We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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Dutch sound artist and Machinefabriek collaborator Wouter van Veldhoven has maintained quite a low profile since he began releasing music in 2005, quietly assembling a unique body of work with a minimum of fanfare or self-promotion. Fortunately, someone at Mort Aux Vaches noticed anyway and invited Wouter to drop by the studio with his arsenal of decrepit reel-to-reel tape players and home-built equipment for a live session of wobbly, understated ambient beauty.
The 35-minute set consists of three pieces, all of which are untitled. The opening work is a fragile, hazy edifice built from what sounds like several decayed tape loops of a melodica (or perhaps an accordion). It is relatively sparse and one-dimensional, but manages to work anyway, simply because it is so sad and tremulous. The central elements of Wouter’s aesthetic seem to be spaciousness, simplicity, and deliberate frailty. Rather than layering his loops to create density and complicated interactions and harmonies, he instead allows his work to unfold teasingly slowly and woozily, as if there is a good chance that the entire thing may collapse at any second or that the next note might never come.
The second track, while significantly longer, does not tamper much with van Veldhoven’s formula. However, the mood takes a more ominous turn, as somber chords insistently swell up from the crack and hiss of the tape while quivering higher pitches form a disquieting impressionist fog above it all. Soon a strange delayed rustling begins to flap through the murky sonic landscape at predictable intervals like a giant mechanical bird, and a host of non-musical flutters and throbs begins to intensify before it all fades slowly away.
The epic (nearly 20-minute) closer that follows it is the most engrossing and emotionally affecting distillation of van Veldhoven’s vision on the album. Again, however, there is no real dramatic change in what he does. Instead, Wouter merely allows himself more time to weave his teetering, quavering sound web. The instrumentation changes a bit though—I definitely hear a guitar and a xylophone this time around. They are not played at all conventionally, however, but are merely sound sources for a drifting and diffuse cloud of blurred notes. About halfway through, the now deceptively complex fog becomes bolstered by shimmering cymbals and the looped melancholy sighing of a human voice. The voice soon begins to overlap itself and unexpectedly coheres into a hypnotic, immersive, and heavenly mantra that sounds as divinely inspired as any Gregorian chant.
Mort Aux Vaches has captured an impressive and inspired performance. This is not necessarily a great or essential stand-alone work due to its brevity and sketch-like nature (brilliant closing piece aside), but it does have the important distinction of being my first exposure to van Veldhoven and it was an extremely favorable one. I am very eager to hear what Wouter can do when he has no time and equipment constraints limiting him: it seems like he has no trouble at all assembling the base elements for works of sublime beauty, but merely needs a sufficient amount of time to bring them to full flower.
Our Love Will Destroy The World's debut full-length (2009's Stillborn Plague Angels) was a strikingly ugly, cathartic, and demonic affair that seemed to take guitar-based noise to its logical extreme. It turns out that it hadn't, as Campbell Kneale's newest black-hearted slab of vinyl makes it clear that he has no trouble at all dreaming up ingenius new ways to be bilious and face-meltingly heavy.
“Halloweenteeth” commences the horror of Fucking Dracula Teeth with a relatively tame low drone that is soon joined by a ride-cymbal drumbeat and a repeating feedback loop. Within a minute or so, however, all hell breaks loose and the groove is blindsided by an avalanche of shrieking, howling white noise chaos. At that point, all pretensions of song-craft and accessibility are conclusively vanquished for the remaining duration of the album. The rest of "Halloweenteeth" unfolds as a dense, throbbing, roiling squall of seething ugliness and it is wonderful. Somewhere beneath it all lurks something melodic and xylophone-like, but it is never allowed to come to the fore. Instead, it sounds like a pleasant song that is being bludgeoned to death.
“The Pleasure's Everlasting” follows in much the same vein, though it is a bit more static and droning than its predecessor. It is built upon a thick bed of hums and crackles, but strangled guitar and swooping gales of static and electronics continually threaten to burst forth from the entropic miasma and take the piece in a harsher direction. It never happens though. In fact, the piece concludes without ever evolving or cohering into something more, yet it never becomes at all boring due to the sheer density and complexity of squirming and seething small-scale eruptions that Campbell has woven into it. While it is the certainly the most minor piece on the album, it is a very effective exercise in the power of simmering tension.
