This week's series of episodes features images from Asheville, NC, which was devastated by Hurricane Helene this past week.
Please consider donating to the various organizations in and around the area.
Episode 714 features music by Pan•American, Maria Somerville, Patrick Cowley, The Gaslamp Killer and Jason Wool, Der Stil, Astrid Sonne, Reymour, Carlos Haayen Y Su Piano Candeloso, Harry Beckett, Tarwater, Mermaid Chunky, and Three Quarter Skies.
Episode 715 has Liquid Liquid, Kim Deal, Severed Heads, Los Agentes Secretos, mHz, Troller, Mark Templeton, Onkonomiyaki Labs, Deadly Headley, Windy and Carl, Sunroof, and claire rousay.
Episode 716 includes Actors, MJ Guider, The Advisory Circle, The Bug, Alessandro Cortini, The Legendary Pink Dots, Chihei Hatakeyama and Shun Ishiwaka, Arborra, Ceremony, Ueno Takashi, Organi, and Saagara.
Cedars is the second collaboration to be released between electronic artists Alan F. Jones and Derek Rogers, though unlike the previous Repetend, Parallax (2015), this is a live recording, rather than a studio collaboration. Recorded in May 2017 in Dallas, Texas, the single piece that comprises this album highlights the different, at times contradictory approaches Jones and Rogers have towards art and composition, and the whole performance seems to be defined by these contrasts, yet somehow the overall sound gels together brilliantly.
The most significant juxtaposition to be heard throughout the performance of Cedars is the disjuncture between some lo-fi elements and its overall more academic sounding instrumentation.The recording, for example, captures some improvised percussion and extremely subtle melodic moments in the opening minutes, but has a raw, room-like ambience that adds to the sense of being there as it was recorded, and not a pristine digital facsimile.Later on subtly treated modular synthesizer passages (or something extremely similar) that sound like the product of deliberate and painstaking shaping and adjustment are interrupted by a random cough from either a performer or an audience member.
Later on what begins as a distorted, bitcrushed synthesizer sounding passage evolves into a xylophone-like melody, all the while the enveloping sound is somewhere between lush musical ambience and low fidelity incidental detritus.Then, in true free improvisation fashion, one of the pair begins to jingle coins and drop them onto a hard, microphoned surface.It is this sort of blend of high art sound design and impulsive improvisation that makes this disc stand out radiantly.
It is hard to determine what of these bits are Jones (who tends to be more of a live performer and collaborator with others) or Rogers (who’s work I am more familiar with, but tends to be a solo artist who runs the gamut from beautiful drones to harsh noise), but the two working together makes for an exceptional, unified album.The conflicting approaches continue throughout the piece, with rattling coins accompanying massive swells of electronics that resemble passing airplanes.
Besides this blend of different sounds and approaches to the performance, another highpoint of Cedars is simply how dynamic the piece is, beginning to end.Rogers and Jones mix a bit of everything in, from recorded piano and acoustic guitar to random found sounds and carefully modulated feedback and distortion.Different components are introduced, allowed to breathe and develop, but are then retired before stagnating and replaced with new ones, keeping a consistent current from beginning to end.
The Turkish artist Ekin Fil (also known as Ekin Üzeltüzenci) follows up her excellent 2016 LP Being Near (also available on Helen Scarsdale) with two distinctly different, yet both exceptional new releases. The reasons for these differences are obvious, with one being a conventional album and the other a film score, but each also cast a focus on different aspects to her work, with the former emphasizing her unique pop sensibilities within a traditional song framework, while the latter her approach to electronics and production.
Ghosts Inside is the more traditional LP of these two releases, and most in-line with Being Near. It is a suite of 11 songs, most of which heavily feature electronics, deeply treated guitar, and her distinct vocals to superb effect.Opening song "Let Go" is rather indicative of much of this album from its start:sparse piano lingering under heavy reverb, casting a rather bleak shadow, as her breathy vocals rise from the darkness like a spirit.Around this she creates a space of abstract, textural electronics that give the otherwise conventional arrangement an additional layer of distinct depth.
