26 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

Although recorded at the point of the group’s disbanding in 2001, this album (remixed last year) is publically released to coincide with a reunion of the band.  Here aided and abetted by members of Providence’s own Landed, the band that defined Load Records’ sound continues to do so through their own brand of sonic scum.

 

Load Records

Diametrically opposed to their 1998 album Law of Ruins, Half Control puts the focus more on blasting scum rock instead of flirtations with krautrock.  The synths are still present but they definitely take a backseat to blasting guitar riffs and distorted bass lines, both of which are very similar to citymates Landed and I doubt it’s coincidental that guitarist Joel Kyack and bassist Shawn Greenlee appear on this album.

Opener "Thrown Out" kicks the door in immediately with a short grinding guitar riff and spastic yelled vocals that coincidentally feel like a band having less than half control over themselves.  The similarly short "A Tighter Passage" continues this aggression, even tossing in a harsh guitar noise break in the middle of the track to add just a bit more dissonance to it.  "Long Time No C" is in a similar realm, but has a bit more of a punked out edge to it, adding more catchy guitar/vocal combinations to the mix rather than just the scraping aggression from the other two.

"Herpe Gimme Strength" is another more melodic one, building descending divebomb melodies out of guitars that sound like synths (or synths that sound like guitars, I can’t decide).  This somewhat continues into "Artificial Light," which has more obvious synth string leads over the distorted din.  With its shorter looped structure and restrained vocals, it comes across more as an extremely agro take on new wave rather than just plain ol’ noise rock, in a good way. 

When the shifts away from the harsher stuff happen, I think it really is a better indicator of the strengths of the band.  The title track, while still having that noise damaged quality to it, is a tighter, darker creation that feels more structured and composed with an aggressive, bass-lead passage at the end.  "Live Legs" is also a synth lead song that undercuts the more traditional guitar and bass stuff, subtly punctuating it in a way that other bands would probably ignore.

The closer is, in my opinion, the album’s best moment.  "Bored Oracle" is a long tune, far longer than any other on the album that emphasizes more development and variations on dynamics than the others.  It opens with only drums and the entry of slow, methodological synths that are gentler than any of the others found here.  As the build begins, restrained guitar enters along with more spoken word type vocals.  While not screamed, the words drip with venom and hatred more than any of the others on here.  There is just a better, slow build to the sound that doesn’t get as showcased on the previous tracks.

Considering that this material is some eight years old, I’m curious to hear how the newer reunited band will sound now, though who knows how the lineup will change between now and then.  But even as an archival recording this is a really strong release, and the moments where a greater concession to melody and structure are made are where it truly shines.

samples:

• Artificial Light
• Half Control
• Bored Oracle

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26 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

The latest release in LTM’s Auteur Labels series makes the odd curatorial choice of focusing on just one year in the life of Factory Records and 1984 is undeniably a rather unexpected year to pick- Martin Hannett was gone, the Haςienda (FAC-51) was not yet wildly popular and was still hemorrhaging money, and most of the label’s major bands did not record anything of consequence.  Nevertheless, the gamble decisively pays off, as the rarities and obscurities compiled here showcase the freewheeling brilliance, eccentricity, and absurdity of the Factory milieu far more strikingly than any “greatest hits” compilation ever could have.

 

LTM Recordings

In 1982, producer Martin Hannett famously filed a lawsuit against the other four directors of Factory Records and ultimately left the fold to pursue more alcohol- and heroin-centric pursuits.  In typical Factory fashion, this potential disaster was issued a catalog number (FAC-61) and a revolving cast of New Order members and their associates took over production duties under the deliberately generic pseudonym of Be Music.  Of course, this resulted in lot of bands sounding suspiciously like New Order, but that aesthetic effectively complemented the label-wide shift in focus away from the arty brooding of bands like Joy Division towards dance clubs and pop charts.

Naturally, the aforementioned New Order are responsible for one of the best songs on the album: the pleasantly lurching “Lonesome Tonight,” which was the B-side to the "Thieves Like Us" single and began its life as a half-assed cover of an Elvis Presley live recording.  The Wake’s propulsive “Talk About The Past” is also immediately gratifying, even though it sounds almost exactly like New Order (a good song is still a good song, even if it lacks originality).  The other unqualified success on the album is the infectious synthpop of Red Turns To’s “Deep Sleep” (whom I had never even heard of).  Fortunately, while the quality of the rest of the compilation veers wildly, it remains uniformly compelling for other reasons.