The entire second side of the record is occupied by the album's clear centerpiece, "In Sleep We Creep," which unexpectedly begins with the coupling of sloppy noise rock noodling and a '90s techno synth bass line. Gradually, that unholy marriage is joined by a chorus of mangled voices and a buried thumping house beat, both of which steadily increase in presence. Then, both the garage rock riffage and bass line abruptly vanish, leaving only a thumping four-on-the-floor beat, thick doom-y distortion, and an intense cacophony of voices that sounds like a riot of the damned. Amusingly, it sounds like there is a cowbell incorporated into the murky, buried beat. Detourning a sexy dance beat into a pulsing, unhinged nightmare is an unexpectedly wry (and effective) move, displaying an impish side to Kneale that has historically been well-concealed. Eventually Campbell casts the beat aside, leaving only an anguished, smoldering wreckage of feedback and howling voices.
This is a significant creative step forward, as the inclusion of dark humor, ruined melodies, and pop music snippets, as well as the increased role of electronics and field recordings, show that Kneale's singularly uncompromising and infernal vision still has a great deal of room left for expansion. Fucking Dracula Teeth is yet another great record by one of the current reigning high priests of unpleasantness.
On their third album, Trembling Bells explore traditional folk themes such as boozing, loneliness, landscape, mystical creatures and regret, with more modern and eclectic sounds. Their joyous approach to playing and singing is hypnotic and passionate with enough humor and raw edges to steer well clear of being over-sentimental.
Trembling Bells’ debut release contained my favorite song of 2009, the sorrowful yet uplifting dirge "Willows of Carbeth." I consciously avoided their second album (lest it somehow conspire to ruin my love for that one song) but am happy to report the group is in good form for The Constant Pageant. The passion is evident from the first piece "Just As The Rainbow" which opens with guitar wailing like bagpipes on heat and the group keeping up an impressive, slow, bombastic pace. Enter the possessed floral gargle that is the voice of Lucretia Blackwell, oft wrongly compared to that of Sandy Denny. While both can conjure a haunting loneliness Blackwell’s is more unpredictable, less pure sounding, and more liable to trilling leaps and guttural bounds. Her adventurously risky singing suits Trembling Bells to a tee since the group repeatedly shift gears and introduce somewhat unconventional instruments onto the solid traditional folk upon which their music is based. "Where Do I Go From You," for instance, includes horns, piano and wild fuzzy guitar but Blackwell’s voice ensures the essential folk aspect can’t be missed, even when she goes into some kind of ecstatic overload repeating the title during the fade-out section.
For contrast, drummer Alex Neilson also sings, both alone and, to fine effect, in harmony with Blackwell. He has featured in a number of other projects including Scatter and Directing Hand but his love of folk music is clearly blood-deep. Neilson is from Yorkshire (from whence came such bastions of folk music as Martin Carthy and the Waterson family) and lovely references to the county, and to other places in England, abound. "Goathland" not only brings to mind the Half Man Half Biscuit song "We built this village on a Trad. Arr. tune" but also name-checks several locations, including itself and Robin Hood’s bay. The later is home (amongst other things) to The Pigsty, one of the most memorable smaller properties restored and available for holiday rental by the non-profit conservation group Landmark Trust.
Trembling Bells show themselves to be unafraid to make a stirring noise and to quote or borrow from 1960s pop music and 1970s progressive rock. They balance deep folk tradition (even the use of brass nods to the tradition of bands attached to the coal mines) with an unabashed love for the sheer power of electric instruments. I can't help but feel that the Watersons themselves might approve. Certainly Mike Heron (of The Incredible String Band) does, if recent joint concerts are any guide. Indeed, the only thing that has me brassed off about this album is the line "wasted my days in watering holes," because the idea that time spent in a good pub could ever be considered a waste, is nonsense to an Englishman.
