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Pauline Oliveros' best-known and influential work is 1989's Deep Listening, recorded in a massive, reverberant cistern.  In the years since that landmark effort, Pauline has founded The Deep Listening Institute, the Deep Listening Band, and performed many mesmerizing concerts in her unending crusade to explore the untapped potential of space, place, and (of course) reverberation.  These two previously unreleased albums capture some of the final recordings her band made with (the late) long-term collaborator/pianist/electronics wizard David Gamper. Although both performances occurred over the course of a January 2011 Seattle residency, they almost sound like two completely different bands: Octagonal Polyphony luxuriates in sublime, slow-motion drones while Great Howl becomes pretty nerve-jangling.
Releasing actual albums has always been something of a tricky and flawed situation for the Deep Listening Band, as the way that sound is experienced is a very large part of their art and that can be quite site-specific.  Some aspects of their vision translate well, such as the 45-second reverb of Deep Listening's cistern or the way that overlapping layers blur together and interact.  However, approximating the omnidirectional immersion of an actual concert seems pretty damn impossible due to the unusual number and location of the speakers involved.  And then, of course, there is the added impact of the band's self-designed Expanded Instrument System (EIS), which I do not understand at all, but seems to mess with both time and space and allow players to "perform in the past, present, and future simultaneously."  The gist is that it sounds like the band is a hell of a lot larger than it actually is (a trio).  Trombonist Stuart Dempster actually states in the liner notes that countless hours of listening, re-listening, mixing, and remixing managed to capture a hint of the experience and that seems like a plausible estimate to me.  This music doesn't strike me from all directions at once, but it undeniably has a unique presence and power.  It doesn't hurt that the music itself is pretty amazing too.
"Bell Dance," the first of two pieces on Octagonal Polyphony, is appropriately based upon a rippling lattice of twinkling, chiming bells.  It is not especially dance-able though, as it is filled out by lengthy sustained tones from woodwinds and Dempster's trombone.  Gradually, however, it becomes more and more disorienting, as occasional dissonances start to creep in and something that sounds like a plucked violin begins playing an insistent motif that makes it all sound like a badly derailed Steve Reich piece.  While it undeniably achieves an appealing degree of complexity and unpredictability, it gets a bit too bombastic and trombone-heavy for my liking at about the halfway point.  It regains some momentum briefly though, as a snarled surge of didgeridoo heralds quite a cacophonous interlude.  The last five minutes or so end up being pretty weird, jumbled, and dissonant, leaving me a bit conflicted about the piece.  I think the actual content is ultimately a bit lacking, but it is so dense, multilayered, and dynamic that it almost overcomes that...almost.  I definitely give them credit for making didgeridoos sound scary and heavy though.
"Dreamport" is built upon a low, undulating throb and some shimmering, uncomfortably dense accordion harmonies.  Given the involvement of the EIS, it is pretty impossible to figure out who is playing what and when, but the piece quickly becomes incredibly dense and vibrant with overlapping textures and overtones.  Though I can pick out Dempster's trombone and some very ominous didgeridoos, it achieves such a quavering, skittering immensity within minutes that individual instruments become irrelevant.  More importantly, it is an absolutely wonderful piece of music–I could not be happier that it unfolds for 22-minutes and found myself gradually turning it up louder and louder.  While "Dreamport" ostensibly adheres to the structure of drone music, it is so massive, dynamic, and uneasy that it bears almost no resemblance to most other work in the genre.  To a certain degree, it captures the Deep Listening Band at their sustained best, but even that pales a bit when compared to the more disturbed and visceral companion effort discussed below.
Great Howl at Town Hall deceptively begins in very similar droning fashion to Octagonal Polyphony, as "Town Haul" opens with throbbing drones, growling didgeridoo, and deep, accordion-produced breath-like noises.  However, the periphery is a bit more jagged and unhinged: amidst the massing sustained tones, there are all kinds of sharp whines and squeaks, as well as various unidentifiable strangled squawks. By the halfway point, it ceases sounding like drone at all and more closely resembles an especially hallucinatory horror film soundtrack...and then it continues to intensify.  By the end, I started to seriously wonder if I was about to be attacked by a flock or swarm of something ill-intentioned.  That dissonant, uneasy atmosphere pretty much sticks around for entire album, though the tension admittedly ebbs and flows quite a bit (it would be overwhelmingly uncomfortable otherwise).
