05 April 2015

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Albums and Singles

After a break of 5 years, Alva Noto continues his "Xerrox" series with Xerrox Vol. 3, entitled "Towards Space," a journey that started with Xerrox Vol. 1, referring to the "old world," and Xerrox Vol. 2, heading "to the new world."

Using the process of copying as a basis, the "Xerrox" series deals with the manipulation of data by means of endless reproduction. due to the inherent vice of the procedure that becomes especially visible when copies are made from copies, everyday sounds are so much altered that they can be hardly associated with the source material anymore. as a result, entirely new sounds are created that, being copies of originals, become originals themselves.

On Xerrox Vol. 3, a new aspect enters the scene. inspired by childhood film memories from the 1970s including Tarkovsky‘s adaption of Solaris and La Isla Misteriosa y el Capitán Nemo based on Jules Verne's "The Mysterious Island," the record shows Alva Noto's private side. with its very intimate atmosphere, it is a personal reflection of dreams, an imaginary journey through emotional landscapes or, as he himself puts it, a "cinematographic emotion of a soundtrack to a film that actually does not exist in reality."

Alva Noto himself further states, "I see Xerrox Vol. 3 as my most personal album so far. I have to admit that this emotional output is a surprise even for myself. it remains exciting how the last two albums of this series will sound like."

More information can be found here.

05 April 2015

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Albums and Singles

I have historically not followed Felicia Atkinson’s prolific career too closely, aside from enjoying the excellent Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier album on Aguirre, but this latest experiment in surrealism/dada/collage/detournement piqued my interest.  For one, it is billed as a "concrète/post-digital oratorio in five parts" and was made in willfully constrained/minimalist fashion using only a laptop with limited software (Atkinson has previously sounded like a one-woman psych-rock band).  Also, it was partially inspired by being frightened as a child by Pierre Henry's "Apocalypse de Jean" and is built upon texts ranging from George Bataille's erotic prose to Felicia's own writings to snippets from random Italian art magazines.  To me, that either sounds like a recipe for a pretentious towering fiasco or a goddamn masterpiece, but the end result is mostly neither, though one piece ("L'Oeil") does manage to veer quite close to the latter.

Shelter Press

The album kicks off with "Against Archives," which is built upon an insistent electronic throb beneath a haze of eerie whines and deeply submerged, barely-there chord swells. Then, somewhere past the halfway point, the piece downshifts into just a deep bass pulse and a very industrial-sounding high-hat and Felicia begins softly, tunelessly, and distractedly singing lyrics like "I'm a sister, I'm a lover" like someone who has no idea that they are being recorded.  The following "L'Oeil" plunges even further into electronic noise territory, but there is a very appealing push-and-pull between Atkinson's gnarled, crunching white noise waves and snatches of some distant, beautiful piano music.  More importantly, Felicia's vocals are very prominent, sounding like a very intimate, hushed, and hurried confessional that seems at least partially culled from Bataille's "Madame Edwarda."  It also feels simultaneously erotic and macabre (there is a repeating line about hanging from a shower curtain rod), but apparently chronicles a conversation with a sweater, which is an amusingly wry bit of deception.

The shorter "The Book is the Territory" departs somewhat from noise to drift into some blearily shimmering Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier-style psychedelia, but also throws some disorientingly dramatic synths and heavy electronic textures into the mix as well.  Unusually, Felicia's vocals are nowhere to be found until they slowly emerge from the murk near the end, panning around to unexpectedly share some kind of powerful, difficult-to-decipher heartache.  The completely instrumental "Carve the Concept and the Artichoke" then plunges into murky and warped dark ambient territory before suddenly giving way to a discordantly played solo piano and a disjointed drum beat amidst some very evil-sounding breathing and dripping sounds.  The closing "Recherche De La Base Et Du Sommet" initially seems like it is going reprise quite a similar formula, but then abruptly transforms into a howling gale of hisses, moans, and metallic grinding as Felicia begins her reading Rene Char's poem of the same name (or some cut-up variation of it, as I do not understand French).  Then the piece dissolves into cavernous moans and snarls of noise and Atkinson sets down her microphone and begins loudly crumpling up paper amidst all the chaos, which is an appropriately weird end for a deeply weird album.

