15 December 2014

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For the third installment of his all field recording based Epoch series, López presents material collected at somewhat more conventional sounding locations, at least for an American such as myself. Captured at various parks and nature preserves throughout Cuba and both the Southeast and Southwest of the United States, the sounds are no less fascinating than his rainforest-centric previous entries in this series.

Nowhere Worldwide

Continuing with the previous releases in this series, Obatalá-Ibofanga is exclusively field recordings, without any processing or treatments performed:simply the editing and mixing performed by López.Even though he may not have had a direct hand in the creation of these sounds, he still shows his impeccable compositional aptitude when it comes to the sequencing and editing of the various recordings that he presents.

Chirping birds and noisy insects act as the most consistent recurring theme throughout this 18-minute piece, but it is in the different ways these recordings are sequenced and mixed that acts as the disc’s greatest asset.For the first ten or so minutes birds are the focus of the recording, and either through the occurrence of nature or subtle mixing by López, the intermingling calls take on a truly musical quality in terms of both rhythm and melody.The next segment is obviously a different location, but the musical quality of what preceded it is drained out, leaving a noisy, almost sharp and shrill passage of organic sounds that are not all that removed from his composed works.

These transitions keep Obatal√°-Ibofanga captivating, and the juxtapositions are consistent with Lopez's traditional material.His transitions from sustained buzzing roars that are obviously insect swarms (but could just as easily be a synthesizer or DSP output) into a wide open fields of hushed cricket chirps and back again are what sets this series off from any other traditional "nature" recordings.The changeovers are often dramatic and jarring, which keeps the sound from fading into the background.

The expansive body of work that Francisco López has produced is considered some of the greatest experimental electronic works, and speaks to his exceptional ability as an artist.This series stands out on its own, acting a sort of ancillary to his numerous Untitled works, but also functions as a more accessible gateway into his catalog.The dynamics of his compositions are present on Obatalá-Ibofanga and the previous releases, but by using the sounds of nature as his instruments, it takes on a different dimension. This direction is one that people put off by his harsher electronic works may find more engaging and easier to understand.Obatalá-Ibofanga is another jewel in his expansive discography.

samples:

• Excerpt 1
• Excerpt 2
• Excerpt 3

 

14 December 2014

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Albums and Singles

The noise/orchestral ensemble, lead and directed by Reinhold Friedl, have performed the work of power electronics titans Whitehouse before, with their 2010 Whitehouse Electronics release drawing heavily from the band’s final three albums. Following recent performances of Metal Machine Music and collaborations with Keiji Haino, Whitehouse succeeds even more than its predecessor by taking a wider swath through the nearly 30 year catalog, and even featuring an all-too-brief vocal contribution by William Bennett himself.

Zeitkratzer

Other than the opening "Daddo," this live performance sticks largely to early to mid period Whitehouse compositions, an era defined by piercing feedback and droning analog synthesizers. Compared to the later vocal and computer-centric works, it is a sound that this nine piece, working largely with stringed and brass instruments, are able to emulate very well.

"Daddo," from 1998's Mummy and Daddy, was the beginning of a digital-heavy era for Whitehouse, and thus its interpretation here is a bit less direct.Originally a piercing piece of digital clipping and stuttering, the Zeitkratzer version emphasizes the original’s clattering, disturbing opening very well with shrill scrapes and churning bass sounds.Bennett's vocal contribution mimics the original’s disturbingly calm introduction and conclusion, excising his manic middle performance from this version.His spoken performance is unnervingly clear and up front:a pedophilic narrative that, 16 years ago, conjured images of the notorious JonBenet Ramsay case.In 2014 and a post-Toddlers and Tiaras world, it has lost none of its unpleasant and uncomfortable impact.

The four remaining pieces have Zeitkratzer drawing from less vocal-heavy eras of Whitehouse's discography.On "Foreplay," from the sophomore album Total Sex, the string section emulates the emergency siren like oscillator tones from the original perfectly, with the remaining players creating a dirty, organic sounding mass of sound that is completely unidentifiable.Vocals by Hilary Jeffery are processed in a Luddite manner:rather than any sort of digital effects, they are performed through a trombone and result in a different take on the originally unintelligible screams.

