Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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The Overtone Ensemble project is a fairly recent development in Catlin's career, as he formed it in 2012 to focus on his Vibrissae works (the instruments borrow their name from cat whiskers).  Prior to the birth of the Ensemble, Catlin was primarily known as an experimental guitarist with an impressive talent for instrument modification, building an array of guitars (and a zither) designed for bowing and unusual harmonics.  He also built gongs and bells from scuba tanks and heaven knows what else.  Catlin is very much an "idea man."  Conceptually, the Vibrissae are an extreme but logical extension of Tim’s earlier experiments with pick-up placement, eBow modification, bowing, and unconventional fret locations.  While it is quite a big leap in practice to move from playing a guitar to "activating" metal rods with longitudinal stroking, it is not hard to see a piece like the ghostly, droning "Adumbration" as a bowed performance on an unfeasibly large, multi-person guitar.  In essence, Catlin just ingeniously found a way to get the sustained, deeply resonant, and spectral sounds that he always wanted without having to use any effects or processing.
Of course, the downside to the Vibrissae is that rubbing a metal rod offers an extremely constrained palette, achieving a very specific sound quite beautifully, but not leaving many options for stylistic or dynamic variety.  Consequently, these four pieces tend to take their individual character from whatever accompanying instrumentation Catlin and his ensemble throw into the mix.  On "Scintillation," for example, there are some clattering metallic sounds, some gongs, and a host of harsh feedback-like whines coaxed from wineglasses or bowls.  Elsewhere, "Oscillation" sounds like the ensemble is playing a complex battery of cymbals and large bells, though it gets more compelling as it gets less busy, as all the clattering racket conceals any of the microtonal harmonic activity happening in the background.  In fact, it kind of sounds like a wild free-jazz drum solo if the hapless drummer in question suddenly found himself missing his snare, toms, bass drum, and high-hat.  Sadly, it is not quite as great as that scenario might sound.  The closing "Accretion" is great, however, as the ensemble uses a battery of handbells to create a vibrantly twinkling, surprisingly physical, and queasily dissonant unreality.  It is like the air itself is somehow transformed into a visceral and malign entity.  There is nothing else quite like it that I have heard.
To my ears, it is exclusively the bookends where the Overtone Ensemble seem like they are realizing their full potential.  I would even go so far as to declare "Accretion" an absolutely singular and legitimately evil-sounding piece of music.  While the middle of the album is definitely eclipsed by the surrounding pieces, I would not say that this album has any significant flaws that could be avoided: the fundamental premise is necessarily a hugely limiting one.  The Overtone Ensemble's appeal lies primarily in the unique and resonant sounds that Catlin's self-built instruments generate, which can sometimes be quite amazing given the absence of processing.  On pieces like "Adumbration," Catlin creates a microtonal cloud of harmonies that seems to hang in the air, shimmering and undulating with a life of its own and "Accretion" sounds like nothing less than the very fabric of reality being gleefully ripped apart.  That is reason enough to hear this album, as far as I am concerned.  Of course, the complex and unpredictable interplay between notes is quite wonderful as well, but the Overtone Ensemble's talents are strictly limited to texture and harmony.  An argument could probably be made that there is quite a bit of hyper-nuanced melodic and rhythmic activity unfolding as well, but it is not anything that is happening on a scale that normal humans can pick up on: anyone looking for great compositions should look elsewhere, as should anyone expecting Catlin's unnerving harmonic swarm to ever blossom into a beautiful vista of warmth and consonance.  This album is what it is.  And what it is most closely resembles is an impossible rich, alien, and sometimes absolutely mesmerizing sound art installation that unexpectedly sprung up in my apartment.
For a band notorious for doing the absurdly perverse, such as releasing two albums both titled The Ape of God simultaneously, but with entirely different track lists, Mickey Rookey Live at London is a surprisingly straight-forward live album. Across 18 songs, spanning since the super-group’s inception in 2000, it works great as a stand-alone release, but also as a distillation of the band’s decade and a half career, captured one night in 2014.
OMG has largely been a studio project made up of some very well known artists in the various post-metal heavy genres:guitarist/vocalists Aaron Turner (Isis, Mamiffer) and Nate Newton (Converge),bassist Caleb Scofield (Cave-In), and drummer Santos Montano.Unsurprisingly from the line-up and the players’ various side-projects, the actual OMG sound is a amalgamation of various metal and hardcore subgenres, but there are always surprises to be had.The set opener "Shadowed/Gift" leads off with a sustained drone and shrill feedback before slowly being melded into a distorted, noisy chug, then into a more traditional doomy metal framework.Similarly, "Common Species" features the band immediately launching into a heavy, pounding mess that gets darker and bleaker before it concludes.