For one, the album is bursting with guilty pleasures.  I was especially delighted by the inclusion of a Shark Vegas rarity ("Pretenders of Love”) that was originally only available on a 1987 compilation entitled Young, Popular, and Sexy.  The magic of Shark Vegas is that they sound exactly like New Order, but comically exaggerated in all respects (especially the vocals).  This particular cut does not let me down and even surprised me with a hair metal guitar solo.  Then there is Quando Quango’s “Atom Rock,” which is quite possibly the single worst song that I have ever heard (perhaps more painful than even Rob Gretton’s molar reconstruction (FAC-99)).  Despite featuring uncharacteristically funky guitar by Johnny Marr and production by Bernard Sumner, it fails on literally every level and approximates a lobotomized Haircut 100.  That said, it is so profoundly moronic (“atom rock from the bottom to the top, atom rock tell me when its gonna stop”) and inept that it somehow transcends mere awfulness and becomes perversely infectious.  It is a horror that I cannot turn my ears away from.

Of course, Factory released quite a bit of forgettable—perhaps even genuinely awful—material as well.  One of the compilation’s more baffling aberrations is a mediocre piano and violin classical piece by The Durutti Column (“Duet (Without Mercy)”), which Vini Reilly describes in the colorful liner notes thusly: "Without Mercy is a joke.  That album’s terrible.  It was all Tony Wilson’s idea to make it more classical.” 

Also, while this disc regrettably contains no A Certain Ratio songs, the ACR gang are conspicuously involved in virtually all its clumsiest and most embarrassing moments.  Nearly the entire band played on Kalima’s smooth vocal jazz abortion “The Smiling Hour” and former frontman Simon Topping delivers his own solo Latin jazz atrocity entitled “Chicas del Mundo” (Tony Wilson believed that Topping was “so upset by the death of Ian Curtis that he turned his back on singing, and instead retreated behind a set of bongos.”).  Incidentally, Topping later joined the above-mentioned Quando Quango to continue his post-ACR streak of crimes against music.  Also, ACR drummer Donald Johnson’s brother delivers a sub-Blondie rap interlude on 52nd Street’s “Can’t Afford” and Johnson himself is credited as co-producer for “Atom Rock.”  I should perhaps note that despite arousing my extreme antipathy, Quando Quango are regarded as very influential on the early NYC and Chicago dance music scenes.  Of course, that does not mean that their music has aged well.

That said, nearly all of the “bad” songs on Factory Records 1984 are still quite fun, and curator James Nice’s quixotic warts-and-all approach has unexpectedly resulted in a great album.  Factory’s tireless enthusiasm, willingness to very publicly fail, propensity for throwing huge sums of money at ridiculous shit (like Happy Monday’s albums), and unwavering sense of humor (there are catalog numbers for both the Haςienda’s cat (FAC-191) and Tony Wilson’s coffin (FAC-501)) made it uniquely human and deservedly beloved and Nice has done a remarkable job of capturing that elusive spirit.  Further installments in this series would be extremely welcome.

Samples:

• Red Turns To – Deep Sleep
• Shark Vegas – Pretenders of Love
• Quando Quango – Atom Rock

 

 

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25 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

A 47-minute elegy to his daughter, who passed away two years before work began on the record, this disc offers a slow and meditative take on electronic composition. Combining field recordings with metallic vibrations, static hum and pure noise elements, Kahn is able to do a lot with what appears to be very little, conducting his own orchestra of sound in a piece whose emotional impact is garnered from its barren makeup.

 

23five

When I say barren though, I certainly mean barren. The work is so slow to evolve in fact that many moments are only decipherable as different upon clicking through the piece's timetable. With this kind of cautious construction, layering the equivalent of vacuum cleaner air drawing upon airplane cabin engine noise, the work evolves slowly enough so as to take its virtually its entire length to entangling itself of each distinct moment. When distant scratches come through amidst the hiss around minute 13 it is nearly revelatory, being the most distinguishable sound yet presented. A soft hum around the 17 minute mark grounds it somewhat, imbuing it with a distinct direction for the first time, though that direction is surely a circuitous one not so much bent on arriving anywhere so much as one settling in to the old mental garden.

