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As a former member of Skullflower and Ascension, Jaworzyn was one of the elite guitar manglers of the '90s noise rock UK scene before seemingly disappearing form the earth. Last year, along with a series of Skullflower reissues, Jaworzyn reappeared with a few singles embracing electronic instrumentation, while still pursuing that world of noise and entropy he did via six strings. Principles of Inertia is another manifestation of this electronic infatuation, with a joyful disregard for genre traditions or conventions.
The two pieces that open and close the album are the ones that flirt most with conventional electronic sounds, although in such a way that ignores expectations as far as structure and rhythm goes."Biorigged" is all nearly random synth beeps and noises, collaged together in something that vaguely resembles a rhythm, but too chaotic to settle in comfortably.A steady, distorted beat underpins everything, and while the changes are slight, there is a lot of variation throughout while keeping the same cyclic rhythm.
That schizoid version of techno appears again on the closing "Apocalypse," all erratic and jerky beats over machine gun like synth sequences.Again, it has an intentionally repetitive quality, but the ghostly synth backing that lurks in the distance makes for a more unsettling feel.Stuttering drum machines are also prevalent on "Festival of Lies," but positioned atop a crackling static backing and dissonant electronics, it almost has a harsh noise quality to it as opposed to a danceable one.
"Gland Collector" is also heavy steeped in rhythm, but again erratic, and with its spiky FM synth sound giving it a dirty edge.It does admittedly stay a bit too repetitive, however, with the changes being too miniscule.The digital only "Dawn of a New Ice Age" is the least focused on rhythm, and instead emphasizes sweeping, vaguely progressive rock synth pads.Like "Gland Collector," the electronics have that same raw, harsh FM digital sheen to them that put the piece on just the right side of noisy.
I was always a fan of Jaworzyn’s guitar noise based endeavors, and that feeling carries over into his newer electronic excursions.When I first went into this album expecting something more akin to conventional techno or electronic music, I was a bit disappointed at the randomness and overly repetitive rhythms.After sitting with the album for a bit, I started to look at it more objectively without any specific expectations, and that is when the strengths became evident.I would still love to hear some throwback guitar noise from him, but works like Principles of Inertia will definitely keep me listening to his work.
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Students of Decay label head Alex Cobb is back with two new albums: his latest ambient drone opus under his own name and a compilation of some of Taiga Remains’ limited-edition cassette releases from 2008. They feel oddly like companion pieces—though at least six years separate the two albums—as it seems like Cobb was always reaching for the same minimal, warm, and blurred aesthetic.  He just used different means to get there at different points in his career.  In any case, both albums are quite likable: while Marigold and Cable handily eclipses Works in both execution and composition, the Taiga album nicely offsets some of Cobb’s serene tendencies with a healthy dose of tape noise, which offers a charm all its own.
Although it does not sound like it, Marigold and Cable was recorded without the use of loops or synthesizers–just "live" processed guitar.  Normally, such feats do not impress me all that much, as how the album ultimately sounds is much more important than the difficulty or purity of the process involved in getting there.  In this case, however, I was genuinely taken aback by how lush and oceanic the opening "Famosa" sounded.  Lamentably, it lasts less than four minutes, however, and is followed by a less immediately striking piece ("Rain at the Fete") that is almost four times as long.  "Rain" is not without its appeal though, despite being less engulfing.  In fact, it is actually quite a bit more ambitious than its processor, sounding like a deliberate composition rather than just a waxing and waning swell of shimmering guitar noise.  Stars of the Lid is probably the obvious reference point for the pastoral drift of "Rain," but Cobb admirably puts a bit of his own spin on that aesthetic by beautifully blurring and smearing his notes.
As good as that sounds, Cobb errs on being a bit too tranquil and understated for my taste, so I prefer Marigold’s somewhat more varied second half.  On "Oversong," for example, Cobb is joined by Root Strata's Maxwell Croy on koto, which proves to be an excellent pairing.  Cobb's guitar shimmer recalls a more restrained version of "Famosa," but the harsher metallic texture of Croy's koto is the perfect foil for Alex’s sea of ambient bliss.  Also, there are some very nice oscillating overtone harmonies drifting about as well, making for an absolutely wonderful piece from start to finish.  Contrast and artfully buried tension always make good ambient drone even better.  The album closes with another lengthy piece ("Marine Layer") that revisits the bleary, long-form drift of "Rain," but much more satisfyingly, as its more pastoral tendencies are balanced out by a subtly dissonant haze of overtones and a bit of unpredictable-sounding feedback.