For "Simple Past" she employs a similar approach:depressive, minor key piano coupled with distant vocals that are largely obscured, but all the while the piece is wrapped in an excellent sense of mood and ambience."Final Cut" is comparable, although the vocals are sparser and there is greater use of static-like textures to the mix.The emphasis shifts to electronics on "Before a Full Moon" and, paired with the beautiful vocals, the piece drifts into heavier and gloomier territories, underscored by churning pseudo-bass rhythms.
Üzeltüzenci’s use of field recordings in "Episodes" also adds a nice dimension, giving a bit of familiar feel to the pulsating keyboards and low end rumble that sounds more like an alien pop song than anything else.While there does seem to be a recurrent shadowy intimacy to Ghosts Inside, it is not that monochromatic.The electronics on "Fin" have an ethereal lightness to them that, when blended with less decipherable recordings and crumbling electronics, ends up resulting in a lighter, though not necessarily jovial mood.Skittering electronics and well-utilized delays push "Like A Child" into a more rhythmic place that is further refined by her light, delicate vocal performance.
The other new release, the cassette Inflame, is Ekin Fil’s soundtrack to the Ceylan Özgün Özçelik film of the same name.Here her electronic and production work takes the forefront via a set of 19 short interludes and film cues that emphasize her synth and sound design work over her vocal and traditional songwriting that defined Ghosts Inside.Because of this, it may not work quite as well as that record does in a traditional sense, but there is a lot of brilliance here as well.Some of these miniatures are not that far removed from her other album work, barring the lack of vocals."The 360∞ (Opening Credits)" and "The Verdict" both heavily showcase rhythmic synth sequences and an understated complexity, with even some percussion in the latter.
Ekin Fil’s occasional implementation of drum sounds is also a distinct facet of Inflame, such as in their big, echoing form that contrasts the droning electronics on "Another Past" nicely balancing the two disparate types of sounds.The rhythmic sounds also appear on some of the less musical pieces as well:"Edit History" is all drums and massive subbass, but as a whole it feels more like sound effects than what I would normally consider music.For "Hasret" she utilizes a nice palette of glitch effects, white noise, and arpeggiated synths that build to a more chaotic, dissonant ending, melding the worlds of noise and music.The opening moments of "Delete History" are straight up harsh electronics, but eventually become reshaped into lush, multilayered tonal drones.
It is difficult to pick a preference between Ghosts Inside and Inflame.At times I felt some of the songs on Ghosts Inside were a bit too similar to one another which, given their relatively short durations and other, more varied pieces, is not that much of a detriment.On Inflame, there were some of the pieces that I wish stretched on for many more minutes, but with most of the durations hovering around a minute or two, simply came and went too quickly.These limitations do not negatively impact either album, however, and both are exceptionally executed records that continue to display Ekin Fil’s beautiful approach music.With Ghosts Inside covering the songwriter and Inflame the sound design and electronic facets of her sound, both are distinctly different yet complement each other perfectly.
Remarkably, this is Silvia Kastel's first solo full-length album, which is an improbably late milestone given that she has been prolifically releasing a steady flow of unusual and inventive tapes and collaborations for almost a decade. Her aesthetic over the years has been quite a chameleonic and unpredictably evolving one, blithely delving into noise, no wave, sound art, modular synthesizer experiments, and a genre-blurring array of other excursions. Characteristically, Air Lows is similarly hard to categorize, but its shadowy, deconstructionist vignettes are certainly a good fit for Blackest Ever Black, evoking the feel of a sleepwalker slowly making their way through an abandoned landscape of urban decay. Some of these pieces are admittedly more fully formed than others, making for a bit of an exasperating whole at times, but the stronger moments definitely have a darkly languorous allure.