For the most part, I enjoyed A Readymade Ceremony quite a bit, but there are a number of elements to it that I find perplexing or exasperating (and not in a "this art is too challenging for me to comprehend" way).  For one, the album is ostensibly a significant divergence for Atkinson due to its text-based nature, but I found her abandonment of conventional instrumentation to be equally radical.  Felicia had previously staked-out some very appealing territory for herself as a purveyor of warmly hallucinatory instrumental reveries, which would have provided a great backdrop for this experiment.  It seems regressive to completely abandon an entire successful aesthetic in favor of becoming a better-than-average texture-centric laptop noise artist, though Felicia's colder and more menacing backdrop admittedly serves her quite well in "L'Oeil."  My other issue is that much of Atkinson’s text-collage alchemy–the album's raison d’être–was lost on me, either reduced to only a few understandable phrases or spoken in a language that I do not understand.  Granted, not knowing French is my problem, but it is worth noting that listeners need to be at least bi-lingual to fully unravel A Readymade Ceremony's mysteries.

Thankfully, Atkinson's voice still can be very effective even when the specific content is lost and its alternately sensual, conspiratorial, and vulnerable presence is a very effective counterbalance to the largely inhuman musical backdrop.  It is not a complete success though.  At its worst, A Readymade Ceremony sounds like a decent noise album or installation piece, which is a definite downgrade from Atkinson's past high points.  "L'Oeil" is inarguably ten minutes of uniquely haunting inspiration though and "The Book is the Territory" is not terribly far behind, which means that A Readymade Ceremony is at least half of an absolute triumph.

• Against Archives
• L'Oeil
• Recherche De La Base Et Du Sommet

 

05 April 2015

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Albums and Singles

This posthumous release is a thoroughly bittersweet affair, as Shimmering Ghost is both Rodman Melchior's final album and her finest hour (probably, anyways).  A series of fractured and flickering collages, these pieces are "experimental" in the best sense of the word, using an unpredictable and simple mixture of instrumentation, found sounds, and field recordings to weave together a very complex, intimate, and evocative narrative.  At its best, Ghost makes me feel like I am drifting through an immersive, mysterious, and disorienting stream of someone else's dreams and memories.  No one else makes albums like this.

Siltbreeze

It is hard to figure out where to even begin with this deeply otherworldly and unique album, as sound collage is hardly anything new, yet Letha’s execution somehow makes it feel that way.  The bulk of the magic lies primarily in the details and the textures, though it also helps that Rodman Melchior was smart and inventive enough to find a way to make a haunted-sounding album seem nuanced and sensual rather than like another boring dark ambient album.  Her success in that regard stems largely from her decision to seamlessly drift between the familiar and the unfamiliar as though the barrier separating our own plane from the supernatural one has weakened and become porous.  The opening "Edymion/MWCIE" is an especially fine example of that tight-rope walk, as its initial Sonic Youth-esque guitar unexpectedly gives may to a beautiful harp waltz from guest Mary Lattimore, albeit one enhanced with eerily swooping, Theremin-like wordless singing amidst subtle hisses and shudders. Eventually, the harp interlude dissipates, but the bottom has effectively dropped out for good, as the hapless guitar figure now has to contend with intruding horses, church bells, and something resembling a Bollywood soundtrack before it all dissolves once more into a hypnotic locked groove swirling with hallucinatory peripheral touches.

The best pieces, however, are the ones that start out completely disorienting and unstuck in time and only escalate from there without any nods towards recognizable contemporary music.  On "Marsh of Diseases," for example, a brief church organ introduction quickly dissolves into rippling snatches of harp amidst a delirious haze of echoing voices, hiss, panned crackling, and a sublimely warm bed of swelling drones.  "Southern Highlands," on the other hand, begins with a man announcing that he has a ghost story to share.  As his tale starts to unfold, however, a simple and bittersweet piano reverie appears beneath him and the tale itself is dismembered into a swirl of echoing and reverberating fragments.  While those two pieces are the album’s clear highlights, Shimmering Ghost is strewn with a number of other unexpectedly beautiful interludes, such as the blurred and doubled monologue that appears over a twinkling and melancholy piano at the end of "Red Moon/Fra Mauro."