While I only truly liked three of the four pieces, that is quite an impressive success rate for an ambient drone album (for me, anyway).  I have no idea how to rank this within Cobb’s oeuvre, however, as I preferred the harsher textures of 2012’s Passage to Morning and have not heard much of his Taiga Remains back catalog.  That said, Alex definitely seems to be making impressive leaps as a composer with each new album, even as he veers away from my subjective comfort zone into calmer waters.  While I am tempted to grumble at length about how there should have been way more koto, I will instead concede that Marigold and Cable is ultimately a strong effort that should sate the appetite of anybody nostalgic for the golden age of Kranky drone, which is certainly a void that could use some filling.
Works for Cassette is culled from two separate releases, Beneath the Weeping Beeches (Ekhein) and Thereafter (Arbor), and is immediately differentiated from Marigold by the fact that Alex's guitar actually sounds like a guitar in the opening "Sup Pralad."  Despite that, he seems to have used the cassette medium to achieve a similar end, replacing willful blurring of sounds with tape hiss and the smearing effect of low-fidelity cassette recording.  The mood is quite a bit different though, as pieces like "There's Nothing" undercut Cobb’s drifting swells with quite a bit of rawness and trebly edge.  A significant change occurs with the lengthy third song, however, which is surprising, as it comes from the same tape as the previous pieces.  While "Skin, Leaves" still sounds quite lo-fi and smeared, it seems to work much better, as the gently oscillating cassette murk is perfectly suited for its glacially drifting melancholy.  It is a great piece, though its execution sounds quite primitive when compared to Cobb's current work.  A strong motif is a strong motif.
The final two pieces come from Thereafter and sound more refined than those from Beeches and quite a bit more like Cobb's more serene work under his own name.  Not entirely though, as there is still quite a bit of tape distortion to give Alex's warm swells of processed guitar a bit of harshness and unpredictability, particularly with the feedback that surges up into the higher registers.  All the now-familiar Cobb characteristics are otherwise quite firmly in place, however, as both "Winter Tai-Tung" and "Spring Shan-Lin-Shi" unfold in gently hallucinatory slow-motion and accrue complicated clouds of overtone harmonies as they progress.  The warmer, more open "Spring" is especially good, though I think "Skin, Leaves" probably still steals the show.
While I definitely enjoyed it, my feelings about Works for Cassette are somewhat ambiguous and conflicted.  On the one hand, Alex has evolved beyond this early material in a significant way, so it seems perplexing that anyone else would want to look backwards when there are better, more recent albums to enjoy.  On the other hand, these pieces are still good enough to make me feel like kind of a chump for missing out on them when they originally came out–I would have liked these tapes a lot in 2008 (and Beeches even had artwork by Solange from Natural Snow Buildings).  Also, it seems like a waste for only like 75 or 100 people to get to hear those tapes, so their reissue seems entirely warranted.  I guess the people who want to experience the more shadowy corners of Cobb's discography will now get their chance and can expect to be appropriately delighted, but Works is probably one for the fans only.
 
 
 
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My general lack of excitement about current glut of synthesizer albums is well-documented, but there are a handful of artists that I still look forward to and Koen Holtkamp is one of them. On this, his first solo album for Thrill Jockey, he delivers yet another fine set of vibrantly burbling analog sounds. While I do not necessarily love every single song on Motion, it certainly contains some of his best work and reaffirms my belief that Koen is in a class of his own when it comes to constructing dynamic, multi-layered synth opuses.
