18 November 2013

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Albums and Singles

Neither Christian Winther nor Christian Meaas Svendsen are newcomers within the Norwegian improvised music scene, but this double disc set marks the first specifically solo releases from the two (albeit with a few collaborative moments as well). With Winther's guitar and Svensden's double bass making for the only instrumentation used, both produce amazing sounds and compositions out of such basic, traditional sources.

Va Fongool

Winther's disc of solo acoustic guitar is home to the most conventional sounding moments to be had, and even that is a stretch at best."We Sleep" is made up of short, erratic string strums that become thicker and more intense with each passing second, and "How Rare to Bloom" even goes further and presents the guitar softer and more delicate sounding for its duration."Read" also follows a relatively conventional trajectory, even with a hint of dissonance surrounding it.

It is on songs like "Hair" that Winther coaxes the most unique sounds out of his instrument, and thus his playing makes the piece stand out.Aggressively plucked strings build into a rhythmic foundation while the metallic buzzing of the strings make for a pseudo melody, even though it bares almost no resemblance to a guitar."Backwards" is perhaps the most baffling to me, as it is a rhythmic piece structured from some sort of percussive sounds culled from a guitar that are almost impossible to place, as they do not sound like simply knocking on the instrument’s body. The result of this ambiguity is an inhuman, almost mechanical quality that definitely kept my ear.

Svendsen does similar things for his double bass on his disc, although here with even less touchstones to traditional sounding instrumentation.Only on "Prolonged Dots and Blunted Beams" does it sound like conventional plucked bass strings, but with a significant amount of string bending and stretching, it sounds quite unnatural."Der Runtergang" at first sounds like normal bowed bass strings, but as it slowly gets rawer and looser, the strings become more dissonant and harsh to almost have no resemblance at all to how it began.

He also works in his own unconventional methods of playing his instrument, such as the polyrhythmic "Hobby," which is all deep thuds and taut, percussive taps.Similarly, on "Double Rainbow," the bass is made to generate rhythms, but in this case it more closely resembles an ancient analog drum machine that is eventually balanced out with some obvious string plucks that are played so rapidly to resemble a sequenced synthesizer.

On a few a of the pieces the two collaborate together, with results that cover the gamut of what both artists do on their solo works."Ärt" is all rather delicate guitar and bass string plucks, which is surprisingly relaxing given the pieces that preceded it."Overslept" is the exact opposite, with both creating messy clattering noises with their instruments, both by physical impact and string playing, resulting in an intentionally messy free improvisation feel.

Even though they are two distinct solo albums with a small amount of overlap, both Winther and Svendsen take similar approaches to their own instruments and the unconventional misuse of them.For that reason they do feel intrinsically connected in some way, almost as if all of the solo pieces were a psychic collaboration unto themselves with or without the other’s awareness at the time.It makes perfect sense to present these together then, as each disc complements the other beautifully.

samples:

• Backwards
• Double Rainbow
• √Ñrt

 

18 November 2013

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Albums and Singles

Recorded near the end of a European tour, Gau is the collaboration of Will Long (Celer), Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabrik), and brothers Jan and Romke Kleefstra. Although on their own these artists tend to work in quiet, sparse sounds, on this single improvised piece all open up quite a bit, bringing with them some forceful, aggressive moments as well as their traditionally restrained ones.

Monotype

With its deep, rumbling opening—a field recording of thunder I assume—I at first expected more of the placid, introspective sounds that I have heard from Celer and Machinefabrik before, but once a bit of tortured guitar tone rose up sharply, my expectation changed.Even early in the piece, electronic static and crackles appear to form a dissonant counterpoint to the more musical nature of the guitar and an added synthetic tones.

The combination of the two approaches—musical and abstract—appears repeatedly throughout the nearly 48 minute duration of Gau.Complex loops of samples, laptop noise and found recordings trade off with quiet reverberating tones, as melodic electronics bounce off dissonant guitar noise and squall.It becomes forceful at times, but never aggressive or raw.

