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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Robert Lowe seems to be the busiest man in music, as well as his own Lichens project he is popping in up in so many different bands: The Cairo Gang, Om and Twilight (the metal band, not the film) to name a few. On this second collaboration with Rose Lazar, Lowe again contributes the music and the duo worked together on the artwork. Musically, it is a far cry from the Robert Lowe I already know; soft synthesiser rhythms and melodies are the order of the day. It is entrancing, comforting and magnificent all in one go.
The music has a lot in common with German synthesiser music from the '70s. Ghosts of Cluster and Kraftwerk pass through the compositions, eerily beautiful. “Suno Vidis” could easily have come from the recording sessions of Cluster’s Zuckerzeit, the dancing melodies and childlike wonder are satisfying to listen to. Lowe again and again captures the very essence of pure, simple and gorgeous music although in a different way from his work as Lichens (which for me always has a very open and investigative feeling to it).
However, it is not all about simple melodies: there are some amazing textures and sounds being created throughout Eclipses. The ending of “Crayon Gym” features some wonderful sounds where the music is being manipulated slowly, ending up somewhere between a cracking voice and the throb of a mighty machine. Elsewhere, computerised beeps and opaque sounds wash over the listener such as on the sublime “Ŭyndham-a Horloĝo.” Here Lowe conjures up the kind of music that would accompany science documentaries in the '60s and '70s, the frenetic electronic blips representing everything from evolution to cloud formation.
As for the actual collaborative part of the album, the LP’s sleeve folds out into a large double sided poster to show off Lowe and Lazar’s handiwork. I am not an art critic but I like the imagery which is a mixture of abstract shapes, rainbows and weather (the use of prisms, light and weather going well with my mental images of “Ŭyndham-a Horloĝo” described above). The youthful style of drawing matches up quite well with the music on the record.
Although Eclipses is currently only available on vinyl, it does come with a download voucher for MP3s which is always appreciated for those who must sometimes leave their turntable behind. However, the experience of listening to Eclipses on my iPod was far less satisfying than putting the LP on the turntable and unfolding the artwork to gaze at while I listened. Plus this is music that sounds best coming out of speakers rather than headphones, the rich sounds filling the room in a way that is lost when listening to it in your ears alone. Finally, it sounds great at either speed which is harder to replicate on my iPod.
11 songs, 41 minutes. Second album from Little Annie aka Annie Anxiety aka Annie Bandez and her piano muse and composer Paul Wallfisch is comprised of of songs which shove a dagger through your heart while tickling your funny bone.Gorgeous digi-wallet with 12 page lyric booklet.
Here comes Genderful, Annie and Paul's new album that somehow manages to perfectly mix soul songs and chansons, bluesy saloon singing and European cabaret styling into a gorgeous, new amalgam. Dig the gentle groove and the sad strings of "Suitcase Full of Secrets", and the fluttering, art-house-cinema-soundtrack glamour of "Because You're Gone Song". "Regret", "Carried Away" and "In The Bar Womb" would make Jacques Brel and/or Serge Gainsbourg proud. "Zen Zexy Zage", "Cutesy Bootsies" and "Adrianna" are brilliant little three penny operas for this post-gentrification/monetary meltdown epoch. Then there are subtle epics like "Billy Martin's Requiem"- a tough, groovy bit of NYC-back-in-the-day-free-association that mixes the ill-fated Yankees manager, the post-punk scene and all the brilliant men lost to AIDS in one smart, seamless package, and "Tomorrow Will Be", a shimmering, resplendent prayer to life with Annie as a knowing urban/urbane/earth mother.
Genderful is sentiment without sentimentality, inspiration without bombast, a collection of songs thick with pain and wit and joy.
A perfect reflection of Annie herself....
See you on the other side of heartache.