As far as I am concerned, Shimmering Ghost has no real flaws: I may wish that it were a little longer or that the balance leaned more heavily towards Letha's eerier, dreamier side, but the album works perfectly exactly the way it is.Although several pieces feel like noisy, textural filler when examined on their own, they provide necessary transitions between the more beautiful, substantial pieces and serve to heighten the escalating sense of dislocation and shimmering unreality: this album works as an effectively sequenced and abstractly phantasmagoric narrative arc rather than as a start-to-finish cavalcade of highlights.  Also, the relative brevity works in Shimmering Ghost's favor, as none of the less memorable stretches sticks around long enough to overstay their welcome.  More importantly, Letha's work feels singularly guileless, purposeful, and unpretentious despite its sophistication, resembling Outsider Art or Folk Art made by someone who actually knew exactly what they were doing and what had come before, but chose to step outside the experimental music continuum in an effort to make something more sincere and meaningful (and succeeded beautifully).  Shimmering Ghost is a minor masterpiece.

• Edymion/MWCIE
• Marsh of Diseases
• Southern Highlands

 

30 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

Cetology is one of those albums that sits somewhat close to an established style (in this case techno) on the genre spectrum, but just far enough out to sound like something else entirely. The elements are all here: synth leads, catchy basslines, programmed drums, but it all ends up put together in a way that might seem wrong, but because of that becomes a different and captivatingly unique beast entirely.

Nute Records

Marreck (aka Michael Hann, who also records as Rejections) utilizes all of those sounds and instruments we associate with dance music, but uses them to instead compose chaotic pieces that defied all expectations.The first piece, "Folio" has an analog-ish kick drum rhythm, with conventional synth leads and washes, but rather than being danceable it is instead an unrelenting barrage of drums contrasted with a frozen, glacial electronic progression.

"Duedecimo" also has Hann doing this extremely well:a stuttering, pummeling kick drum sequence is mixed with handclaps that more closely resemble automatic weapons fire.Along with this abrasive rhythm section, he blends in aggressive, noise heavy synth stabs and what sounds like a futuristic warning siren blasting outward.

On a piece such as "Somina", he lets the noise take the lead.A stuttering, harsh beat and distorted ambience results in a chugging, industrial-like sound that is as rhythmic as it is dissonant."Cuvier", on the other hand, keeps the rhythm aggressive but not distorted, with oddly processed sheets of synth noise washing forward.He keeps things together, with the noisier moments being reigned in before they get out of hand until the very end, where everything just explodes into a mass of futuristic war-like noise.

Harsh noise artists trying to make acid house techno would probably result in a song similar to "Luna", which sounds like familiar, squelchy synth sounds destroyed and quickly reassembled into a burst of rhythmic noise, all the while a light, beautiful synth passage underscores and contrasts the chaos.The closing "Octavo" has the ambience of an air conditioning system entering full on meltdown, with muffled, reverb heavy thumping beats and a dark, oppressive and claustrophobic feel that builds to its intense conclusion.

With so many noise artists trying to adopt techno sounds and beats these days, Marreck's album sounds like the opposite:an electronic artist using his dance-oriented gear to make abrasive blasts of harshness.Michael Hann's use of these familiar sounds, in these seemingly unnatural contexts, is this album’s greatest asset.Parts may seem familiar, but Cetology sounds like no other album, and no other artist could have made it.

samples:

• Folio
• Somina
• Octavo

 

30 March 2015

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Few bands consisting of only a drummer/vocalist and bassist would be able to carry that arrangement for almost 16 years, but few bands are Lightning Bolt. Sticking true to their roots since 1999, Fantasy Empire is their first record in five years, and also their first recorded in a professional studio. This has not at all dulled their sound: it is still as blown out and distorted as ever, and as before memorable riffs and melodies lie beneath the primordial low-end sludge.

Thrill Jockey

The more conventional studio setting that Fantasy Empire was recorded in may give a certain extra depth to the sound, but Brian Chippendale's manic drumming and unique, broken-megaphone like vocals lose none of their impact, nor does Brian Gibson's unique bass sound, which slips from bass to guitar to synth sounds and back again, often within the same song.

The opening song "The Metal East" encapsulates this wonderfully.What sounds like a conventional guitar riff, caked in distortion, is cast into a mass of low end fuzz and unrelenting pounding.What could almost pass for a keyboard slips in at the end to make things even weirder."King of My World" has the duo trying out an almost funky lurch, with an overall lighter feel to the song overall and again what could pass for a synthesizer in the lead.

