18 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

Masami Akita is always at his best when he is either working with a well-chosen collaborator (like Christoph Heemann or Richard Pinhas) or paying tribute to something he loves (like bondage photography or his pet chickens). This unusual and surprisingly listenable 1998 release falls squarely into the latter category, as Akita ferociously cannibalizes the progressive rock that meant so much to him as a teenager.

Alien8

The title track opens the album in relatively straightforward Merzbow fashion, with a quasi-industrial locked groove that is quickly obliterated by an avalanche of blistering white noise.Atypically, however, the static eruption quickly subsides and the insistent rhythm again takes over.While Masami does not depart very much from his signature sound, the jousting interplay between rhythm and ruin is fairly dynamic and compelling.Then, at about the halfway point, the dust settles a bit and a lurching rock groove fades in.At first, Akita lets it unfold with little molestation, although it is a bit distorted and the cymbals sound warped and delayed.Then, of course, the floodgates are opened and the beat drowns in the expected sea of chaos (though not without a few textures that fall outside the usual Merz-palette).

The lengthier piece that follows, "Contrapuntti Indian," goes one step further and actually begins with a looped melodic guitar figure.Naturally, it is quickly ripped to shreds by another abrasive flurry of ear-shredding dissonance, but it pops up again a little later with an extremely cool stumbling tom-tom beat beneath it.Akita gets the balance between rhythm and savagery just right here: this is one of strongest pieces in the entire Merzbow discography.

The remaining three songs don’t dally with melody again, but they all follow a similar seesawing trajectory with tensely repeating rock snippets battling to stay afloat amidst tumultuous washes of abstract noise.The relatively short "Farsa Del Buen Vivir" is another of the album’s clear highlights though, due to its insistent quasi-Eastern rhythm and Akita’s especially unhinged blasts of feedback terrorism.Merzbow’s white noise assault is far more effective when it broken up with oases of structure and space than as a punishing and unrelenting hour-long roar.

It is very easy to focus on the fact that Masami has spent the last few decades repeating himself to the point of self-parody, but it is also impossible to deny that he has nevertheless remained a reliably distinctive and crushingly visceral artist.He may only have one trick, but it’s admittedly a pretty great trick (even fish raining from the sky would get boring if it happened every day).On occasions such as this, when Akita steps out of his comfort zone into a different dynamic context, it is possible to experience his vicious onslaught with fresh ears and be floored all over again. Aqua Necromancer often gets unfairly lumped in with the various "Merzbow with drums" albums, but that completely misses the point.Masami Akita has no intention of maintaining a groove here- rather he has choreographed a frenzied struggle between order and entropy.This is the sound of rock music being torn apart by a pack of snarling wolves, but not without a fierce struggle.

Samples:

• Soft Drums
• Farsa Del Buen Vivir
• Contrapuntti Indian

 

18 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

Sometimes the only way to move ahead is to fall behind the times. On his fifth solo album, Alasdair Roberts continues his run as one of the most eloquent advocates of traditional folk music. The eight originals on Spoils possess a ragged, arcane beauty that seem out of pace with the modern world, which makes them all the more striking.

Drag City

Roberts is often lauded for his elaborate diction, and rightly so for he can stack archaic words in multisyllabic rhyme with a deceptive ease. He is able to keep cadence and melody in his voice despite the poetic gymnastics of his writing, barely pausing over ten dollar words like "bilious" and "saturnine." That would be enough to prove him as more than just a hack, but there is content along with beauty in his language.

The numerous obscure references in Roberts’ lyrics reveal an encyclopedic mind, able to grasp culture by its roots as well as by its branches. The breadth of his knowledge gives the songs a visionary aspect. In "The Flyting of Grief and Joy," Roberts recounts centuries of creation and destruction, singing "A tithe of skin, a toll of bone, a bloody libel burning/In Jericho and Babylon, eternally returning." And though Roberts has a historian’s eye for detail, his passion quells any suspicion that his lyrics are over-studied.