This album is a bit of a compositional divergence for Holtkamp, as the first three of these four songs were all composed and recorded in the studio.  While that is generally a very normal way to create an album for many, it is not for Koen, as most of his previous solo work has evolved from his live performances.  Initially, that seemed like a dubious move to me, as one of my favorite parts of Holtkamp's aesthetic has always been the way that his songs can gradually blossom from unpromising beginnings into something quite mesmerizing once all of the accumulating loops are finally in place.  Thankfully, that magic remains mostly intact–the only real change is that the pieces maybe develop a bit faster than they did previously, though they still all feel somewhat epic in scope.  Yet another of Motion's innovations is that working primarily in the studio inspired Koen to augment a few pieces with non-synth textures, most prominently with the distorted electric guitar melody in "Vert."
Astonishingly, I like electric guitars even less than vintage synthesizer textures (I am very picky), so "Vert" is my least favorite song on the album, though it is not bad by any means.  Koen's other instrumental divergence, "Crotales," is much more to my liking, augmenting its burbling, shimmering arpeggios with warm (virtual) stand-up bass and gently twinkling crotales.  The best pieces, however, are the synth-only bookends, "Between Visible Things" and the legitimately epic "Endlessness," which was not composed in the studio.
"Between Visible Things" begins with bright, gently phasing arpeggios over a slowly descending chord progression augmented by sustained electric guitar.  Gradually, however, Koen starts spiraling some sounds out of his previously rigid pattern and a melancholy bass burble appears to pull the cheeriness into darker and more emotionally resonant waters.  Once that happens, the piece is essentially firing on all cylinders and Koen expertly keeps the proceedings compelling by artfully adding and removing layers.  The 21-minute "Endlessness," on the other hand, captures Holtkamp at his long-form, snowballing zenith, evolving from swaying minimal drone into a complexly multi-layered crescendo with a very cool swooping melody.  While it is by far the best piece on Motion, "Endlessness" is basically a reprise of all of the same themes that fill the rest of the album–the sole key difference is that it is just much longer and more slow-burning.
As far as straight-up synthesizer albums go, this is definitely one of the best ones that I have heard in the last few years, but "Endlessness" (which takes up literally half of the album) is actually wonderful enough to make me forget that I am listening to a synth album altogether: sure, the textures still sound like synthesizers, but they feel like a mere tool used to create something of hypnotic, evolving beauty rather than the main attraction.  Though I suppose there is some irony in the fact that the best piece on this album is the sole piece that stuck to Koen's previous methods, the end result is quite possibly the best album of his career, so he is probably nearing the peak of his powers no matter how he chooses to work.
 
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This is Thielemans' first full-length for Miasmah as a solo artist, but he has previously turned up on the label as a guest on Kreng's debut album, which provides a fairly accurate window into the milieu from which he is coming: the darker, weirder fringes of Belgium's theater/improv/art scene. Unlike his fellow shadowy avant-garde eccentrics, however, Eric is primarily a drummer and Sprang is composed almost entirely of unusual percussion experiments. Needless to say, that is some rather niche territory to occupy in an already very niche scene, but this is quite a remarkably fascinating album for a one-man tour de force of skittering, plinking percussion.
Despite Eric's long history as a drummer (a jazz drummer even), it is quite difficult to find much on Sprang that sounds like it came from an actual drum kit.A few pieces, such as onomatopoetically titled "Sprrrrrrr," admittedly feature some subtle mallet- or brush-driven drum rhythms, but such touches are rarely (if ever) the focus.Rather, the bulk of Sprang sounds like the work of a whimsically deranged inventor who has created an arsenal of clattering, plinking, plonking, and rattling wind-up mechanical devices, which is certainly a hell of a lot cooler than a 40-minute drum solo would have been.The overall feel is definitely an understated, small-scale, fragile, and cinematic one, like something that might be playing during a Quay Brothers film.That rickety, dreamlike illusion is further enhanced by a number of small touches throughout the album, particularly on "Garden," which features a bittersweet whistled melody and a stumbling, disjointed glockenspiel motif.
While almost the entire album maintains a deliciously forlorn "wounded toy" aesthetic, the individual pieces cover an impressive amount of stylistic ground.  "Tptptptp," for example, sounds like a crazily virtuosic drum solo performed entirely with spoons and things lying around a kitchen, while "Kkkkrrrrr" sounds like someone playing an empty oil drum with a violin bow inside the violently creaking hull of a sinking ship.  And then there is "River," which resembles nothing less than a room full of malfunctioning, out-of-control antique clocks.