"White Whip," from Twice is Not Enough, is a bit more boisterous than the slow malignance of the original.With the woodwind and string players generating a massive low end drone and feedback, its sound mix of the original with the unique instrumentation work very well.The weakest part of the album, for me, is the ensemble's take on "Fanatics."Previously a vocal oriented piece that mixed the lyrics with an extreme high/low frequency pairing, it feels less faithful to the original, especially lacking the extremely effective cracking whip noise surge that was featured heavily in the original song.

While it does sound superficially gimmicky having performers use traditionally classical oriented instrumentation to reproduce some of the most dissonant and abstract electronic works, the truth is it results in a unique and compelling approach using familiar sounds.Far more than any of those symphonic versions of rock band collections, the way in which these performers are able to reproduce some of the most inhuman sounds with only centuries old instruments is impressive on a practical, but also conceptual level, and results in a fresh, but different take on the Whitehouse material I have known for so many years now.

samples:

• Daddo
• Foreplay
• Fanatics

 

14 December 2014

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Albums and Singles

It is with great pride and pleasure that Glistening Examples announces the newest collaborative efforts of Aaron Dilloway and Jason Lescalleet.

Recorded at Tarker Mills in February 2014 then mixed and mastered at Glistening Labs, this 38 minute LP was carved deeply into 150 grams of virgin vinyl via Direct Metal Mastering at GZ Media in the Czech Republic.

More information can be found here.  Also of note, Jason has started a subscription series for his ongoing This Is What I Do project.

14 December 2014

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Albums and Singles

Following on from her highly acclaimed Ett LP on Editions Mego, Klara Lewis presents 4 new works which further her signature explorations of field recordings, electronics, rhythm, sound and atmosphere. Here Lewis exemplifies her uncanny ability to harness the world outside in order to reconstruct and re-present this as amorphous musical matter. These 4 new tracks exude a certain ambiguity where standard signposts such as rhythm, ambience, texture, light and dark remain as elusive as they are present. Whilst bypassing passive or photographic representation of the source material these works withhold a strong emotional quality resulting in a confident and at times brutal musical manifestation. As suggested by the title, Msuic resides in a zone at once familiar and slightly off-kilter, a world of Lewis' devising in which the listener is warmly encouraged to enter and explore. Msuic is another superb collection of music as fantastic matter.

More information is available here.

14 December 2014

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Albums and Singles

Benjamin Finger's fractured and skittering first release for Digitalis is not entirely without precedent, as he previously dabbled with techno beats a bit on 2010's For You, Sleepsleeper, but it is still quite a departure from the dreamy, hallucinatory soundscapes that I normally associate with him.  As far as departures go, I would say Mood Chaser is quite a good one, as Finger successfully translates his skewed psychedelic sensibility into a disorienting and kaleidoscopic dance party.  Though it is perhaps a bit too over-caffeinated to quite stand with his best work, this is certainly an exuberant, weird, and fun effort in its own right.

Digitalis

The best description of Mood Chaser that I can come up with is that it is like being talked into going out to a club by some friends even though I have an extremely high fever and no longer have a firm grasp on either reality or the passing of time.  Also, the DJ at the club has been unknowingly drugged and is sleepily, deliriously changing tempos abruptly, playing songs backwards, choosing the wrong speed, and accidentally playing multiple songs on top of one another.  The overall effect, of course, is quite surreal and disorienting in the extreme: one moment I am happily dancing to a thumping house beat, but in the next, time has suddenly slowed to a crawl and I feel like I am underwater or floating through space.  It is quite a neat illusion, though it tends to work best when Finger transports me furthest from the dance floor.  From a listenability standpoint, the album highlight is probably "Nicotin Weather," which is a largely beatless piece built upon pulsing, droning synths and a bleary haze of sometimes chopped and looped choral vocals.