Regardless of the source material, Roberts’ music has the honesty of personal revelation, even if he is taking the persona of another. When he sings from the perspective of Ned Ludd, the effect feels artless, as if Ludd’s grudge against the industrial machine was Roberts’ own. The effect is only broken when Roberts rejects the vision, saying "that’s only what this guitar puts into my mouth," a blunt but effective reminder that singer and song are two different things. Yet if his artistic voice still comes off as out of date, it is because so much music today does not reach outside the narrow lives of its creators.

For all the fire and brimstone that he can summon against the modern world, Roberts can take on more roles than just the prophet standing in judgment. His voice suits more personal subjects just fine, as on the album’s closer "Under No Enchantment but My Own," a delicate song about a break-up. Roberts lingers over the verses like man recalling a bittersweet memory, at once savoring and regretting the moment. He takes the perspective of a man hard-bitten by experience, singing "All too familiar/A thing a road reversed reveals."A tone of genuine loss pervades the song, ending Spoils on a tone very different from Roberts’ persona as a visionary lawgiver.

So much poetry is contained in the lyrics that it is easy to neglect the music that accompanies it. In Spoils, Roberts sticks to loose folk-rock arrangements similar to genre touchstones like Crazy Horse or the Incredible String Band. His songs are punctuated with resounding cymbal crashes and long dramatic guitar electric guitar chords. In the past, some of Roberts’ songs have suffered from flat arrangements, but on Spoils he wisely relegates ennui to being a subject matter rather than a compositional principal. Roberts is at his best when his backing band pushes him forwards, as they do in "Ye Muses Assist," where acoustic guitar and flute bob up and down together in an infectious riff and are broken up by thick snarls of feedback.

Evident as his talents are, Roberts seems in danger of sliding into a respectable but nonetheless unwarranted obscurity. His music elicits more of a grudging respect than genuine enthusiasm.The popular fetish for constant innovation harms the appreciation for traditional folk music, regardless of how radical and deconstructed it is.Roberts himself has stated in interviews that he sometimes feels "trapped" in his attachment to the old songs, but the anachronistic character of his music is one of its most distinguishing characteristics. Perhaps Roberts is mistaking a position of strength for one of confinement.While the majority confines their interest to the commonplace, he at least is one that is looking outwards for inspiration. If that is behind the times today, chances are that Roberts will fare better tomorrow.

samples:

• The Book of Doves
• The Flyting of Grief and Joy
• Ye Muses Assist

18 April 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Now Wait For Last Year is a masterpiece of understated electronic elegance. Like the hallucinatory drug JJ-180 from the Philip K. Dick novel which the album is named after, these songs have the ability to bend time, only in this case Caroline has utilized a synthesizer for the purpose of warping temporal perceptions. No heavy handed tricks or tomfoolery seem to have been used in achieving this effect. With her delicate touch, she created a pleasing batch of songs perfect for rainy evening meditations.

Klanggalerie

Caroline K was a member of The Pump and a founder of Nocturnal Emissions. Also alongside Nigel Ayers she co-founded Sterile Records, a label notable for being the first to release music by Lustmord and other underground acts from the early '80s. She sadly passed away in 2008, leaving behind only this one solo record, the first release of Earthly Delights in 1987, an imprint which Nigel started after dissolving Sterile Records the year before (having grown tired of the medical and military metaphors he felt dominated the industrial noise music crowd). Luckily for this reissue a suite of three songs titled "Between the Spaces" have also been included, their fragile beauty a far cry from the often times spastic and sputtering noise heard on The Pump and early Nocturnal Emissions.

The album opens with "The Happening World," a massive long player of 20 minutes. Starting with a maximum of oscillations, a heavy throb reminiscent of de-tuned warning sirens soon enters the fray, forming the centerpiece of the song. A banshee like howl eventually pierces the wall, and continues to cry, building up a tension that is held until the very end. A bell like cadence of soft tinkles eventually crumbles the entire ominous structure.