Blackest Ever Black had some intriguing and unusual things to say about Air Lows, describing it as a "reverse Wizard of Oz" and mentioning that one of its primary inspirations was avant-garde fashion.The former refers to the mood shift that unfolds over the course of the album, gradually moving from brighter, livelier fare towards something considerably more stark and haunted.Even the early pieces have a fragmented, disorienting, and broken feel, however, and most of the more appealingly hooky moments perversely occur during the darker half. The fashion influence is also quite interesting, though it seems very easy to read far more into it than was intended.As far as I can tell, the main impact from that is that these eight songs often take shapes that are bold and inventive, yet not necessarily functional.A prime example of Kastel’s complicated vision is "Bruell," which opens as a jabbering cacophony of discordantly metallic synths, stuttering drums, and gurgling bass gargles before unexpectedly dissolving into an eerily beautiful, slinky, and neon-lit groove for a fleeting moment.As a whole, it is a weirdly fascinating piece that seems to follow a bizarre and fractured dream-logic, but I cannot help but feel a little frustrated that the seeds of a much better and more coherent song are present as a mere ephemeral and quickly discarded interlude.In fact, I think that piece succinctly illustrates what drives me a little crazy about this album: Kastel seems able to casually toss off snatches of gorgeous or vampirically sexy music, yet that never seems to be her ultimate objective.Instead, those moments of beauty are just something to fleetingly glimpse in Kastel's enigmatic and bizarre hall of mirrors.
While I can appreciate Kastel's challenging and fluid approach to structure on an intellectual level, the pieces that follow a more linear and conventionally structured path understandably tend to be the more satisfying ones.The most impressive example of that trajectory is "Heart 2 Tape," which marries a murkily throbbing pulse with a gauzy swirl of angelic vocals.Kastel strikes a perfect balance between swooning beauty and a lurching, noise-damaged undercurrent, then makes it even better with a hallucinatory haze of muted bloops and an obsessively looping synth melody.While it is essentially just a 4-minute vamp on a very cool theme, it transcends its seemingly simple components to feel like an especially novel and aberrant twist on dub.On a related note, almost all of the pieces where Kastel sings tend to rank among the album's highlights, as her alternately sensuous and somnambulant vocals are a necessary and effective counterbalance to the oft murky and vaporous music.Elsewhere, "Spiderwebs" offers an especially bloodless twist on the downcast, skeletal pop of label mate Carla dal Forno, as it sounds like Kastel is both in a trance and trapped at the bottom of a well, damned to sing the same cryptic refrain forever."The Closer The Stranger" is yet another memorable piece, resembling a sultry club jam that has been dissolved into a slowly creeping fog.Much like the groove in "Bruell," the isolated and decontextualized song fragments that flow through "Closer" offer strong evidence of a genuine talent for hooks that is continually being subverted and disrupted.
The remainder of Air Lows is a bit of curious mixed bag that mostly feels like a series of surreal interludes bridging together the more substantial pieces.The one exception is the vocal-less "Air Mob," which sounds like a dub groove that has been completely eviscerated to leave only a slowly shuffling beat and a shivering haze of drones and feedback.I rather like it, but I am not sure it quite makes the leap from "cool idea" to "song."I suppose that is the central caveat with Air Lows, as it seems like Kastel's aesthetic is quite a willfully perverse and elusive one, sabotaging and deconstructing most of her strongest and most instantly gratifying ideas to craft something disconcertingly indistinct, ephemeral, and shadowy.I can certainly appreciate that objective, but Air Lows errs on the side of diluting Kastel's best material a little too much for my liking–this feels a bit like an overstretched EP. That said, the results are quite impressive when she hits the mark and she hits it several times.Also, Kastel has carved out quite a singular aesthetic niche with this album, as it legitimately sounds like it was recorded by an actual vampire (or at least a partially drained victim in the thrall of one).Anyone can dress up in black and wallow in deep melancholy, but Air Lows evokes the profound loneliness and existential dread of being alone on a subway platform in an unfamiliar and vaguely threatening city at 4am.
