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Like great film noir, everypiece of Murcof's puzzle is obviously manufactured and manipulated andcalculated and refined; it so completely captures a tone that I don'tmind that the sets are fake or the lighting is hyper-real.
Leaf
I was introduced to Murcof's work with last year's Utopia single and I was hoping that the follow up album to that would be as good as the single promised. With Remembranza,Murcof does not disappoint. It's difficult to say where this musicwould fall in record bins filed by genre, but what matters is thatregardless of the conventions of the particular slice of the musicalspectrum that Murcof is working in, he manages to fill his songs withdepth and atmosphere. Remembranza is full of distant, reverbsoaked pianos, suspensful string arrangements that hang in the air likesmoke in a dark, shady pub, and autoclave-cleaned beats that nearlyfall into minimal techno rhythms, but rarely serve as the impetus fordance. The result plays out like techno noir made for headphones ratherthan dancefloors. This is music for murder mysteries and hardenedgumshoes and crazy dames, but it's all controlled so precisely that itnever evokes a real, urgent sense of dread. People notusually won over by the abstraction and detachment of clicky minimalistelectronica should find that Remembranza supplies enough clicksand pings and muted thumps to stand in for that style, while it alsoprovides the emotional backdrop of a film score or well-orchestratedpop music. I'd love to hear this record with some sultry, bluesy vocalsover it. As is, it's still a wonderful piece of deep listening moodmusic just waiting for a film to be shot to go with it.
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Pup is another entry into the highly nuanced, subtle, and delicate world ofminimalism that at one time would have been called “ambient” but nowgoes by titles like “lowercase.” There’s too much of this sortof thing for me to be able to stay abreast of, but Dan Abrams’ work asFenton is solid and enjoyable.Plop
Although Fenton creator Dan Abrams is from California, this disc comes all the way from Japan, by way of theJapanese label Plop. It's a record formorning listening: every song feels like a beginning of sorts to ajourney that is never exactly spelled out or completed. The songs arebuilt up from loops of pristine guitar plucking and the artifacts of along, long delay time. While I see music like this played out all thetime by folks with a single guitar and a loop pedal, it’s obvious thatAbrams is not just knocking these tunes out in a matter of minutes andrendering them to tape. There isn’t much to the compositions,but they grow organically, and they are finely balanced and carefully mixedto reward deep listening. A disc like this finds me willing to acceptit differently at different times.
Without the time and solitudenecessary to devote complete attention to Pup, the recordbecomes a pleasant background texture to my day, but something that isultimately not recognizable or distinguished. Given an hour to sit downwith headphones or near field monitors, the record plays altogetherdifferently and the subtle layers of sound never get boring becausethere is almost always something else to explore. At other times, whenI want to concentrate but can’t, I imagine that Pup isthe basis of another record somewhere with drums and voices and a bandusing simple looped guitar as a foundation rather than the focus.
This is the nature of music like this, and why it’s so hard for me withmy schedule to get into it fully. I suspect that the tensionthere is exactly why music like this needs to exist: to give us areason to slow down, zone out, and bathe ourselves in microscopic beadsof sound. I only wish that were possible more often.
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Tesco
Ever since unleashing the amazing one-two punch of But What Ends When the Symbols Shatter? and Rose Clouds of Holocaust, Douglas P. has been creatively floundering. His teaming with Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch yielded two albums that abandoned all of Death in June's usual subtlety and atmosphere in favor of overblown orchestral loops littered with samples from Leni Riefenstahl films and filled with laughable lyrics about Kristallnacht and anal sex. Then came the nadir, 2001's All Pigs Must Die, a prolonged screed against the now-defunct World Serpent Distribution that played like a vicious self-parody. Now comes the new album, a collaboration with fellow fascist sympathizer Boyd Rice. I might have expected them to produce some kind of martial epic extolling the virtues of Bush's imperialist wars, but instead they opt for a more personal album, a return of sorts to the guitars-and-windchimes sound that characterizes classic Death in June. As could be expected, every track is overloaded with excessive echo and reverb, and most are scattered with dialogue snippets from cult films, a familiar DIJ tactic. Unfortunately, Douglas P. has not learned any new chords, recycling the same dull strumming he's been churning out for twenty years. Boyd Rice provides vocals for most of the tracks, in his familiar I-can't-bothered-to-sing monotone. "Sunwheels of My Mind" is almost clever, a solar-centric adaptation of Dusty Springfield's classic "Windmills of My Mind." The album's lyrics deal primarily with the passage of time (punctuated by the Alarm of the title) and a preoccupation with solar imagery. It's the old familiar sun = light = Lucifer = Satan = power equation, a fairly juvenile symbolic conceit coming from a pair of middle-aged men. All that being said, I still liked this much, much better than All Pigs Must Die or the recent Wolf Pact album. It's a big improvement over Nazi tape-loops and boring personal vendettas, but its appeal is largely nostalgic—it reminds me of a time when DIJ were slightly relevant. At this point, I'm not holding out much hope that Douglas P. will ever come up with another truly worthwhile album.