"Animal Lattice" starts with a simple drum machine loop—a steady snare like tap occasionally punctuated by a sharp hits—repeating with minimal variation for the rest of the song. The rhythm is complimented by a low and resonant blasting sound that conjures images of primitive woodwinds. What could be Caroline K's voice, as sampled by a keyboard and saturated in reverb, plays soft notes that echo underneath. The primitive feel of the song is contrasted with simple keyboard lines that shimmer and dance across the top. In "Chearth" these melodious keystrokes are the highlight, holding an air of buoyant joy against other sounds that are beneath its grace: churning pools of miasmic sludge and hissing gasps of steam from creaking aged machines.

"Tracking With Close-Ups" continues with sheer tones sustained along a glimmering line, arpeggiated notes climbing and descending, and the unmistakable hand-clap sound of a drum machine. I don't know if this song ever made it as a hit on the dance floor, but I think it would fit well into the end of a club DJ set, helping people wind down by lowering their heartbeat back to normal. "Leaving" is one of the most iconic songs on the disc, and the last song on the original album. With the sound of cars driving past through mist and rain it creates a mood of dark ambivalence as the keys are played in a way that is as unsettling as it is unwavering. It has a very cinematic quality about it, and if I had heard it before knowing who it was, I might have thought it was something by Goblin for a Dario Argento movie.

There is a calm assuredness about "Between the Spaces 1-3," markedly different from the feeling of underlying paranoia on the previous five songs that made up the original album. Of course it makes perfect sense for an album named after a Dick novel to have a paranoid feel, but I am relieved to be ushered into a glowing realm of light for the finale. "Between the Spaces 2" contains brief chirps whose afterimages linger to create a feeling of warm enclosure, while a harp like melody drifts endlessly back and forth. The third part of the sequence contains the sound of cars passing in the rain again, or the beat of the surf up against the shore. The similar sounds in "Leaving" created a sense of dread, where here they promote a feeling of solemn transcendence.

Unlike Nigel, Caroline chose to drop out of the public eye, all the while remaining a good friend with him, later marrying his brother (and fellow band-mate from those early years in The Pump and Nocturnal Emissions) Danny Ayers. At last reissued in 2010 this album is a fitting tribute in memory and honor of a musician who helped forge one of the UK's most legendary groups from the avant-garde.

samples:

• The Happening World
• Chearth
• Between The Spaces 2

 

15 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

Piotrowicz's newest release is a relatively concise 12" single that hearkens back to his early days in a multitude of ways. The title itself translates as "Old School Made of Gold" in English, and the two songs included were originally recorded in 2010 and 2011 (but remixed this year). But even more indicative of its throwback nature is the fact that these two pieces were completely composed on modular synthesizers in a more immediate method of composition, rather than the varying techniques he has used in recent years. The final product is a single that is reminiscent to some of the earliest work I have heard from him, yet feels entirely fresh and contemporary within his discography.

Musica Genera/Bocian

"Calamitas" begins with Piotrowicz adjusting his knobs and connecting his patch cables to effectively mimic the sound of a vintage organ:a thick and heavy tone that waivers between melodicism and dissonance.He maintains a spacious, open feel to the piece while keeping the synth passages complex and dynamic, swelling in volume and retreating to quiet.The piece hits saturation points of pure sustained tone, after which he scales everything back to build up again. Before its abrupt conclusion, the pitches are switched to more polarized high and low frequencies to end on a slightly coarser and more forceful note.

The other side, "Ice Walk," leads off with a pulsing, sequenced sound rather than the sustained, expanding tones of "Calamitas."On the whole it is a more dissonant, menacing sound in comparison, shifting into massive expanses of sound with buzzing drones mixed with lurching pulses.An ugly concrete expanse stretches out, with an overall vibe in league with early Throbbing Gristle and SPK.Even still, Piotrowicz has composed a song that slowly slips out of its structure, becoming more and more erratic in its closing moments as it collapses in a sputtering fit of decay.

