that I’ve come to expect from David are all present, but here he is more accessible because he has let the guard of overly cryptic lyrics down.
The closing “The Dreammoves of the Sleeping King” is a great example of the combined genius arrived at when Steve Stapleton and David work together. Again, the music shares methods of working and common motifs that pop up repeatedly throughout Current 93’s discography. This twenty-minute barrage of somnolent madness is quite similar to that heard on Faust. Both contain the voices of children reading fragmentary bits of the Lord’s Prayer, as if it alone would protect them from the nightmarish and otherworldly forces the sounds invoke. Melted they smear across the audio spectrum in hazy blurs of thickly swathed vibrato. Ever malleable, it contains moments that appeal to both my darker and more whimsical sensibilities. Stapleton and Tibet had this material in mind for a film they wanted to make about the land where dreams go to when they die. The film was never made, and some of the other music for it, as yet unreleased, still remains lurking in their archives.
Pictured on the cover and in the inlay are colorful photographs of a strange cast of characters: Rose Macdowall, Tony Wakeford, Douglas P., Ian Read, John Balance, Tibet, Steve Stapleton, Diana Rogerson, and children. As I started to trace David Tibet’s influences and the various connections making up his musical family tree I was initiated into a whole new world of listening, and of literature. The music on this disc opened me up and in the process I was transformed. In 2005 the Free Porcupine Society reissued the original six tracks in a limited vinyl run. It would be nice to see the 12 songs from the CD reissued, remastered, repackaged and remixed. I’m sure some related material could also be scrounged up for inclusion. David and his friends at Coptic Cat have already done so with a number of other albums from Current 93’s extensive back catalogue. Earth Covers Earth deserves the same lavish treatment.
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- Hour Glass (For Diana)
- At The Blue Gates of Death (Before And Beyond Them)
- The Dreammoves of the Sleeping King
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Like great film noir, everypiece of Murcof's puzzle is obviously manufactured and manipulated andcalculated and refined; it so completely captures a tone that I don'tmind that the sets are fake or the lighting is hyper-real.
Leaf
I was introduced to Murcof's work with last year's Utopia single and I was hoping that the follow up album to that would be as good as the single promised. With Remembranza,Murcof does not disappoint. It's difficult to say where this musicwould fall in record bins filed by genre, but what matters is thatregardless of the conventions of the particular slice of the musicalspectrum that Murcof is working in, he manages to fill his songs withdepth and atmosphere. Remembranza is full of distant, reverbsoaked pianos, suspensful string arrangements that hang in the air likesmoke in a dark, shady pub, and autoclave-cleaned beats that nearlyfall into minimal techno rhythms, but rarely serve as the impetus fordance. The result plays out like techno noir made for headphones ratherthan dancefloors. This is music for murder mysteries and hardenedgumshoes and crazy dames, but it's all controlled so precisely that itnever evokes a real, urgent sense of dread. People notusually won over by the abstraction and detachment of clicky minimalistelectronica should find that Remembranza supplies enough clicksand pings and muted thumps to stand in for that style, while it alsoprovides the emotional backdrop of a film score or well-orchestratedpop music. I'd love to hear this record with some sultry, bluesy vocalsover it. As is, it's still a wonderful piece of deep listening moodmusic just waiting for a film to be shot to go with it.
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Pup is another entry into the highly nuanced, subtle, and delicate world ofminimalism that at one time would have been called “ambient” but nowgoes by titles like “lowercase.” There’s too much of this sortof thing for me to be able to stay abreast of, but Dan Abrams’ work asFenton is solid and enjoyable.Plop
Although Fenton creator Dan Abrams is from California, this disc comes all the way from Japan, by way of theJapanese label Plop. It's a record formorning listening: every song feels like a beginning of sorts to ajourney that is never exactly spelled out or completed. The songs arebuilt up from loops of pristine guitar plucking and the artifacts of along, long delay time. While I see music like this played out all thetime by folks with a single guitar and a loop pedal, it’s obvious thatAbrams is not just knocking these tunes out in a matter of minutes andrendering them to tape. There isn’t much to the compositions,but they grow organically, and they are finely balanced and carefully mixedto reward deep listening. A disc like this finds me willing to acceptit differently at different times.