Track listing 1. Tomorrow Will Be 6:42 2. Miss Annie Regrets 1:22 3. Suitcase Full Of Secrets 4:06 4. Billy Martin's Requiem 4:53 5. In The Bar Womb 1:59 6. Because You're Gone Song 2:17 7. Cutesy Bootsies 3:01 8. Zexy Zen Like Zage 4:34 9. Carried Away 2:23 10. God Song 4:52 11. Adrianna 5:30 Running time 41:35 total
Release date: March 2010 File under: Pop, Melodramatic Popular Song, Piano Lounge For fans of: Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel, Antony & The Johnsons, Eartha Kitt, The Tiger Lillies
You can preorder this release now. It will be available on Monday 05 April, 2010.
artist: Henry Jacobs title: Around The World With Henry Jacobs (produced by Jack Dangers, Alex Artaud, & Henry Jacobs) catalog #: IMPREC054 release date: April 27, 2010 upc793447529929 format: double CD
Absurd folklorist Henry Jacobs returns with a selection of rare interviews, odd loops, sales pitches, early synthesizer demos, an ether-infused evening, and more! Produced in San Francisco and New York City, Around The World With Henry Jacobs is a travelogue that continues the story begun with The Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs, mixing archival material from the 1950s with recent improvisations by Jacobs. Guests include Stan Freberg and Dr. Irwin Corey, with Alan Watts returning for a visit, too.
Also included is special bonus disc — First Night, one of the true gems from the collection. Recorded in February 1957 by Henry Jacobs on the opening night of the Poetry/Jazz Series at The Cellar in San Francisco, this unique document captures the first time Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti read their poetry to jazz in this very intimate setting. In contrast to Fantasy Records' Poetry Readings in the Cellar, you feel yourself a part of the audience here, moments punctuated with a register ringing, muted conversations, laughter, and clinking glasses. Includes Rexroth reading "Between Myself And Death" and "She Is Away", and Ferlinghetti reading "The World is A Beautiful Place."
After a four-year hiatus, this slumbering drone supergroup has returned with a deeply unsettling and surreal new album. That time was not spent idly, as Above The Sky sounds like it has been sculpted and tweaked to razor-sharp perfection. Despite being the work of three people with three different aesthetics, there is no absolutely trace of ego, compromise, bloat, or wasted time here. This is as perfect as drone music gets.
Above the Sky apparently had a very difficult birth, as it originated from a single concert that Paul Bradley, Colin Potter, and Darren Tate played together in 2006. The trio wasn’t entirely pleased with the recording, so it was gradually embellished, enhanced, layered, and reworked until it finally became “A Place of Voices.” In the process, quite a bit of new material was recorded, some of which cohered into the album’s closing piece. The rest of it wound up as Beneath the Earth, a bonus album that sold-out very quickly.
Each of the two tracks included here is a half-hour long. The first one, “A Place Of Voices,” begins with ominous, queasy droning. As it progresses, the sound slowly undulates and swells while spectral creaks, scrapes and squeals flit about the shadows. However, only the peripheral mindfuckery remains relatively constant, as the trio seamlessly drifts from one movement to another. It flows quite beautifully, but it follows a very unpredictable course, as a cacophony of bowed metals can turn into a pleasant field recording of a flock of chirping birds within mere minutes (and does).
The following piece, “Cloudless Day,” fades in with a shifting, quavering mass of subtly clashing notes and a harsh metallic shimmer. The volume swells and drops unpredictably, heightening the deep sense of unease, and various elements begin to change dramatically until it graduates from “uneasy” to “harrowing.” Then it all abruptly stops, only to begin again in a distant, murky new form. After a while, that limps to a conclusion as well, but is soon replaced by a still more disquietingly hallucinatory phase that calls to mind a haunted hall of mirrors. Ultimately, however, the birds reappear and it all ends on an unexpectedly calm note: the titular “cloudless day,” I suppose (but one that only appears after a trip through hell).
Above the Sky is an album that is malevolently alive, as every single sound is active and holds the potential to morph into either something deeply ugly or an unexpected oasis of calm. It is a constantly and mysteriously shifting sonic terrain that seethes with implied menace. Repeat listens will certainly lessen the impact of the twists and surprises, but there is so much to absorb and appreciate that it won’t matter. This is a brilliant and nightmarish masterpiece from start to finish.
JG Thirlwell's Manorexia : The Mesopelagic Waters.
We are proud to announce the release of JG Thirlwell's Manorexia : The Mesopelagic Waters.
This album is released on the Composers Series wing of John Zorn's Tzadik label.