Yet the changes do happen, and the patience with which they do so rewards a concerted listening effort. Metal-on-metal clatter subsides in the mix almost half of the way through the work's length, sounding like a mini Gamelan orchestra playing from inside a wind turbine. Volumes are delicately adjusted, allowing details to come to the fore that, whether always present back there or not, feel to be coming from the same organism, drawing itself out through the most minute adjustments in color.

There is a sense of urgency in the latter half of the work, if only in contrast to the first half. It becomes less static and busier, with sounds rebounding around the space and jumping out from the singular static that started the work. Still, the consistency of sounds being as they are, the result is not so much busily seeking anything as it is teeming beneath its own weight, its super-heated molecules bouncing together without losing the general forms they inhabit.

It isn't until about half an hour into the piece that snippets of a discreet melody appear, though these too are so fractured as to become part of the general landscape, tickling the outer reaches of the hum with brief splashes of color. These flurries of notes not only tie the piece inward, setting the outer boundaries of the hiss buildup, but they also signal the piece's movement toward a more mechanistic and gestural sound for a time, one that has momentary flashes of a daily movement removed from the ethereal space of the work as a whole.

The final ten minutes find the work slipping back to its origins, decomposing until it is only the crackle of burning wax and a gentle airy breath of tone. Dense though it may be, the work is quite well situated and wisely done, uncompromising in its enactment without lacking beauty or finesse. There is likely no knowing just how this recording relates to its subject matter—certainly it is not in any linear manner representative of it—but there can be no doubt that this is a highly personal and well phrased statement from a musician with his ears on a singular form of sound composition.

samples:

• Vanishing Point

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25 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

The unfortunate victim of a knife attack three months before the release of this album, Wolfgang Riechmann's credentials extend far beyond this, his only solo record, which is finally getting the reissue treatment. An early collaborator with Neu!'s Michael Rother and Kraftwerk's Wolfgang Fluhr, Riechmann introduced himself as an individual voice within the broad boundaries of '70s German electronic music with a focused minimalism and clear pop sensibility.

 

Bureau B

To be fair—as with much of the material from this era and locale—much of the sound on the record does read as a bit dated in the electronically advanced age we currently reside in. Analog sweeps and crude drum machines abound, but the constructions are still wholly tangible, imbuing the disc with a certain gratifying sense of nostalgia removed from the purely silly sound of a record whose time has come and gone. Despite the epic grandeur of a track like "Silberland," whose regal tempo is occupied by video-game worthy melodies, the careful choice of sounds, crystalline and hollow all, keeps the piece moving into truly spacious territory.

The opening title track is perhaps the most redundant offering on the disc in fact, its phased beat looping along a simple melody and dour vocal. The track could just as easily be a Kraftwerk circa Autobahn, but Riechmann's solo approach means that there is never any more present than is necessary, and no line contributes worthlessly. Even Riechmann's relatively unconvincing vocals are so of their era that they add a sort of baroque human element into the fold.

That said, most of the material here is instrumental, and in this realm Riechmann is truly adept. "Weltweit" shimmers with barely two sounds present, gliding on glacial tracts that grow as another line joins in and they are allowed to mingle and internally shift. This is clearly someone who requires very little to do quite a lot, exhibiting the same pointed melodic strength as Roedelius if devoid of some of the classical jovialism of the latter's solo output. Elsewhere, "Himmelblau" billows with ethereal tones that careen about before tightening their focus and growing into one of the most overtly forward-looking tracks on the album, revealing New Wave and even early House disciples through its child-like melodic line.

