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They refuse to be any one thing except consistent, producing a prodigious amount of work. Yet they don't receive as much coverage as they should, much of their work going ignored even by those publications claiming to bring their audience the cutting edge in musical innovation.
Cinematic probably best describes the work of Andrew Liles, though a term like that fails to hint at all the nuances that make his music so intriguing and fun. Darren Tate, on the other hand, works with Monos, a group comprised mostly of him and Colin Potter. Their work reaches further into the world of drone music, populated as it is by layers and layers of dense electronic sound and warped samples. Unlike some collaborations, it is actually possible to hear the merging of these two approaches on Without Season. The notes claim that Liles was just the conductor and that Tate, along with guest Kathleen Vance, worked on most of the source material. If this is true, it just goes to show how unique Liles approach to music is. His trademark humor and strange understanding of horror are all present on this disc along with Tate's thick sound and careful use of variation.
Everything from piano and the sound of candy wrappers unfolding to an accordion and the use of bird calls can be found on this album. Nothing is too exotic, strange, or out of place for either of these guys. Want to tie together the sound of birds, running water, a fat man moaning, and the faint ringing of crystal glasses? These guys will do it and they'll convince you that each of these sounds are out to kill you while they're at it. That or the distinct possibility of being suffocated will come to mind and all the claustrophobic nightmares everyone has will somehow come to life and finally deliver on their promise.
Carried out as a single piece in five parts, Without Season builds, recedes, and recycles itself without bothering to stop or take inventory of where it has been. Its 40 plus minute duration is over far too quickly, feeling as though it passed in ten. At times the record is beautifully dreamy, almost as though it were sewn together using silk and nothing more. Even the abrasive parts, especially the awesome hum that opens the album, sounds smooth and fine as it rumbles outward.
The album closes with a simple melody played out between vague environmental sounds, an accordion, and a piano and its wandering rhythms end up portraying the whole of the album perfectly. There's a sense that Tate and Liles set out to get lost on this record and to bring back all the details no matter how illogical they all might turn out to be. This particular meeting has produced an exceptional and strange record. It stands out among many of the other collaborations I've heard and marks another high point for both Tate and Liles.
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Tension is a quasi-necessity in the musical world. Without it music can sound painfully empty or end up entirely boring because it just doesn't have that ooomph so many feel when listening to good music. Plenty of music pretends to produce friction or emotional weight in the content of its lyrics or through the thickness of its instruments, but there is no great difficulty in discerning the pretenders from the genuine article. Listen to the radio for a little while and then grab a Stars of the Lid record and draw a comparison between the two. One will sound flighty, packed full of fraudulent significance and pressing seriousness, trying way too hard to dig into the meat of adolescent trials and the other will be hypnotic, purporting nothing other than the nudity of its sounds and the real stress generated by the interaction of the instruments. It's a world of difference hearing real tension in a song, especially when Brian McBride is responsible for all the weight and gravitational pull on a particular song, let alone a full-length album. When the Detail Lost its Freedom was conceived as McBride made a move from Chicago to Los Angeles.
His sounds push and pull, generating a feeling of desolation and unnecessary pain not unlike the feeling I get when standing at the precipice of a large and open space. I could get lost in such a space and do often get lost inside this album. The way these sounds play off each other, the way one enriches and imbues the other with new meaning and significance, evidences how carefully much of this record must've been put together. Some of the signature Stars of the Lid techniques are to be found throughout, especially when the album opens and "Overture (for Other Halfs)" unfolds like a blanket of warm air. The shimmering, muffled timbre of violins isolates everything else, dreams them all away, and completely surrounds every thought that might threaten to invade the sanctity of the moment. It's a completely submissive experience because it is impossible to get away from the space the album opens up.
Once the shining, less compressed strings wind up out of the darkness it's impossible to get away from the album. It's a lonely and powerful experience that only a talented musician like McBride could deliver. Despite its more classical leanings and tight structure, the album feels free and absolutely organic. Had McBride been around to talk with Kubrick during the make of 2001,some of this material might've found a home in the movies and in space.It's finally that natural, human element of this album that become mostdistinct and most attractive. Without flashy production, without aflashy image, and without a super-fast riff or commercial hook, McBridemanages to create all the gravity in the world and tug on all theemotions related to loss and reflection.