The songs that stand out the most for me are the ones where the two Brians embrace their inner stoner and pump out their completely unique spin on riff-heavy '70s classic rock."Over the River and Through the Woods" may have that memorable big riff sound, but with that expected Lightning Bolt unhinged approach to music."Runaway Train" is another slab of big guitar(like) sounds and grimy, filthy low end bass guitar tones.With a memorable stomping beat and chaotic "rock out" closing, it is the perfect balance of structure and disorder.

The album concludes on the 11-plus minute "Snow White (& the 7 Dwarves Fans)", with the duo cramming as much of their sound into a single piece of music.While it might begin with a disturbingly clean, slower paced prog rock opening, the two cannot stay restrained for that long.Soon it is their normal blown out sound, with frenetic vocals vying with dense bass murk to be the most prevalent element to be heard.The final quarter is itself an impressive pairing of unnatural bass sounds and insanely rapid, complex drumming, shifting dynamics and just a brilliant mass of sound.

Lightning Bolt may have been using the same gimmick for a decade and a half, but Fantasy Empire shows that they manage to keep it fresh and innovative after all this time.With Chippendale and Gibson both using their instruments to make sounds that they were never intended to make, these songs manage to be odd outbursts of noise while still pushing out catchy riffs and memorable rhythms.

samples:

• The Metal East
• Runaway Train
• Snow White (& the 7 Dwarves Fans)

 

29 March 2015

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The photographs that comprise the artwork for Characters at the Water Margin, of the Hoh River and of Washington State’s Pacific coast, teem with secluded life, the same life that Loren Chasse presents in his music. It’s an unusual sort of life, easy to miss despite its ubiquity. Gnarled tree trunks, stones worn into smooth ovals, driftwood piled into broken lattices; by definition these are dormant and inanimate things, but Chasse listens and composes with a heuristic ear. Along and above the Olympic Peninsula’s jagged shoreline, small commotions lie in wait, accompanied by the constant pulse of the ocean. Tucked away at the foot of a national forest, in the wreckage of a glacial waterway, they are all but invisible. The circumstances of their appearance depend on close listening, on the slowing down of time, and on a willingness to hear the depth of music that subsists in the tiniest places.

Unfathomless

The "character" in Characters at the Water Margin is ambiguous. Does Loren Chasse think about this album in terms of its material qualities, like hard and soft and smooth and rough? The sounds he focuses on, largely tactile and granular, definitely support that view. Or is his subject a place and a time in the personal sense, as if coastal Washington were a character in a story or the identity of a person that lives not too far away? The liner notes and album art, as well as the music, support that interpretation too.

The answer is probably both. Field recordings near the mouth of the Hoh River are the material for and the subject of this album, and Chasse blends the two indiscriminately. The foamy rush of ocean waves, the rough crack of dry timber, and the chalky mineral sound of granite and shale pop out in these songs, as does the manner in which Chasse has altered and layered them. Even within the same song, his recordings are sometimes clear and sometimes opaque, either finely detailed or muddied by the movement of wind, a lack of visual context, or by the muffled quality of the recordings themselves. The mix remains sparse almost the entire time, however, and often borders on the silent. The idea is to listen closely, to hear all the little details in whatever way they are presented. That includes hearing Loren Chasse in the background, interacting with and observing his surroundings.

Those interactions include some amount of post-production, though it is hard to say whether or not Chasse could have affected the album’s most unnatural sounding noises, like the mysterious electric hum at the beginning of "Handfuls on an Edge of Foam," on site. Guessing whether this sound or that sound occurred in studio or in the field obscures the point anyway. The presence of the ocean, of the wind, and of flora and fauna is constant. Location matters. What is heard and how it is heard are equally important, but not just in a "guess how he did it" way. Like characters in a novel, the elements in Characters at the Water Margin amass an emotional, or at least a imaginative, power over time. The obviously drummed rhythms on "Ovoids for a Tumbling Pattern," the cold spray of salt water, and the intermittent call of seagulls all point to and away from themselves, as do the odd spells of static, distortion, and amplified ambiance. At times the music is relaxing, almost meditative, its impressive emptiness an opportunity to shut the rest of the world out. At other times it is alien, as when the shifting rocks and squishy soil suggest the presence and movement of an unimaginable creature.