Conversely, the lengthiest (and perhaps best) piece on Sprang almost sounds conventionally musical, as "Post Soldiers' Hymn" combines an oddly lurching, stumbling beat with a humming, quavering drone.  In fact, there are even chord changes at one point, though Thielemans mostly uses his glockenspiel to create a hanging, oscillating haze of overtones.  Despite being the most "straight" piece on the album, it perversely manages to highlight just how ingenious Eric is, as even his concessions to things like beats and melodies manage to sound quite broken and unique.  I suppose drifting within shouting distance of normalcy probably provided me with the necessary context for appreciating the full aberrance and otherworldliness of Thielemans’ vision, which I ultimately appreciated immensely.  I guess that makes Sprang a minor masterpiece of sorts and an inspiring one at that, as it feels like a secret and surreal handmade thing that seems totally detached from the time and place that birthed it.
Samples:
 
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Hey.
Denovali Swingfest London 2014 starts on April 18th. We've just compiled a free download sampler for this year's event. 15 tracks of the 11 artists performing at the festival. Their sets will as always be as long as a proper club show (around an hour).
More information on both the event and the sampler can be found here.
Tracklist:
01. PIANO INTERRUPTED - Emoticon
from The Unified Field (Denovali Records)
02. ULRICH SCHNAUSS - A Ritual in Time and Death
from A Long Way To Fall (Scripted Realities / Domino)
03. HIDDEN ORCHESTRA - Dust
from Night Walks (Tru Thoughts / Denovali Records)
04. ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF - Mountains Crave
05. ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF - Epitaph of Theodor
from Ceremony (City Slang / Kning Disk / Other Music Recording Co.)
06. ORIGAMIBIRO - Odham's Standard
from Odham's Standard (Denovali Records)
07. THE HAXAN CLOAK - Dieu
from Excavation (Tri Angle)
08. PORTER RICKS - Nautical Dub
from Biokinetics (Type)
09. WITXES - Through Abraxas III
from A Fabric of Beliefs (Denovali Records)
10. PETRELS - Giulio's Throat
11. PETRELS - Canute
from Onkalo & Haeligewielle (Denovali Records)
12. ORIGAMIBIRO - Ada Deane
from Odham's Standard (Denovali Records)
13. PIANO INTERRUPTED - Cross Hands
from The Unified Field (Denovali Records)
14. JOHN LEMKE - Ivory Nights
from People Do (Denovali Records)
15. THOMAS KÖNER - Nuuk (Air)
from Nuuk (Mille Plateux)
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Big Blood – Fight for Your Dinner Vol. I – CD-R/Cassette (coming Soon) DTTR 041
Recordings from 1986-2014, Songs from comps, old family recordings,
alternate versions, new and unreleased songs all under one roof.
Hand made and screen printed. (17 songs, 53 minutes)
More information can be found here.
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Form Themselves Into Streams
Fourth in the Archival Series of Richard Skelton’s work, Form Themselves Into Streams was originally conceived and recorded during 2007 and 2008, at the same time as his Marking Time album.
The album was revisited in late 2013, during which some new elements were added. Originally conceived as one long recording, there are now five distinct, yet connected, pieces.
1. Carr (06.32)
2. Burn (04.35)
3. The Black Water (07.18)
4. Burning (06.28)
5. The Black Dub (07.58)
Total Running Time : 33m 23s
Ridgelines (Volume One)
Recordings made for two hills: 'Black Combe' in Cumbria, UK, and 'Ceapaigh an Bhaile' (Anglicised as 'Cappanawalla') in County Clare, Ireland.
Ridgelines (Volume One) consolidates two previous releases, Black Combe (2011) and Ridgelines (2012). It adds three previously unreleased versions of "Cappanawalla."
1. Black Combe (26:11)
2. Cappanawalla (05:18)
3. Cappanawalla (05:49)
4. Cappanawalla (12:47)
5. Black Combe (15:40)
6. Cappanawalla (15:16)
Total Running Time : 1.3hrs
Dyad
Originally released as a limited edition 'bonus disc' on the 9th of February, 2010, to accompany the reissue of Crow Autumn on Tompkins Square Records.