On last year's excellent Fountain, Grody divided his time between nods to droning contemporary ambient and more traditional acoustic guitar fare.  This time around, the focus is much heavier on his more rustic, Takoma-influenced leanings, which yields mixed results.  On one hand, these songs are more distinctive and anachronistic, but their languid pace and comparative lack of hooks blunts their impact a bit. In Search of Light still boasts some wonderful songs though–they're just a bit more sparingly distributed than they were on its predecessor.
As far as opening songs go, Grody could not have done much better than the wistful and languorous waltz of "Hello From of Everywhere," which beautifully weaves together bittersweet synth buzz and a nicely harmonized descending guitar melody.  Despite ending a bit sooner than I would have liked, it is pretty much the embodiment of everything Danny does well, which set my expectations for the rest of the album almost impossibly high.  In a few instances, such as the gentle and dreamlike "China Beach," he manages to deliver on that huge initial promise.  "Stars Gaze," the album's sole foray into shimmering ambiance, is quite beautiful as well.  Unfortunately, there are also several pieces that sound to me like a key component is absent.  In the otherwise excellent "Orbits," for example, Grody creates a nice pulse with a pleasantly chiming arpeggio progression, but leaves out a strong melody.  It still works in the sense that it is likable and derives a cumulative power from intelligent repetition, but it definitely falls short of the heights reached elsewhere on the album.
A few other pieces miss the mark a bit more conspicuously though, mostly when Grody indulges an urge to lazily meander or incorporate psych elements– he does both on "Ohr," lamentably.  My lukewarm feelings regarding some of the other pieces are probably attributable to a widening gulf between my taste and Danny's taste rather than questionable artistic decisions though: I am simply not a huge fan of  the '70s Takoma roster to begin with (Robbie Basho, love of raga, etc.), and Grody seems to have appropriated much of that aesthetic minus the blues and ragtime elements that gave that milieu much of its gravitas and vibrancy.  I definitely get the sense that Danny is converging towards some kind of kora/folk/minimalism amalgamation that is all his own, which puts me in the curious position of being disappointed to see someone evolving towards a more original aesthetic (he is misfiring with honor and vision!).  This wouldn't bother me nearly so much, naturally, if I didn't love the other facets of his sound– change is hard when the status quo is desirable.  Thankfully, he has not reached that hypothesized ultimate stylistic destination just yet. In Search of Light may be a so-called "transitional" album, but it is happily still a half-great one.
This stripped-down 20-minute EP captures Blackshaw back near the top of his game, finding the perfect synergy between his talents as a steel-string virtuoso and his ambitions as a more varied composer.  While the overall feeling of these two pieces is languorous, melancholy, and impressionistic, the crisp sound and complex and inventive arrangements imbue them with a surprising amount of dazzle and immediacy.  James makes a virtue of brevity, as Holly is a complete, undiluted, and consistently strong effort.
In some regards, Holly is very much a return to Blackshaw's roots, as his acoustic guitar playing again takes center stage.  Also, it is very nearly an entirely solo affair, enlisting only multi-instrumentalist/All is Falling alum Charlotte Glasson to fill out the sound. Despite that, these two pieces have little in common with the Eastern-tinged American steel-string folkies that inspired James' earliest work.  Instead, Holly fits comfortably (not regressively) into Blackshaw's career arc, feeling very much like a neo-classical guitar album– Blackshaw even plays nylon string here for the first time.
Fortunately, close similarities to Julian Bream and John Williams fall by the wayside once James picks up enough momentum.  "Holly," for example, begins with a deceptively somber twelve-string guitar motif before quickly spiraling off into an roiling web of lightning nylon string arpeggios and descending piano chords.  I was especially struck by the way the incredibly fast and complicated fingerpicking is counterbalanced by the rather languid piano and violin themes– it gives the piece an unusual sense of motion and urgency.  While certain passages in "Holly" are quite beautiful compositionally, the main attraction for me lies in the blindingly dexterous and multilayered cascade of notes employed to unfold the piece's simple melodies.  This is essentially a mesmerizing performance that also happens to be a good song.