While these are common elements found throughout Mickey Rookey, variations occur. For example, the heavy pounding rhythms and bass-lead melody of "Regain/Rejoin" called to mind a more metal focused Head of David.On "To Carry The Flame (Radio Edit)," the crew provides all slow metal screams and a grumpy, slogging pace that fits the band’s name very well.However, there is a significant amount of variation and change throughout, and also some of the album’s most overly melodic stuff.
Admittedly, I latched on mostly to the experimental moments, like the twinkling electronics heavy "Christmas Eve Pt.III" or the obtuse pseudo-reggae of "Scraps Theatre Presents."The highlight of the disc, however, is the 12 minute epic "Zozobra Pts. I-III."At first a mass of stabbing distorted guitar, the mix is slowly filled in, complete with more conventional singing for background vocals.The sound transitions nicely from some of the performance’s ugliest moments to some of its most beautiful, and a multi-part suite structure that makes it extremely engaging.
Having never been a huge fan of pure metal and many of its multiple permutations, I will admit that some of the pieces did not resonate with me (mostly because of the vocal style), but on the whole, MickeyRookey is an excellent document of Old Man Gloom and their infrequent performances.The depth and variety of the band’s playing though is what makes this record shine, and that dry, sardonic sense of humor the band has always employed succeeds live just as well as it does in the studio.
Lamentably, I have not been following Thomas Brinkmann’s career at all until now, as I had unfairly assumed that he was exclusively a techno producer and probably not of much interest to a connoisseur of the fringes like me.  As it turns out, however, his releases for Editions Mego are quite radically experimental and very much to my taste, particularly this one.  A1000 Keys has its roots in an intriguing and ambitious premise: Brinkmann basically converted the sound of a grand piano into binary code as a "fatal homage to minimalism and a consequent denial of virtuosity and the idea of creative genius."  Naturally, that claim was more than enough to pique my interest, but I would not have stuck around for very long if that concept had not translated into such a gloriously visceral and dissonant tour de force.  Brinkmann decisively delivers on his bold promise, taking the more chromatic and violent strains of modern classical piano composition to an impressively inhuman extreme.
In keeping with his ballsy and quixotic rejection of all warmth and humanity, Brinkmann named each of these 18 pieces using three-letter airport codes.  His reasoning was that airports are "non-places that establish their own space-and-time continuum, while lacking individual identity and history."  Also, they are "sterile passages for anonymous, objectified masses."  I definitely like the way Brinkmann thinks.  Unsurprisingly, the corresponding music is similarly anonymous and lacking individual distinctions, turning something that would normally be a flaw into a perverse virtue of sorts.  There is nothing resembling a conventional melody anywhere on 1000 Keys and Brinkmann does not expression much interest in differentiating the pieces with significant rhythmic or dynamic variations.  He even seems content to mostly restrict his activities to the rumbling lower registers.  What he offers instead, however, is an unrelenting onslaught of jagged, percussive dissonance.  Occasionally, he changes the formula a bit with something like a deep, buzzing drone ("TLV"); a scratching and popping rhythm ("YWG"); or an occasional brief interlude of gently burbling synth-like tones ("SFO" and "HEL"), but the overall aesthetic is very clearly one of nerve-jangling punishment and harsh chromaticism.
Aside from the impressive and maniacal show of force, I was most struck by the pieces where Brinkmann digitally obliterates the piano-like elements so completely that his grand piano sounds like crunching industrial machinery, as he does with the relentless and crushing locked-groove of "CGN" and the grinding closer "KIX."  Neither piece would sound out of place on a noise album.  Nor would the jagged, disorienting, and dissonant arpeggios of "KGD" sound all that out of place on a Morton Feldman album…or at least they would not if they were played with an uncharacteristic degree of violence.  For the most part, however, Brinkmann's pieces remind me favorably of Pierre Boulez’s more confrontational work, but played with an unfeasible number of fingers and very much fixated on the gut-level power of the churning lower register.  While those differences are admittedly significant on Brinkmann's side of the equation, they do not matter all that much on my end.  Aside from the two palette-cleansing synth-like interludes, listening to 1000 Keys is basically like being attacked for 70 minutes or so: the differences between songs can seem very trivial as the cumulative effect adds up.  No one cares about the nuances that separate being hit with a bat versus being hit with a hammer.  Both hurt.  The same is true of punishing repetition, ugly percussive chords, and roiling chromatic runs in the lower registers.