And it is always colorful. The tide doesn't simply rise and fall, the ocean attacks the land in concentrated surges. The trees don't just rustle when the wind blows, the hollow branches of old wood sing when the air slides over them, and grains of sand and silt fall in avalanches, unearthing a hidden network of debris and corroded artifacts. With the ear pressed so closely to the ground, even the dirt moves and breathes like a living thing. From this perspective the smallest event acquires significance and the world grows that much larger.

samples:

• Arrangement for Two Phases of the Moon
• Ovoids for a Tumbling Pattern
• Striking Cedar Tongues

 

29 March 2015

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This is a record about love and resistance. After the broken frigidity of Classical Curves, Jam City returns with an urgent, fearless and strikingly sensitive album of modern pop songs, both crushingly heavy and glitteringly light. Made by modest means, made by any means, the DIY origin of the record speaks to the artist’s faith in the power of music to not only transcend but also to confront, unsettle and suggest an alternative to the total colonisation of art by neo-liberalism. Always raw, always in the red.

There’s no question that you’re listening to the same artist responsible for some of the most intense and influential club tracks of the last 5 years, on an album that could only be realized by Night Slugs. Dream A Garden is not a total break from the world of Classical Curves, but rather an inversion: what becomes of the people struggling to live and love beneath the chrome-plated, vacuous and superficial machinery that we must fight to see beyond? While drawing on a diverse musical history (sound system guitar dynamix, punk, hip hop, grime, country, the gothic and the modern), Dream A Garden remains rooted in the bleakness of the present: everyday life under the regime of high capitalism. Turning the avenues of lifestyle fascism we walk through everyday into psychedelic, surreal daydreams; Jam offers his songwriting as a coping mechanism, a form of re- scrambling a landscape dominated by ideologies of selfishness and hatred.

More information can be found here.

29 March 2015

Administrator

Albums and Singles

When Daniel O'Sullivan was invited to curate the sixth installment of Transmissions Festival in Ravenna in 2013, his first request was for Charlemagne Palestine, the shamanic world-maker and sacred toy emissary associated with the New York, '60's minimalist scene and one-time student of Pandit Pran Nath. Palestine is known primarily for extended performances with Bösendorfer piano, cathedral organs and falsetto voice, but has also exhibited his visual work internationally.  After Transmissions, O'Sullivan invited Palestine to play a two-night residency at Cafe Oto, the second night of which was a collaboration with Grumbling Fur, the duo of O'Sullivan and Alexander Tucker.

The performance at Oto was a ritualistic union of crystalware, processed strings, live tape-manipulations, Indian harmonium, shimmering piano clusters, bleating cattle, a Japanese orgy, disembodied vocal harmony and rousing choruses often led by sing-a-ma-jigs (singing Fisher-Price toys affectionately referred to as "the singing assholes").  A continuous flow of overtones and plainchant sieved through mutant simulations of processed pulses, orbiting strings and heliotropic vocal mantras.

Following their recent critically acclaimed avant-pop albums Glynnaestra (Thrill Jockey) and Preternaturals (The Quietus), this is the first incarnation of the Grumbling Fur alter-ego "Time Machine Orchestra," an alias put together to explore extended drone works, improvisation and automatic composition.

More information can be found here.

29 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

A collaboration between these two avant-garde elder statesmen could have gone any number of ways, given Chatham’s late-career embrace of the trumpet and Palestine’s unrelenting eccentricity.  For the most part, however, the sprawling, nearly three-hour Youuu + Mee is a huge success, taking minimalist drone into some very twisted, unexpected, and dark places (though Palestine's occasional eruptions of yowling vocals remain very much an acquired taste/potential deal-breaker).

Sub Rosa

Youuu + Mee is roughly divided into three hour-long pieces spanning three CDs, prosaically entitled "First," "Second," and "Third."  As it happens, the first piece is my favorite of the lot for a number of reasons.  It is built primarily upon an endlessly rippling two-note piano motif coupled with sustained trumpet drones from Chatham.  After about ten minutes or so, Palestine joins in with some sort of ritualistic approximation of Tuvan throat-singing in his trademark countertenor.  Though that is exactly the sort of thing that could potentially derail the song for me, the singing quickly disappears and Chatham's looped trumpet begins to resemble a threatening swarm of insects while the previously simple and innocent piano ripples steadily drift into darker and darker territory.  It basically sounds like La Monte Young being engulfed in a cloud of angry bees, which is a very cool niche that I do not think anyone else has attempted to fill yet.  Admittedly, there is a bit more to it than that, as the piece is not just an exercise in escalating intensity and insect-mimicry: the duo actually do a very fine job of building and releasing tension throughout, even if the "bee attack" parts are unquestionably the highlights.  That said, I always enjoy Palestine's intense, ringing, and overtone-friendly style of minimalist piano playing, especially when it veers into more dissonant territory.