"Boo, Forever" is a bit less awe-inspiring technique-wise, but it is cut from roughly the same cloth and is no less enjoyable.  The key difference is that it is built around a few layers of 12-string steel guitars, which gives it an added crisp physicality.  Also, the melodic crescendos feature woodwinds rather than violins, but the general mood remains the same.  Exactly what that mood is, however, is somewhat difficult to put my finger on.  It is impossible to say how much the Christmas-connotations of "holly" have colored my judgment at this point, but I think these two pieces definitely evoke a cozy, huddled-near-a-fireplace-on-a-cold-winter-day feel that is quite appealing (even when co-mingled with muted sadness).  In fact, the worst thing that I can possibly say about this release is that it may err on the side of being too polite, but I can find room in my heart for "nice" things if they are well-executed.  While it doesn't quite reach the heights of some of Blackshaw's individual pieces from the past, Holly is certainly an inspired detour (and a very solid one at that).
Compared to the sprawling songs on their previous album 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra have streamlined their songs as well as their name and their line up for this album (the band are now a far more manageable five piece compared to the larger ensembles of previous albums). Granted there are still a couple of monster-sized pieces here but there are a number of shorter, punchier songs to break them up. Kollaps Tradixionales shows this pared down Silver Mt. Zion in ferocious form, the stark beauty of their music reinforced with a renewed fire in their bellies. As usual, I am completely blown away by their music.
“There is a Light” takes up the baton from tracks like “BlindBlindBlind,” its undulating form going from peacefully reserved to ecstatically charged; yes it is that loud/quiet/loud that has become a cliché in this post- Godspeed world but Silver Mt. Zion make it into something transcendental unlike lesser imitators like Explosions in the Sky of Mono (not to detract from those bands but really they are monochrome compared to the vivid color of SMZ’s music). Any accusations of sticking to a formula are well and truly dashed with “I Built Myself a Metal Bird,” which is the closest the band have come to pure unleashed rock. Even so, their use of unusual tempos and bawled-out vocals pushes themselves outside the realms of traditional rock. This is furious music delivered with all the restraint of war. Here new drummer David Payant proves his worth by stampeding through his kit.
The title track is not a track at all but three pieces named as variations on the album’s title that expand in completely different directions. Beginning with the gentle “Collapse Traditional (For Darling)” and moving to the explosive “Kollaps Tradicional (Bury 3 Dynamos),” Silver Mt. Zion show all their various faces and in three pieces sum up everything they represent: fear, hope, anger and passion. By the time the final piece, "'Piphany Rambler," arrives, this album has taken its toll. Not to suggest by any means it is difficult but the levels of energy I expel listening by singing along, getting worked up and calming down again makes for a tiring and utterly worthwhile hour of my life.
A review of a Constellation album is never complete without mentioning its presentation. Kollaps Tradixionales is another fantastic addition to the label’s design portfolio, the vinyl version comes with beautiful posters and a book of found images (made in collaboration with film maker Jem Cohen who has worked with the band along with Vic Chesnutt in the past). To top things off, as with some of their other recent albums Constellation also include a CD copy of the album for those times when vinyl is not an option. This nice gesture is a far better than the recent trend of including a download coupon as I find that these downloads end up sitting on a hard drive rather than being played. At least the CD has received plenty of spins in the car so far. Thanks Constellation!
The anchoring of western music to equal temperament has on one hand lead to many musical developments but on the other hand, there is a whole world of musical textures and approaches to composition lost to instruments that are stuck playing in chromatic scales. On this excellent compilation, several artists explore intonation from a number of different approachesm utilizing a range of instruments. Ranging from almost ambient soundworks to difficult conceptual pieces, The Harmonic Series is an expansive anthology of unusual and beautiful music.
The idea of intonation alone is not a new one but it is a particularly apt type of tuning that fits with the technological and cultural movements of the 20th century. The mathematical side of just intonation and its reliance on whole number ratios sits comfortably beside ideas like quantum mechanics and the development of computer technology. Additionally, there is a feeling of otherness about pieces performed in intonation; the interaction between the notes sounding alien compared to the expected sounds that a modern ear conditioned to equal temperament. Michael Harrison’s “Tone Cloud II” transforms the familiar sound of a piano into a metallic shimmer, the interference from the different notes forming an uncertain backdrop to the relatively straightforward arrangement. Played on a piano tuned in a standard way, this would be a nice but inoffensive piece but Harrison allows the alternate tuning to give the music a hue that it would otherwise be lacking.