"Great Haul" is initially a bit less disquieting, as it merely sounds deranged rather than menacing: it has an odd, lurching rhythm and the blurting music sounds drunk, chromatic, and sometimes eerily speech-like (presumably some kind of neat trombone/wah-wah pedal trick).  It is nevertheless an incredibly complicated piece and various layers of field recordings and dissonant string-like noises rapidly escalate into a crescendo that is about as apocalyptic and overwhelming as it gets.  It must have been very memorable and surreal for concert attendees to experience such face-melting intensity from a trio of senior citizens armed with accordions and trombones.  Though it eventually subsides into a shimmering coda with lingering flashes of dissonance, it is essentially 12-and-a-half minutes of unbridled awesomeness that is scarier and more innovative than 95% of the extreme music being made today.
The longer "Great Horned Howl" starts off on an unexpectedly pastoral note, as Gamper's piano ripples amiably without any significant threat of being overwhelmed by dissonance.  Notably, he manages to simultaneously call to mind both Steve Reich and Conlon Nancarrow, which is an unusual feat indeed (his Reich-ian repeating patterns start to multiply and some are sped-up and pitch-shifted to an inhuman degree).  Around the midpoint, things settle into a strange gibbering and skittering lull before getting very weird indeed.  I wish I could I say knew what was going on, but I definitely do not–all I know as that the piece begins being populated with cartoon voices and Halloween sound effects like howling wolves and cackling witches and that it is all bat-shit crazy.  I think there may also be some monkeys and birds thrown into the mix as well.  While I appreciate being totally blind-sided and wrong-footed by a piece of music, it is simply too unhinged and outré even for me (especially at nearly 20-minutes long).
The album closes with "Growl Howl" (someone in the band is clearly fond of absurdist wordplay), which revisits the skittering/gibbering chromatic aesthetic of the previous piece, sans sound effects.  Then it unexpectedly snowballs into a brief crescendo even more intense than that of "Great Haul," complete with jarring aftershocks.  It is probably one of the heaviest things that I have ever heard, given its context and suddenness.  Curiously, things become subdued, mournful, and strangely beautiful after the outburst, though an ominous rumbling quickly threatens to envelope my welcome respite of conventional beauty.  The rumbles eventually triumph, but the doomed, melancholy motif somehow becomes even more moving as it is being consumed.  The last five minutes of the piece don't quite ever recapture either the visceral impact or the emotional resonance of the preceding ten, but Oliveros' uneasily dissonant accordion settles into a steady rhythm that calls to mind slow, deep breaths, ending the album in a completely appropriate way (like recovering from a traumatic scare or other harrowing experience).
Normal rules for music criticism don't quite feel like they apply to these albums, as they seem somehow more vivid and multi-dimensional than other music: the content is almost secondary to the immensity and vibrancy of the sounds being created.  While neither album is an unqualified success and the trio make a number of musical decisions that I am not entirely fond of, I am nevertheless left feeling like that does not matter terribly much at all.  In fact, I feel like I indirectly experienced something rather monumental–when Dempster, Oliveros, and Gamper (along with unsung hero/engineer Michael McCrea) are at their best, they are absolutely staggering and seem more like a force of nature than a band.  The Deep Listening Band was (is?) a wholly unique phenomenon: while it is hardly a secret that bizarre and dissonant avant-garde music is infinitely more palatable when coupled with presence, immediacy, and gut-level power, no one else has perfected that difficult balance quite as beautifully as this.
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Named after the groundbreaking 1926 film by Kenji Mizoguchi, this collaboration opens with a very familiar sound found in the first two Vikki Jackman albums: Vikki on piano. Once again it is a slow, delicate, and serene melody, but it is brief and a quite deceptive introduction to the album, conceptually. There is very little of the bright piano as the record unfolds.
private release via Faraway Press
While I am versed on Andrew Chalk, I don't have any frame of reference for Jean-Noel Rebilly. Chalk is certainly versatile enough to manipulate moods and feelings with what sounds like the slightest changes in textures and timbre. A Paper Doll's Whisper of Spring shares the very direct characteristic of Vikki's most recent solo album, Whispering Pages: the songs vary in length but are all grounded in a relatively short time, unlike the sidelong pieces on her first album, Of Beauty Reminiscing, where the whole feel was far more dreamlike. Paper Doll's Whisper... is not as bright as Whispering Pages, however, and is somewhat odd to listen to this time of year as the summer is beginning.