First released as Dyad (SRL19) as part of the *Skura boxed collection, on the 2nd of February, 2011.
1. A Broken Consort - Severance (05:20)
2. Saddleback - Gerroa Thursday (Richard Skelton Version) (06:14)
3. Heidika - Limn (Original Version) (03:10)
4. The Shape Leaves (Early Version) (06:53)
5. Heidika - Limn (Reworked) (03:15)
6. Machinefabriek & Richard Skelton - Daas (07:42)
Total Running Time : 32m 34s
More information can be found here.
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Comprised of eight tracks in 30 min, Periscope Blues is the culmination of a mission gone wrong. Music for the stranded, the lost, those backed into a corner with nowhere to go, or maybe a reflection of sad individuals panicking on a tropical vacation gone awry.
Somber yet very tense drifting off radar machine electronics that feel like a blistering sun beating down on decaying beach remains as time crawls on. That or the equivalent to working the grill summers at Jones Beach and stealing from the register just to get a little more...
More information can be found here.
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I Shall Die Here is the fourth full-length album by The Body. Sharing their moribund vision for I Shall Die Here with Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak), the tried and true sound of The Body is cut to pieces, mutilated by process and re-animated in a spectral state by the newly minted partnership.
The Body's brutal musical approach, engraved by drummer Lee Buford's colossal beats and Chip King's mad howl and bass-bladed guitar dirge, becomes something even more terrifying with Krlic's post-mortem ambiences serving as both baseline and outer limit. I Shall Die Here sonically serrates the remains of metal's already unidentifiable corpse and splays it amid tormented voices in shadow.
According to the band themselves, they sought to create something wholly experimental with I Shall Die Here. In the course of its creation and recreation, they have attained that rare artistic goal: an album with few precedents and a paradigm shift richly realized. Bobby Krlic's downcast electronic visions laces seamlessly into The Body's already volatile mix of fissured doom metal and fused verbal spaces. The onset of a new music emerges with I Shall Die Here, and in its shifts, shadows, and reeling voices, the darkest possible formulation of electronic music has been realized.
More information can be found here.
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Robot Records’ three-CD retrospective of Jacques Lejeune’s music from the early 1970s and 1980s contains over three hours of heady electronic noise, surreal acoustic transformations, deconstructed field recordings, and disorienting aural splutter. It is a collection that spans 14 years and six electroacoustic compositions: one composed for ballet and inspired by Snow White, another inspired by the myth of Icarus, and others by landscapes, symphonic form, and cyclical movement, among other things. They flash with theatrical flair, jump unpredictably through minute variations, and churn chaotically, tossing fabricated scree and instrumental slag into the air. A 28 page bilingual booklet filled with photographs, drawings, and program notes accompanies the set, along with a 32 page booklet of interpretive poetry. In them, Lejeune, Alain Morin, and Yak Rivais offer up remarkably precise interpretations for each of the pieces, but the writing works much better as a rough guide to the visually evocative clamor of Lejeune’s electric transmissions.
Jacques Lejeune’s musical career began auspiciously, at the famous Schola Cantorum de Paris, a private music school in the city’s Latin Quarter whose alumni include Edgard Varèse and Erik Satie. From there, he moved to the Conservatoire National Supérieur, where Adolphe Sax had once taught and where Igor Wakhévitch would eventually study, and labored under the tutelage of Pierre Schaeffer. He finished his education with François Bayle at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, then joined the GRM in 1968 and became director of the Cellue de la Musique pour L’Image, or The Department of Music for Images, responsible for the production of sound and music for both theater and television.
By 1971 he had finished his first major composition, Cri, which premiered at the Royan Festival in 1972. It was Lejuene’s introduction to France and the first indication that his stint in the Images Department at the GRM had been as formative as the rest of his education.