For "Second," both musicians switch to different instruments, with Charlemagne transitioning to organ and Rhys picking up an electric guitar.  Initially, the two musicians limit themselves to a single slowly strummed chord being repeated over an unchanging organ drone, but Chatham's guitar contribution slowly becomes more complex as he employs his looping pedal.  To his credit, however, Chatham takes his playing in a very different direction that I would have expected, massing his notes into a stuttering, prickly thicket of overtones rather than anything melodic or structured.  For the most part, Palestine keeps his drones fairly tame, patiently shifting chords until the mood darkens once again around the 15-minute mark with an unexpected plunge into a minor key.  Though Charlemagne quickly and seamlessly reverts back to less-threatening chords, that first hint of menace proves to be a harbinger of where the piece ultimately heads.  "Second" takes a long time to become fully unnerving though, as there are some passages of sublime beauty along the way whenever Palestine hits an unexpected chord change or when Chatham allows his guitar noise to drop out to leave only plucked harmonics.  Most of the pleasure, however, lies primarily in hearing the piece transform from its placid beginnings onto a steadily darkening storm over the course of its 60-minute arc.

The final piece is yet another organ-based excursion, with languorous sustained notes from Chatham's trumpet providing shifting coloration for Palestine's lush, static drone.  For a long time, "Third" is quite a conventionally beautiful piece, warmly undulating without a trace of dissonance and gradually embellished by an undercurrent of twinkling piano.  Even Palestine's vocals are kind of enjoyable when they first arrive, transforming the piece into something resembling an exotic mass.  Curiously, Chatham returns to his guitar around the halfway point and the piece morphs into a near-reprise of "Second," albeit one with busier, more melodically active piano and a visceral plunge into the lower octaves.  Eventually it returns to yet another reprise, however, this time a reversion to its own earlier incarnation...but not before Palestine unleashes a wildly unexpected and feral-sounding vocal crescendo that makes me fear for Chatham's safety.  Fortunately, he quickly calms back down and final third of the pieces ebbs to a warm and beautifully rippling conclusion.

The only real criticism I can muster for this epic is that it sounds very much like a Charlemagne Palestine album, with all of the normal caveats that entails: his vocals can definitely be grating at times, but he is also an iconoclastic visionary, so I tend to give him a pass on his rougher edges.  They are definitely there though. He is kind of like an especially delicious meal that has a few large shards of glass in it.  That said, Youuu + Mee sounds like an especially strong Palestine album, which I did not expect at all, as most of the Charlemagne Palestine albums that I love are not particularly recent.  For his part, Rhys Chatham proves to be an excellent foil for a very strange and complicated artist, which is no small feat considering both the size of Palestine's personality and the scale at which Chatham normally works (performing solo is presumably very different than composing for massive guitar ensembles).  Also, neither man plays it at all safe: this is certainly a tour de force, but it is at times a very dissonant and nightmarish one.  Which, of course, is exactly what I would hope for: there are scores of people making pleasant drone albums, so there is no point in two artists of this caliber covering that territory when there is far more ambitious, ritualistic, and uneasy terrain left to discover.

• First
• Second
• Third

 

29 March 2015

Administrator

Albums and Singles

On paper, this compilation seems like exactly what the world needs: a new compilation celebrating the legacy of a criminally underappreciated and mostly forgotten band whose entire catalog is largely out-of-print.  In reality, however, Bourbonese Qualk 1983-1987 is kind of a perplexing mixed success, as Mannequin decided to focus exclusively on Qualk's rather primitive early years, bypassing almost all of their more distinctive and original work.  There is still a lot to like here, as the band originally sounded kind of like an anarcho-punk band that could not afford guitars or a full drum kit, but this era definitely would not have been my first choice if I were commencing my own reissue campaign.