Great Britain isn't exactly known for its pleasant weather and this spring has been an exceptionally grey and rainy one, so it's probably no surprise that this album is a product of the winter and cold spring. There's a sense of sadness and longing, which is quite a change from what I considered was an uplifting album. Following the under a minute opening "Mist," the trio present two pieces absent of a recognizable piano. "Nami" is a gorgeous interplay with almost inaudible low rumblings, matched with long, echoing sounds that seem to whisper every now and again, while what sounds like a plucked instrument of some sort is providing the only element that hints at melody. More importantly is the sort of feeling of sorrow, which is something I wasn't expecting. "Snowflake," which follows, has a sense of longing, perhaps a sleep that desires to wake up soon.
It isn't until "Magnolia" where the piano is identifiably audible again. If "Snowflake" is the longing to wake up, "Magnolia" is certainly the break of day. On this beautiful album centerpiece, it seems like the piano is only accompanied by the faint sounds of a wind instrument, possibly a clarinet, and the echoes of the piano looping back. All around is a delicate sense of stillness but the mood is far more uplifting and alive with hope.
What follows seems more like sketches, as each of the four remaining songs are extremely brief at around four minutes and under. With music this patient, a two or three minute piece doesn't have the time to fully develop, especially in "Wandering," where the echoes seem to quiet down to almost nothing in the middle and swell back up again before it fades out, almost unnaturally. "Plume" sounds like the reintroduction of the clarinet that may have been heard in "Magnolia," with a very unnerving and dissonant play between that, the piano, and possibly a very low frequency bass. This piece is under two minutes and also fades unnaturally, suggesting that it could have gone on much longer with much less than desirable results. Now I'm left with the sense of longing for something that could have become out of that session which could have been more rewarding as a much longer and more developed piece.
"Whispers" closes the album appropriately with a play between a softer, more somber piano and string-like accompaniment, and the mood is far more of a sunset than the feeling of sunrise on "Magnolia." While I do enjoy it and can appreciate its beauty I feel like we got to this point a little too fast. Even though the album is nearly 45 minutes, Paper Doll's Whisper... almost seems like it went by too quickly.
Once again the duo of Jackman and Chalk have assembled an amazingly special and personal package, this one is a fold out constructed of an embossed paper, affixed artwork, and a beautiful hand crafted inside with a vellum lining. Unfortunately this is now sold out at the source, so the only resources to locate the album at this point are stores and auctions. I hope that this trio meets again, however, to more fully develop some of what seems like sketch-work that characterizes the last bits of the album.
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An enigmatic project out of the wilds of Madison, Wisconsin, this duo, with connections to the likes of Kinit Her, Burial Hex, and many more projects, weave together an unlikely combination of medieval folk, post-rock, and electronic sounds into two side-long pieces that channel a variety of moods, though most of them are cast with some level of darkness.
The A side of this vinyl, "Helix I," is where the medieval vibe comes through most.Through twisted strings, deep cello and trumpet fanfares, there is a sense of time long past emanating throughout, but devoid of any renaissance fair type clichés.Attention is eventually drawn towards passages of guitar, with the strings sinking back into a droning, bleak backing track.The individual instruments meld together into a cold wall of sonic abstraction, becoming more and more pensive as the piece concludes.
The flip side, "Helix II," picks up with unidentifiable sound sources creating a ghostly fog of sound.The occasional higher register note occasionally pierces through the mostly bass heavy drone, but only to be pulled in again.With the appearance of distant, marching rhythms a dramatic flair definitely can be heard, reaching a restrained peak of bombast before pulling back.