Perversely, 1000 Keys greatest faults can also be seen as thematically pure attributes.  Without question, this is a very single-minded and one-dimensional album and it stretches out for two LPs.  Listening to the entire album is exhausting.  However, that sameness and unrelenting density also gives the album a monolithic power that effectively emphasizes Brinkmann's intended statement.  Another possible critique is that Brinkmann's "denial of virtuosity and the idea of creative genius" is literally just that: a denial, rather than any kind of replacement.  Post-1000 Keys, I am still more than happy to seek out both virtuosity and genius, but Brinkmann at least showed that the alternative can offer quite an impressively bludgeoning and absorbing spectacle.  Also, I think he definitely pushed the envelope a bit regarding the piano’s range of expression.  Admittedly, I wish 1000 Keys showed a bit more depth and variety compositionally, but that is probably beside the point and possibly even antithetical to what Brinkmann was trying to do here.  These are not brilliant compositions, but they are fascinating experiments and great art.  Thomas Brinkmann basically took one of the greatest symbols of Art and Genius (the grand piano) and weaponized it.  More importantly, he crafted an album ferocious and uncompromising enough to make me care.  A1000 Keys is a seriously heavy album.
I first encountered John Chantler's work with 2010's Luminous Ground and summarily dismissed him as just another vintage gear fetishist making gently blooping, blurting, and semi-random-sounding modular synth music. In hindsight, I still do not think that I was entirely wrong about that, but I was quite mistaken in my assumption that that album conveyed the full range of Chantler's artistry. While some parts of Which Way to Leave? similarly invite comparisons to the fading analog synth revival that has plagued me for the last few years, the more substantial pieces show that Chantler is a formidable composer with a vibrant and distinctive style of gnarled and grainy unpredictability.  When Chantler is good, he is extremely good.
It is very easy to see my why previous exposure to Chantler's work did not make much of an impression, as Which Way to Leave? shows that Chantler's greatest talents seem to be textural and that entropy is probably his muse.That being the case, a modular synthesizer should theoretically be the perfect instrument for such an artist.Unfortunately, it is a little too perfect, as it lends itself so well to textured unpredictability that almost everyone wielding a vintage modular synth sounds about the same to me, aside from a few singular artists like Alessandro Cortini.Thankfully, it seems like Chantler is merely using his synth as a tool this time around rather than keeping his hat in the ring with the other synth purists.I have no idea what he plays on this album, as he credits himself with just "electronics," but I do know that he has a few guest musicians on board and that there is ample evidence that these pieces are multi-layered compositions rather than solo improvisations or one-take performances.Amusingly, this is also Chantler's "most explicitly melodic" record according to Room40, a claim that makes me curious to hear how much more amelodic his previous work could possibly be.I suppose the opening "Falling Forward" technically does have a melody, but its appeal lies primarily in how mangled, blown-out, and stuttering that melody gets by the time Chantler is done with it.  Whatever relationship Chantler has with melody seems to be a rather abusive one, as the main theme of "Falling Forward" truly sounds like it is being played at the wrong speed though a blown speaker as the electricity flickers and shorts out.
That said, the best pieces are indeed the ones that balance Chantler’s sizzling, crackling, and gently blooping textural soundscapes with at least a hint of melody.Consequently, "Falling Forward" is one of the album’s legitimate high points: its greatest strength is in the contrast between its dense, gnarled, and sputtering central motif and the nimbus of unpredictably harmonizing sustained tones on the periphery.Another strong piece is "Fixation Pulse," though it takes a while to evolve beyond a subdued host of alien hums and bleeps.Gradually, however, a distorted and sizzling ghost of a melody burns through the haze and achieves a kind of otherworldly, slow-motion beauty.  I suspect my favorite piece on the album is the lengthy "First December" though, which sounds like gorgeous drone work processed through a crazy array of filters that transform it into something vibrantly shuddering, shimmering, and unrecognizably different.That piece is kind of a brilliantly representative microcosm of what Chantler does on this album: sometimes the compositions are strong and sometimes they are not, but the magic lies in how organically alive and otherworldly those compositions can feel.
