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I don't love all of this, of course. My taste runs more towards thelate 70s/early 80s industrial post-punk sounds, so the tracks here byDepartment S (a foot-tapping punk-disco anthem called "Going LeftRight") , the amorphous fuzz noises by Ludus (one of the exclusivetracks), and especially Crawling Chaos and Artery's skewed punkappealled to me. The comp is successful in that it's certainly got myinterest enough to seek out more CDs by these bands, which areforthcoming in the months ahead. The reunited Crispy Ambulance and theproject currently calling itself the Wake (now a duo containing onlyone original member) sound tired and reaching, not particularly asinspired as those bands early 1980s music. The Graham Massey (of BitingTongues and 808 State) remix of a newer Crispy song just plods alongwith seemingly random effects and some movie samples...
- Crawling Chaos - Arabesque
- Ludus Rosa - Luxemburg
- Section 25 - Part Primitiv
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Listening to the overtly Eastern influenced percussion Angus Maclise plays on parts of this double CD, I can't help thinking that replacing him with Mo Tucker might've been the best thing that ever happened to the Velvet Underground. They're such different drummers, almost opposites, that you suspect Lou Reed had totally had enough of the hippy dippy guy who'd turn up to play gigs half an hour late and then carried on playing half an hour after the rest of the band finished. Tucker's monotonous tub thump became such a signature of that band that it's hard to imagine them any other way.Sub Rosa
Maclise died almost exactly 24 years ago out in Nepal. Over the last few years this marginal character has been exhumed for public display with a bunch of archive recordings that reveal a curious dabbling with everything from meditative hand percussion to beatnik poetry to electronic tape splice composition. This selection from a much larger cache of recordings rediscovered by Exploding Plastic Inevitable whip cracker Gerard Malanga covers all points, but is intended only for those who want to dig deeper than the festive Oriental tribal music featured on the earlier release Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. The most impressive selections here are probably the early 'electronics' compositions "Electronic Mix For 'Expanded Cinema'" and "Tunnel Music." "Electronic Mix" exhumes eerie drone flailed at by babbling radiophonic shrapnel and for almost half an hour transcends the shoddy audio quality. Most of the music is rendered quaint and distant by poor mushy recordings, like faded photos that maybe muddy memory as much as clarify.
This is an album that could only be recommednded to people who are fairly obsessive about this whole late sixties New York loft drone scene. Tony Conrad and John Cale collaborate on some tracks, but you'd be better advised to check out their releases on Table of the Elements before getting this. There are two poetry recitals included, and Maclise has a friendly welcoming vocal presence. "Description of a Mandala" has some nice cut up images, but the twenty minutes of "Universal Solar Calendar," where he gave a name to every day of the year reeks of tired hippy dogends and quickly gets tedious. Another half hour instrumental, "Thunder Cut," features a loop of a thunder recording made by Tony Conrad, but everyone else seems to be playing completely out of time with it. You wouldn't even realise it was thunder if it wasn't documented in the booklet. Some of the recordings, such as "Two Speed Trance" are so lo-fi that their character has probably altered entirely, paying Maclise a diservice.
If you don't mind mangled squished violins and cracked cimbalums partially bled by years of magnetic corrosion and recording limitations, and really want to hear every last gasp of a guy who left the Velvet Underground not too soon, then this is the double disc you've been waiting for. Those who are a bit less obsessive about the historical angle might just be left thinking that some ghosts are better left to rest. Mostly this sounds like some hippy farting about. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but its questionable how many people really need to hear it many years later when there are so many better contemporary recordings around. Nothing left now but the recordings, fading slow.
