Youth and painfully melodramatic vocals don't spell out "genius" in big, bold letters. While much of the music that this 17 year-old old writes sounds nice (in terms of production), many of his songs are covered in a too-sweet glow that renders all the glorious fuzz and inherent beauty of his guitar work null. Connor Kirby-Long makes music full of good ideas: at times his arrangements hint at a desire to push his own songwriting abilities forward, but all too often this results in a stifling inertia where nothing goes anywhere. There's huge washes of electronic buzz permeating every corner of every song, but this isn't enough to carry the record all by itself.
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After several releases for various labels, this German duo release their first full length for Ant-Zen. The album covers a wide variety of styles and textures in a concise 42 minutes. Over eight tracks they attempt to achieve a balance between melodic and abrasive elements.
Also on the short side—but decidedly not as fun—is the third album from French musician, vocalist and poet Toog. The record is intended to be a modern variation on Poems For Lou, a book written during World War I by poet and soldier Guillaume Apollinaire who was inspired by a woman named Lou that he loved and lost in Nice before the war. In Toog's version, the role of the muse is played by actress Asia Argento, and WWI is replaced by the war and terrorism of the post-9/11 world. It's impossible for me to verify if Toog's words truly reflect these themes, as aside from two pieces that are sultrily spoken by Argento, all of the readings are in French, a language that I remember very little of from my lessons of many years ago. At least the music, which is produced by French sound artist Digiki, is generally quite nice, mixing together elements of downtempo electro & ambient with low-key pop & hip-hop, and even some hints of industrial, classical and cabaret. Given the strong poetic theme of the work, however, it's quite obvious that without some understanding of the words, listeners just won't get the full message that Toog is trying to convey in the 10 tracks on 'Lou Etendue'.
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.
In an era when so many guitarists have taken to laptop processing in order to coax new life from their thought-tired instruments, it seems only fair that other solo-instrumentalists should join the fun. And while the cello has enjoyed its fair share of fusion within the rock sphere, I've yet to see someone sit alone with this instrument, so engorged with classical and acoustic traditions, and really "plug in." Part of what makes Arnold Haberl's output as Noid so fascinating is the way the Austrian cellist moves beyond a banal, deconstructivist treatment of his playing and into ideas for composition where the computer feels less like a medium guiding the production of a piece and more like a voice within the music, to be engaged and countered, rather than simply played-through. Haberl's pieces branch off of strict minimalist ideas, bypassing crude layering techniques of the analog past and instead favoring tightly-wound, stuttering loop effects, drawn out often to the realm of nauseous formalism. Rarely is any multi-tracking involved in Noid's creations; rather miniature fragments of playing are captured, treated, and allowed to loop out, at times for over ten minutes with no real variation. The cello's woody groan becomes an industrial sander on the opening "melodien," stripped of human presence, even a performer's pause or the negative space of a hand slightly off-beat. It's clear after such a beginning that this will be "process" music, here less about the process of making, which becomes increasingly transparent as the disc progresses, and more about the process of listening, of accepting the music's sensory overload in juxtaposition with virtual lifelessness of the sounds themselves and the possibility of their "performance." Haberl does perform with live sampling and manipulation, and the points on Monodigmen where his cello is left recognizable logically become some of the most mind-numbing. "Vacuum 1" is a 12-minute piece of the cellist in lock-groove mode, struggling around what sounds like the opening strains of "Flight of the Bumblebee." After the question of Haberl actually playing such an infernal half-measure over and over again has been ruled out, listening becomes a tug-of-war between enduring the instrument's stunted flight and the utter detachment resulting from the search for patterns, or anything "material" in the music, and finding nothing. I hesitate to dismiss Noid's music as a purely formal exercise because of the way he continuously engages the elements of poise and human concentration almost inseparable from his chosen instrument, in an ultimate reduction of all that is traditionally expressive about it. There are times when Monodigmen feels like an extension of Cage's efforts to communicate the zen-like void or 'nothing' in musical composition; other times, however, Haberl's creation seems too much of an endurance test to communicate anything worth the time it takes to get there.
While comparisons to Cold Cave are going to be somewhat inevitable in this day and age, this four track EP from Clockcleaner vocalist/guitarist John Sharkey III embraces the new wave nostalgia to some extent, but the result is closer to early '80s death rock than the more synth heavy projects, owing far more to the likes of Christian Death than New Order.
Having been stalwarts in the Japanese electroacoustic microsound scene for over a decade now, the quartet has always focused on unifying the usually disparate worlds of laptop based programming and improvised organic music. For their second release on the 12k label, they have done exactly that, marrying acoustic guitar with software patches, all presented in a warm, post-rock influenced analog audio bath.
After successful releases on Sedimental and Tilt Recordings Thanasis Kaproulias was invited to the venerable VPRO Radio to perform a piece live, and unsurprisingly it has been released on the Staalplaat label for the rest of the world to hear. The single 47 minute track covers the composer’s sound as it is being refined, capturing elements of other artists such as Francisco Lopez and Bernhard Gunter, but still retaining an identity all his own.
The debut release from this synthesiser duo of Andrew Fogarty and Ivan Pawle is a raw but ultimately unsatisfying release which fails to capture the full potential of the group. The basic ingredients are here but they have not come together yet. That being said, this is far from a bad release but based on this EP alone there is not a lot to separate Boys of Summer from the countless other CD-R/tape culture groups out there.
Expanded to a three piece, this second EP from Dublin’s Boys of Summer hits all the spots that V failed to tickle. With a far richer palette of tones at their disposal, the group offer an immensely satisfying journey through the dustier regions of that piece of meat between the ears that calls itself a brain. Like transmissions from another planet, these three pieces are alien sounding and utterly bewitching.