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Praemedia
I'm quite sure a devilish tailor is making its way through my eardrums every time I put this record on. It's not that there's anything evil about this record; but every instance of sound is a rapidly moving panorama of subconscious and dream-like sounds accelerated through time and set to explode upon aural reception. Blevin Blectum's newest record plays like a billion ping pong balls shot into a room about three inches wide and tall. The result is a barrage of micro-sounds that weave themselves together to make patterns of pseudo-melody and hushed excursions into the clouded heart of glass machines. At times Magic Maple is propelled by a turbine engine bent on choking some kind of rhythm out of the random chaos of sounds assembled into each song and at other times it's a playful cascade of rushing sounds, skipping semi-percussion, time-distorted bits of radio interference, various vocal samples, and unknown instruments bent and snapped into unrecognizable alien keyboards. Blectum's songs never fall into any recognizable format nor do they rely on any one technique; each song plays like a small portion of something greater that, if it could all be heard at once, would reveal some grand, majestic schematic that can only be hinted at when received through typical, human ears. What's more, Blectum's chaos is catchy: at times a xylophone or inter-dimensional steel drum fades in and out of the mix to reveal bits of repeated melody and mutant rhythms that never quite find their own pace. It's an addicting kind of music because it doesn't look to typical song structures to make it enjoyable, but it also doesn't go overboard and exist somewhere on the edge of sonic tolerance and pure experimental recording. It's almost pointless to talk about these songs individually; most of the time I can't tell where one song ends and the next begins. Everything fits together perfectly, but the whole album modulates within itself and never gets boring or frustrating in all its bouncing glory. The end of the album, however, is particularly outstanding and there are moments when just the smallest changes made by Blectum are breathtaking. Of course, these moments don't last long because she just never bothers to sit still.
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In describing the sound of Mono's third full-length album it's hard not to invoke a number of bands whom I have nevertheless sworn to eschew in the body of this review. Let it suffice to say that the music is sweeping, anthemic, instrumental, crescendo-heavy, at once deliberately delicate and mindlessly reckless; this much should give you some idea of the musical path on which Mono tread (some might even call it a new path to Helicon, to tell the truth).
Despite the surface similarities to a cadre of aphonic groups, Mono have a hook all of their own. They bring to light a very palpable and very realized "music of anxiety" (not to be confused with the anxiety of music, which you might ascribe to John Cage, first and foremost). This music of anxiety masquerades as songs which you might feel comfortable introducing to your parents, who enjoy all of the refinements of classical. In other words, the songs are lovely and accessible. But certain songs are filled with massive building themes and bridges, each one successively getting louder or faster or both. It is in these precise parts where the anxiety lurks. To illustrate, I offer a challenge: try and fall asleep to "Lost Snow," or "16.12," both of which start off innocently enough, lulling any quasi-narcolept into a comfort blanket of promised sleep and placidity. But then the songs evolve. They burst forth. They blossom violently like a flower which does not merely let its petals spread out gently, but rather one which erupts and explodes, sending thick clouds of pollen into the air and leaving its pistils and stamens shaking in the aftershock. Mono's style can be clawingly unsettling, full of nervous energy and discomfort. It does not allow you to sit and standby; instead it sucks you into the whirlwind. Yet there is always an outlook to the light at the end of the song, after the guitars collide and distort, where the sonic storm yields to space and eventually catharsis. The formula (polarization of a song's harshness and quietude) is not new, but Mono executes it as elegantly as any band whose skinny fists stir up such tempests of sounds which assail the ears for ten minutes at a time. Not every song proceeds along these lines. "A Thousand Paper Cranes" and "2 Candles, 1 Wish" stay hushed, concentrated, and focused throughout. The sequencing on the album seems to indicate that Mono is well aware of the anxiety of their songs. The band acknowledges the need for rest between the storms of their mightier songs and they acquiesce by putting the softer bits between the harder ones. In this way, the spaces between the songs mimic the spaces within them.