Mostly naked, strummed guitar chords fill up this space, with field recordings of thunderstorms and distant trumpets keeping everything rather bleak.Surprisingly, what sounds like an electric guitar kicks in, giving a distinctly modern feel to the song, especially when compared to the other side.The addition of a repeating, percussive pulse is where things start to feel more conventional, but in a good way.
With one half feeling like a bizarre take on medieval folk sounds, and the other bringing up bits of new wave rhythm and synth, Yesodic Helices could be a directionless mess, but the end product is anything but.Drastically different sounds and moods abound, but they all come together in a beautiful, if dark and murky, pair of ghostly long-form pieces that transcend genre labels.
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The subharcord is an early electronic instrument designed in East Germany during the 1960s. Essentially a subharmonic sound generator, its main function was to be a sound effects generator for TV and film. Only three of the original eight machines are thought to exist, and Bretschneider used one of them in June of 2007 (later remixed and edited in 2011) to create the material that makes up this single piece, a multifaceted composition that stays compelling throughout its entire 37-minute duration.
A single piece broken into eight logical segments, Kippschwingungen works as a long-form composition as well as in smaller, track-sized bites, something that is rare in this world of sound art.It does not require to be heard in full, nor does it sink off into the background if attention is not focused solely on it.
The short opening passage, a monochromatic outburst of wet motor noise panning from side to side, sets the stage for what comes.The following part adds sweeping layers of nasal electronic sound, slowly building into what sounds more like the work of a traditional synthesizer.Slowly but surely a layer of dry clicks and pops arise, balanced precariously between glitches and true rhythmic structures.
These clicks become a dominant motif through the next few movements, an almost jarring outburst that sounds like an over-amplified needle piercing cloth.What sounds like began life as static eventually becomes a full-fledged rhythm, locking into an identifiable structure as a quiet layer of ambient electronics surrounds it.These proto-beats get deeper and rawer, becoming an approximation of a 909 kick drum thump that is panned from side to side.
The textures shift from identifiable rhythms to a jackhammer-like outburst of noise. While it is a thin, brittle sound, the subharcord shows that it was capable of serving its original, sound effect generating purpose.Eventually the repeated pulses slow down, breaking apart like an overworked engine.
The final three segments wander in a more abrasive direction, with the rhythmic throb resembling a helicopter being subjected to an array of processing and effects, staying static but evolving at the same time.Finally the piece comes to its conclusion first as a rapid fire, disorienting blast of sound and then finally a roaring, raw sine wave.
Kippschwingungen is definitely a concept album, but one that manages to cross-over from the often stoic, academic world of sound art and into an abstract, yet memorable piece of electronic music.With the admittedly odd uses of rhythms and textures, there becomes a certain sense of, for lack of a better term, catchiness that comes out.It is this that makes Bretschneider's album stand out amidst a crowd of similar, but less compelling practitioners.
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Originally released to raise money for recording the next Swans studio album, this live album has been repackaged and trimmed down for mass consumption. Capturing the group at one of its many peaks, it provides a thrilling document for those who paid witness or for those poor unfortunates who found themselves unable to attend any of the shows. A wide range of older classics, recent songs and new semi-improvised works make up the set list. If anyone still doubted the sincerity or legitimacy of the reformed Swans, this will silence all arguments.
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Originally released to raise money for recording the next Swans studio album, this live album has been repackaged and trimmed down for mass consumption. Capturing the group at one of its many peaks, it provides a thrilling document for those who paid witness or for those poor unfortunates who found themselves unable to attend any of the shows. A wide range of older classics, recent songs and new semi-improvised works make up the set list. If anyone still doubted the sincerity or legitimacy of the reformed Swans, this will silence all arguments.
Beginning with "No Words No Thoughts" from the mighty "comeback" album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, it is easy to hear how the already lengthy intro segment had elongated and mutated into a piece of its own. The album plays for about 15 minutes before "No Words No Thoughts" actually kicks in properly and already the mood is white hot. Swans have always been able to transport me and this is no exception as I am dropped back into that same head space as I was on the 22nd of October last year.