Jan Kleefstra's spoken word performance throughout is normally something I would find off-putting or distracting on an album such as this.Given that the rest of the piece is subtle electronics and occasionally boisterous drama, I initially worried that the presence of a human voice would be distracting and shift the focus too greatly, but that ends up not being the case at all.The vocals are performed in Frisian, an uncommon Germanic tongue, and placed tastefully low in the mix.They are not obscured by any means, but feel perfectly appropriate when they do appear.

I admit some trepidation in going into this album, because while I have the utmost appreciation for the work of both Celer and Machinefabrik, both of them tend to work in those delicate, sparse realms of sound that I have become a bit burnt out on as a genre.In this collaborative setting, with the two Kleefstras, the result is a bit more jagged and abrasive and therefore hit me as being fresh and different than what I expected.Gau does an exemplary job bouncing between the pensive and the ragged moments, and it is that unpredictability that is its greatest asset.

samples:

• Gau (Excerpt 1)
• Gau (Excerpt 2)
• Gau (Excerpt 3)

 

17 November 2013

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Albums and Singles

My Cat Is An Alien have just finalized their most extreme work to date: 'PSYCHO-SYSTEM' is a 6 CD Box + Digital Download released by Elliptical Noise Records (Canada), representing the most advanced expression of their current creative method of composition through the brothers' brand new self-made strings and electronic instrumentation.  An explicit warning reads that "prolonged exposure to sounds and high volume listening can cause episodes of psychotic break with reality, hallucinations, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, catatonia."  Watch the official trailer by Roberto Opalio.

More information can be found here:

• BANDCAMP
• SOUNDCLOUD
• TUMBLR
• BAND WEBSITE

17 November 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Ambiguity hangs from every word that comes out of 25 year old Tahliah Barnett’s mouth. She sings about sex, love, craving, deception—and sounds direct enough doing it—but what she leaves out of her songs is just as important as what she keeps in them. Her accomplice, producer and Yeezus collaborator Arca, couldn't be more sympathetic. He matches her terse, enigmatic professions and weightless melodies with a magic show of slow-motion rhythms and phantom effects, making the best possible use of repetitious forms to emphasize and heighten the drama in her lyrics. EP2 is a pop record, but FKA Twigs and Arca pull it off so spectacularly that it sounds and feels like more.

Young Turks

In interviews, FKA Twigs admits that she likes to work quickly. "I don’t like to labour over things," she says. "In my experience, the first idea is usually the best one." That dedication to immediacy is most obvious in her lyrics. On opener "How’s That" Twigs sings a total of about six lines, most of them delivered in fragments: one question, one incomplete thought that could be read sexually or spiritually, and five moaned exclamations, which are repeated incrementally over a voluminous bed of chromatic noise. With every repetition Twigs and Arca add a level of intensity to the sung lines, giving mundane statements like "you know everything" a cathartic insistence and a special emphasis.

That is basically how the duo operates for the entirety of the record. Arca builds a house of mirrors around Twigs’s sparse lyrics, anchors it with a heavy low end, and adds bits of psychedelic color to help play up the uncertainty and immediacy of the written lines. There’s lots of pitch-bending and lurching rhythms, pulses that build pressure and then fizzle out, and awkward movements that stutter and hesitate before finally getting in line. When the strong climaxes do come, they seep into the mix like an injection of molasses. "Papi Pacify" practically explodes during its chorus; strings spasm and double over the top of each other; the wavering melody of the verse turns suddenly confident and dark; the rhythm picks up a thumping persistence, and Twigs’s voice rises to match Arca’s wave of noise.

It all sounds ecstatic, but Barnett avoids the usual love song clichés and digs into the meat of her subjects, pulling out absurdity, contradiction, and bathos for the attentive. She plays on the violent connotations of pacification, leaves the usual inside-outside dichotomy to be read either perversely or transcendentally, and pens a strange encomium to free love, which might also be a condemnation of objectification and prostitution—sexual or otherwise. Her videos, most of which are either directed or co-directed by her, reinforce that multiplicity. In "Papi Pacify" it isn't clear whether she’s being dominated physically or secretly pulling the strings, and "How’s That" treats the human form like an obstacle to something altogether more fluid.