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There is something otherworldly lurking just below the surface of Klas Rydberg's strained howls that is slightly off-putting, something that is not so much heard as felt, something that draws you in while oozing a slight uneasiness. Where a majority of the increasing number of sludgy, pseudo doom acts are content to pound away on the same note for hours on end in the name of "atmosphere," this Swedish septet strives for something more on their third full length.
Salvation is an eight song, 72 minute behemoth that's as diverse as it is excruciatingly heavy. While the bulk of the album's duration is spent creeping under the weight of Johannes Persson's immense guitar tone that's as percussive as any drum set, the band is not afraid to add their own flourishes to a style that can quickly become stagnant due to its repetitious nature. Nowhere else is this more evident than on "Crossing Over," which pits Rydberg's underrated singing voice against a slow building wall of jangled guitar that would sound at home on any bold dreampop album. While this is one of my personal favorite tracks, it does seem out of place amongst the oppressive rage of its peers and has a tendency to slow down what is already becoming a physically arduous listen by the seventh track. That's not to say the remainder of the album is without its placid moments, but they are composed in such a way as to not reveal what beast waits around the corner or beneath that proverbial surface, consisting of deftly composed goth rock morsels with a decidedly "non-American" vibe that's difficult to explain and separates them from their contemporaries. The first track, "Echoes," even works with a slight Middle Eastern-themed solo as it slowly builds to the deafening, cathartic roar prevalent throughout the more straightforward "Adrift" and "Vague Illusions." With the volume up enough (which it should be at all times), it is even possible to detect the tasteful contributions of Anders Teglund, whose sparse synth work walks the thin line between subtle and barely audible, adding yet another layer to this dense masterpiece. While the cruel reality surrounding this album is that it will more than likely get lost in the shuffle of a great many other bands who channel 80's-era Swans into their particular brand of madness, this one is worth the effort. - Drew Wright
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Virgin Prunes formed in Dublin in 1977, part of the fertile Lypton Village artpunk scene that also spawned U2. Instead of Bono and The Edge, Virgin Prunes had the equally absurdly named Gavin Friday, Guggi, Dave-id, Dik and Pod (later adding Haa Lacka Binttii and D'Nellon). From a very early point, it became clear that while U2 were aiming for global chart domination, Virgin Prunes were more interested in remaining aggressively idiosyncratic, developing their own unique brand of transgressive, avant-garde performance art and a wildly anarchic take on post-punk rock.Depending on who's being consulted, the band name either refers to an Irish slang for masturbation or a term for a person with a particular kind of sexual hang-up. A cult fixture from the early singles until their 1986 swansong The Moon Looked Down and Laughed, the Prunes are barely remembered today. Much of their work was outstandingly original, and yet it has remained criminally ignored and rarely heard, largely due to the near-total unavailability of their back catalog. Initially available only in small vinyl and cassette editions, the catalog has suffered over the years from poorly mastered bootleg CD reissues that immediately went out of print. Mute Records, working alongside principal visionary Gavin Friday, attempt to rectify this situation with the release of five definitively remastered and repackaged reissues of the Virgin Prunes back catalog, with bonus tracks, lyrics and rare band photos included with each album. Since the Prunes disbanded, Gavin Friday has maintained a tenuous connection with the mainstream, recording a series of contemporary pop albums and doing soundtrack work for the popular Irish films In The Name of the Father and The Boxer. He scored a minor hit with the track "Angel," which appeared on the soundtrack for Baz Lurmann's Romeo and Juliet, and he can be seen performing in a scene from Lurmann's garish musical Moulin Rouge. In addition to occasional collaborations with his friend Bono, Friday has also worked with a number of other artists, contributing vocals to Coil's Scatology, Dave Ball's In Strict Tempo and The Fall's Wonderful and Frightening World Of The Fall.