On “The Beauty of Sorrow” Pauline Oliveros shows a different side to intonation which accentuates its more musical side; the “wrong” feeling of the tuning negated by her sombre composition. Taking this “wrongness” and revelling in it, Charles Curtis’ “Stanzas Set Before a Blank Surface” is a difficult piece compared to the others included in The Harmonic Series. Harmonic intervals are combined with intervals of silence and all conventional musical forms are eschewed in preference of a total “sound for the sake of sound” approach. Curtis presents different blocks of sound, revelling in the overtones produced by his actions. It is the kind of piece where deep listening provides a profound and rewarding experience that will alienate your friends disinclined towards experimental music.
Although the notes accompanying Greg Davis’ “Star Primes (for James Tenney)” read more like readouts from an astrophysics experiment, the end result is a blissful drone piece which is beautiful but fails to exploit the use of intonation alone. The piece could be any electronic drone in any tuning as it does not seem (to these ears anyway) to capture the same rich oddness of the other pieces. Yet this is just nitpicking because at the end of the day because much like all of Davis’ work, the drone is immensely satisfying and whether my ears can detect it or not, the piece fully fits within the remit of the compilation.
Overall The Harmonic Series is one of those great compilations where everything comes together: the concept, the selection of artists and the final flow of the album. Additionally,The Harmonic Series also comes with comprehensive sleeve notes covering both the theory behind intonation in general and individual essays on each piece included on the compilation. Short of including some La Monte Young on it, I cannot think of how this album could be bettered.
In the canon of Whitehouse, this is an odd release. It lacks the unabashed brutality of the early releases, the monotone sex-crazed sounds of the mid period, and is far more restrained than anything that has been released since. I think for that reason this has become, at least for me, their lost classic. Not lacking the caustic, angry vocals and genuinely disturbing moments of their discography, the other component is a very nuanced study of electronic textures, and an oh-so-subtle sense of humor and irony that really holds it all together.
Whitehouse was a band that, in my early days of being in the "noise" scene, I intentionally went out of my way to avoid. They seemed to represent too many of the stereotypes that pervaded, i.e., serial killer worship, misogyny, sex obsession, etc. Once I was actually exposed to them via a mix tape ("Just Like A Cunt," from this album), my opinion shifted. Granted, those themes were still present, but the presentation was one different than I had anticipated. The track just simply clicked…sure, I by no means was a supporter of the lyrical content, but the way it was delivered was just undeniable. But we’ll return to that later.
The band has always been focused on the darker side of society, but the previous releases stuck to a regular formula: up until about the release of Right to Kill, every album was shrill EDP Wasp noise, feedback, and William Bennett’s manically shrieked, but undecipherable, vocals. At the mid-point of their career, they stripped the noise back some and allowed the vocals to be heard. The most notorious of these albums, Great White Death, conjures images of loitering around seedy bookstores on the "bad" side of town, with sticky floored peep shows in the back and publications of questionable legality being carried out in non-descript paper bags. The vocals became the center point here, and the noise became more of a backing rather than a focus. Up through the Bret Easton Ellis obsessed Never Forget Death and the reverb drenched Halogen, the color changed from one of overt aggression and violence to a restrained menace.
The latter’s title track and the short closer "The Way It Will Be" were, at least to me, much more unsettling than anything off of their previous work. The combination of Peter Sotos' misanthropic texts, Bennett’s buried vocals, and extremely heavy reverb gave a sense of cold menace rather than sex crazed aggression. Quality Time kept the vibe, but pulled away the reverb and effects, leaving behind a slew of bizarrely organic textures, the origin of which I am still not sure of, but is the product of one of the last major Whitehouse and Steve Albini collaborations.
The album opens with "Told," a slow burning track of carefully controlled feedback and boiling analog textures. Bennett’s vocals enter, first calm and then disgusted, eventually becoming maniacal and shrieked, chastising and taunting a non-existent sex worker. Structurally, the track is one of the most musical bits of noise recorded. For a genre (and band) criticized for being nothing but formless chaos, there is a very song-like progression in both the backing sound and the vocals.