Now in his late 80s, Alvin Lucier has had a long career of radical compositions that explore phase interference, the resonance of spaces, and deeply unconventional sound sources. Although his output has certainly slowed in recent years, he remains as idiosyncratic and experimental as ever, recently becoming interested in unexplored possibilities for the electric guitar. The first half of this album is just such a piece, as "Criss Cross" was composed in 2013 for Stephen O'Malley and Oren Ambarchi (who perform it here). O'Malley and Ambarchi return for "Hanover" as well, albeit as part of an ensemble that roughly mirrors the 1918 Dartmouth Jazz Band pictured on the album cover (Lucier's father was the violinist). Needless to say, nothing on this album sounds even remotely like guitar music, though "Criss Cross" is not a dramatic departure from some of Lucier's previous work with competing phases. The nightmarishly spectral chamber music of "Hanover," on the other hand, is quite a large (and harrowing) surprise.
The prosaically titled "Criss Cross" is the first piece that Lucier ever composed for guitar and it has a very simple and aggressively minimalist premise: wielding E-bows, O'Malley and Ambarchi start at opposite ends of a semitone, then each of them slowly slides to the other end (and then back again…and again…and again).Thankfully, the chosen range falls in the lower frequency range, so the uncomfortably close harmonies that arise do not sound shrill at all.Instead, their proximity merely creates an oscillating pulse that speeds up or slows down depending on how close the two guitarists are to the same pitch.That steady, slow-motion see-sawing continues for roughly 16-minutes and it is the entirety of the piece.As such, its appeal is primarily conceptual, as it basically sounds like a droning thrum created by a wave generator of some kind, albeit with the length of the waves constantly shifting incrementally.Stylistically, it closely resembles some of Eliane Radigue's more purist drone work, though Lucier is perhaps even more austere.As such, the process itself is largely the appeal, as I never would have suspected that any guitars were involved at all if I did not know anything about the piece's background or its participants.
Though it is a considerably more "difficult" listening experience than the comparatively placid "Criss Cross," "Hanover" strikes a far more powerful and absorbing balance of concept and composition.Knowing its inspiration, it is also kind of a blackly funny piece, as few things could possibly swing less or clear a dance floor faster than Lucier's hazy miasma of queasy glissandi and uncomfortable, sickly harmonies.Ambarchi and O'Malley are additionally joined by a third guitarist (Gary Schmalzl), as Lucier replaced the banjos in the picture with guitars, but I am not sure it makes all that much difference who is involved, as any character or real distinction between the various musicians is essentially blurred into oblivion.Occasionally a single clear piano note will ring out, but the violin, saxophones. and guitars all smear and swirl together in a quivering haze.The best description of the piece that I can muster is that it feels like the hapless 1918 Dartmouth Jazz Band checked their tuning before launching into their set...only to have time immediately stop.Instead of their various notes ending naturally, however, all of the various pitches instead began to nightmarishly slide around in a kind of grotesque, slow-motion dance while they all watched in frozen horror.Naturally, I am exactly the target audience for something like that: "Hanover" is a wonderfully ugly and sinister fog of glacially evolving dissonance and tension.
I was not at all sure what to expect from this album, as I was a bit apprehensive about the idea of Lucier composing for guitars, particularly since O'Malley’s involvement suggested that some kind of awkward doom metal/conceptual sound art mash-up might result (both artists have strong and divergent signature aesthetics).Also, while Lucier never stopped working, it has been quite a while since he unleashed a provocative new major opus, so I had no idea where he currently was aesthetically.As it turns out, all of my concerns were happily unfounded, as Lucier has clearly not mellowed at all, nor did he allow Ambarchi and O'Malley's own aesthetics to hold much sway over his vision.This is pure, undiluted Lucier.In fact, this release not only befits his well-earned reputation as a restlessly inventive iconoclast, it actually bolsters it further.If this pair of new works has any flaw at all, it is merely that "Criss Cross" is essentially an interesting new way to revisit old territory rather than a complete leap into the unknown."Hanover," on the other hand, is a legitimate bombshell, viscerally illustrating that Lucier still has an impishly heretical approach to modern composition and that it has some very sharp teeth.