The chronological beginning of the reissue series is A New Form of Beauty, in many ways the most ambitious of the Virgin Prunes' various projects. A New Form of Beauty was intended as seven-part artistic cycle exploring the band's inversion of the standard concept of beauty, reflected in their eccentric costumes and bizarre neo-primitive face paint. The Prunes were tuned in to an Artaudian current of perverse beauty and outlandishly confrontational performance, and this manifests quite well in the music itself. In many ways, their freakish attire and dark sense of melodrama served as a blueprint for the emerging goth scene, but the Prunes had talent and creativity that their followers often lacked. A New Form of Beauty Parts I through IV are collected here for the first time, originally released separately on 7", 10" and 12" EPs and a cassette. (Part V was an exhibition held in 1981, Part VI is an unpublished book and Part VII is an unreleased film.) The music is mercurial and often difficult; dark and overwrought; jagged and dissonant. Gavin Friday's vocals are twisted and menacing on the 10-minute "Come To Daddy," a lopsided avant-punk epic propelled by a brutally distorted, metronomic beat. The song tumbles over itself by the seven-minute mark, turning into a clattering free-improv with Friday screaming desperately: "No one cares about Mammy! No one cares about Mammy!" Their style seems equally informed by glam rock, Krautrock and their punk contemporaries, somewhat comparable to Public Image Ltd.'s Metal Box but existing an aesthetic sphere of its own invention. "Sweethome Under White Clouds" is another deconstructed punk song, this time with a sinister mantra and undercurrents of atmospheric drone. And "Sad World" is something else entirely: a gloomy paean to misery that slowly fades into drug-damaged oblivion. The overlapping vocals of Gavin and Guggi, which often form a tense call-and-response conversation, is one of the Prunes' unique trademarks. "Beast (Seven Bastard Suck)" is a dark, chaotic slab of malevolence punctuated by the crack of a bullwhip. Even when I sense the Prunes are just fucking around with delay peddles, as on "Abbagal," the effect is positively eerie. Disc two consists of Part IV, a 37-minute live performance entitled "Din Glorious," which moves freely between energetic performances of their songs to blasts of terrifying noise, grotesquely distorted vocals and deeply unsettling tape manipulations. A New Form of Beauty is practically begging for rediscovery and reappraisal as one of the most wildly imaginative and unorthodox documents produced in the post-punk era. Stay tuned over the next four issues for reviews of the rest of this critical series of reissues.
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Threshold House
At first listen, COILANS seems like Exhibit A for the sort of experimental audio that functions as more of an intellectual or conceptual pleasure, rather than the sort of viscerally satisfying music I've come to expect from Coil. It clocks in at well over four hours of entirely unstructured, rhythm-less high-frequency sine-waves and subtly shifting AC hum. Tracks have no beginning or end, no point-counterpoint or resolution, and no tonal consistency. This new three-disc set also includes a DVD of synchronized digital animations for four of the tracks. It's a reissue and expansion of ANS, a limited edition, tour-only CD released last year, minimally packaged in an unmarked black plastic clamshell. This new boxed set comes in a beautiful foldout cardboard package (identical to the recent reissue of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy for Lilith) decorated with pictures of the disused ANS machine itself, sitting neglected in a basement room of the Moscow State University, rarely used and in dire need of a radical overhaul. It was built in 1958 by Evgeny Murzin, who set out to create a synthesizer capable of producing the full range of audible frequency via a unique photoelectric process. The composer inscribes his visual "score" onto a glass plate covered with sticky black mastic, slides it through the machine, which reads the inscribed plate and converts the etchings into sound produced by a system of 800 oscillators. In the liner notes, which provide further technical information about the machine, Coil acknowledge that it takes a lot of practice and skill for the user to relate the marks on the plate to the resultant sounds. Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke (whose name is misspelled in the notes) spent an entire year of intensive work with the machine to produce his one and only piece of electronic music entitled "Flow." However, Coil spent only a few days with the ANS, so by their own admission, the sounds on these three discs cannot be described as "compositions" in any sense. Instead, the sounds represent an accidental interpretation of Coil's visual art into audible electricity. As such, it is pointless to assess the musical merit of any of these pieces. The soundpieces in the set are the work of various solo and group alignments of Jhonn Balance, Peter Christopherson, Ossian Brown, Thighpaulsandra and Ivan Pavlov of COH. The notes do not identify which track features which personnel, either because they can't remember or they think it doesn't matter. The CD wallets (and the prints included with the first edition of the set) feature some of the line drawings that were used to make these pieces, but once again, the listener is given no indication which drawings produced which sounds. The drawings operate as Spare-style magical talismans, where occult symbols and "alphabet of desire" glyphs representing words or phrases (such as the tautological "IT JUST IS" on the back of disc B) exist as arcane sigillizations. But the ANS is able to take these occult strategies a step beyond the usual, by transforming them into an entirely exotic lexicon of ghostly electric frequencies. This relation of visual image to sound had the effect of a strange form of synaesthesia on me as I waded through these four discs of unprocessed analog tones; I began to form novel mental connections between sound and vision, thoughts and symbols. Halfway through the third disc I had become like Nikola Tesla, obsessively listening to electronic signals trying to pick out messages he was certain were being transmitted by extraterrestrials. Is it possible for the mind to subconsciously decode this esoteric system of pulsations, throbs, clicks and whirrs? It's impossible to say with any certainty, but the mere suggestion that it might be so makes the sound entirely compelling. At first glance, the DVD animations seemed no more inventive than WinAmp visuals, but I soon noticed the subtle psychedelic abstractions present in each perfectly synchronized schema. By the end of my COILANS adventure, I was tuned into a heretofore unexplored magickal current, a current that sparks and buzzes with vibrations of the manifest spirit. Electricity has truly made angels of us all.