The 18 minute album contains eight tracks, radically rearranged from the first two Manorexia albums, Volvox Turbo and The Radiolarian Ooze. The album's complex arrangements and evocative sweep owe something to contemporary classical music and cinema, minimalism and maximalism, while undeniable warped and refracted through Thirlwell's unique prismatic filter.
It is performed by the chamber ensemble version of Manorexia in the arrangements that JG has been performing and perfecting over the last couple of years. The album features the playing of David Cossin on percussion, Leyna Marika Papach on violin, Elena Moon Park on violin, Karen Waltuch on viola, Felix Fan on cello, David Broome on piano and JG Thirlwell on samples/keys, compositions. It was recorded and mixed at Eastside Studios in NYC and engineered by Marc Urselli.
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The Mesopelagic Waters
In JG Thirlwell's words......
Manorexia was conceived in the year 2000. I began working on the first album on Thanksgiving morning and released it in 2001. It was started as an electronic and sample based project where I wanted to explore a spatial quality not existent in my other work. I released two albums as Manorexia, Volvox Turbo and The Radiolarian Ooze, both on my label Ectopic Ents exclusively thru my website www.foetus.org.
I had wanted to rearrange some Manorexia compositions for string quartet with percussion for some time, and proposed this to David Sefton at UCLA back in 2002, but in course of those discussions we switched to my Steroid Maximus big band.
Eventually I made the first live performance as Manorexia in Russia in 2006. Kenny Savelson at Bang On A Can proposed my going there for a performance at the same time as the Real Quiet trio of David Cossin, Felix Fan and Andy Russo. Real Quiet agreed to be the core of Manorexia for the Russian dates and we augmented the lineup with two violinists and a violist in Moscow. I rearranged some of the Manorexia material to be played by string quartet, piano, percussion and laptop with Ted Hearne.
I have since formed separate Manorexia ensembles in NYC and London. Manorexia has played at All Tomorrow's Parties, The Whitney Museum, Bang On A Can marathon, Brainwaves Festival and several times at The Stone NYC.
This album is the product of the first wave of chamber arrangements of Manorexia material.
-JG Thirlwell
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JG Thirlwell is a composer/producer/performer based in Brooklyn who works under many pseudonyms including Foetus, Steroid Maximus, Manorexia, Baby Zizanie Clint Ruin and Wiseblood. If there is a common thread to his varied musical styles it is a dramatic intensity and an evocative, cinematic quality. He is also widely recognized for his remix and production work, as well as his graphic design.
JG has completed commissions for Kronos Quartet, Bang On A Can and League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots and is also a member of the "freq_out" sound-art collective, who create on-site sound and light installations. He also scores "The Venture Brothers", a hit cartoon show on Adult Swim/Cartoon Network.
Hungry Shells documents the meeting of two remarkable avant garde spirits. In 2018, Pekka Airaksinen presented Ka Baird with Buddhist parables that had been revealed to him in a mediative state. The result is a glorious recording, as the collaboration dissolves their individual states, their voices, flutes, and synths, into an organic harmonic discord.
In the history of both these artists are signs which led here. From 1967-70 Airaksinen composed as a member of infamous performance group The Sperm, who fell foul of Finnish obscenity laws. After devoting his 1970s to Buddhism, Airaksinen returned in the '80s with a system for translating the names of Buddhas into mathematical forms and then into musical compositions. Ka Baird, under her own name and as an integral part of Spires That In The Sunset Rise, always makes an intriguingly cathartic and genuinely skillful racket. Like a whirling dervish tramp emerging unscathed after an instinctive blindfold dash through a forest of rocks and bogs, she has incredibly never put a foot wrong. Baird's signpost is perhaps STITSR’s concept album Mirror Cave based on a blend of Italo Calvino’s (very) short story ‘Sword of the Sun’ and Shinkichi Takahashi’s After-Images: Zen Poems. The lyrics of "Hungry Shells" also bear a resemblance to elements in that Calvino story.