Without the time and solitudenecessary to devote complete attention to Pup, the recordbecomes a pleasant background texture to my day, but something that isultimately not recognizable or distinguished. Given an hour to sit downwith headphones or near field monitors, the record plays altogetherdifferently and the subtle layers of sound never get boring becausethere is almost always something else to explore. At other times, whenI want to concentrate but can’t, I imagine that Pup isthe basis of another record somewhere with drums and voices and a bandusing simple looped guitar as a foundation rather than the focus.
This is the nature of music like this, and why it’s so hard for me withmy schedule to get into it fully. I suspect that the tensionthere is exactly why music like this needs to exist: to give us areason to slow down, zone out, and bathe ourselves in microscopic beadsof sound. I only wish that were possible more often.
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In describing the sound of Mono's third full-length album it's hard not to invoke a number of bands whom I have nevertheless sworn to eschew in the body of this review. Let it suffice to say that the music is sweeping, anthemic, instrumental, crescendo-heavy, at once deliberately delicate and mindlessly reckless; this much should give you some idea of the musical path on which Mono tread (some might even call it a new path to Helicon, to tell the truth).
Despite the surface similarities to a cadre of aphonic groups, Mono have a hook all of their own. They bring to light a very palpable and very realized "music of anxiety" (not to be confused with the anxiety of music, which you might ascribe to John Cage, first and foremost). This music of anxiety masquerades as songs which you might feel comfortable introducing to your parents, who enjoy all of the refinements of classical. In other words, the songs are lovely and accessible. But certain songs are filled with massive building themes and bridges, each one successively getting louder or faster or both. It is in these precise parts where the anxiety lurks. To illustrate, I offer a challenge: try and fall asleep to "Lost Snow," or "16.12," both of which start off innocently enough, lulling any quasi-narcolept into a comfort blanket of promised sleep and placidity. But then the songs evolve. They burst forth. They blossom violently like a flower which does not merely let its petals spread out gently, but rather one which erupts and explodes, sending thick clouds of pollen into the air and leaving its pistils and stamens shaking in the aftershock. Mono's style can be clawingly unsettling, full of nervous energy and discomfort. It does not allow you to sit and standby; instead it sucks you into the whirlwind. Yet there is always an outlook to the light at the end of the song, after the guitars collide and distort, where the sonic storm yields to space and eventually catharsis. The formula (polarization of a song's harshness and quietude) is not new, but Mono executes it as elegantly as any band whose skinny fists stir up such tempests of sounds which assail the ears for ten minutes at a time. Not every song proceeds along these lines. "A Thousand Paper Cranes" and "2 Candles, 1 Wish" stay hushed, concentrated, and focused throughout. The sequencing on the album seems to indicate that Mono is well aware of the anxiety of their songs. The band acknowledges the need for rest between the storms of their mightier songs and they acquiesce by putting the softer bits between the harder ones. In this way, the spaces between the songs mimic the spaces within them.
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Tesco
Ever since unleashing the amazing one-two punch of But What Ends When the Symbols Shatter? and Rose Clouds of Holocaust, Douglas P. has been creatively floundering. His teaming with Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch yielded two albums that abandoned all of Death in June's usual subtlety and atmosphere in favor of overblown orchestral loops littered with samples from Leni Riefenstahl films and filled with laughable lyrics about Kristallnacht and anal sex. Then came the nadir, 2001's All Pigs Must Die, a prolonged screed against the now-defunct World Serpent Distribution that played like a vicious self-parody. Now comes the new album, a collaboration with fellow fascist sympathizer Boyd Rice. I might have expected them to produce some kind of martial epic extolling the virtues of Bush's imperialist wars, but instead they opt for a more personal album, a return of sorts to the guitars-and-windchimes sound that characterizes classic Death in June. As could be expected, every track is overloaded with excessive echo and reverb, and most are scattered with dialogue snippets from cult films, a familiar DIJ tactic. Unfortunately, Douglas P. has not learned any new chords, recycling the same dull strumming he's been churning out for twenty years. Boyd Rice provides vocals for most of the tracks, in his familiar I-can't-bothered-to-sing monotone. "Sunwheels of My Mind" is almost clever, a solar-centric adaptation of Dusty Springfield's classic "Windmills of My Mind." The album's lyrics deal primarily with the passage of time (punctuated by the Alarm of the title) and a preoccupation with solar imagery. It's the old familiar sun = light = Lucifer = Satan = power equation, a fairly juvenile symbolic conceit coming from a pair of middle-aged men. All that being said, I still liked this much, much better than All Pigs Must Die or the recent Wolf Pact album. It's a big improvement over Nazi tape-loops and boring personal vendettas, but its appeal is largely nostalgic—it reminds me of a time when DIJ were slightly relevant. At this point, I'm not holding out much hope that Douglas P. will ever come up with another truly worthwhile album.