I suppose the remaining "songs" are quite likable as well, as they are at least admirably warped and evocative. "Lesser Demands," for example, sounds like a field recording from the inside of some kind of giant unearthly beast, while "All Visible Signs" is all woozy twinkling and sad, sea-sick bloops until it transforms into something that resembles nothing less than an alien rainforest.The closing "Beginning Again" is curiously quite similar, but eventually diverges by cohering into a strangely beautiful coda of erratically oscillating feedback and unexpectedly poignant bleeps.I suppose that coda is what separates Chantler's superior work from the rest, as he always excels at setting the stage for something wonderful to emerge, but sometimes seems perfectly content to just remain at that point.When he actually goes one step further and allows something more substantial to take shape, the results can be absolutely sublime.Ultimately, I think only about half of Which Way to Leave? truly approaches greatness, but it is still a complexly layered, subtly hallucinatory, distinctive, and richly absorbing album that seems to get deeper and more compelling with each successive listen.
The first solo album from Rod Modell (Deepchord) in nearly 10 years, following up 2007's Incense & Blacklight comes in lush form with, Mediterranea. Clocking in at 72 minutes, this cerebral epic reveals a sense of timelessness and stillness, an exquisite portrayal of reflection that is sonically enriching and emotionally engaging. Opening with field recordings conducted while abroad in the islands of Spain, sculpts a sublime sense of nuance that creeps into fore as time passes, gradually enveloping and evolving into what sounds as an orchestra playing from the fathomless ends of the ocean. The quiet jazz induced snare percussion honors the melody hidden deep beneath the surface. Congas and tribal rhythms accentuate its colorful and vibrant dream-like melodies that slowly expose themselves into the mix. Haunting, alluding to the symphonic, its emotional depth shift gradually, revealing the underlying, subconscious tonal colors. The magic and lushness of the strings, the beautiful resonance of the violin and the love felt in each key stroke tugs right at the heart strings. To us here at Echospace, this may be the most beautiful and inviting piece we've ever heard from Rod, absolutely stunning!
Wolfgang Voigt has announced the GAS box set, which will be released on 28th October on Kompakt. Inside this comprehensive anthology, listeners will experience the remastered albums ZAUBERBERG (celebrating the 20th anniversary of this essential album), KÖNIGSFORST, POP and the sought-after OKTEMBER 12", all together available as luxurious 10LP+4CD edition, including longer original CD edits never before available on vinyl.
The first book devoted to power electronics, written by artists, fans, and critics.
Power electronics is a genre of industrial or ‘noise’ music that utilises feedback and synthesizers to produce an intense, loud, challenging sound. To match this sonic excess, power electronics also relies heavily upon extreme thematic and visual content— whether in lyrics, album art, or live performance. It is a genre that often invites strong reactions from both listeners and critics, if not dismissed or ignored altogether.
FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR is the first ever English-language book primarily devoted to power electronics, bringing together essays and reviews that explore the current state of the genre, from early development through to live performance, listener experience, artist motivation, gender and subcultures, such as ‘Japanoise’.
Written by artists, fans, and critics from around the world, FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR provides comment on a musical form that is at once theatrical and absurdist, while bringing to listeners a violent, ecstatic, and potentially consciousness-altering experience. In considering this ‘spectacle’ of noise, how far can we simply label power electronics as a genre of shock tactics or of transgression for transgression’s sake?
About the editor
Jennifer Wallis is a historian and author, currently living in Oxford, UK. She is a fan of power electronics and has previously worked with noise act Hate-Male.
Contributors
Mikko Aspa, Tom Bench, Bindweed, Scott Candey, Nathan Clemence, Andrew Cooke, Mike Dando, Sonia Dietrich, d foist, Spencer Grady, Clive Henry, Grant Hobson, Kevin Matthew Jones, Paul Margree, Nick Nihilist, Jack Sargeant, Stephen Sennitt, Richard Stevenson, Duncan Taylor, Philip Taylor, Jennifer Wallis, Daniel Wilson, Ulex Xane
It’s easy to forget that Norway shares a short stretch of frontier with Russia, right at the northernmost tip of the country. That region is where Geir Jenssen, the Norwegian electronic producer behind Biosphere, comes from, and where he has been composing his austere, disturbing and deeply textured ambience since the early 1980s.
Biosphere has released many albums to date including Substrata, voted the greatest ambient album of all time on the Hyperreal website, and has collaborated with Arne Nordheim, Higher Intelligence Agency, Deathprod, Pete Namlook and Bel Canto.
His 12th album Departed Glories is his first in almost five years and marks a new deal with the Oslo independent label Smalltown Supersound. On the cover is a photo of the Russian landscape taken more than a hundred years ago. It’s part of an incredible cache of recently discovered images by the photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, who pioneered a form of colour photography using three sheets of glass, and left us with a collection of hauntingly beautiful pictures of a vanished world that could have been taken on an iPhone.