Slowing their pace, the group move through a stunning rendition of "Jim" (where Christoph Hahn’s slide guitar almost brings me to my knees) before unleashing a monster in the form of "Beautiful Child." The twin percussion of Phil Puleo and Thor Harris drive the song on with a ferocity that should be hard to match but the rest of the group follow them, matching them beat for beat and sweat and for sweat. Michael Gira’s voice sounds a bit rough here and throughout the album, undoubtedly due to the strain of giving it his all every night. However, while this should result in a flawed listening experience, it adds to the frantic feeling running through the performance. Other older songs get an airing but it is this and the "Sex God Sex" which stand out in terms of intensity.
This brings me to the new songs, the ones that I was most excited about hearing when these discs landed. All are embryonic jams here (Gira’s commentary on the demo recordings from the first edition suggest that much of the new material on the live album has been reworked or added to) but they show that the spark that ignited the new incarnation of Swans is far from extinguished. Two of the new pieces are tacked on to the beginning of older songs; "The Seer" explodes into "I Crawled," whereas the scorching riot of "93 Ave. B Blues" suddenly drops out into the tender "Little Mouth." Gira still knows how to confound expectations. Unfortunately, one of the new songs played on the tour, "Avatar," was left off the album (though it will be on the next studio album judging from what Gira has been saying).
The centerpiece of We Rose from Our Bed with the Sun in Our Head is "The Apostate," a stand-alone piece which is truly immense (it kept getting bigger and bigger as the tour went on and here it clocks in at just under 17 minutes). Starting like a bastard sibling of the B-side of Einstürzende Neubauten’s album Fuenf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala before nearly launching off into space, I am sorry that the Dublin gig was not at the end of the tour so I could have heard this in the flesh. As Gira ad libs the lyrics over an evolving and complex backing, it is hard not to stop what I am doing and stare dumbfounded at the stereo’s display. If the new album has even a quarter of this power, I will be ecstatic.
Since I received the first edition of this album some months ago, I have played the crap out of it. To me, it is up there with Swans Are Dead and Public Castration Is a Good Idea, forming a holy trinity of live albums (and to me, the definitive Swans sound). It is great to see this getting an airing beyond those who were lucky enough to be on the internet at the time of its original release. While the solo demo recordings for the new album have been left off this version, the meat is still here.
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Previously, Gregory Scharpen’s work as Thomas Carnacki has been strange in an unsettling way, finding haunted parts of the psyche and probing them relentlessly. For this latest album, the music retains its strangeness but now there is a fantastic, warm feeling running through the pieces. There remains a darkness lurking beneath the surface but Scharpen’s humor is more evident now than before.
 
Alethiometer Records
Inspired by Matmos’ album The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, Scharpen created an album of pieces dedicated to friends and colleagues. The germ of this album can be found on the tribute compilation, Irreplaceable Hand, a fundraiser for Dax Pierson who was paralyzed in 2005. "Bedtime Story for the Most Fragrant Room in the Ward (for Dax)" from that album appears here and forms a poignant focal point for The Oar of Panmuphle. Bearing in mind that this is probably the oldest piece on the album, it sounds like classic Thomas Carnacki as indeterminate clicks, clacks, taps and rattles chatter over an intermittent metallic bowing.
As usual with Scharpen’s work, there are oblique and not-so-oblique references to Surrealism and decadent literature; indeed, the title of the album alludes to one of the characters in Alfred Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician. One of the best such bits comes early in the album with a dusty loop of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ "I Put a Spell on You" forming the backbone of "Death Dance of the Ant Queen (for Dawn)." The pure bad-ass rhythm and the original song’s pseudo-occult subject matter fit perfectly with Scharpen’s approach to music, especially as the sample begins to break down and recombine in unfamiliar patterns as Scharpen takes the everyday and shows us a hidden facet of it.
Elsewhere, it feels like Scharpen is doing the opposite by using commonplace references to obscure things; many of the pieces seem to use in-jokes or private references as starting points. There are a number of rather odd inclusions that do not entirely make sense to an outsider such as part of a lecture by Jon Ronson about his book The Men Who Stare at Goats on the aforementioned "Bedtime Story…" Undoubtedly the weirdest sample appears on "The Last Trip to Clown Town (for Matt)," a queasy vocal refrain by (presumably) a clown which probably raises a smile on Matt Waldron’s face but I find it perplexing and even alienating (it is definitely annoying!). Yet, as irritating as that particular sample is, the piece works terrifically well within the confines of this strange, strange album.