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Youth and painfully melodramatic vocals don't spell out "genius" in big, bold letters. While much of the music that this 17 year-old old writes sounds nice (in terms of production), many of his songs are covered in a too-sweet glow that renders all the glorious fuzz and inherent beauty of his guitar work null. Connor Kirby-Long makes music full of good ideas: at times his arrangements hint at a desire to push his own songwriting abilities forward, but all too often this results in a stifling inertia where nothing goes anywhere. There's huge washes of electronic buzz permeating every corner of every song, but this isn't enough to carry the record all by itself.
When Khonnor does decide to lay off all the hiss, his guitars sound plain and relatively flat. "Crapstone" highlights this problem; the keyboards sound like they're being forced out of an old toy that Khonnor must've gotten when he was six and the guitar that is strolling along over it sounds like the work of a disinterested street musician floundering about lazily on his guitar whenever an attractive lady walks by. Other songs show promise, but never reach any kind of satisfying climax. It's Khonnor's age that really shines through this record, not his purported infinite talent. "Kill 2" skips along with an innocent cadence and might sound just fine if it weren't for the dramatic melodies that echo between the keyboards and heavily processed computer-melodies. When he sings it comes out as though he's whispering to someone whom he's in love with, but instead of being sure of himself he tilts back and forth and emphasizes all the wrong aspects of what he has to say. There are a couple of songs ("A Little Secret" comes immediately to mind) where his voice doesn't interrupt anything and all the instruments work very well together. The result are interesting but not enthralling strands of sound. I'm sure there are lots of teenagers in basements across the world that are making lots of music; there's nothing unique or especially outstanding about this one except that he's very obviously ambitious. I can't recommend the CD, however, because there's just not enough material in here to make me want to listen to the record over and over again. Perhaps time and experience will lend Khonnor the songwriting ability he needs to compliment his energetic ideas, but until then his music is all decoration and no substance.
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aRtonal
In an era when so many guitarists have taken to laptop processing in order to coax new life from their thought-tired instruments, it seems only fair that other solo-instrumentalists should join the fun. And while the cello has enjoyed its fair share of fusion within the rock sphere, I've yet to see someone sit alone with this instrument, so engorged with classical and acoustic traditions, and really "plug in." Part of what makes Arnold Haberl's output as Noid so fascinating is the way the Austrian cellist moves beyond a banal, deconstructivist treatment of his playing and into ideas for composition where the computer feels less like a medium guiding the production of a piece and more like a voice within the music, to be engaged and countered, rather than simply played-through. Haberl's pieces branch off of strict minimalist ideas, bypassing crude layering techniques of the analog past and instead favoring tightly-wound, stuttering loop effects, drawn out often to the realm of nauseous formalism. Rarely is any multi-tracking involved in Noid's creations; rather miniature fragments of playing are captured, treated, and allowed to loop out, at times for over ten minutes with no real variation. The cello's woody groan becomes an industrial sander on the opening "melodien," stripped of human presence, even a performer's pause or the negative space of a hand slightly off-beat. It's clear after such a beginning that this will be "process" music, here less about the process of making, which becomes increasingly transparent as the disc progresses, and more about the process of listening, of accepting the music's sensory overload in juxtaposition with virtual lifelessness of the sounds themselves and the possibility of their "performance." Haberl does perform with live sampling and manipulation, and the points on Monodigmen where his cello is left recognizable logically become some of the most mind-numbing. "Vacuum 1" is a 12-minute piece of the cellist in lock-groove mode, struggling around what sounds like the opening strains of "Flight of the Bumblebee." After the question of Haberl actually playing such an infernal half-measure over and over again has been ruled out, listening becomes a tug-of-war between enduring the instrument's stunted flight and the utter detachment resulting from the search for patterns, or anything "material" in the music, and finding nothing. I hesitate to dismiss Noid's music as a purely formal exercise because of the way he continuously engages the elements of poise and human concentration almost inseparable from his chosen instrument, in an ultimate reduction of all that is traditionally expressive about it. There are times when Monodigmen feels like an extension of Cage's efforts to communicate the zen-like void or 'nothing' in musical composition; other times, however, Haberl's creation seems too much of an endurance test to communicate anything worth the time it takes to get there.