Nothing is as it seems, which is actually a nice summary of the EP. Twigs and Arca are working with a formula everyone knows. It’s pop music. But the way they handle their material disguises that fact. They know the shape and extent of their art, and rather than playing by the rules or trying to bust it wide open, they’re walking a middle path, finding smart ways to stretch, dye, and warp it. It’s tempting to call EP2 experimental, but it’s clear that FKA Twigs knows exactly what she’s doing.

EP2 can be heard in its entirety on Youtube:

• How's That
• Papi Pacify
• Water Me
• Ultraviolet

 

17 November 2013

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Albums and Singles

Stephen Bishop is best known as the man behind Opal Tapes, but he also releases some very deviant and noteworthy music of his own as the deceptively named Basic House.  While both of these albums were released in 2013, they take Bishop's otherworldly wrongness in two very different directions.  Caim in Bird Form is the much weirder (and arguably more unique) of the two, but the more recent Oats compensates for its comparative lack of derangement by incorporating a heavy noise/industrial influence that yields some impressively brutal results.

Digitalis/Alter

Caim has one of the more eerie and wrong-footing openings in my recent memory, as Bishop takes the hackneyed trope of using film dialogue to a bizarre extreme with "Aspirin Telepath."  Aside from some murky, throbbing synths, the piece is little more than a tense monologue pitch-shifted and taken wholesale.  Then that is followed by "I Found U," which opens with a crackling, near-incomprehensible answering machine message.  That message ultimately gives way to something resembling music, but just barely: it features only looped swells of static, a repeating hollow thump, and some uneasy echoing and machine noise.  It is certainly a very sparse and minimalist piece, but it is also quite an enjoyable one, recalling some sort of deep subterranean or sci-fi twist on The Loop Orchestra's mad brilliance.

While part of me hoped the album would continue to sound like an enigmatic radio transmission from deep space forever (or just listening to late night television on lots of hard drugs), the album arguably begins in earnest with the third piece "I Don't Remember Acid."  At the very least, it feels structured and has a clear beat/rhythm of sorts.  Bishop's "songs," however, are not techno/dance in any conventional sense–rather, they are a ruined, rusted, sickly sounding, and grotesque caricature of the genre.  Everything sounds scratchy, queasy, and anemic.  That is, except on the rare occasions when it does not, such as with the bassy, spaced-out dub techno anomaly of "64 Bummer."

While that piece is reassuring in that it shows that Stephen could competently make something more straight-forward if he felt like it, I am (predictably) far more impressed with his more outré excursions, like the blearily dissonant haze of "Field 0.08" or the shivering rhythm in "Ultra-Misted" that gradually degenerates into backwards-sounding whooshes.  Or the beat in the title track, which basically sounds like someone rhythmically sharpening a long knife.

My favorite piece, however, is the closing "TV Illness," which sounds like it appropriates the same string piece used in Severed Heads' "Wonder of All the World."  Bishop takes that beautifully melancholy piece in a very different direction though, as it sounds like it is fitfully reverberating through a cavernous parking garage.  It makes for a very hallucinatory and bittersweet listening experience, which is happily reprised as "In Illness Form," a remix by Scuba Death (the sole real difference being the addition of more hissing and a metallic machine-noise rhythm).

If Caim can be said to have a flaw, it would be that the individual pieces are all based on a few simple, repeating motifs–the sort of thing that other musicians might see as little more than studio experiments or the beginnings of something larger.  That did not bother me at all though, as they cumulatively form one hell of a bizarre and unique album.  Also, anything more elaborate or musical would have ruined my pleasing illusion that these are field recording collages made by a serial killer or madman hiding in a sewer: Caim works so wonderfully precisely because of Bishop's unwavering commitment to his broken, crackling aesthetic of cryptic dispatches.  Stephen certainly recorded some great individual pieces, but Basic House's brilliance lies far more in how it sounds than in the actual beats and notes being played.