The longer title track that follows beings with the same alien sense of sonic disconnect, unfamiliar textures that grind away as the vocals shriek alongside. The same restrained feedback textures of "Told" with a raw, nauseous analog clicking acting as rhythm to the shrill noise’s melody. Lyrically a combination of Peter Sotos’ filth and a porn director pushing an actress to do a little more than she’s willing to creates an unsettling atmosphere to say the least, and Bennett’s clipped, overly affected vocals only add to the sense of discomfort. The dynamic level actually stays rather close to ambient territory, with only the vocals pushing everything into abrasive pastures. As an instrumental it’d be a slow sparse study of unnatural analog textures.
At the mid-point of this album is perhaps the most bizarre and uncomfortable pieces of sound anyone has ever committed to record, and it may simply be an example of context more than content. "Baby" is, ostensibly, just a recording of a baby playing in the bathtub with some nearly inaudible subsonic synthesizer noise. The standard child babbling and noises are there with really no processing. The voice of the child does sound like it may have a bit of effects placed on it, but otherwise it stays rather untouched. Other than the minor effects and multitracking to the voice, there’s nothing sinister at all here, but placed into the context of a Whitehouse album, and this particular Whitehouse album at that, it is extremely uncomfortable to hear. Sitting right in the middle of the album is "Execution," five minutes of unadulterated synth noise that, other than the undulating chugging rhythmic elements, sounds more like the Incapacitants or other highly regarded Japanese artists than anything usually labeled "power electronics." It bears more than a passing resemblance to the earlier Whitehouse albums, so perhaps it is a bit of nostalgia more than anything else.
"Just Like A Cunt," here the Philip Best version, is perhaps the track that shows what Whitehouse evolved into for their most recent releases. Sonically it is a simplistic track: the backing sounds like a broken alarm clock and boiling water, but the centerpiece is the vocals. Philip Best delivers the lyrics with a venom that I have never heard anywhere else, snarling and screaming the misogynist lyrics like someone moments before a murder. Rather than Bennett’s penchant for going into unhinged shrieks and screams, Best keeps his anger focused and directed. The untreated and coherent vocals became the focus once the acclaimed Cruise was released some years later. For anyone who takes the lyrics at face value, it should be noted that much of them are appropriated from Bob Dylan’s "Just Like a Woman," with a few words substituted, placing it more as a parody or character study than a truly spirited piece of woman-bashing. There also exists a take of this track with William Bennett’s lead vocals, but given their bizarre tone and delivery, along with its limited release (on a one track Japanese 3” single only), I’ve always considered to be more of a joke at the fan’s expense than anything else.
The closing "Once and for All" is the culmination of all of the restraint shown from the prior tracks: white noise, shrill squeals, and Bennett’s entirely undecipherable vocals, with almost everything other than the title sounding like the self-directed rantings of someone in a mental institution. While Halogen ended with the quiet reflection of "The Way it Will Be," restraint is thrown out the window here, and the manic fury of the track heralds the intensity that would follow two years later on the fully digital Mummy and Daddy.
Whitehouse were always, and continue to be a polarizing force in electronic music. There are many who despise them for their subject matter, others who embrace them for the same thing, and those such as myself who take none of it at face value but instead look at it as a merely a study of dark and unpopular topics. In the Whitehouse canon, this one is overlooked for the likes of New Britain (for it’s pure sonic brutality), Great White Death (for its prurience) or Cruise (for the vocal intensity), but it stands out on its own as an odd bit of synth textures and lyrics that unsurprisingly delve into the darkest reaches of the human psyche. Regardless of one’s position on the lyrics, Quality Time is one of the albums that, with the vocals totally removed, would still stand strongly on its own in the world of sound art. The electronic textures here are the star, and the vocals just add an even more tangible darkness to the one the music creates on its own.
Consisting of two distinct conceptual pieces spread across a total of four tracks, La Casa creates sound based upon the disparate concepts of both nature and urban sprawl, utilizing field recordings in each case both in their untouched and heavily treated states. The complex result is simultaneously warm and inviting, yet cold and detached, exactly as the source material would lead one to expect.