samples:
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Ted Minsky is actually Anne Grabow. Why has Anne Grabow chosen such a masculine moniker? Who is Anne Grabow? Who, for that matter, is Angelika Koehlermann? That's like asking who Betty Crocker is. Someone. Anyone. No one. And in the end, does it matter? What evidence can we glean from the press release? Nothing important, it seems, except that Ted Minsky is described alternately as a "young costume designer" and as a "super-architect" leading us "to the borders of pop music." This is pure hyperbole, I'm afraid.Angelika Koehlermann
Ms. Minsky/Grabow's musical travesty Madame Le Ted sounds something like a lobotomized Bjork recording songs onto a faulty four-track in a public bathroom stall. The dimly realized melodies and poorly mixed vocals are covered up with a bland palette of factory-preset distortion effects. The vocals are of the world-weary chanteuse, I-can't-be-bothered-to-actually-sing style. The lyrics are in a confounding combination of German, Spanish, and English. What shall we call this hybrid? Gerspanglish? Spangermlish? How about "annoying"? It's like a series of idiosyncratic in-jokes that nobody actually gets, not even Minsky herself. Songs with names like "Who Will Hold My Boobs?" promise humor and irony, but deliver only detached weirdness. Ted Minsky has an obsession with her own bodily self-image, which is explicated in the song "Proportional." This plays like a musical version of the comic strip Cathy. The desire to turn this music off is nearly irresistible. I think I'm going to give in.
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The further I investigate, the more Angelika Koehlermann seems to be a fictional character. According to the press release, she is a girl from Paris who, on a whim, took a train to Koln and met a guy who suggested that they "make an electronic music label." She decided to try her hand at playing "guitar tracks for Japanese young people."Angelika Koehlermann
Ms. Koehlermann's strange biography ends with a passage so beautifully absurd, I am forced to quote it here in its entirety:
- "There is no end to this story, because the only possible end was for her to die, but she preferred not to. There is no end to this record because the only possible one would have been to remove it and everybody wanted to listen to it before."
I am rendered speechless by this Zen paradox masquerading as a press release. What IS the sound of one hand clapping? Whatever that might sound like, I'm sure it's not anything like Boulder dDash's unfortunate new AK release, Alien Folk Trash. Unfortunately, this album cannot live up to its wacky title. I'm afraid this is yet another exercise in banal, low-fidelity electro-pop noodling. Boulder dDash is Jean-Baptiste Hanak, one half of the French group dDamage. Yeah, I know, I've never heard of dDamage either. The music is made of up uncredited samples and loops from other artists, with extremely annoying drum machine and Casio keyboard stuff on top. It's like Wesley Willis producing a Beck album on inhalants. The thing that really puzzles me about this music is that I can't figure out what audience Jean-Baptiste has in mind for this execrable album. I have a feeling that even his close friends won't listen to this CD all the way through. It's far too painful. They'll probably just be like: "Yeah, Jean-Baptiste, the album is great. I especially like the first ten seconds of track one." As a totally unnecessary and unwanted bonus, the Alien Folk Trash CD also comes with a whole extra full-length album The Dark Side of Boulder dDash in MP3 format. This may be the most unwelcome gift I have ever received. 
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samples:
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Released just a few months after the rigid 10th, Nobukazu Takemura's newest is an adventure in minimalism that is as restorative as a long vacation taken after going too long without a break. Too often have I heard sound collages that seem to go nowhere; they simply run about in circles covering the same old ground for the duration of fifteen or twenty minutes or more. Thankfully, Assembler/Assembler 2 is about as predictable as a piano falling out of a building.
Each track is a creature in and of itself, suitable for individual release, and captivating both sonically and melodically. Despite the obvious connection to noise music and modern compositions, this album is full of gorgeous melodic tones and hidden harmonies stretched across almost subconscious space. "Conical Flask" gets things off the ground smoothly with a series of skipping tones that all fit together perfectly and form an abstract and rolling melody that jumps from one ear to another. "USINE" and "Ligne à haute tension" are more disturbing and grinding. They're not completely barrages of sound, but the impression they leave with me is the image of two chainsaws being rammed into eachother or perhaps the sight of heavy artillery exploding far in the distance. In either case, they work well next to the more haunting and accessible songs. "Kino-ear" is a favorite of mine and it definitely feels like the centerpiece of the album, it seems to have the most gravity and it is also the longest track. Throughout its nearly fourteen minute duration "Kino-ear" shifts from subtle glass-like ringing and aqueous gurglings to guitar meanderings. Sometimes the movement from one sound to the next isn't so polar and sometimes the changes happen abruptly, but they never happen annoyingly. The sounds don't necessarily always blend together perfectly but they do form a coherent whole: the sudden shift from guitar sounds to car horns to the audible splash of feet in puddles somehow makes sense. Each composition is like a short film viewed through LSD-tinted eyes. It's not that the music is all that "trippy," it's the thematic qualities and the total individuality of every track that ends up producing a disorienting but cohesive hallucinogenic trip. 
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