Early on, Cri delivers brief, sometimes confounding glimpses of particular places and circumstances. Those images are held in focus just long enough to be recognized and then swept away: a marching band stomps through a busy street in the first movement, then disappears into the sound of French horns warming up before a performance; frogs croak in concert with crickets as sheets of tape noise flutter by imitating the sound of water; people laugh and conversations crash against bursting radio signals and gusts of analog distortion. In the second movement entire sentences survive, accompanied by reverse audio and a small gaggle of test tones. Exclamations leap out of the commotion and a radio transmission about Pakistan and the United States floats smoothly by, like a small town seen from the window of a passing train.
Lejeune introduces the skull-pounding sounds of a construction site later in the piece, but not before dampening the mood with desperate cries, rushing sirens, and the sinister crack of jackboots on concrete. The final movement is similarly ominous, though not as visually striking. Synthetic tones and surface noises replace the recognizable audio of the previous movements, and these become louder and gain more and more momentum until, near the finale, they crescendo in one long animal-like groan. The final minutes are calmer and more reflective, like a single wide-angle shot of the entire composition. The camera holds its gaze as people walk obliviously through the frame, and then the shot fades to a quiet, contemplative black.
Pieces like Parages, finished two years later, and Symphonie au bord d’un paysage, completed in 1981, also contain familiar worldly fragments, but in both works Lejeune so thoroughly transfigures his sounds that the familiar in them disappears. The focus shifts from the presentation of images to their transformation. Seagulls mix with squawking machines and squeaky hinges during one small section of Parages, calling our attention to the quiet pleasure of household noises. Moments later a series of sine waves and a brief flute passage swallow an entire church organ whole. Symphonie moves through several such transformations too: turntables start and stop, loose floorboards bend and creak under the weight of someone’s shoes, and numerous electronic reverberations zip like lightning through the mix. A few such reverberations repeat themselves, but most erupt in seemingly improvised and unrepeatable fits. Parages is particularly varied, moving at such a pace and with such variation that getting lost among its many mutations is inevitable.
It is an impressive and dynamic piece, but Robot could have easily named the collection after 1975’s Blanche-Neige, Lejeune’s incredible production for Fantasmes, ou l’histoire de Blanche-Neige, a ballet adapted from the Grimm Brothers’ version of Snow White by Yves Boudier and Catherine Escarret. Instead of simply composing music for the ballet, Lejeune creates an entirely self-sufficient audio version of the fairytale, using vocal snippets, sounds effects, and collaged motifs to represent the characters, places, and actions in the story. We can hear birds crying in the forest and monsters walking secretly in the dark during "Solitude of Snow White in the Nocturnal Forest," and Snow White, made wholly present by the inclusion of just a few fragmented sounds, gasps through every four tense minutes of it, panicking in response to the insects and night creatures that crawl by. Lejeune plunges into Snow White’s head and makes the tightness in her chest palpable one small detail at a time.
"The Hunter’s Race Dragging Snow White," on the other hand, gallops along quickly, pitched forward by vocal samples clipped so short they read as street percussion. Pots and pans and buckets belch muted vowels and abbreviated exclamations to the tune of sine waves and low, agitated drones. It is a frightening sequence, effective because all of its elements—the horse, the hunter, the sudden movements, Snow White’s confusion, and the gnarled forest path—are all depicted with perfect clarity.
Lejeune’s touch is delicate enough to handle light, color, and humor too. He takes pianos, harps, random stringed instruments, and bells to the chopping block, and then turns them into wavy, dream-like apparitions. During Snow White’s funeral, he uses awkward, honking voices to represent the dwarfs’ lamentations, rather than the usual melancholic singing. In place of the expected solemn dirge we get a line of mechanical toys bleating a lost and tuneless song. It’s a small bit of comedic relief, but a welcome one. Later, as the evil queen approaches her death, Lejeune cuts triumphant drums against operatic vocals modified to portray screams. It’s the sound of the queen protesting on the way to her execution, histrionic and larger than life. That spectacle carries through to the conclusion, where echoes of the prince’s earlier scenes are married to sounds used during Snow White’s solo appearances. The ballet ends happily, with birds singing and the happy couple riding off into a wobbly, harp-filled sunset—it’s a perfect storybook ending to a piece of music that, more than anything else, behaves like a story.