Despite being one of the shorter pieces on the album, the opening "Patterns For Alto" is perhaps the most striking and effective distillation of Bertucci's distinctive artistry, marrying the trance-like repetition of early Terry Riley with Pauline Oliveros's groundbreaking work in harnessing the natural reverb of unusual architectural environments.More specifically, Bertucci unleashes a rapid-fire cascade of trilling saxophone patterns in a cavernous space, deftly using the enhanced reverb to weave an undulating web of squirming notes and ghostly overtones.It feels a lot like an eerily pretty swarm of lysergic bees.Curiously, Bertucci does not return to similar territory at all with the remaining three songs, but I suppose that makes sense given that her definitive statement in that vein only needed to be made once.The longer "Accumulations" is still saxophone-based, however, albeit in a completely different direction (or at least a completely different time scale). It deceptively opens as a slow, billowing fog of sinister harmonies, but that early dissonance quickly gives way to a languorous and lyrical saxophone melody.That motif too proves to be a bit of a feint, as the piece ultimately transforms into something in between those two poles: a murky and uncomfortably dissonant swirl of gauzy, layered harmonies mingled with viscerally harsh squeals that resemble the death throes of a free-jazz freak-out.It is quite a challenging piece, as it is not particularly easy on the ears, but it is also quite a fascinating and bracingly violent one that takes some unusual twists.The final moments are especially unexpected, resembling a sax and heavy electronic noise duo performing at a placid beach surrounded by birds.
Bertucci's sax does not play much of a recognizable role in the album's second half, aside from being the source of the early blurry and smeared drones in the epic "Sustain and Dissolve."While nerve-fraying dissonance continues to be the water in which Bertucci swims, "Sustain" is a bit more understated and nuanced than its predecessors, resembling a lovely drone piece that is constantly slipping out of focus to produce curdling and unnerving overtones.Unexpectedly, however, that motif eventually "dissolves" into a strange coda of hollow metallic pulses and distressed-sounding field recordings that evoke a deeply hallucinatory afternoon at the oceanside.Curiously, the brief closer "At Dawn" is almost a complete reprise of that coda, but re-envisioned as a lonelier and more warmly beautiful experience, transformed into a fond and bittersweet memory that mostly edits out the presence of all the other humans.It is actually my favorite piece on the album, which I feel a little guilty about, given that it lacks the sharp edges found elsewhere on Metal Aether: it is just simple, perfect, and nakedly lovely.
It is very hard not to love an album that contains four strong, compelling, and distinctive artistic statements in a row, so my only real caveat with Metal Aether is that the degree of dissonance can be "difficult" at times.It is crucial part of Bertucci's aesthetic, however, as the most consistent thread that runs throughout her work is a genius for subtly accumulating and resolving tension.One more item of note is that this album sometimes feels more like a compilation than a coherent, intentional whole, which I suppose it is, as it spans work across three years and two continents.I am the absolute last person who would attempt to stop someone from releasing a uniformly excellent album that does not quite fit together seamlessly, yet it bears mentioning that "Patterns For Alto" and "At Dawn" sound like the work of two completely different artists.As such, I would be very hard-pressed to succinctly describe Bertucci's overarching vision.However, she definitely has one, as Metal Aether never feels derivative or particularly indebted to other artists: inspiration may came from different places, yet the end results are always triumphantly Bertuccian.I will definitely want to hear whatever she records next, even if I have absolutely no idea quite what direction it may take.In any case, this is a great album.I suspect that the sustained and roiling sax eruption of "Patterns for Alto" will be the piece that gets all the initial attention, but anyone who takes a deeper plunge will likely find that there are plenty of other highlights that just take slightly longer to reveal themselves.
Once you'll touch the sky you will never return to dust is a new 1-hour long instantaneous composition performed with a prepared mini-keyboard, a handmade shortwave receiver and Roberto Opalio’s patented alientronics and wordless vocalizations. It is a masterpiece of modern minimalism, an ecstatic voyage where time and space lose their meaning, thus glorifying the poetic lyricism of the "here and now," that "eternal now" that other visionary artists and vanguards of the past have always dealt with, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Muhal Richard Abrams. "Towards the Sun," headed Arthur Rimbaud. "Space Is The Place," asserted Sun Ra.
Eliane Tapes is a new series on Moving Furniture Records. All the music in this series is dedicated and/or inspired by the works of Éliane Radigue.