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LTM
In his original instructions to this piece, Satie wrote: “In order to play this motif 840 times in succession, one should prepare oneself in advance by maintaining complete silence and keeping absolutely still.” In this performance there are only 40 repetitions so an intensive preparation for listening is not required. Vexationsis one of those pieces of music I had only read about. It sounded greaton paper but I was sceptical whether or not it translated into actualmusic. While I haven’t stuck the CD on repeat for 24 hours I do thinkit works fantastically. The music is written to be nearly impossible toremember, no matter how many times I listened to it I couldn’t find myplace in the motif.
Alan Marks has done a marvellous job here (well he did a marvellous job nearly 20 years ago, this is a reissue). Unfortunately the liner notes don’t mention whether he performed the full 840 repetitions or just enough to fill a CD. The “action” in this piece is hidden in the slight emphasis variations and changes in expression that the performer brings to it. Marks’ playing does subtly change throughout the 70 minutes. He seems comfortable with the piece whereas I feel most performers would feel like they were in a musical straightjacket. A problem with Vexations is the recording quality. I felt it was lacking a bit, there seems to be a fair amount of hiss in the background and the sound of the pedals on the piano is a little intrusive.
Alan Marks’ rendition of Vexations is a nice introduction to Satie’s infamous work. However given current technology I think it’s about time someone recorded the full 840 repetitions to hard disc and released it in that format.
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Cenotaph
Yeh currently has a full-length available on Thinwrist, a collaboration with Comets on Fire out on Yik Yak, and this double-disc set cataloging unreleased tracks, songs from limited edition CD-Rs, and noise pulled from now out of print cassette releases.
Burning Star Core has been around for nearly ten years and, as such, it's difficult to call Yeh and his music new. Before anybody outside of small, exclusive, and hip circles was talking about Yeh and his approach to electronic music, he was releasing music through his own Drone Disco label and contributing to all manner of compilations and smaller labels. By 2003 or 2004 he had music available on Gameboy Records and Chondritic Sound. He has a huge past and an even more impressive sound. His music is diverse, ranging from harsh noise dysfunction to playful melodic constructions that might owe some recognition to Terry Riley. He fuses both approaches, deconstructs them, rewires them, and rethinks them completely over the course of this two-disc release and has me very excited to hear more full-length material from him.
Despite spanning nearly ten years and despite being constructed from a slew of divergent material, Mes Soldats Stupides '96-'04 presents a coherent vision. Yeh is always occupied with different approaches to his gear and to composition, but his music constantly returns towards the exciting, lo-fi, and tense perspective of dramatic composition. A song like "White Swords in a Black Castle" can be considered nothing but a dramatic experience. The layers of distortion play over the simple, orchestral melody underneath create a dizzying effect, like plummeting to the Earth without fear of death. His techniques are nearly always immersive, enticing instead of repulsive, and content with being both approachable and strange.
This compilation is also compelling because it clearly depicts a development that has gone untouched by almost everyone. Despite the critical praise that The Very Heart of the World has received, Yeh's other work is gone almost completely unrecognized by everyone that can't afford to keep up with every band and every label constantly cycling through the electronic underground. Visiting certain message boards is enough experience for me to know that it would've been near impossible for me to ever find out about Yeh with so many bands and labels releasing literally hundreds of albums every six months. And despite this complication, songs like "Everything 2000" or "The Point of Departure is Not to Return" are golden, in need of more exposure, and worth purchasing the entire release for. When Yeh employs his noise, he emphasizes it, bleeds it of its soul, and chokes it until every last ounce of necessary energy is squeezed out.
His compositions don't ever sound like pure chicanery, there are subtle and beautiful peaks accompanied by low troughs and explosive depressions. Much of the music will sound somewhat familiar because it owes a little bit to those who have gone before: krautrock, ambience, free-jazz, noise, drone, rock 'n roll, avant garde composition, minimalism, it's all here in some mutated and lovingly cared-for form. Yeh has fused it all together, made it his own, and perfected his sound for a long time. And now he's finally showing everyone just how excellently it can all come together.
This album is a necessity for anyone who has some love for strange music and who feels that there isn't so much new under the sun to enjoy. Yeh's not just a new face, he's an erudite listener with about as many faces as a president under fire and each of them are equally intriguing. Such immediately striking music such as this is pretty rare and there's little doubt that Yeh is an imaginative guy with a lot of music left to make; there's almost a decade of wildly contrastive music on two discs here. He might as well be a bottomless pit of sound.
This is going to be in my player for a long time or at least until I can get my hands on an album or two. I feel the beginning of an addiction coming on and, if we're lucky, Burning Star Core will be releasing music as frequently as before, but now everyone will know where and when they'll be available.