The all too brief closer, "Traumzeit" seems to point towards more from this young artist. Yet even in this debut, one genuinely feels like they can hear what might of been—his predeliction for long, drawn out pseudo-dance constructions could well have taken him into the '80s with more than was necessary. Perhaps no great revelation, the album is still a fantastic example of its sound, and does display more than a hint of distance from the usual crowd. There's almost a David Byrne-like melancholy buried beneath these chilly atmospheres, though maybe that's just the cover talking.

samples:

• Weltweit
• Silberland
• Himmelblau

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25 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

A strange voyeristic look into the world of electro-acoustic music, this album is composed of a single 40 minute composition. It lacks some important qualities, but has some interesting moments, nonetheless.  Dogs in English Porcelain mixes instruments with animal sounds to create a flow of sound-energy which ultimately does little to entertain due to its emphasis on aesthetics rather than substance.

 

Music Appreciation

Segmented like a puzzle, Dogs strives to stay above water despite its often metallic and underwhelming nature.  It is natural that Rossetto's music would be heavily visual because she is a painter, but as an audio piece her sophomore effort is lacking.  Aesthetically speaking, it is captivating with its very quiet beginning and unique noises, including the use of what sounds like babies or even monkeys (birds are the actual source).  The clattering of silverware employed gives Dogs a homemade feel and the droning background supports that aspect.  Yet, in terms of substance, the record is rather empty and doesn't feature much depth.

Comprised of a single composition, the disc isn't very engaging and the musicianship is illusive and arbitrary.  The first half of the piece is rather stagnant, with glimpses of ingenuity at the 15 minute mark, where we first hear stringed instruments.  It only becomes interesting at the 30 minute mark when reverberated chimes enter the fray. It sounds like a glorious and fading meltdown.  The intention is perhaps to disassemble the first 30 minutes of the piece while creating a considerable juxtaposition. The contrast between the first part and the second part of the album is achieved with an almost textbook feel.  The fluctuation in volume and the various instruments makes it somewhat amusing, but awkward at the same time. The recording is technically well-produced and is expressive and the music is amorphous and distant yet well-grounded.  There is a shift in force and focus towards the end of the disc that makes the whole thing seem more mysterious than it actually is.  I think this is partly because there was no mystery in the piece to begin with.

The album does have its moments: the sublimely orchestrated strings, the wishy-washy tube noises, and scattered electric pulses are appealing in their own way.  Although the effort is there, these 40 or so minutes only manages to introduce the listener to the world of electro-acoustic music. Thankfully, there are more worthwhile releases out there capable of doing just the same thing.

samples:

• excerpt 1
• excerpt 2
• excerpt 3

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25 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

I can't tell if Aidan Baker is releasing old material and calling it new or producing muddy sounding music on purpose. Much of Gathering Blue has a basement tapes quality to it, but the reissued material that composes the second LP of this two-LP set is mostly stunning, as is the packaging that accompanies it. Baker might be in need of some quality control when it comes to his latest work, but his back catalog continues to impress me.

 

Equation

Aidan goes for broke and begins his latest endeavor with a side-long meditative jam. It's composed mostly of a strong, low-end rhythm, an indistinct weave of harmonies, and the kind of processed haze found on nearly every fuzzy, electronics-heavy record out there. A fraction of the way through, Baker begins to half-mumble some vague and mostly incoherent lyrics with a heavy-handed dramatic tint to them. "Bond of Blood" is a risky way to start a record and it mostly fails to capture my attention. It is mixed entirely too low and contains a repetitive structure that completely betrays Baker's typically intricate and subtle approach to writing. Anything on the I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed compilation bests this muddied work by a country mile.

Thankfully, the reverse side of the record picks up some of the slack with "Gathering Blue" and a cover of Joy Division's "24 Hours." Nevertheless, a strangely under-produced sound hovers over these songs. When compared to the second LP, all three opening tunes sound like unfinished demos tossed together without a thought given to production. Sometimes the rawness of poorly recorded albums can be appealing, but in Baker's case nothing is gained and a lot is lost. In any case, "Gathering Blue" is another mostly quiet amalgam of processed guitar and quiet melody, but it brings a little more structure and diversity to the table than side A did. The Joy Division cover is both amusing and disappointing. For the duration of the song Baker simply plucks its familiar melody and sings the lyrics in the same half-mumbled way employed on "Bond of Blood." The result is a dreary and dark remake of an already dark and weighty song, but without the driving rhythm or bitter anger of the original. It works to an extent, but I've come to expect more from Baker. Vocally, he doesn't seem capable of expressing anything beyond doubt, remorse, or self-loathing, none of which compliment the music on this record.