With her groundbreaking work already in the late '60s and early '70s Éliane Radigue created a path for many other musicians in the field of minimalism and drone music.
To celebrate the amazing work she has done (and still does), we ask musicians to create works that are inspired by her work and as such are a dedication to her.
The first release for Eliane Tapes is by Kassel Jaeger.
For Retroactions, Kassel Jaeger created "studies" trying to extend the gesture Éliane Radigue did with feedbacks, with a different and more "hi-fi" setup than the one she used at the time.
In 4 studies, he experiments with different feedback setups: controlled, non-controlled, processed and non-processed. He worked with 6 microphones and 10 speakers, feedbacks.
The Sky With Broken Arms is a further step ahead into the realm of the unknown, where the music made of minimal, dreamy guitar chords and eerie wordless vocals over a dense layer of crackling noise comes out of a strong conceptual idea.
As Roberto Opalio’s foreword to the work reads "On a winter day two years ago, I found out that an entire section of my vinyl collection was completely ruined by an inexplicable oxidation process. [..] As a first reaction, I decided not to play those records ever again... and that I did, for a long time. 'Til one night, exhausted, I felt the absolute urgency to listen to one of those LPs whose musical content got buried by the vinyl surface noise. In that moment, the shocking epiphany: [..] slowly, I began to perceive that not only were the old, beloved sounds that I was used to still there, but the layer of ground noise obliged me to even more attentive and active listening; thus I was discovering very subtle sound details now claiming their own being and pretending their own space. The idea of a new MCIAA album came out of this enlightenment. A new concept concerning the representation of music on the one hand and its perception on the other. A music so essential and precious as to be discovered by the listener little by little, because hidden by a blanket of crackling noise, which I obtained from the blank grooves of my damaged vinyls. Thus, here we are: infinite spaces of disintegration and psycho-existential ecstasy… essentially, spaces of non-limited, non-stoppable Poetry."
Northern California producer Fred Welton Warmsley III's solo work as Dedekind Cut (pronounced "dead-da-ken cut") has evolved from fractured industrial design into increasingly subdued and sublime ambient meditations across two years of dedicated activity. His second full-length collection, Tahoe – so named after the mountain lake town he now calls home – swells with widescreen grandeur, evoking vistas both inner and outer. There are echoes of his earlier, more tempestuous mode in tracks like "MMXIX" and "Spiral" but overall the album skews panoramic and pensive, muted synthetic mists contoured with choral melody, field recordings, and radiant drone. His compositional instincts feel alternately classical, contemporary, and conflicted, befitting an artist whose discography spans divergent labels.
Warmsley characterizes Tahoe as a "time peace," sifting through "the past, the present, future, and fantasy."
Norway's Kristoffer Oustad and the Finnish duo of STROM.ec (Jasse Tuukki and Toni Myöhänen) are no stranger to dreary, aggressive electronic music, so a collaboration between the two comes as no surprise. I have some familiarity with both artists and I have been a fan of everything I have heard from them so far, but it was rarely surprising or unexpected in sound. With these two projects coming together, however, the final product stands out even more uniquely than their solo material. New Devoted Human is richer, more complex, and more fully fleshed out than I expected, and has an impressive amount of depth and complexity that is strong and memorable on all fronts.
Of course the album is jam packed with distorted static and bleak passages of funereal drones, but the trio's use of more conventional song structures and instrumentation is what gives this record its distinctive sound and overall song to song diversity.Opener "Inherent Resurrection" is at first the expected overdriven synthesizers and menacing hum, but once the big, multilayered rhythms come in, the feel shifts more to a heavily distorted, noise laden take on EBM.Nothing here would be appropriate for a goth club of course, but it has a great, memorable sense of structure and rhythm.
"Fever Wave Dream Function" sees the trio retaining some of this mood but within a slower tempo.Melodic synth pads creep from the background, but explosive drums and bass heavysequences take center stage.A wide array of styles appear throughout the title song as well:power electronics style yelled vocals are blended with big, industrial drums and rhythms, but all augmented by some at times beautiful ambient synthesizer works.The standard ranting, screaming and aggression does take more of the focus throughout the album, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.For "Blood Consciousness", the angry and malicious vocalsare hard to fully decipher are mixed with harsher, brittle passages of noise and distortion.Even within all this chaotic violence, however, there is a clear sense of structure and organization.Similar styled vocals appear throughout "Reluctant Traveller" (by guest vocalist Grutle Kjellson), but within a diverse mix of crashing rhythms, jarring noise, and at times what almost sounds like a guitar appearing occasionally.
