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Robert Piotrowicz/Carl Michael Von Hausswolff
While there doesn't seem to be any specific concept to unify both sides of this split LP, there doesn’t need to be. Instead, it is a strong paring of a relatively young artist and one who has a long and established career, with both providing material that is quite different from each other.
The Robert Piotrowicz side consists of one long track, "Clinamen 3," that continues his careful study of the analog modular synthesizer.With each release, his ability to structure and compose has become more and more polished, to where pieces don’t have the raw, improvised sound usually expected from experimenting with analog instruments, but instead represent carefully arranged and structured pieces."Clinamen 3" is essentially three movements in a single piece, the first characterized by a high frequency tone and an erratic rhythmic bass pulse that slowly builds upon one another until it creates a wall of symphonic roar.
This is eventually paired with a low-end passage that is quite dark, and infests the symphonic leads with a sense of evil and menace, the two writhing together in a horror movie haze.It suddenly drops and comes back in a different form, the same basic building blocks rearranged in a more chaotic, disorienting form that defines the second movement.The third goes all out, mixing a low end thump with a siren melody lead, dropping subtlety in favor of pure force, before going out like a lamb with a short, simple melodic coda.
In contrast to Piotrowicz's bombast, Von Hausswolff instead opts for quiet, textural studies of sound.The first of his two pieces, "Ritual Shaving of an Ass in Belgium (aka Eating A Piranha Wouldn't Be So Bad The Way Things Are These Days)," besides being a strong leader for song title of the year, is based upon loops composed for an installation performance.The textures are light and scratchy, with careful variation on the crunchy textures, with the vaguest insinuation of bass hidden.
The following piece, "Ritual Shaving of an Ass in Poland (aka The Snoring Innocence)," is rawer, static, heavy, and abrasive.It’s shortbut it seems to capture extraneous sounds and audience conversations on ragged audio tape, which is then used and mangled to create an approximation of what would be considered a "noise" track, but its worn, decaying nature gives it an historical, hollow quality that makes it quite unique.
Both the artists are doing drastically different things from one another, yet the pairing of them together nicely demonstrates opposite ends of the experimental/avant garde electronic genre.It is one of the rare cases where a work is actually strengthened by the great disparity of its contents, and each side seems to make more sense based upon its accompaniment.
samples:
- Robert Piotrowicz - Clinamen 3
- Carl Michael Von Hausswolff - Ritual Shaving of an Ass in Belgium
- Carl Michael Von Hausswolff - Ritual Shaving of an Ass in Poland
 