These are one of the inspirations for Jenssen’s latest project, which he began working on this project around five years ago, while he was based temporarily in Krakow, Poland. Living near the Wolski forest, his daily walk took him past sites – beautiful and at the same time terrible – where Poles had been executed during the second world war. After researching the area he discovered that a Polish medieval queen Bronislawa, had hidden among the trees with some nuns in the 13th century to escape the invading Tartar hordes, and that a monument to her memory had been built and then destroyed by invading Austrians in the 19th.
It made him speculate about what kind of music someone like Bronislawa might have heard while trembling among the trees? Not real music, surely, but something the fears in the mind might conjure up. He went in search of local folk music, from Poland and Ukraine, and began to work with that material to transform it into something reflecting psychological trauma.
Around the same time he stumbled on Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs and was immediately struck by the way they brought history, with its long departed souls, a little bit nearer. One image in particular, of an Armenian woman in a forest in what is now Turkey, especially got under his skin. ‘The crystal clear yet haunting atmosphere fascinated me,’ he says.
All of these inspirational elements came together to provide the necessary propulsion to make Departed Glories, an album that sets the back of the neck hairs quivering in just the same way. It’s almost entirely constructed from hundreds of snippets of Eastern European And Russian folk music recordings, melted together to transform them into 17 unsettling and occasionally blindingly radiant beatless tracks. Each sample fragment is like a sliver of glass plate, and like the photos, it has left a music that is radiant, ghostly and unforgettable.
You can’t accuse Supersilent of keeping the noise down. Ever since 1997, when Norway’s finest free music oufit came together for the first time, their unpredictable noises and rapturous textures have been heard all around the world – and maybe somewhere outside the stratosphere too.
Mostly taped in an Oslo studio at the end of 2014, the band record everything on 13 live, while blasting their sound through a PA system, so that they can feel the physical air moving as if they were on stage. Tracks 1 and 5 date from 2009, immediately after their drummer’s exit. “They were tryout sessions to see how we should proceed,” says Helge. “It was a kind of research for the band to feel how it is to be three, not four, and to blow off some steam.”
All of Supersilent’s music is entirely unplanned, with all three experienced musical adventurers throwing themselves into the moment and riding the emerging maelstrom. They always manage to surprise you, whether it’s the Indonesian ritual music heard from a Scandinavian mountaintop on the opening track “13.1” or the compressed digital labyrinths of “13.9.”
The trio swap instruments with abandon: percussion, trumpet and woodwind, electronics and Storløkken’s collectable assortment of vintage keyboards. In this technologize environment, sounds are passed around, distorted and spat out again in tantalizing splurges. “It takes time to shape a band from the beginning,” says Helge, “but for us now the trio is working really well.” With Supersilent’s lucky 13, now you can be the judge of that.
Hubris continues the exploration of relentless, driving rhythms heard on Ambarchi’s Sagittarian Domain (2012) and Quixotism (2014). Where those records looked to Krautrock and techno for their starting points, the sidelong opening track here begins from the perhaps unlikely inspirations of disco and new wave, drawing particularly from Ambarchi’s love of Wang Chung’s soundtrack to William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. Leaving behind the song-forms of these reference points, Ambarchi weaves a sustained and pulsating web of layered palm-muted guitars from which individual voices rise up and recede, eventually setting the stage for some lush guitar synth from Jim O’Rourke. Arnold Dreyblatt collaborator Konrad Sprenger contributes overtone-rich motorized guitar, pushing the piece into a satisfying intersection of shimmering minimalism and rhythmic drive that smoothly builds up until the entrance of Mark Fell’s electronic percussion in its final section.
After a short second part, in which Ambarchi, O’Rourke and Crys Cole pay tribute to the skewed harmonic sense of Albert Marcoeur with a track built from layered bass guitar figures and abstracted speech, the long final piece pushes the concept of the first side into darker and denser areas. Joined by electronic rhythms from Ricardo Villalobos and the twin drums of Joe Talia and Will Guthrie, the layered guitars of the first piece are transformed into a raw and tumbling fusion-funk groove that calls to mind early Weather Report or even the first Golden Palominos LP. As this stellar rhythm section rides a single repeated chord change into oblivion, a series of spectacular events emerge in the foreground: first, aleatoric synthesizer burbles from Keith Fullerton Whitman, then slashing skronk guitar from Arto Lindsay, until finally Ambarchi’s own fuzzed-out guitar harmonics take center stage as the piece builds to an ecstatic frenzy. Few artists could hope to include such an incredible variety of collaborators on one record and still hope for it to have a unique identity, but Ambarchi manages to do just that, crafting three pieces that emerge directly out of his previous work while also pushing ahead into new dimensions.