• Field 0.08
• Ultra-Misted
• TV Illness

Initially, Oats sounds a hell of a lot like its predecessor, as "AR II" offers up a healthy dose of tape hiss and a warbling, obsessively repeating loop.  It quickly makes some surprising updates to Bishop's formula though, as an actual house beat(!) appears alongside some very conventional high-hats and a burbling techno bass line.  That piece turns out to be an aberration in almost every way though, as the rest of the album is rarely that minimal or that straightforwardly musical.  The second piece, "Child Confession," is very much the one that sets the tone of what is to come: dense, murky, crunching soundscapes with subtly hallucinatory synth flourishes and lots of heavy machinery sounds.

The biggest thing that separates Oats from Caim is density: Oats is far more crushing and relentless than broken or crackling.  That difference is embodied nicely by "Interiors," which basically sounds like a fleet of street cleaners plowing through a pig farm.  Such thick, buzzing soundscapes happily make up a significant portion of the album, as Bishop returns to that theme again (minus the pigs) with both "L Wave & Comb" and the roiling factory noise of "Dry Contact."  The remaining pieces are divided up between ominous, pulsing ambient drone ("Time Table" and "Nurse"); haunted, minimalist dub techno variations ("C-Beat" and "La Coccinelle"); and a couple of curious divergences.

The first of Oats' curveballs is "Est Oan," an alternately cartoonish and creepy experiment in pitch-shifted voices amidst brooding dark ambient throbbing and skittering.  The other aberration, however, is the album's masterpiece.  According to Alter's description, "B.G. Feathers" "evokes the grinding power of Maurizio Bianchi's best '80s material," a claim that I will have to take their word for, as I have never heard anything by Bianchi that sounds quite like it.  In any case, it is an absolutely crushing piece and a brilliantly simple one besides: it is essentially just a heavy, endlessly repeating, and blown-out industrial crunch, but the twist is that the crunch is constantly changing in violent ways.  In fact, it often sounds like the tape is literally being shredded, which is an extremely neat trick.  Few things make me happier than gnarled, unrelenting, mechanized crunches at high volume.  It breaks my heart every single day that I do not live in a futuristic dystopia terrorized by mechanized juggernauts, so I deeply appreciate Basic House for at least providing the fleeting illusion of one for me.

Ultimately, Oats hits higher highs than Caim while also being significantly more accessible, as Bishop's more beat-driven pieces offer enough of a semblance of normalcy to probably draw in the more adventurous strain of underground dance enthusiasts (especially given Stephen's role in the scene).  Part of me laments Bishop's evolution a bit though, as Caim in Bird Form was front-to-back otherwordly insanity.  Oats is certainly a logical and impressive leap forward, but Basic House's newfound force and quasi-professionalism necessarily comes at the expense of some of its its rickety predecessor's "outsider art" charm.  I still love both though.

• AR II
• Child Confession
• B.G. Feathers

 

 

17 November 2013

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Albums and Singles

This is the debut full-length from Brian Leeds' Huerco S. nom de guerre, one of the most exciting projects to emerge from burgeoning scene surrounding Opal Tapes.  While Leeds does not necessarily offer up anything truly novel, his skill at seamlessly blending together industrial clang, dub techno, hissing Tim Hecker-style ambiance, Boards of Canada-esque warped wooziness, and minimalist underground dance is quite peerless.  This is easily one of my favorite albums of the year.

Software

The most immediately striking aspect of Colonial Patterns for me was that it is a mixture of several recognizable and predictable influences that sound so completely natural together that it seems astonishing that no one has thought to combine them before now.  After my initial bewilderment, however, I began to appreciate the incredible amount of craftsmanship and nuance needed to pull off such a feat successfully.  The base ingredients are simple: warmly crackling and sibilant synths; a slow, pulse-like thump; locked-groove-like repetition; and some subtly hallucinatory "damaged tape" effects.  What Leeds does with those various threads is extremely impressive though, as even the haziest bits are sharply realized and there is no clutter or superfluous sound to be found anywhere.  Colonial Patterns is about as deliberate and unerringly chiseled as an album can be, yet never feels suffocatingly or lifelessly overwrought.

