Hoor-paar-Kraat, "In Your Absence", "Chorea"

Anthony Mangicapra's Hoor-paar-Kraat project has always been rather prolific, but a recent spate of limited new releases has made this even more noticeable, but without any reduction in quality or distinction On these two tapes, he (and associates) balances both tense, carefully constructed pieces with shambolic, improvised sonic rituals.

Robert & Leopold, Black Horizons

On "A Lanoo Alone" (from In Your Absence), he constructs a taut composition of carefully building shrill loops that evolves and develops as time wears on, slowly building momentum like a painfully slow descending elevator into Hell.When that more prominent, forceful sound drops away, it leaves behind a disquieting sense of ambience, with tight passages of feedback shimmering through atop urgent, but obscured undulations before stopping dead unexpectedly.

"I Would Have Made New Teeth for Him" (on Chorea) shows a similar sense of composition, meshing shrill, glassy bits of noise over a simple click rhythm that builds in complexity, building to a more traditional feeling as the feedback and dissonance is miraculously shaped into a more musical framework, coming together as some sort of esoteric, alien approach to traditional composition.

The backing half of each cassette sees Mangicapra going in a different direction, one of a looser, improvised nature rather than the complementing, more rigidly structured works."In Your Absence" puts field recordings with cavernous echoes and massive reverberation, the occasional ghostly apparition or creaking tape loop slipping through."Never Once Did He Complain" involves a wider array of players and sounds, mixing mangled piano and erratic pseudo-rhythms together into a shamanic ritualized jam session.The overall sensibility of the piece is consistent from beginning to end, but a flowing and endearingly sloppy structure.With the looseness and use of toy instruments, it conjures more of a warm, nostalgic feeling than a darker one than I would have expected.

Even with these tapes representing only a part of a recent batch of Mangicapra's work, it continues to stand out as fresh and unique, calling to mind the work of Nurse With Wound or irr. app. (ext.), but with his own sound and approach.His strength and skills at conjuring moods and images via sound is unparalleled, but also extremely complex.Rather than just relying on dark and mysterious, there are far more feelings and themes that arise from moment to moment on these two tapes.