From a sheer lunacy standpoint, however, Mood Chaser offers quite a few highlights of a different sort.  "Elfin Geezer" is probably the most deranged of the lot, as it sounds simultaneously backwards, skipping, hyperactive, and possibly falling apart, then throws an insistent acoustic guitar strum into the mix.  Other stand-outs include the stuttering, underwater electropop of "Odd Infinitum;" the gnarled, dissolving techno of "Saguaro Cactus," and the lysergic, everything-happening-at-once entropy of the opening "Dwarf Palms."  In fact, every piece on Mood Chaser is quite strange and compelling in some way, as Finger admirably avoided both any filler and any oasis of relative normalcy.  As a whole, this is a remarkably well-crafted album: Benjamin always maintains a propulsive sense of momentum and displays an impressive intuition regarding how far out he can go or how long a given theme should last.  While it is not a particularly short album, it feels like one in the best possible way–kind of like a great ride at an amusement park ("Wow- it's over already?  Let's do it again!").Although it lacks the sustained, enveloping beauty that characterizes Finger's best work, such comparisons are somewhat irrelevant, as Mood Chaser is chasing after something different entirely.  It is hard to say exactly what that something might have been, but it certainly makes for a wild and entertaining departure: this is Benjamin Finger’s party album.

• Nicotin Weather
• Bong Puzzle
• Elfin Geezer

 

14 December 2014

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Albums and Singles

This reissue of Amir Abbey's 2011 cassette is not quite as strong as last year’s Movements of Night LP, but it certainly boasts enough inspiration to justify Students of Decay's decision to rescue it from out-of-print cassette purgatory. Although Amir covers a perplexing amount of stylistic ground and occasionally errs on the side of being too derivative, he has admittedly chosen some very cool artists to emulate (Popul Vuh, for example) and tends to excel at most of the genres that he delves into (shoegaze, drone, etc.).  That unevenness and shifting vision prevents The Silent March from quite succeeding as a complete album, but a few of the individual pieces are quite compelling.

Students of Decay

As far as cover art goes, Amir could not possibly have chosen have chosen anything more representative of his sound than a cloud.  While he drifts somewhat freely in style throughout The Silent March, the unifying theme is always that the music is slow-moving, soft-edged, shape-shifting, and somewhat dark.  The metaphor could even be extended further to note that these seven pieces also vary in density and in the amount of light that they let through.  Also, they tend to conceal things as well.  I was tempted to even add that The Silent March's missteps occur almost every time Abbey departs from his "I want to sound like a cloud" aesthetic, but he thankfully snuck in a few divergent successes that derailed my half-assed theory.  In any case, Amir is at his best when he goes with a slow-motion engulfing roar of shoegaze guitar noise that gradually reveals some kind of melancholy loop or chord progression.  The album reaches its zenith with the opening one-two punch of "Outside" and "Come Down Slowly," which does exactly that: the roar of "Outside" gradually segues into the warped, hallucinatory synth dirge of "Come Down."  Amir is quite fond of segues, incidentally: all of Silent March's songs bleed into one another.

Another highlight is the very different "Her Spirits," which sounds like an unplugged, funereal Codeine with proggy tendencies and a completely unexpected penchant for Indian instrumentation and flutes.  It is most definitely a dirge, but it maintains a weirdly hypnotic pulse and does a nice job of layering subtle psychedelic touches.  Amir then racks up yet another highlight at the album's end with the Popul Vuh pastiche of "Silent March II," which strongly resembles one of the variations of the Aguirre theme.  The other three pieces are all likable in their own ways, but tend to be too short or too one-dimensional to leave a strong impression, aside from the bleak "Eternal," which approximates a black-metal-damaged Explosions in the Sky.  Abbey was still finding his voice at this stage, I suppose, as he seemed a lot more focused in his vision with its follow-up.  As such, The Silent March is not the ideal starting place for Secret Pyramid, but it is successful often enough to appeal to existing fans who find themselves thirsty for more (especially since Amir is not an especially prolific guy).

Samples:

• Come Down Gently
• Outside
• Silent March II

 

14 December 2014

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Albums and Singles

On what I assume will be his final release of the year (although with his prolific output its hard to be sure), Kevin Drumm's Wrong Intersection is a single piece with a sound that fits its somewhat sinister title and ambiguous artwork perfectly. It might not be as aggressive as some of his other works, but Drumm excels in setting an exceedingly bleak mood via a constantly shifting dynamic, and a healthy bit of extreme frequencies as well.