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After several releases for various labels, this German duo release their first full length for Ant-Zen. The album covers a wide variety of styles and textures in a concise 42 minutes. Over eight tracks they attempt to achieve a balance between melodic and abrasive elements.
The most extreme example of this juxtaposition is "A Difference That's For All To See." While the three preceding tracks are linear in structure and feature vocals set to danceable rhythms, this fourth track is of two halves. The first half consists of slowly shifting, atmospheric loops. At first this sounds like an intro to something chaotic, but after three minutes it seems that the track will remain ambient. 30 seconds later a short burst of feedback announces the track's sudden shift into full-on grindcore, complete with ramshackle drumming and distorted vocals. This is directly followed by "Away," a lush instrumental with a melodic, almost calming feel. Without the clutter of vocals it was easier to enter the space they were trying to create. While musically the album is very successful, vocally it is more problematic. The vocals provide a sharp contrast to the melodic elements, the tension they create in these tracks makes me feel claustrophobic, and they're so loud in the mix that they often overpower the music. This is especially evident on "Gloomy Day", "Push Yourself" and the album-closing "Kill All Lifeforms." It is unclear from what perspective the lyrics to this track have been written. The sentiment, taken at face value, seems extremely negative, with lyrics such as "thoughts of making things better in the future are unnecessary, thank you. You don't have the future for that." Although they have been written in the first person, it is possible that these lyrics are meant as social commentary. Given the current state of the world, promoting violence and negativity seems unnecessary. In contrast, lyrics such as "follow your dreams, with one step forward" and "rediscover yourself, your pride, your dignity, your holiness, force and weakness, love and passion" on "Push Yourself" are much more hopeful, and this contrast suggests that on all tracks the vocalist is referring to someone other than himself. I often prefer when an artist creates an atmosphere which suggests an idea without stating it as obviously as Klangstabil have done on some of these tracks. To their credit, Taking Nothing Seriously is a much more eclectic set than many of their contemporaries attempt. It would have been a more enjoyable listen if it had been balanced a little more toward subtleties.
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Karaoke Kalk
Also on the short side—but decidedly not as fun—is the third album from French musician, vocalist and poet Toog. The record is intended to be a modern variation on Poems For Lou, a book written during World War I by poet and soldier Guillaume Apollinaire who was inspired by a woman named Lou that he loved and lost in Nice before the war. In Toog's version, the role of the muse is played by actress Asia Argento, and WWI is replaced by the war and terrorism of the post-9/11 world. It's impossible for me to verify if Toog's words truly reflect these themes, as aside from two pieces that are sultrily spoken by Argento, all of the readings are in French, a language that I remember very little of from my lessons of many years ago. At least the music, which is produced by French sound artist Digiki, is generally quite nice, mixing together elements of downtempo electro & ambient with low-key pop & hip-hop, and even some hints of industrial, classical and cabaret. Given the strong poetic theme of the work, however, it's quite obvious that without some understanding of the words, listeners just won't get the full message that Toog is trying to convey in the 10 tracks on 'Lou Etendue'.
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