This personal approach to his music, or at the very least personalised approach, has opened up Scharpen’s music beyond the already vibrant forms it inhabited. Scharpen has hinted that there is at least another album of similar works in progress and I am interested to hear the results of further experiments as The Oar of Panmuphle is utterly beguiling.
samples:
- Bedtime Story for the Most Fragrant Room in the Ward (for Dax)
- The Last Trip to Clown Town (for Matt)
- Encoded for the One-Half, and Not the Many (for Kristin)
 
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This debut release from Matt Harries as Brennendes Gehirn is a veritable storm of turbulent noises, ranging from freeform sketches to the kind of almost-danceable rhythms that I would expect from classic albums from Scorn. Bleakly psychedelic sounds reverberate and bump off each other like living creatures as Harries builds a magnificent range of pieces from the sort of junk sounds that can easily be boring or clichéd in less skilled hands.
 
The curtains of noise that form "Chorea Imagnativa Aestimativa" hide a number of items from us. What are those strange voices saying? What is that haunting bell-like vibration? Where are we and is it safe? Harries drops us into a fog of pure sound and the disorientation created by the piece sets the tone for the rest of Epidemics of the Modern Age. Forms emerge from the haze, insectoid and disturbing. "Over Man and Beast His Flaming Sword" continues this apocalyptic cacophony, intensifying and distilling the music into sheets of glorious and almost painful noise.
Suddenly, Harries’ almost impenetrable wall of sound shatters on "Annihilation (Awakens New Life)" to reveal a soothing but slightly unnerving loop of strummed harp and percussion. The surprise use of melody and structure after the amorphous pieces that come earlier in the album reinforces the power of both approaches. While a whole album of in-the-red volume is always welcome, Harries has made something far stronger than just another noise album. He pushes further with "Elegie für Clemens Scheitz," which sounds like someone in an empty car park playing a Tricky album slowed down to an oily, grimy funk. Shimmers of feedback cut through the sluggish, bass-heavy rhythm as queer voices seem to emerge from the air. It is a terrific track to say the least.
Harries returns to a more harsh noise aesthetic for "Chorea Sancti Viti." The longest piece of the album delves into the depths excavated many years ago by Lustmord. I cannot say it is my favorite piece on Epidemics of the Modern Age but I much prefer it to most of that dark ambient malarkey that gets released, possibly because Harries does not allow it to remain too ambient and actively gets me by the ears and forces me to listen to his work. A metallic ringing, like the resonance of a huge drill, comes out of the speakers in waves. The shimmering sound creates a claustrophobic audio net and seems to get tighter and tighter as the piece progresses. It is a hell of a way to finish off, especially given the movement of some of the earlier pieces.
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Despite being one of the most visionary and iconoclastic artists to emerge from the early days of electronic music (as well as a rather fascinating and enigmatic person), Daphne Oram has only recently (and posthumously) begun to get the recognition she deserves.  Unlike the similarly wonderful and massive Oramics compilation from 2010, The Oram Tapes is comprised of largely unheard work from Daphne's mountainous tape archive that is currently being sifted through at Goldsmiths College.  That naturally means a tendency towards sketches and excepts, but it also means that it is sometimes alternately weirder, harsher, better, and more intimate than its predecessor.
Interestingly, Daphne is most famous for co-founding the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, which used innovative technology and methods to create striking, otherworldly sound effects for shows like Dr. Who.  In fact, all of the pictures included in this release seem to be taken there, as they show Oram in a laboratory-esque environment surrounded by serious-looking men in suits.  Now here is the twist: Oram actually left both the BBC and financial stability behind in 1959 (less than a year after the Workshop was founded) due to her frustration with her employers' lack of understanding regarding her work's potential.  She set up her own studio in a hop kiln, surrounded herself with self-built and modified equipment, and quixotically managed to make a modest living making exactly the kind of strange and innovative music she wanted.  (Incidentally, my other favorite thing about Oram is an apocryphal story about how two of The Beatles visited her at her studio once and how she had absolutely no idea who they were, nor did she particularly care once she found out.)