Handmade Birds

Drumm mixes hushed harsh electronics with digital interference noise in the opening minutes, conveying a creeping malignant force in its overall subtlety.His use of random sounds being disturbed by some unseen entity does a brilliant job at introducing the work.After about 10 minutes, thunderclap-like crunchy noises, shrill oscillations and what sounds like field recordings of crows have the piece taking on a clearly evil tone, leaving a feeling of isolation and utter darkness.

One thing that Drumm does extremely well on Wrong Intersection is keeping the composition continually changing and evolving.At this point, the piece builds to a harsh and violent outburst before abruptly stopping, replacing the distorted passages with a droning, ringing tone.He keeps the sound very sparse and foreboding, abruptly stopping and magnifying the buzzing harsh cacophony that follows.Drumm maintains the slow and subtle pacing, but introduces a buzzing machinery drone and oceanic swells of noise, never becoming harsh but always just on that precipice.

The buzzing works well to convey something that is ambiguous and dangerous: an unidentifiable sound that cannot be seen, conjuring an exquisite sense of dread.The intertwining electronics remain in a sparse arrangement, but interact perfectly with one another to keep that sustained creepiness.Again, Drumm backs off with the harshness, leaving an underlying bowed string like melody to sustain throughout as the noise drifts in and out.Everything then is pulled away into a paring of extreme high and low frequencies.Shrill, painful ultrasonic frequencies are blended with heavy low end, subwoofer taxing drones that at first appear amidst distorted passages, and then in an ambient, spacious context.

Most of Wrong Intersection features Drumm building up from either silence or the most minimal of tones, conveying at best ambiguity and at worst pure evil, then being pulled apart and reshaped by him.The constantly shifting dynamic and variations on sounds that stay constant throughout the album is where its strengths lie, taunting a full on assault but never actually reaching it.It is bleak and sometimes terrifying, but that is exactly what makes the album so gripping.

samples:

• Excerpt 1
• Excerpt 2
• Excerpt 3

 

14 December 2014

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Albums and Singles

One way to approach Jürg Frey and Radu Malfatti’s II is to concentrate on how they shape their music. The numerous small silences that dot the first disc are conspicuous. So is the album’s low volume and the sharp, maybe surprising, beauty with which Frey plays his clarinet and Malfatti his trombone, but form takes precedence over these. Form and the way sounds are formed. Much of what happens on these two discs is the product of the tension between silence and sound, the difference between expression and phenomenon, and the manner in which sounds beget forms all on their own. By subduing material and structure, Frey and Malfatti knock down the walls that sometimes bind music to a fixed path. What lies outside is a sparse and weightless field where music seemingly organizes—and destroys—itself.

Erstwhile

II, as the title implies, splits the work of Jürg Frey and Radu Malfatti over two discs. The first, a Malfatti-credited piece titled "shoguu," cuts a strong impression. Long, vibrating tones, stark harmonics, and frequent silences comprise nearly all of its material, though certain tones are so smooth and consistent they sometimes sound computer-generated. The likelihood that computers were used is probably pretty low, but the semblance of that analog hum adds a mysterious and blurry component to the performance.

The noise of a depressed valve, a few unexpected squeaks, and the odd bodily clank of brass or hardwood turns up as well, but for the better part of the five sections of"shoguu," a subdued, balloon-like spaciousness holds court. The combination of clarinet and trombone produces delicate music, as restrained as it is gorgeous. Without a discernible structure—and without the usual musical tools, like rhythms, chord changes, and other sonic continuities—the duo’s wavering tones come off as autonomous little events, cobweb-like and fleeting. Some of the melodies are so tenuous they seem almost illusory, like particles of dust that might disappear should the sunlight hit them a different way. Malfatti even hollows his trombone’s lower register out, making it feather-like and buoyant, it’s swelling whole tones like vents of warm rising air.