Araksinen has said "I think making art must be some form of madness." The album starts with "Big Stone Small Stone," a calm piece of spoken word floating amidst cascading piano notes and buzzes and bleeps which are frantic to the point of relaxation. "Syzygy" picks up the pace in a relentless flowing river of Baird’s singing, blip and boom percussive beats and synthesized flute. Should anyone be balking at the mention of flute, here is a—hopefully unnecessary—reminder that Florian Schneider’s flute powered some of Krafwerk’s finest recordings
Elsewhere the music resembles morse codesque throbs, occasional synthesized muted car horn blares, breath rhythms, a radio being tuned quickly across twelve stations, and metallic twanging the likes of which I have not heard since seeing the Gas Tank Orchestra perform live in New Orleans. "Grey Body" has sound fragments perhaps not unlike an Arabic market, then swells with what seemed like the dwarf from Twin Peaks talking backwards, but reveals as Airaksinen revisiting Baird’s "big stone small stone" recital from the first track. It ends in a storm of creaking, swirling, synth gusts snorting like the breath of a demon… before Airaksinen says the very Zen words "not very special."
The warbling, weaving "Roseclouds" is a blended voice duet with babbling synth-flute and chants such as "fragrance filled the earth" over popcorn beats. The peak track is "Variable Star," with a buzzing, quivering, intro and outro, bone-rattling percussion, and narcoleptic vocals. In a way this bleeds into the title track, which ends the record. Almost a mini concept album in itself, this longer piece plunges into darker fluid tones like a underwater organ played backwards as Baird narrates a poetic tale of transformation, with shells gobbling pearls, retreating undersea and suns melted together shining underwater; all reminding me of Hendrix fleeing a dying planet in a futuristic mini-sub during "1983 A Merman I Should Turn to Be."
Pekka Airaksinen passed away on May 6. The Wire magazine ran a great photograph of him which resembles the picture of Geronimo on Roy Harper’s Lifemask album. For this review I spent time, like a demented peasant gathering crops before the storm, with the Spires That In The Sunset Rise back catalog. Their music is a startling combination of technique and belief, dark and weird clock stopping sounds, strangely healing time-reversing incantations, cathartic frenzy, breathless waves of heady operatic gibberish and wildly bent, looped, layered, and reversed flute, and should not be missed. I may just develop an unhealthy obsession and review all their albums in order.
His story is somewhat legendary in the noise/power electronics scene: recording as MB, Bianchi put out a slew of albums in the early 1980s that helped to define the genre during its nascent days. Then, in the middle of the decade, he left music for personal reasons (rumoredly he became a Jehovah’s Witness). He reappeared in the latter part of the 1990s, with work I had been told (either directly or via a place like alt.noise) resembled a more avant garde Yanni. Needless to say I avoided it. Once this album was available, something told me to check it out and, while not in the same league as his early work, it channels enough of it to still be an interesting listen.
Early MB albums such as Aktivitat and Symphony for a Genocide are ranked as high water marks in the early industrial, noise, and power electronics genres, and for good reason. While his early sound was intentionally mired in a lo-fi analog murkiness, it worked. While contemporaries such as SPK and Whitehouse were using their work to push the boundaries of volume and extremity, MB was far more restrained and dour, but in a way that worked. It was very depressive and dark, but never falling into clichéd territory.
The first two tracks on here really had my hopes lowered for this being an album worthy of being filed next to the two ArcheoMB box sets on my shelf. "Ortni" is reverb battered drone, with deep tremoloed scrapes, almost strings-like, met with some rudimentary layering and variation. "The Inflammatory Sesor" follows a similar pattern, switching the strings for church organ like textures that are a bit more compelling, but the texture is also just a bit too bland. While it wasn’t along the lines of Yanni, I was feeling this like a rejected Cold Meat Industries demo tape circa 1996.
Once "Oigada" hit its stride, a bit of the old Bianchi began to shine through. The overtly flanged rudimentary rhythms and complex layering, matched with sci-fi like beeps and tones in the background channeled that old school industrial style he was pioneering some 25-plus years ago. The best part is, it never sounds like an imitator, it just sounds like MB, even without the protection of analog fuzziness.
"Ogral" pushes deep mournful tones into slow reverb, which swells in volume to reach a stride that is purely harsh electronic noise, but done sparingly as to not become too contrived. "Evarg" sounds as if it’s based upon decaying tape recordings of symphonic music, all leaning into the higher frequency end of the spectrum. Like the track before, it isn’t shy about pushing into grinding harsh noise territory, but never excessively so.