The second LP illustrates just why Baker became so popular in the first place. It collects the Cicatrice and The Taste of Summer on Your Skin EPs from 2003 and 2004 as well as a couple of remixes included on the Arcolepsy remix EP from 2005. The Cicatrice EP and a remix by Building Castles Out of Matchsticks take up the entirety of Gathering Blue's third side. Each of the five songs are soulful and carefully layered productions that move along at a slow and sensuous pace. The contrast between their shimmering high end and substantial low end produces an almost dub-like and hallucinogenic effect, which reverberates and throbs like a inhuman organ and lends a substantial amount of movement to the whole production. Colorful echoes and subtle nuances decorate Cicatrice from top to bottom, but Baker doesn't rely on them to be effective. An indistinct, but persistent sense of melody and intensity carries these pieces, which are seamlessly meshed together by crisp production and clever sequencing. It's a shame that an already limited and hard-to-find EP such as this one had to be re-released on a limited vinyl collection.

The fourth and final side of Gathering Blue is something of a mixed bag, but Cicatrice is a hard act to follow. The Taste of Summer on Your Skin is an upbeat and mostly busy production with drum 'n' bass rhythms populating a portion of its length. Dark, atonal pulses and cosmic noise constitute the rest of the it, which is entertaining but not altogether enthralling. I've heard lots of spacey sounds like these and though the effects and arrangements employed are attractive, they're also a little predictable. The dark colors and menacing passages work for me, but are familiar and well-trodden, too. The Troum remix, which ends the record, is a lovely mass of sound built from metallic trembling and futuristic horn sections. It ends the record on a high note, but doesn't exactly strike me as an appropriate closer.

On a record this uneven, a killer Baker original could have saved the day and left me musing over his many talents, but instead I'm left thinking of another band and their consistently excellent output. Gathering Blue is a sloppy and strangely fractured collection, but still worth seeking out just for the Cicatrice reissue and gorgeous packaging. Everything else will likely intrigue Baker fans, but fail to win anyone else over.

[samples unavailable]

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25 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

This carefully arranged and whisper-quiet record on Sedimental squeezes the time right out of life. Kyle Dunn's slow orchestral pieces emphasize tiny movements and utilize subdued instrumentation as a means of stopping the clock and highlighting minuscule developments. The result is a beautiful and flawed record, one that shares a lot with early Stars of the Lid records, but Fragments & Compositions of... is absolutely bare-bones with little dressing and no pretense.

 

Sedimental

The nature of Dunn's work invites all kinds of cinematic ideas and fantastic daydreams. As the stringed instruments he employs stretch out and breathe their harmonic sighs, an irresistible urge to impose lonely environments and isolated people upon the record arises. Ordinary and familiar events acquire a special dimension in the light of music such as this and, if experience is any indicator, that's simply a natural consequence of well-written, well-produced chamber-drone. Kyle employs this potential well, shying away from overt drama, goofy samples, and imposing or unnecessary narratives while developing a natural and sensuous cycle of hushed pseudo-sonatas. His manner of constructing songs depends largely upon a natural and convincing tapestry of sounds: violins, cellos, pianos, and processed sound drift together throughout the majority of the record; expanding and contracting naturally as though Dunn's influence was not at all involved and the music spontaneously seeped into existence. This sometimes generates a wash of pure sound and sometimes results in an intricate and subtle dance of classical instrumentation. Kyle fluctuates between emphasizing either drones or delicate and mesmerizing patterns, with one instrument or another sometimes assuming solo duties. He manages to extract a fair amount of variety from this formula but never injects the music with surprising dynamics nor do stark contrasts ever develop. The album floats along at a pleasant enough pace but it doesn't travel as far as I would like and it never deviates from the tone established in the first minutes of its playing.