Robert Piotrowicz has expanded his stylistic repertoire in recent releases to include more academic, electro-acoustic arrangements, and even recently stepping into the world of opera.For those reasons, Stara Szkoła Ze Złota has more than a bit of nostalgic feel for his earliest (though I hesitate to say simpler) works.There is a focus and purity to the sound of these two songs that make them sound so new and immediate today though, and still fits in perfectly with his ever expanding catalog.

samples:

• Calamitas
• Ice Walk (Excerpt 1)
• Ice Walk (Excerpt 2)

 

15 April 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As two of the more recent works from the prolific Eric Hardiman (who also performs and records as a member of Century Plants, Twilight of the Century, and a slew of other projects), Remember Me Now and Surface Language are distinctly different facets to the Rambutan project. The former is a diverse collection of instrumentation and sound, from found processed recordings, improvised percussion and guitar. The latter, however, has a more consistent focus, built from repeating motifs and loops fitting a more tautly structured composition. Both, however, capture Hardiman’s penchant for bending objects and instruments into often unexplainable sounds, yet result in nuanced compositions of melody and abstraction.

Kendra Steiner Editions

Remember Me Now is more of an album in its structure and presentation, with 11 pieces of variable lengths that draw from all different facets of the Rambutan sound.Pieces such as the opening "Petrified" and "Sliding Scale Deviance" capture his mostly amelodic, free improvisation work.The former is all crunchy scrapes panned left to right while chiming and gentle glassy sounds are stretched over top.The latter begins with the metallic vibrating of bass guitar strings that could just as easily be vibrating springs, creating anything but a conventional rhythm. "Sliding Scale Deviance" may have Hardiman adding some lighter electronic sounds to the mix later on, but that grinding string scrape is what makes the piece the most memorable.

Guitar acts as the focus on "Kill The Lights," which slowly builds up from complex, intertwining layers of slightly less mangled instrumentation."If I Can’t Be Wrong" features rather untreated guitar playing towards its conclusion, beginning with fluttering alien noises and an overall sense of moving forward and backward, but never standing still.The conventional and unconventional both blend excellently on two of the albums high points.The first, "I Should Be Tired" captures the delirium that can come from extended insomnia brilliantly via odd collaged noises and erratic pitch bends.Hints of melody and bizarre percussion slip through fleetingly, resulting in a piece of disorienting ambiance.Basic piano melodies and found noises are contrasted on "Fourth Day," coming together like a sparse musical composition combined with a piece of purely free improvisation.

samples:

• I Should Be Tired
• Sliding Scale Deviance

Surface Language, on the other hand, is two 15 minute pieces that stay in a more constant, focused mood rather than the eclecticism of Remember Me Now.Ghostly electronics and strange humming feedback make for the foundation of "The Surface of Language."Hardiman adds and subtracts layers with regularity, maintaining a consistent structure but never letting it pause for long, eventually drifting off into a galaxy of cosmic electronics.The other piece, "The Language of Surface" is built upon echoing loops and hushed rhythms.Again he constructs the piece slowly, with the alternating pitch of chiming percussion bouncing the mood between light and darkness.Slowly he nudges the piece towards a noisier, more chaotic conclusion compared to how it began.

DNT

Remember Me Now is the more diverse and wide-ranging of these two releases, but for that reason it jumps all over the map as far as tone and mood.In contrast, Surface Language makes for two more focused and consistent compositions, but also less variation.While they may be different, both are brilliantly executed, and both releases capture Hardiman’s singular, powerful approach to creating music that sounds like no one else.

samples:

• The Surface of Language
• The Language of Surface

 

15 April 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Somehow Drew McDowall has managed to be involved with the most interesting fringes of electronic and experimental music for over three decades without ever stepping into the spotlight himself, most notably working with Psychic TV during their ‘80s heyday and teaming up with Coil throughout the '90s.  Lately, he has mostly been quietly focusing on occasional remixes and soundtrack work, though he intermittently records as half of modular synth duo Compound Eye.  Collapse is a bit of modular synth album too, but it sounds almost nothing like Compound Eye.  Instead, it intermittently sounds like a great unfinished Coil album (when it does not instead sound like a collage experiment or a modular synth improv session).