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The piece feels more subtle and more definedthan its predecessors: mainly because there is more open space, more quiet, moreof the nagging sense of each sound’s designation in both breaking down thetransparency of the whole and working within it. PureGaze and Mobius Fuse worked firstas beauteous, lush journeys aloft on the dream currents of muffled fireworks,bowed strings, night insects and organ wash. Only later would the pieces break down and settle in the mind, letting somekind of science develop out of Block’s diverse archeology. ChangeRinging feels intent on rushing that settling.
The opening trombone bleat/fog horn/syntheticblast (you can never tell) acts almost like a volume check, setting up for aclose listen. The section of gurgling,chirping tones that follows remind me of works by Matthew Schumacher and theircreation of an immaterial surface that rustles, fades, and pops withoutbecoming so effervescent as to engage its own disappearance or shimmeraway. Snatches of woody, resonantinstruments closely recorded bounce off of pure tones and the slight cracks ofsomething outside, in a blanket of thick, gliding strands. Another fog horn from the silence brings thesecond phase, the bizarre traffic of fire-cracking static, an earthy rustle,and the parts of a few instruments,no doubt including Bhob Rainey’s sax in full clap and miniature shuffle.
The key, of course, is Block’s recordingmethod and volumetric arrangements; high volume listening really pulls the headin thousand places, and average levels will have you in a pleasant strainingfor the details. Change’s conclusion is a stew of quiet commotion, outsides,insides, and inbetweens gathering in a blissful flux of indescribabledirection. Chamber stings equalunderwater poolhall equal screaming blues of sky inside a twist of bark: asquabbling that is not uniform, not even a working together, but a fittingtogether, a wonderful, befitting fitting together.
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Those who’ve heard people playing music with glass (not atall uncommon today), or anyone who’s worked a wet finger around the top of awater glass, will be familiar with the building blocks of a glass harmonica’ssound: steely, constant drones often touched by the sense of rushing or anxiousvelocity. Perhaps the way that the discsare arranged, or the fact that they are discs and not more concave shapes,produces, in the glass harmonica, a profoundly resonant exaggeration of thesounds produced by a wet water glass rim. The overtones created by concurrent drones are comparable to those of agong or large metal disc, minus the moment of striking impact and the variableof decay. Imagine sounds with theup-front urgency of sine-wave tones or tuning forks (the sound source forKubisch’s first release on Semishigure), but made strange and irregular by anobscured ringing, the glistening and wavering of vibrating metal.
Not part (from what I can tell) of one of the installationworks for which Kubisch is most famous, Armonicais almost one hour of glass harmonica recordings, unaltered by the artist. The silences and short fades that cut thehour into intervals give evidence to a kind of sectioning or arrangement byKubisch, a compositional intent that is nearly lost to the sense of awedirected at the instrument itself. It’simmediately hard to believe the sounds are non-manipulated until the noise ofthe player’s foot comes sneaking through like a message from the other side…thefamiliar one.
The higher-pitched discs sound at first like violins in aConrad drone formation, tactile in their suggestion of movement, but soonlifting to the front of the sound field with the nervous constancies of puretones, encompassing and impossible to let ride in the background. Lower-pitched discs operate within adistanced ringing similar to tuning fork notes, but always possess some form ofminute, rhythmic imperfection, perhaps due to the finger’s revolution aroundthe rim. When layered, these tinyundulations, like absent thought patterns, create bizarre,spatially-disorienting effects in conjunction with the more absolute sounds ofthe higher, rushing drones. The effectreminds me frequently of a more subtle version of the warm, warbly antique synthsound that Boards of Canada use so often. Kubisch’s piece, in contrast, is numbing and unforgiving; it’s closer inoverall feel to the work of Phil Niblock, despite the frequency of the breaksin the sound’s forward momentum. I feelthe recognizable sensations of mind-suspension combined with a very realgravity and heavy placementhere. Something about these sounds Ihave not pinned down makes them seem utterly alien but at the same time so sopresent. It’s driving me a bit (more)crazy, feeling like I could make more than a few friends with some 18thcentury harmonica-playing spinster freaks. Thank you, Christina Kubisch.
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Troniks
If this is at all possible, then the collaboration between Phil Blankenship and the members of Yellow Swans might be the most arresting and peaceful space ever created under the name of noise. Coil did something similar when Constant Shallowness Leads to Evilwas performed live: they claimed to provide a space where the listenercould wrap themselves in the most protective blanket ever and, fromthere, contemplate the world around them.