Leeds' complete control and thoughtful construction even extends to the sequencing, as he breaks up the album with several different types of pieces, all of which somehow feel thematically and aesthetically consistent.  For example, there are a few great pieces in the aforementioned "Tim Hecker" vein, like the beautiful (but brief) "Chung-Kee Player" and "Monks Mound," which eschew beats for dreamily hissing and pulsing bliss.  Other pieces, such as "Skug Commune" and "Ragtime USA," boast strong enough beats and hooks to qualify as potential singles, but are still understated enough to blend with the rest of the album.  Still other pieces–most of them, actually–recall the late '90s golden age of dub techno artists like Pole and Kit Clayton.

The best and most distinctive pieces, however, are the ones in which Leeds manages to seamlessly blend all of those threads (as well as some others) together at once.  My favorite among them is "Quivira," which deftly blends a lurching, metallic industrial rhythm with warm, scratchy synth swells and obsessively see-sawing blurts.  Another particularly unique piece is "Annagramme of my Love," which embellishes its throbbing beats with little more than crackling static and a buried, stuttering vocal loop.  Brian also does warped-sounding mindfuckery quite well, though only the delirious and wobbly "Prinzif" fully highlights that knack.

Colonial Patterns is the rare album in which I thoroughly enjoy almost every song, no matter how long or short it is or which direction it takes.  The worst thing that I can say about it is that the quality dips a bit near the end, as both "Canticoy" and "Angel (Phase)" allow merely decent ideas unfold much longer than necessary.  Still, 12 excellent songs out of 14 is one hell of an impressive success rate, particularly when the listener is as jaded as I am.  Leeds clearly set out to deliver a flawlessly realized, perfectly flowing masterpiece and came as close as I possibly could have hoped for (uniformly brilliant albums being a truly rare phenomenon in the single-driven world of underground dance).

• Quivira
• Monks Mound
• Prinzif

 

05 November 2013

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Albums and Singles

[SIC] comes in a handmade cover, each copy individually crafted from recycled plywood and cloth, decorated by use of stencils and printing blocks. Optional second disc [SIC] - Bonus
Three tracks are: 1:Letter from Topor; 2: Eyes of a Scanning Girl; 3: Monsterkamer (Orgasm)
Optional second disc [SIC] - Bonus contains 1: Letter from Topor (Draft);  2: Eyes of a Scannong Girl (Draft). These are different mixes of the  tracks on [SIC]. [SIC]

You had to wonder first time through their eyes. Primary means sensory concept. Forty people squashed in a small room. Guy called Bushy played dumb dumb to crowd surfing toilet. Multitude swayed and cried fronting the Chinese rock'n'roll  takeaway band. 19 pre-pubescent pterodactyls list vampire records chronologically. Bushy feels they came to be frustrated in new little venues. Procession of bats and traffic in urban sound design.

Acoustic instruments used in creating [SIC] and [SIC] Bonus include: locust pod, reco-reco, atabaque, vozembouch, cuica, hungu,  slide carambolade, double breasted field jacket, agogo, caxixi,  Shakuhachi, double bass, violin, santoor, zither, chimes, bells, gongs, piano frame, fishing line, didgeridoo, bicycle wheel (alloy), daxophone, chinese metal shaker, conch, piano, sarangi, straw cymbalom, to mention but a few.

[SIC]  costs  including shipping worldwide  € 35.- including shipping worldwide

available from www.aranos.org

05 November 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

[SIC] comes in a handmade cover, each copy individually crafted from recycled plywood and cloth, decorated by use of stencils and printing blocks. Optional second disc [SIC] - Bonus
Three tracks are: 1:Letter from Topor; 2: Eyes of a Scanning Girl; 3: Monsterkamer (Orgasm)
Optional second disc [SIC] - Bonus contains 1: Letter from Topor (Draft);  2: Eyes of a Scannong Girl (Draft). These are different mixes of the  tracks on [SIC]. [SIC]

You had to wonder first time through their eyes. Primary means sensory concept. Forty people squashed in a small room. Guy called Bushy played dumb dumb to crowd surfing toilet. Multitude swayed and cried fronting the Chinese rock'n'roll  takeaway band. 19 pre-pubescent pterodactyls list vampire records chronologically. Bushy feels they came to be frustrated in new little venues. Procession of bats and traffic in urban sound design.