Dais

Collapse opens in somewhat counter-intuitive fashion, as three-part "The Chimeric Mesh Withdraws" stretches out for almost 20 minutes and takes quite a while to fully come together: initially, it is just an ominous and amorphous haze of echoing clicks, disjointed piano, and somewhat shrill and nightmarish synth whines.  After about eight minutes, however, McDowall’s floating and seemingly improvisatory hellscape gives way to an eerily buzzing and oscillating synth motif and "Chimeric Mesh" blossoms into a thing of disquieting and alien beauty.  It is also around this time where Coil comparisons become absolutely unavoidable, as the haunting central theme is increasingly buffeted by peripheral electronic flourishes that resemble giant swooping robotic birds of prey.  By the end, it completely makes sense why McDowall wanted to lead off with such a piece, as it is a gloriously sinister, hallucinatory, and weirdly melodic mindfuck.  This is exactly the sort of thing that obsessive Coil fans have unknowingly been waiting for.

The following "Hypnotic Congress" is nearly as stellar, but considerably more condensed, launching immediately into a futuristic and mechanized-sounding pulse that becomes increasingly more textured and substantial.  Around the halfway point, it transforms into something considerably weirder, morphing into a clanging, lurching industrial rhythm beneath a shifting, artificial-sounding vocal sample that sounds like an infernal choir of damned souls.  It is quite a wonderfully menacing and inhuman-sounding piece and a perfect continuation of the momentum started with "Chimeric Mesh."  Unexpectedly, however, the remaining three songs take somewhat diverging paths.

On "Through is Out," McDowall is assisted with some violin from Nicky Mao (Hiro Kone), weaving a considerably warmer and more human-sounding spell.  There is still some mindwarping aberrance to be found though, as McDowall’s synthesizers take on a sickly, strangled sizzle as the piece gradually descends into darker and more melancholy territory.  The brief "Convulse," on the other hand, is basically little more than a collage experiment, as a female voice (or two?) endlessly repeat the phrase "I convulsed" over a wobbly and echo-heavy rhythm.  Later, the closing "Each Surface of Night" takes the album into a considerably more drone-centric direction, largely eschewing anything deviant or nightmarish in favor of a dense, slowly undulating thrum before belatedly perking up into an understated crescendo of twinkling and delay-enhanced minor-key arpeggios.  That makes for an odd and somewhat perverse ending, as the final moments sound like an escalation into a more structured and melodic piece that never comes.

Collapse is a difficult album to form a solid opinion on, as it frequently flirts with greatness while simultaneously highlighting why McDowall has avoided recording a solo album in the past.  The main issue is that Drew seems to be primarily an "idea man," albeit one who has quite an impressive attention to detail and texture (he gets some brilliantly twisted sounds out of his synths).  He is not a particularly great composer though.  Consequently, Collapse is filled with dazzling moments that either never quite make the leap into something more, go on a little too long, or get diluted by somewhat meandering surroundings.  Also, the final three pieces make it feel like McDowall finished a wonderful album, then realized that he needed to find another 15 minutes of material to fill the second half of the record.  They do not exactly feel like filler, but they do feel like experiments or sketches that are not completely in line with the striking, distinctive, and focused one-two punch of "Chimeric Mesh" and "Hypnotic Congress."  I like those two pieces a lot, so I guess that means I like Collapse a lot, as they take up most of the album  And I do like Collapse a lot–it just feels more like a prodigious talent in need of a foil than it does the epic, well-deserved "coming-out party" that it could have been.

• The Chimeric Mesh Withdraws
• Hypnotic Congress
• Through is Out

 

 

 

11 April 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

11 April 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

11 April 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

11 April 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This brilliant and mind-bending solo opus by Natural Snow Buildings' Mehdi Ameziane was originally issued as an LP by Dull Knife in 2009 and sold out within hours. Fortunately, it has now been reissued and remastered and augmented with a massive amount of bonus material for those of us that weren’t fast or well-informed enough to catch it the first time around.