The opening piece, "Zone Sensible 2," is nearly a half hour of recordings based on beehives near Paris. The opening moments of the piece are unsurprising: the expected buzzes and hums of bees are present and grow in complexity, either as La Casa began to record closer to the hive, or via multi-track recording. Once the swarm arrives at the full level of intensity, it suddenly drops off via processing to near nothing, leaving only the most fragmented of sounds crackling away, the bees reappear again heavily under the influence of signal processing, covering everything in a shiny digital static sheen. The high frequency static coalesces with deep, undulating pulses before the untreated bees appear again, in concert with their digital counterparts. The processing brings out the pure tonal elements of the insects, creating warm tones light years away from the harsh textures of bee wings. The tones meld to create warm ambient electronic music, with insect interference coming in like static over radio transmissions. Eventually the bees take control, leaving the mix purely under the control of their wings before pulling away and allowing the subtle processed sounds to remain.
The remaining three tracks make up distinct segments of the "Dundee 2" piece, a collection of field recordings made around the city of Dundee, initially for use as a multitrack soundtrack to Ken Jacob’s "nervous magic lantern" film. The opening moments of the first piece are simply the clicking sounds of walking in an open parking garage. For me, this went from assumed to known the moment a booming voice cuts in, asking La Casa what he’s doing in the garage. The response, "I’m just recording space" is an honest one, but is still humorous to the befuddled guard, signaling a transition from the pure recordings to treated ones, leaving in bird songs over a low register hum and glitchy microsound delays shaped into a shrill rattle. Passages of echoing, open field sounds mix with the harmonic tones and digital stuttering, mixing both the natural world with the synthetic one.
The second segment is more forceful in its approach, with metallic rattling noises and heavy wind dominating the otherwise subtle sounds. Metal percussion like elements stick around, clashing against the otherwise complex subtlety, the heady mix ends with a surprising pastiche of church organ. The final segment goes even farther, with dense industrial clanging covering the bulk of the mix, with only the occasional voice from a field recording giving a human element to an otherwise mechanical track. The final two thirds retreat to a pensive ambience that contrasts the earlier intense noise.
While this disc joins two very different pieces, the fact that the two come from entirely different sound sources is irrelevant. La Casa utilizes the tonal qualities of both to conceptually highlight the inherent themes, but his adept hand at structure and composition gives them a coherent quality that both act as a microcosmic study of nature and society, but also a sonically compelling album that would stand high even without any sort of theme present.
The title of this album alludes to a deeply macabre and scatological Indonesian myth about young girl who possessed the dubious magical ability to defecate surprising items ranging from earrings to knives to...well...gongs. When she distributed these items to men at a village dance, the villagers collectively decided that her power was an infernal and unseemly one and that they needed to bury her alive. Fortunately, the story has a happy (albeit grisly) ending, as her friend later dug up her corpse, dismembered it, and reburied its parts all over the village, which caused delicious tuberous plants to grow.
I am not sure quite what moral I should take away from this tale, as it seems to make a strong case for digging up and disfiguring corpses, but frowns upon public defecation. Regardless, the timeless, bizarre, and shadowy music of The Glorious Gongs of Hainuwele certainly approximates the sort of music that might’ve been playing at just such a memorable dance.
Syed Kamran Ali (one-third of The Hunter Gracchus) is one of the key figures in Sheffield’s recent resurgence in underground music prominence, a small but thriving scene centered around a disused factory and the Singing Knives label. On this, his solo debut, he performs an ingenious inversion of the Muslimgauze formula, appropriating exotic field recordings in order to create even more exotic (and imaginary) field recordings of his own.
Some material seems likely to have been culled from Africa and The Middle East, but Ali could just as easily have limited himself solely to the thematically appropriate region of Southeast Asia. Much more important than the origin of the base material is what Syed does with it. Actually, what he doesn’t do with it might be more important still: these songs sound completely raw, unpolished, and devoid of any conspicuous contemporary music influence. If anything, Ali seems to have artificially eroded, distressed, and overloaded his loops to make them sound even worse, though he clearly took cautions to avoid completely rendering the instruments unidentifiable. As a result, the music captured here sounds ancient and forgotten, very much akin to Nonesuch’s Explorer series, which documented everything from folk dances to voodoo rituals. The key difference, of course, is that the culture that Ali is documenting exists only in his head.