The album's one-dimensional quality might be an artifact of its development. These pieces were recorded over a period of two years and, if the title is any indication, were not originally conceived as parts of a whole. In that light the static quality of Fragments... acquires a sensible logic: think of the album as little more than a compilation of closely related compositions from the same time period and the uniformity becomes understandable. The austere beauty of the record is ultimately its greatest virtue and its most annoying element. Nonetheless, its uniformity is not especially damning. The quality of the songwriting combined with Dunn's restraint is enough to make this a good record. A broader dynamic range and a greater instrumental variety would help it a great deal, however.

samples:

• Miranda Rights
• Furthest From It
• An Extension

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19 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

After listening to the last few Jack Rose records religiously, it's something of a shock to hear vocals on a Rose-related record. But that's just what you get as this self-titled disc starts up: a cover of "Little Sadie" rambling and swinging hard like the rock 'n' roll cornerstone it is. Colored with shades of bluegrass, blues, and country music, this self-titled record takes American roots music and strips it until all that's left is its energy and attitude.

 

VHF

Except that the group covers a couple of tunes from Kensington Blues and Dr. Ragtime and His Pals, it's tempting to think that The Black Twig Pickers are the stars of this record more than Rose is. When "Little Sadie" kicks the record off, the first thing I hear isn't Jack's guitar. Instead, a flurry of fiddle, tin can percussion, and harmonica blow out of the speakers with either Nathan Bowles or Mike Gangloff blurting out lyrics like a drunken member of the audience. "Little Sadie" has seen many incarnations, but most people probably know it as "Cocaine Blues" and are likely to be familiar with the Folsom Prison version by Johnny Cash more than any other. The need-no-one attitude and rebellious quality of that song sets the pace for the rest of the record, which teeters between bluegrass, country music, and the sobriety of Rose's well-crafted instrumental jams. 

Many of the album's highlights are the songs with vocals. It's fun to hear "Kensington Blues" played by a talented bluegrass group, but Jack Rose's typically contemplative mannerisms don't exactly match the band's upbeat tempo and tendency to play a ramshackle style. Nonetheless, Rose's performance falls in line perfectly with the rest of the band and his rhythm playing holds together its myriad impulses. On the surface there seems to be a lot in common between this album and Dr. Ragtime and His Pals, but where the former often wound itself up into hypnotic patterns, this one lets loose and aims for a grittier, more physical satisfaction. To that end the band keeps their songs strong and simple. They forgo showy instrumentation in favor of solid melodies and galloping, dancey beats and in the process give their music a tough, almost punk-like exterior. That's not to say they've cramped their country style any, they've just amplified it with the kind of swagger that was once synonymous with it.

samples:

• Little Sadie
• Hand Me Down My Walking Cane
• Some Happy Day

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19 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

It's no secret that Jandek is the oxymoronic title holder for most prominent musical recluse. With over 18 albums to his name in about 30 years of work, the musician has been as prolific as he has hidden. Only recently did he reveal himself to live audiences, beginning a welcome tour schedule that nevertheless has done little to diminish the mysteries buried beneath a quarter century under wraps. This, a reissue of his second album from 1981, presents for the first time since its initial pressing a vinyl copy of the album, which finds Jandek further refining his distinctly unrefined take on blues drift.

 

Jackpot

To call Jandek's sophomore effort a major step forward from Ready for the House—whose repeated guitar line carries throughout every song—would be a mistake. Indeed, the nine songs presented here all feature similar guitar ruminations as well, but with three years of work the album is slightly more dexterous in its interplay, even if the result is equally catatonic and harrowing.

The layout of the album is apparent from the opening, "Feathered Drums," which sees Jandek's detuned guitar abstracting the blues into a lonesome and highly individual interpretation. With his hollow vocals finding crevices in the guitar lines through which to sing his empty and cold poetry, Jandek's power is at once distinguishable, walking the cliched line between genius and insanity effortlessly and, better yet, genuinely. This is after all, like all of Jandek's albums, about as claustrophobically personal a music as anyone is likely to hear.

"I Knew You Would Leave" is the longest song on the album as well as its centerpiece, presenting over ten minutes of some of Jandek's most chilling and isolated dirges put to tape. Drawing out every line while his guitar punctuates certain statements with high-end twangs, the piece is utterly singular while still drawing on the emotional weight of so many other musical styles, like some twisted and dark Gospel sermon.

"Wild Strawberries" distorts the guitar line even more, proving a fine demonstration not only of how tight Jandek constrains himself in his forms, but also how much he manages to pull out of such similar material. With an almost raga-like quality, the piece glides and shifts instrumentally for an extended period before "Forgive Me" slows it down in favor of a solemn ballad. "You're the Best One" pulls as much from Gagaku and gamelan as it does folk.