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With their debut full length album, this New York City trio have created one of the most memorable melodic electronic albums in recent memory. Throughout the 11 track CD they fuse acoustic instrumentation with electronics to outstanding effect. The album works well as a whole, with many tracks segueing into one another seamlessly. Although most of the tracks are beat oriented, the varied drum sounds and patterns complement the melodic elements rather than become the focus.
schematic
The use of a brass section on several tracks sets Forest of the Echo Downs apart from countless other electronic releases. This live instrumentation gives "Black Moss Caves Pt. 1" and "Forest Floor" a cinematic quality. This music would be the perfect soundtrack to a film version of the plant-life scenes illustrated on the cover. The mid-album placement of "Baron of the Bog," the sole vocal track, balances the 44 minute set nicely. This track would be played during the scene in the film in which the main characters meet in a bar with a plant-life theme. This track has a live, almost lounge band feel, but does not sound out of place among the other, more digital compositions. Although "Holographic Moon Owls" and "Pollen and Spores" have similar qualities to instrumental hip-hop, their arrangements prevent them from sounding as if they are lacking vocals. While most tracks feature a linear structure, they also contain plenty of analog synthesizer burbling and other intricate flourishes. The three-dimensional use of the stereo field ensures that new discoveries will be made with each repeated listen. Although it is unclear whether the acoustic instruments have been played live or are sampled, it is apparent that this crew has musical ability that goes beyond sampler programming. By the end of "Black Moss Caves Pt. 1," I had to remind myself that I was not listening to Dead Can Dance. It is not often that groups working in electronic music transcend genre and defy categorization with this level of success.
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Intr_version
Here is another album from Intr_version that perfectly conforms to my expectations. I first heard The Beans on the label's excellent Saturday Morning Empires compilation, where their "May 6th Expires" served as the closing track, a gentle, rain-saturated drift-off that managed to sound both out-of-place among label's dominant electronic artists and also very apt, as a summary of the melancholic mood-building available throughout everything I've heard from the label yet. With this, their fifth proper release, the group has made a record whose spectral, narcotic beauty I feel instantly like I've heard many times before, but will never grow tired. The Beans are from Canada, and it's hard not to align their music, however slightly, with fellow countrymen Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Bassplayer is four long "rock" instrumentals driven by the same kind of simple, sad, two-chord meditations that Godspeed layers high with the swooning textures and the odd cryptic political snippets to create their signature effect. The Beans approach the same medium with fewer musicians, a looser stylistic palette, and much less bombast. Their slow, low-rising pieces seem—like Godspeed's—to touch on very familiar, almost basic melodic components, but without as much heart-stringing, making them better open to interpretation—if not quite subversive or challenging content-wise. Nothing is particularly new about the group's style or methods; however these songs speak for themselves, as "May 6th Expires" did as the finale of Intr_version's sampler. Included here as the first track in longer form, the song saturates from the first second, an almost note-less, reverb-expanded bassline brimming and coating each lazy, jazzy slide of the guitars, hooked into each other as if guarding against a very real threat of disintegration, a feeling notably lacking from the work of Godspeed and other post-rock groups where the studied, forced character of songs often ruins their potential for dramatic intensity. Bassplayer benefits from production that retains a live feel, emphasizing the endurance and conviction of the players while making the layered crescendos of the music all the more impressive. My first thought when hearing The Beans was actually a similarity to Australia improvisers The Necks, not so much in direct tonal relationship or even in the music's structural intent, but The Necks work within a similar slow-enfolding, immersive environment in which a song's parts reveal themselves as dependent without a sense of hierarchy. And though The Beans' discography does include three film scores, they refuse the visual dependencies of most things termed "cinematic." While much of this music captures a certain melancholic urgency that could serve the right film very well, it's hard to tell if this is not simply a part of the familiarity, the comfort I find in the music. Bassplayer is special in that it takes comfortable, almost predictable associations and offers the opportunity of living inside them for a short time, a kinetic edge usually denied music of such lateral calm and tender restraint.
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