Syed covers a lot of stylistic and emotional territory here, which is what elevates the album from a cool idea or clever intellectual exercise into something truly unique and mesmerizing. For example, the ruined strings of “Mal De Ojo” and “Scarecrow” are haunting and heartbreaking to a degree that can only be achieved by a time-ravaged tape reel, while other tracks (like “Lila Derdeba") can be quite raucous and heavily rhythmic. There are also some moments that sound like a waterlogged tape of Tom Waits at his lurching, junkyard-percussion best, yet all these disparate threads somehow manage to fit seamlessly alongside flourishes of deranged and harsh experimentalism. Throughout it all, Ali displays an innate genius for keeping things hooky, hypnotic, and unwaveringly human. An experiment like this one is an easy one to ruin with too much tinkering, self-indulgence, repetition, and clutter, but Syed has managed to sidestep every peril to egolessly let the recontextualized loops lead him into strange and wonderful new territory.
Aranos’s new long-form opus may be a bit lacking in his characteristic eccentricity, but it maintains his usual high standards of adventurousness, difficulty, and oblique conceptuality. While ostensibly a drone piece, the tone is much less meditative than I expected. Instead, Crow Eye Hint is a nakedly experimental and exploratory work for much of its duration, focusing on both negative space and the acoustic properties of misused pianos and clashing tones. Also, it gets pretty scary.
Crow Eye Hint is definitely an album that requires headphones or extreme volume to be fully appreciated. The main reason for this is the subtlety of its lengthy opening, which just sounds like sporadic, arrhythmic whooshing and creaking noises when listened to casually. Deeper focus reveals that those whooshes are merely the attack of notes that have been reversed (the tip of the iceberg, so to speak). Much quieter, but much more engrossing, is the murky hum and dynamic swelling of the notes’ backwards decay as Aranos calmly plucks and manipulates the piano wire.
Perhaps sensing that the piece was in grave danger of succeeding as an ambient work, Aranos impishly detonates the reverie after a few minutes with a brief and violent flurry of discordant, conventionally played notes. The microcosmically waxing sound world returns yet again, but with a looming sense of disquiet, as it is now clear that another explosion of dissonance is likely to occur without warning. It doesn’t happen immediately though, and the swelling reversed notes gradually increase in tension and power as Aranos increases the volume and puts the piano’s sustain pedal to work. The effect is quite a visceral one, as the rumbling bass notes begin as a diffuse thrum beneath a nimbus of treated flaps and flutters, but slowly snowball and cohere before roaring and tearing into the aural foreground. After about ten minutes, the long-awaited jarring flurry of notes finally hits once again, but is a little tamer this time and carries with it an entirely new direction.
At this point, Aranos begins playing the piano with the actual keys, but things remain far from conventional. Using the sustain pedal and a single rapidly played note, he creates a woozy, quavering shimmer that he buffets with various amplified thumps and an insistently repeating, oddly chosen tone. Glacially, the tremulous underlying drone increases steadily in depth and density while remaining melodically static until abruptly opening up into a lush, string-enhanced pastoral vista.
The second half of this 54-minute work remains relatively entrenched in that droning vein, which is slightly more listener friendly than that which preceded it. At the very least, it achieves and maintains a distinct flow. However, the placid atmosphere dissipates pretty quickly, as the pulse intensifies and the violins begin to grow more nightmarish and discordant. The piece ultimately becomes quite a harrowing and grotesque caricature of the fleeting oasis of bliss that earlier emerged as its center. That tense and disturbing atmosphere, however, eventually gives way to an eerily throbbing and moaning denouement before finally concluding, appropriately enough, on the surge of a single backwards note.
Crow Eye Hint is a very nuanced, engrossing, and intriguingly structured work and probably one of the best things that I have heard from Aranos. It certainly took me some time and effort to fully absorb and embrace this album, but it was well worth it once I did. Perhaps cognizant of the demanding nature and delayed gratification inherent in such a piece, Aranos has made the album available as a free download for more trepidatious listeners, but the handmade wood, canvas, and woodcut packaging of the actual CD is an endearingly personal touch.