Seeing how harsh noise almostalways confuses me and ultimately turns me off, approaching any musicof that kind in this way is helpful. This roughly nineteen-minuteone-song recording was performed live at Camp Blood in 2004. I'm notsurewhere Camp Blood is, but if this was actually recorded in the woodssomewhere, the entire scene must have been terrifying. The name "CampBlood" immediately reminds me of nightmares I had when I was little,when Jason would chase me around in his damn hockey mask until I rippedthat mask off his face and he disappeared altogether. In the comfort ofmy room, however, this recording sports the following benefits: itdrowns out the noise my roommates and their friends make in the nextroom. All the noise tends to blur together and take on the propertiesof a drone, it has reduced my frustration on several occasions and hasalso managed to put me to sleep when played at low levels. I know thisisn't what harsh noise intends to do. I know it is supposed to befrightening and I know that the sudden shock of squeals and improperlytuned radios are supposed to repulse me and somehow remind me of allthe silly conventions normal music adheres to helplessly. But thisharsh noise stuff is beginning to sound like a weird mirror of all the"drone" music I'm in love with.
Even when played loud, music like thestuff that's on this particular release sounds likeattention-hungry sound manipulation. Not that a Colin Potter releaseand this one have anything in common other than their inherent distancefrom most of the musical world, but there is something to be said ofconstant sound and unrelenting density when mentioning drone or harshnoise. Both are present, but for the most part are used for differentends. When the noise first hit my ears on this release, I was slightlyshocked and I almost turned it off. After ten minutes of its continuouscacophony, I was almost unaware it was even playing. Listening to itover and over again has alerted me to the fact that sometimes harshnoise isn't what it claims to be. It's a sort of oxymoron.
Okay, soPrurient's last release really is a harsh piece of noise work, buteventually noise just drops off into the background and becomes ashield, just like Coil said it could. Once someone is comforted bynoise and made to feel its positive contributions, can one really callsuch a thing harsh? That's exactly what this little release does, itstarts out as a disgusting figure of impending doom and ends up beingthat fort you built when you were little, the one that was perfect forescaping the real world and imagining whole new ones.
So the questionis, are we all noise-oholics because we can't stand the peace andsolitude of silence or is it because noise really drowns out all theother crap constantly shoved down our throats through the radio andtelevision? In physics noise is the disturbance of a signal, like adistortion of some kind. Here noise is really the same thing, but thething it's distorting is probably best left distorted. Who wants tohear their roommates yammering on in the next room or the next "clever"beer commercial anyways? Stuff like this might be the warmest blanketyou can find this Christmas. It is the season for commercials,afterall.
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Funckarma are Don and Roel Funcken and they like to remix. Refurbished One is a collection of various remixes they’ve done. I’ve heard of pretty much no one apart from Plaid so I can’t tell you how they compare to the originals. The album is mediocre at worst and mildly interesting at best. Funckarma are not the most original artists I’ve heard, the tracks here all follow the well trodden path of late '90s electronica with blips, beeps and synth that sounds like Autechre or Aphex Twin. Although in fairness, originality is not something I associate with the remixing world.
Most of the remixes are entertaining enough, “Duuster & Donker” and “Als het iemand is” being the two tracks that tickled my fancy the most. Other tracks like “”Nore” and “Alive in Arms” do little for me. I must point out that there are no real bad tracks on the album but that Refurbished One just lacks some inspiration. One thing I will celebrate about this album is how unified it sounds. There are fourteen different artists being remixed yet the album gels together like it was the work of one artist. Few remix artists have the strength to put their own stamp on someone else’s work.
Refurbished One is fairly laid back and is something I wouldn’t mind listening to while cooking dinner or having a few drinks but not something I’d put on to immerse myself in.
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As the host of an electronic music show on Georgia Tech’s student-runradio station and a Tech grad himself, Thatcher’s music geekcredentials precede him. I expected his record to be something like ahighly technical filter of his influences, built around some insanelycomplex homebrewed software or gadgets that he had engineered—somethingfidgety and maybe overly ambitious. Instead, the process behind Definitionis nice and transparent, and the execution is nearly flawless. As I spinthe record more and more, I find myself transfixed with the soundscoming from the speaker rather than absorbed in the workshop-likefascination with how he’s pulled it all together.