Surely not an album that will win over any detractors, Six and Six is an impressive demonstration of Jandek's controlled vision. Utterly alone both in song and sound, the album is rich with depth that deserves deep and committed listening.

samples:

• Feathered Drums
• I Knew You Would Leave
• Wild Strawberries

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19 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

While the previously released (and reviewed) Perfectly Flawed disc demonstrated the variety of sounds that can be generated using only an Autoharp, here the Sutcliffe Jugend/Inertia (and former Bodychoke) member takes the approach to an almost Quixotic level:  17 full length discs using only the same instrument, recorded in a limited number of sessions.  While some near 17 hours of autoharp music may sound daunting, Tomkins takes enough variation in his approach, both physically and conceptually, to deliver a vastly different array of sounds.

 

Between Silences

The story of this release (outlined in the accompanying booklet) is that Tomkins bought an old and ragged autoharp from a yard sale one day and began experimenting with it, without tuning or restringing the instrument.  At the eve of a Sutcliffe Jugend show, his musical partner Paul Taylor had to pull out and, in an attempt to flesh out a live show alone, Tomkins discovered that layering loops of autoharp made for a good backing track.  The early experiments of this appear in this set, along with a great deal of newer material.

Limited to 20 copies in the first edition, the 17 discs that make up this set are all individually sleeved and titled to roughly give an indication of what is contained within.  Both Some Have Patterns and Slow Patterns, for example, are largely rhythmic loop-based recordings that build upon Spartan loops that become more and more complex as the tracks progress.  Bow is more of a concrete title, consisting of all pieces in which Tomkins plays the autoharp with a violin bow, giving more of a sustained strings characteristic to the sound, hinging on slow drawn out notes and subtle building in layers and duration.

Other discs are not labeled as much for their structure as it is for the feeling and emotions that went in to creating them.  Manic, for example, is some 66 minutes of frantic string plucks, crazed notes, and schizophrenic attempts at playing the instrument.  While the sound remains relatively calm, the playing style is the equivalent of the manic fury most have come to expect from the artist, though here in a more stripped down context. 

It would be remiss if Tomkins didn’t cater at least somewhat to the fans from the earlier Sutcliffe Jugend days, and though he has done quite a bit to show there is a lot more to his work than just brutality, he’s just like the rest of us and still likes to crank the noise once in awhile.  Into Noise are slower developing tracks of low end drone that build and swell across each of the three tracks into sustained roars recalling Hermann Nitsch’s aktion based symphonies, and Noise begins by pegging the overdrive to the max, the volume up so loud to almost obscure the autoharp’s characteristic tones under thick roars.  Rather than just staying with this approach, there are tracks of percussive and looped passages that give the rhythmic thump of classic death industrial, and other scraping and slicing tones that could be from the best of the slasher films. 

For most of this set, the post-performance processing and multitracking was kept to a minimum, most of the material was recorded live using only effects and loop pedals.  The final two discs of the set are the exception to this rule, as they are constructed from pieces and samples of the previous material.  Rewoven (Light Weave) is the lighter of the two discs, cutting up fragments of notes into near traditional rhythms, resembling so-called "electronica" to some extent before ending with vast ambient space.  The counterpoint Rewoven (Dark Weave) is the processed sounds from before built into dark ambient space:  the opening pieces are slow funeral drone and quiet, dark and reflective tones.  The closing segment is really a culmination of the near 16 hours that preceded it:  a 40 minute piece of violent roar, restrained noise, and thick ambience.

Sure, it has to be said that at 17 discs, this is a somewhat excessive and indulgent set.  However, each disc has enough variance in sound and style to let them stand on their own and not sound unnecessary or repetitive.  Listening to them back to back or even in close succession is a bit too daunting of a task but spread out or treated individually, each disc represents a variation of the pathological study of a single instrument.  It would probably be best for most to check out the single Perfectly Flawed disc first, but if that grabs others like it did me, this set should be sought out immediately afterwards.

samples:

• Noise Track 1
• Bow Track 3
• Rewoven (Dark Weave) Track 4

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