Acoustic instruments used in creating [SIC] and [SIC] Bonus include: locust pod, reco-reco, atabaque, vozembouch, cuica, hungu,  slide carambolade, double breasted field jacket, agogo, caxixi,  Shakuhachi, double bass, violin, santoor, zither, chimes, bells, gongs, piano frame, fishing line, didgeridoo, bicycle wheel (alloy), daxophone, chinese metal shaker, conch, piano, sarangi, straw cymbalom, to mention but a few.

[SIC]  costs € 35.- including shipping worldwide

Available from   www.aranos.org

02 November 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

VOD120: V/A Rising from the Red Sand Volumes.1-5 5LP set

"Rising From The Red Sand" was one the most comprehensive compilations of early 80s industrial, wave and underground music, spanning a total of five cassettes, compiled by Gary Levermore for his own Third Mind Records label (which has also recently been revived).

The original five tapes are now released as a 5xLP set, following several months of tracking down as many artists as possible to obtain their permission to reissue their material. Almost all were found, although nine tracks are missing from this box. Rising From The Red Sand was a precursor to the two later double-LPs Elephant Table Album and Three Minute Symphony, but due to the vastness of the project, it offers a more complete insight into the musical underground of the early-mid 80s period.

Rising From The Red Sand includes the likes of Chris & Cosey, Nurse With Wound, Die Tödliche Doris, Test Dept, Attrition, Colin Potter, Muslimgauze, Ian Boddy, We Be Echo, Konstruktivists, Portion Control, Metamorphosis, Bene Gesserit, Legendary Pink Dots, P16.D4, Nocturnal Emissions, Human Flesh, Bushido, Smegma, Ptose, Kopf Kurz, Merzbow, Tone Death, Pseudo Code, Conrad Schnitzler, Cultural Amnesia, John Hurst, Section 25, Fan Tan,  Un Departement, Scram Ju Ju, Five Or Six, Sylvie & Babs, James Braddell, Onnyk, Nexda, Hula, Dave Knight, and Irsol.

Liner notes are written by Frans de Waard (of the Korm Plastics label and Vital Weekly), and he writes: "I still regard it as the best compilation of industrial music from that time - a five hour Encyclopedia Industrialis."

More information can be found here (due out in late November 2013).

02 November 2013

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Albums and Singles

VOD119: Hafler Trio A Cure for Kenophobia–An Empowerment in 4 Easy Stages at Very Reasonable Rates: Recordings 87-99 4Lp Set

This very special box-release with booklet and containing almost 4 hours of Hafler Trio archive recordings recorded between 1987 and 1999 gives a great opportunity to dig into the universe of music-mastermind, multi-talent and concept-art genius Andrew McKenzie and his electronic/drone/ambient/music concrete-like music-output as Hafler Trio.  None of the collected songs have ever officially been released on vinyl or CD up to this point.

In 2012, Frank of VOD went through a whole pallet of tapes, DATs & reels with Hafler Trio Archive-Recordings; some released, but many still  previously unreleased. Frank of VOD digitalized several of his favorites and Andrew chose the final recordings to be selected for this release and also made this very beautiful conceptual design for the box. This is the ultimate Hafler Trio experience for die-hard fans, as well as new open-minded listeners not aware of Andrew McKenzie's work.

The 4 LPs  contain the following audio:

Lp1: The Hafler Trio Play The Hafler Trio Play The Hafler Trio By The Hafler Trio

Lp2: I Love Children But I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One

Lp3: Regicide, Fratricide & Feneration for Dummies

Lp4: The Generosity of the Body with Explicit Diagrams

More information here (due out in late November 2013).