The Recompas (sometimes spelled re com pas) sound is adub-tickled, low tempo collage of processed beats, synth melodies, andscrap bits of noise that sound roughly familiar but don’t identify withany particular scene. What I love most about Thatcher’s work is thatit’s dirty as hell, with loops that are scraped across gravel, beatento death, and then full of artifacts and wandering hints of noise thatfill up the space perfectly. Recompas plays with some primitive synthsounds that echo '70s BBC sci fi music and game melodies, but theresult never sounds like a throwback or rehash. That by itself is ahuge accomplishment.
But my admiration of what Recompas has pulled off here extendsmostly from the emotional weight and depth of sound he’s managed towrangle. “Bruxism” bristles with a lurking dread and disembodiedsaxophone married with a skittery beat evoking the best of the dubterror heyday, while “Pupal,” works a Tron-like melody and some choice,dead slow percussion to great effect. “Appypolyologies” takes awonderful melody and builds it up with dubby bass and scattershot drumprogramming creating a track that aches as it moves. The record isconfident and accomplished, intricate and banging at the same time, andit finishes off with a trio of remixes from r_garcia, Tricil, andRetconned that are all solid and varied, with plenty of Recompas’personality still in tact.
What’s most exciting about Definition is that Thatcher has laid out a firm foundation for hissound, and he’s announced his presence loudly. While the record hintsat stuff that might be found on Skam and Sub Rosa, it is ultimately allRecompas: twisted, distorted, and cobbled together in a way that is aseffective as it is unique. I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see a morewell known label license this record from Nophi for a larger release,and frankly it deserves as many ears as it can find. Unless half adozen shocking masterpieces drop out of the sky in the next 30 days,this record’s definitely won a spot in my personal top 10 for the year,and with any luck it will speak to many others the way it has spoken tome.
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Everything on Hangable Auto Bulb is definitively Richard James, from oddball samples about mashed potato on “Children Talking” to the neck snapping breakbeats. I felt like I was listening to his entire back catalogue condensed into just over half an hour. What is even better is the fact that most of the material is danceable. Not in a jerky, beard-stroking IDM way but actual fun appreciation of music with your body.
“Laughable Butane Bob” is very nearly a cheesy dance anthem but it’s pulled back from musical oblivion by James’s idiosyncratic blending of wobbly synth lines with some of the finest beats made by a machine. Another remarkable thing about Hangable Auto Bulb is that it doesn’t sound dated or tainted by countless emulators of James’s style. I found it as fresh today as it sounded a decade ago.
The humor is still funny and the music still sounds modern. Aphex Twin may have strayed off the road a few times over the last ten years but on Hangable Auto Bulb he was heading full tilt down a highway that looked like it was going somewhere special indeed.
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Hymen
If I were still of a mind to lace up my combat boots and stomp-danceuntil the wee hours of the night in a smoke-drenched hole in the wall,this would likely be my favorite record of the year. Architect is theproject of Daniel Meyer, who’s probably best known as a member of thelate-blooming industrial act Haujobb. I jumped the industrial shipsometime around 1994 just as a new crop of post Skinny Puppy bands wereemerging and filling the holes left by longtime industrial danceveterans who had either gotten too old to look good in leather or hadmoved on to more lucrative forms of music making. As a result, Haujobbflew by me completely, but I can understand and hear where Daniel Meyeris coming from on his latest release for Hymen.
There’s adistinctly technological edge to the music—sounds are processed andsynthesized in an obviously mechanical way—but the sound design isstill sharp and appropriate. The rhythms remain tied to a dance flooraesthetic, thus tying the record to it’s past, but there’s nothingstomp-stomp-stomp about the album. Most of the snare drums are replacedwith bursts of static noise while the kick drums splatter like adistorted 808 running wild. The album feels like the perfectly logical,but still fruitful and progressive result of a scene that has recycleditself more than it has reinvented. When artists stray too far awayfrom the strobe light and technolust aesthetic, they are oftendismissed by the scene-faithful as style traitors. I can see Architectappealing to the purists without pandering to them. This album couldeasily be the “gateway drug” for the diehard boots-and-goggles crowdinto a world of music outside of their comfort zone, and that is alwaysa good thing.
Aside from winning the ‘Quickest Sample Turnaround from Movie to Album’ award for dialogue that’s lifted from Sin City,the album also reminds me that there was a reason that I liked themusic I found in high school, and it didn’t always have to do withchanting and being pissed at the world. This is the sort of thing thatI had hoped would grow out of the halcyon days of industrial danceclubs, and while many of Architect’s peers are still recycling thevocal distortion, stage posturing, themes, beats, and glowstickdreadlocks from 15 years ago, Meyer seems to be moving forward, if everso slightly, to keep it fun.
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