Aside from indirectly providing sound effects for a show I despise and being super-humanly disinterested in pop culture, Daphne is also notable for being the first woman to ever design and build an electronic instrument: the Oramics machine, which converted drawings to sounds.  It is unclear how many of these recordings actually employ that technology, as she did not start using it to compose until 1968 and many of these recordings are undated.  Also, they all sound bizarre enough to have originated in any number of ways...and they did.  The most extreme example is probably her work for The Innocents, which is built from African field recordings.This is arguably the most extreme foray musically too, as the included excerpt culminates in an explosion of distorted and frightening animal howls (amusingly followed immediately by a very pleasant music box-like recording for a butter commercial).  Another commercial piece, "Anacin Components," unexpectedly turns out to be one of the album's most weirdly compelling moments, as it features Oram discussing how toothaches should sound in a very cheery and prim British way.
Aside from those rare glimpses into what Oram was actually like, my favorite pieces are the ones that still sound improbably contemporary.  "Illustrations," in particular, sounds like it could have easily emerged from the cassette underground last week (Oram unwittingly embraced tape hiss and analog synth textures way before they were cool).  Some of the other stand-out pieces are bit less musical though, as Daphne's murky and unsettling score for Hamlet sometimes sounds like a proto-Throbbing Gristle.  The Hamlet score is not a fluke either: despite her polite, square-seeming demeanor, she certainly did not shy away from catharsis, cacophony, ugliness, and industrial rumbles and shudders when it fit a piece.
There are also quite a few pieces of historical interest here, as The Oram Tapes features alternate versions and fragments of one of Daphne's major works, "Pulse Persephone."  Also, there are two pieces taken from tapes enigmatically labeled "2001," which may or may not have wound up in Kubrick's film.  That wasn't especially exciting for me (I was far more interested in finding out how toothaches sound), but it is certainly a notable inclusion.  Naturally, a double album of early electronic music (particularly one composed of mostly fragments) holds limited entertainment value for most people, as it is not an epoch that has aged particularly well.  However, as a history lesson and a portrait of a brilliant, complex, and uncompromising artist, this collection is pretty exceptional. The fact that some of the pieces still sound great is certainly nice, but being introduced to the artist eclipses the actual art (in a good way, of course).  While Oram's relative obscurity (until recently) makes it unlikely that she was a direct influence on many of today's artists, she certainly anticipated many elements of trends that hit decades later and did it on her own, in a very male-dominated milieu, and built her own goddamn instruments to do it.  If that is not inspiring, I do not know what is.
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Special 5-CD box-set edition of the Broken Flag Retrospective originally released on vinyl in 2007. A compilation and retrospective of one of the most important and influential British noise and power electronics-labels led by Gary Mundy of Ramleh.
This edition was made to coincide with the Never Say When event organised by Second Layer and Harbinger Sound. Includes classic material spanning 1982-85 from Sutcliffe Jugend, Consumer Electronics, Un-Kommuniti, Maurizio Bianchi, Controlled Bleeding, Ramleh, Male Rape Group (Mundy/Best), Kleistwahr, TOLL, New Blockaders, Mauthausen Orchestra, Falx Cerebri, Giancarlo Toniutti, Vortex Campaign and many more. All material is the same as the out-of-print vinyl edition. Also comes with a booklet featuring extensive notes by Gary Mundy.
More information is available here.
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SEMA was an 80's experimental-project by Robert Haigh who became well-known in the '90s for his ambient Drum & Bass-project Omni Trio.
In 1980, Robert formed the industrial/avant-funk bands Truth Club and Fote as well as his own label Le Rey Records.
Between 1982 and 1984 he released 4 LPs under the name SEMA on his own Le Rey label: Notes from Underground, Theme from Hunger, Extract from Rosa Silber and Three Seasons Only - which can be found in this box set release.
He also contributed to several Nurse With Wound (United Dairies) projects. Those recordings are provided as bonus tracks on this box set in addition to the 4LPs.
The music of SEMA integrates pianos, orchestral instruments and experimental techniques in a neo-classical and minimalist approach.
These legendary recordings employ a wide palette of light and shade, emotion, texture and atmosphere to produce a sound that is unique in its form and expression.
More information is available here.
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