Mannequin

This compilation is essentially a "greatest hits" overview of the first five Bourbonese Qualk albums, which I suppose offers significant utilitarian value for anyone delving into their somewhat extensive catalog.  Granted, all five albums are available in their entirety for free at the Bourbonese Qualk website, but I can see the appeal of having their highlights condensed into a single attractive-looking package (especially since I vastly prefer Qualk's later work).  There is some internal logic to focusing on this particular period as well, as it covers both the band’s full run as a trio of Simon Crab, Julian Gilbert, and Steven Tanza and their entire stretch of self-released albums (with the exception of 1990's Bo’Qu compilation).

The four pieces collected from 1983's Laughing Afternoon generally capture the group at their most straightforward, primarily consisting of little more than leaden beats, processed unmelodic vocals, and repeating bass lines.  There are certainly some glimmers of the band's more ambitious future in the unusual beat, odd squawks, and tape experimentation in "God With Us," but the core aesthetic at this point is basically just processed shouting over a simple beat.  The only real exception is the brief dub experiment of "Qualk Street," which features some surprisingly melodic guitar work from Crab as well as some unexpectedly fluid drumming from Tanza.

Hope’s five contributions offer quite a bit more promise, though a couple of pieces are just retreads of the previous "thumping-and-shouting" formula with some slap bass thrown into the mix (which definitely does not help matters).  The throbbing, trance-like "Invocation" is very adventurous by 1984 standards though, augmenting its relentless forward movement with shifting percussion flourishes and buried, Eastern-tinged burblings.  Hope also seems to be the point where Qualk started to get weird and hard-to-define in earnest, as the trio also veer into pulsing, straight-forward industrial dance ("Head Stop") as well as something that sounds like a skilled ethnographic forgery ("Black Madonna") until the unfortunate vocals appear to ruin the spell.

1985’s Spike is even more of an oddity, as it was originally released on a German label rather than the trio's own Recloose Organisation or New International Recordings imprints.  Also, half of the album was devoted to the soundtrack for a dance performance, represented here by the fluidly rumbling and ritualistic instrumental "Deadbeat." The rest of the album seems like it was a bit of an informal grab-bag though, culled from recordings the band made while organizing the Atonal festival in Berlin.  For example, "Shutdown" initially starts off with some promising tape-loop work, but quickly becomes another plodding exercise in shouting and "funky" bass playing.  The remaining "Suburb City" and "Pogrom" mark major leaps forward, however, incorporating Crab's Middle Eastern-sounding violin playing into a pair of inventive and enjoyable grooves.

Gilbert and his vocals appear to have been largely absent from 1986’s significantly improved Preparing For Power, though he contributes a passable (if unintentional) John Balance impression in the excellent "Return to Order," which features the band’s most effortlessly melodic and nuanced music to date (it sounds like a reggae Coil, actually).  The other six pieces culled from Power are not quite as immediately gratifying, but a few of them are quite good and tower above almost everything from the preceding albums.  "Outcry," for example, sounds like a soulful collision between jazz and Cocteau Twins, while "Soft City" resembles a mariachi band jamming with a drum machine.  Other pieces, however, sound either like a poor man’s Crass or simply abstract experiments that have not aged particularly well.

Gilbert was officially gone for 1987’s self-titled album, which also proved to be Tanza’s swan song as well.  Curiously, Bourbonese Qualk is only represented by two pieces, but they are both quite strong.  "This is the Enemy" again recalls Coil to some degree, but mostly because it feels like an ingeniously warped fever dream of a song. The closing "Work Over," on the other hand, captures Crab and Tanza at absolute their peak as a rhythm section, locking into a heavy, propulsive, and multi-layered groove beneath some beautifully weird and garbled robotic vocals.

Ultimately, Bourbonese Qualk 1983-1987 is exactly what its title promises, which I suppose makes it a success, albeit one for a somewhat enigmatic audience: I cannot think of anyone who would need this, aside from longtime fans who just want a physical product.  I suppose this also provides a handy overview for the curious, but the curious would be much better served by checking out later releases like On Uncertainty or Unpop long before this, as most of these songs are too rudimentary and dated to offer a big return entertainment-wise in 2015 (except for those with an unhealthy obsession with early '80s industrial music).  That said, I certainly cannot fault Mannequin for wanting to tell the world about Bourbonese Qualk.  Also, the chronological order of the pieces provides a fitfully compelling and informative overview of the formative years of a very idiosyncratic entity.  This may not represent Qualk's best work, but it at least does an excellent job showing how they eventually got there (warts and all).

Samples:

• God With Us
• Return To Order
• Outcry