For that reason, nothing else in the set sounds quite like Blanche-Neige. As with Parages and Symphonie, Les palpitations de la forêt, from 1985, includes several recognizable snippets among its battery of vibrations, but all the drama consists in the way those snippets are transformed, not in what they represent. The same can be said of 1979’s Entre terre et ciel. In these shorter pieces (still almost half an hour long) Lejeune steps out of the role of director and into the role of scientist. He places his material under a microscope, analyses the forces at play, then smashes everything to atoms, stretching some sounds to oblivion and restoring others to a semi-familiar state. The crux of the music consists in the elemental features revealed by this process: space, time, density, frequency, repetition, variation, volume, and memory all come to the fore; representation, melody, and narrative recede into the background. The landscapes and human references are still present—small streams, duck calls, muted fireworks, and so on—but they’re at the service of these building blocks.
Other composers from the GRM have used similar techniques in their work, as the recent glut of GRM reissues can attest. Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, Jean-Claude Risset, and many others experimented with pre-recorded and acousmatic sounds, using them to play with form and to extend their musical vocabulary to regions far beyond the reach of acoustic instruments and traditional notation. In that sense, Jacques Lejeune’s music is part of an experimental tradition that took root in France during the 1940s. He learned his craft from the musicians and inventors responsible for its development and, to some degree, carried their interests and concerns into his own work. But his treatment of images and his focus on the theatrical and dramatic potential of musique concrète make him unique.
By gathering of all these pieces into one place, Robot has emphasized that uniqueness in a way that a single LP release, or even a triple gatefold deluxe LP release, couldn’t. The chronological presentation of Lejeune’s work, in combination with the remastered audio and uninterrupted playback, makes approaching and appreciating the music easier. The book of poetry and the program notes, despite their sometimes labyrinthine and overwrought language, do the same. The result is a smartly presented, perfectly focused snapshot of one of the GRM’s lesser known members, one that has long deserved such a considerate, thorough, and excellent retrospective.
samples:
- "The Icarus Cycle," from Parages
- "The Hunter's Race Dragging Snow White," from Blanche-Neige
- "Animated," from Symphonie au bord d'un paysage
 
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Christopher King, the artist behind Symbol, has been prolific for a number of years, as the founding member and guitarist for This Will Destroy You, creating film scores, and spending time in other local Austin bands. Online Architecture, however, is his first truly solo release. Across six compositions juxtaposing lush electronics with decaying analog media, the album has a familiar warmth while never shaking the feeling of something sinister just beneath the surface.
King intentionally dubbed his recordings from modular synthesizers and effects onto decaying 1/4" and 1/2" inch magnetic tape, utilizing the fragmenting sound as an instrument unto itself, a natural form of post-production that no software plug-in could fully approximate.Inevitably there are some parallels to be drawn to William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, but the two are completely distinct and separate entities that happen to use a similar technique.
The opening piece, "Tracer," is probably the lightest one.What sounds like it could almost be guitar is mixed with keyboards and covered in a sun-baked, crumbling layer of reverb.Both due to its instrumentation and its decrepit source material, it feels like revisiting a collection faded memories from the late 1970s.Beyond that things start to get a bit more unsettling.
"Shadow Harvesting" sits amid a lo-fi ambience, crackling tape and mechanical sounds covering an organ-like repeating synth pattern.Compared to "Tracer," it is a bit more skeletal, and because of this it brings a sort of insinuated creepiness that reappears throughout the album."New China" comes together similarly, with sad synth tones forming the foundation with almost rhythmic loops defining the rest of the piece.
Things do slip more into dissonance once "Syn Cron" hits its stride: a noisy, almost guitar like sound leads the way, with other, more gentle layers lightly drifting from channel to channel.The more ragged sounds hide low in the mix on "Clear Passage," beneath shimmering, string-like tones and soft electronic passages.The long closing piece, "Lineage," initially has a more malignant feel through some sinister synth pulses at its introduction, but later drifts into a sad, yet hazy and hallucinogenic outro.
King’s first release as Symbol is hard to consider a debut given his involvement in many other bands and projects, and the influence of those projects resonate in Online Architecture.Complex, moody, and fascinating, it is the use of analog decay and damage that give this album its distinct identity, and help it to stand out brilliantly amongst so many other synth heavy records.
samples:
 
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