The less harsh moments of New Devoted Human are also memorable as a bit of pleasantness in this otherwise swirling maelstrom of chaos.Symphonic touches appear throughout "Nattsvermer," with the heavy drama enhanced by some unconventional programmed rhythms.The piece never goes into overtly aggressive territories, and actually has a rather pretty conclusion.Album closer "Kosto" also sees the trio working in some neo-classical bombast and structures, but its final moments finish the album on a rather light, almost uplifting note.
Extra kudos should be given to the Malignant label for issuing New Devoted Human on both CD and vinyl.Besides the latter's more luxurious presentation, the analog mastering gives an even more pronounced depth and richness to the album, elevating it as the strong artistic statement it is.Oustad,Tuukki, and Myöhänen may not have intended to create an album with any sort of human warmth to it, but it is there, lurking beneath the cacophonous rhythms and ranting vocals, and that edge makes for quite a standout piece of intentionally ugly music.
Both Kazuma Kubota and Mei Zhiyong are relatively new to the realm of harsh noise, but they have individually worked with some of the biggest names associated with the genre, such as Macronympha, Torturing Nurse, and Kazumoto Endo (among a multitude of others). This collaborative session is refreshingly no frills and stripped to the barest foundations of what traditional noise is and should be, and at a time in which so many artists are stepping away from the style, it is wonderful to hear something that is as classic and timeless as this.
Session June.12.2016 is just that:a recording of Kubota and Zhiyong together working their array of electronics and distortion pedals to create relentless, amelodic sheets of noise and at times piercing, painful tones.The stripped down feel carries into the simple packaging:a plain white sleeve, without any artwork or additional details that is fitting for the unedited, untreated recording that it adorns.Having thrown myself deep into the harsh noise world in the mid and late 1990s, this looks and feels like something I would have randomly ordered via a mailorder like Relapse or Anomalous without fully knowing what I would be receiving, but being very satisfied with myself once it arrived.
The duo waste no time in the performance, immediately blasting in shrill and stuttering electronics, with harsh, distorted stabs cutting in to end any semblance of conventional structure or sound.Cuts and edits are violent and jerky, building into painful walls of noise and then cutting them away to more jarring, jagged soundscapes.It is hard to ignore the influence of the classic practitioners of the genre:Kubota and Zhiyong go from the cut-up pseudo-rhythms of Pain Jerk, the manic stop-start structures of Masonna, and the multilayered sheets of noise pioneered by the Incapacitants.The performance never comes across as an emulation of any of these legends, but instead it feels like intentional, reverential nods in their direction.
Across the 45 minute session the two never let themselves fall into monotony:shrill, painful high frequencies are soon replaced with massive, foundation shaking low end bursts.Textures resembling rushing waves and sputtering computers appear, as do some nearly psychedelic passages of phaser and flanged layers of static.There is a sense of movement and activity throughout, but also a feeling of consistency and focus.Even with all of these changes, it never feels like Kubota and Zhiyong are just letting the machines do all the work, but that they are actively shaping and structuring the chaos.After a chirp-heavy build it seems to herald the end, with the layers of noise stripped back for the sake of sparser passages, but there’s one last shrill and bass heavy burst left before the two call it quits.
Kazuma Kubota and Mei Zhiyong admittedly are not breaking any new ground on Session June.12.2016, but that is not the point.With so many of the well-regarded noise artists either drastically slowing down activity or branching into less abrasive, more musically tinged work, it is simply refreshing to hear an unadulterated pure noise record.No pretense, no attempts at being provocative, simply a disc of extremely varied, high quality noise.It may not be anything wildly unique or innovative, but it is pure comfort food to an old school noise fan such as myself.