 

Blackest Rainbow

There are a lot of unusual things about Natural Snow Buildings, but the most notable (to me anyway) is how utterly detached they seem to be from the mundane and often petty world that the rest of us are stuck living in (both musically and otherwise).Instead, Solange Gularte and Mehdi Ameziane seem to inhabit a darkly magical and Edward Gorey-esque shadow reality. Also, they seem guileless and genuine in a way that is wholly foreign to modern human nature.Those are admittedly odd statements to make about a band, but Solange and Mehdi's recorded output provides excellent corroborating evidence.The duo are prolific, but each new album is released without fanfare, as though they had simply accumulated enough otherwordly material for yet another dispatch from their insular, self-contained universe.More significantly, though the duo tend to put a great deal of effort into beautiful art and packaging, they release everything in such limited quantities that it seems that they have a total indifference to any of the external rewards that might be reaped from producing great work.Or they’ll release a double-album as a free download (through some third party, of course).The simple act of creation seems to be the entire point and whether the rest of the world notices or gets a chance to hear it is largely irrelevant.

Another odd thing is that Mehdi’s vocals are quite feminine- in fact, critics often mistake him for a woman.More specifically, he sounds like a profoundly sad and somewhat ghostly Vashti Bunyan.The actual music, on the other hand, sounds exactly like the sort of album Shirley Collins might have made (but regrettably didn’t) after teaming up with the Current 93 milieu. Some songs, like the simple and sparse acoustic ballad "Bride of the Spirits," sound a lot like traditional Celtic folk (until the "Come to me, my only child- I’ll just eat your flesh" line, anyway).More often, however, the songs seem to come from a much more exotic time and place, such as the pagan drone of "Druids."While this mystique and timelessness is certainly deliberate and well-earned, some of the credit must be given to Mehdi’s exclusive use of instruments that cannot be associated with a fixed point in time, such as flutes, tampura, shruti boxes, and tambourines.

Despite the clear allusions to psych folk, traditional music, and modern drone/noise strewn all over the album, The Hollow Mountain still sounds like something entirely fresh and unique.Ameziane weaves all of his influences together in an unpredictable, ingeniously arranged, and complicated way, but makes it all sound like a seamlessly and organically unfolding dream.This is the kind of music that unicorns would make (if they had good taste): melancholy quasi-medieval ballads warp into field recordings of babbling brooks, clanging cathedral bells, or a chorus of happily chirping birds just as easily as they turn into evil-sounding drones or heavenly psychedelic fugues.The tone is similarly mercurial, as Mehdi’s sweetly melodic songs have a tendency to become menacing, ritualistic, or pastorally beautiful with little warning.It never seems jarring or clumsy either, although Ameziane's vocals can sometimes be oppressively sad when I am in the wrong mood.

I have not heard the original LP version of this album, so I cannot say how much effect Ben Nash’s remastering efforts have had on it.It’s a pretty lo-fi album, but not in a bad way- more in an immediate and raw way, but with a thin patina of hiss and distortion that suggests that it may have been recorded with just a microphone and an 8-track.Amusingly, the "bonus track" included here is almost 45 minutes long, making it essentially a "bonus album."Disorientingly, it is just as good as the main album and could have easily been released separately, but I’m sure Mehdi forgot about it as soon as it was done and moved onto something else.Regardless, more TwinSisterMoon is always a good idea, as Mehdi's artistry is best appreciated as complete immersion.

I haven’t tracked down enough of the voluminous Isengrind/Twinsistermoon/Natural Snow Buildings ouevre to effectively contextualize The Hollow Mountain within a hierarchy of essentialness (they’ve been working in extreme obscurity for 13 years now), but I can conclusively state that it is a beautiful and stunning album and that it is actually still available (a very rare occurrence indeed).Also, despite the fact that it has been retooled slightly for mass consumption, it still retains some of the duo’s characteristically ambitious packaging: the disc is (egolessly) enclosed in a booklet of Solange’s creepily surreal woodcut-inspired art.

Samples:

• Walhalla
• Unseen Seen
• To The Green Pastures (of the Land of the Dead)