"Shoguu" is a Japanese term that means both "dealing with" and "treatment" in English. In the context of Jürg and Radu’s playing it takes on an additional sense, something like "dealing with silence" or "the treatment of sound," or maybe even "dealing with the other guy in the room." Because the structure of the piece is invisible, the tones themselves become the focus, and because only two instruments are played the entire time, a special significance develops around the way they interact, both with each other and with silence. As they carve different shapes out of the air and take stock of the extent of the distances between them, it becomes easier and easier to understand what Frey meant when, in 1998, he wrote, "Sounds always occur as a formation or a shaping. They come into being by crossing a border which divides them from all others. At this border, everything formed becomes particular." It’s as if the music is being sculpted one object (or phrase) at a time.

On disc two, Frey’s "instruments, field recordings, counterpoints" utilizes precisely those ingredients to craft a larger, different sort of sculpture. Field recordings of distant highways or spinning hard drives shimmer flirtatiously on the horizon, distorted and time-stretched to varying degrees. They act as a fixed reference for everything else, like a distant object in the night sky. Disconnected melodies pass under them and anonymous percussion rattles in between, booming and echoing down unseen canyon walls. A few edits shift the action suddenly, making it clear that these sounds have been arranged, but the music still achieves the illusion of total presence. It’s like Frey and Malfatti are holding a camera on one scene the entire time. The composition doesn’t move from left to right, it diverts attention or changes focus from instruments to an anonymous hum to the sound of birds and back again. Combinations rise and fall, disappear and reappear, and the scene slowly becomes more (or less) complex. Still, there’s no sense of composition. Either the sounds just happened that way by accident or they were always there and Frey and Malfatti cut them out from the silence. Cut too much and the performers begin to show through the work. Cut too little and it might not seem as if anything is happening at all.

That kind of controlled expression, which depends on the artist doing less rather than more, makes II difficult to pin down. At first blush it looks simple and compact, the product of reduction and compression. After a while it takes on the opposite appearance. The sounds grow and overflow with miniscule details and the music opens up in a way that suggests boundlessness. The sensation of constant shaping and the numerous pregnant silences push the edges of the music further and further into the distance, where the need to control and to speak relaxes and the ear wins a little freedom. To some degree, where it wanders depends on the performers. But after they’ve finished selecting and arranging their parts, much depends on the listener.

samples:

• shoguu (I)
• shoguu (II)
• instruments, field recordings, counterpoints (excerpt)

10 December 2014

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Albums and Singles

Black Mass Rising presents Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson Live at L'Étrange Festival 2004

A live homage to Derek Jarman, Sleazy performed a soundtrack to Jarman's The Art Of Mirrors at this Paris performance shortly before the end of Coil.

Limited 500 Copies Double LP gatefold !

PRESALES NOW ! OUT on 19TH JANUARY 2015 !

Get your copy now !

Black Mass Rising

07 December 2014

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Albums and Singles

Else Marie Pade's Electronic Works 1958-1995 is a heavy-duty three-LP set which was restored, mastered and cut at Dubplates in Berlin under the watchful ears of curator Jacob Kirkegaard. These monumental works are presented, for the first time, pressed on audiophile grade heavy duty vinyl where they belong. Audiophile grade 3LP is pressed in an edition of 500 copies.

"The sounds outside became concrete music, and in the evening I could imagine that the stars and the moon and the sky uttered sounds and those turned into electronic music." Else Marie Pade

Else Marie Pade (born 1924 in Aarhus, Denmark; currently living in Copenhagen) is a precious golden gem in the world of contemporary electro-acoustic music. She is a true pioneer of Musique Concrete and electronic music recorded on tape. She is Denmark's first lady of electronic music and her piece "Syc Cirkler" (Seven Circles) became Denmark's first electronic piece to be performed on the radio.

EMP's search for sound began in early childhood when she was isolated in her bed for long periods of time due to illness. There she would lie and listen to the sounds around her just as she did years later when she was imprisoned for spying on Nazi compounds in Arhus. Once released from prison she became a piano student at the Royal Danish Conservatory in Copenhagen but chose to instead pursue the nuances of her inner sound world after hearing Pierre Schaeffer in 1952. She began studying with him not too soon thereafter. Her first electronic composition premiered in 1955.

More information can be found here.