The closing "The Plain Elanif" is a fitting coda for the album: music-tinged tones swirl up to the surface, but are kept in an industrial swamp. Perhaps this is where the “converted” MB shows up: while the music is superficially just as bleak and depressive as the best of his early work, there’s an underline sense of hope and positivity that shines through. Never annoying or new-agey, it just feels like a stream of light piercing through the otherwise hopeless track. It is a pleasant conclusion for a surprise of an album.
After the first two pieces on here, I thought my instinct was wrong in seeking this disc out. It wasn’t John Tesh goes isolationist, but it was just too overwrought. Once it hits its stride though, the album does demonstrate its pedigree and shows that, regardless of his personal life, MB still can compose an appropriately dour industrial symphony worthy of his past discography.
This is one of those kind of albums that is impossible to pigeonhole in any sort of specific genre. There’s some drone elements, but those are mostly overshadowed by tribal drumming. There’s dubby production, but also layers of noise and mutated psychedelic rock. All the while there’s a little bit of metal here and there. Named for a giant squid, this Italian project certainly has its tentacles entangled amongst themselves to create an unclassifiable blur, but it’s a compelling racket.
"Untitled No. 1" opens the album with heavy cavernous guitar feedback and tribal drumming echoing from the deepest parts of the sea, locking into a repetition that never stagnates. The drums speed up into more intricate, chaotic patterns before the entire mix collapses under the weight of itself, devolving into a primordial muck of sound. "We Dream the Seashore" almost literally uses its title as a jumping off point, with pegged out field recordings creating a noise bed that crashing waves of noise and jackhammer rattling and junky percussion sales upon, the full proceedings sounding a junk metal noise band freaking out by the sea.
Sandwiched in the middle of the album are a series of tracks that show a hint of 1960s psychedelic rock shining through. "Cephalopedie" features swirling rock guitars with mutated gamelan percussion and far eastern strings, resembling that era’s penchant for mixing eastern and western sounds, but with an entire doomsday cult’s stash of LSD. The title track uses a similar sonic clash, but with swirling tablas and a noisy bed of electronics, like the MC5 playing through a busted PA in the middle of Riyadh, with occasional intrusion of Xenakis and his noisy compositions. For all its chaos, the end hides beautiful melodies amidst the darkness.
The massive "Another Kind of Blue" combines tribal tabla playing and junk percussion at the opening, treating all of it with dubbed out echoes that would make Lee Perry even madder than he already is before launching into full on noise territory via waves of feedback and guitar squalls. Once the noise retreats, what remains is anemic guitar and tortured psychedelic rock, later met by shortwave radio loops of lost vocal transmissions. The entire track then goes into sharp, banging metallic rock before falling apart at the end.
"Bbroke" continues the more obtuse side of Rex’s sound, with a muffled, aquatic guitar squeal that channels the best of black metal with massive sustain, but is actually one of the most sparse tracks here, allowing the ugly guitar to stand on its own. The closing "Untitled No. 2" takes clattering metal percussion but puts it alongside warm, fuzzy organ drone and other unidentifiable elements that are somewhat musical, creating an inviting closer to the album that is the perfect metaphor for returning to the surface after a deep, frightening dive.
The aquatic imagery in both the band and album names comes through in the sound, as it all has that dark, murky quality of a deep sea dive. The tracks are dark and obscured, with only the most minimal of light shining through to show unknown creatures and organisms. Architeuthis Rex has a very unique sound and concept that I definitely want to hear more of in the future.
While still a fairly new label, London’s The Tapeworm has quickly established itself as one of the most prominent and unique exponents of the underground’s current cassette renaissance. Obviously, much of the credit for this is due to the surprisingly well-known artists (Stephen O’Malley, Phillip Jeck, Geir Jenssen, etc.) that they’ve enlisted, but a significant part is also due to their bold attempt to bridge the oft-disparate worlds of high art and the DIY ethos. This latest batch of tapes documents the collision of these two worlds with varying degrees of success.
The Tapeworm’s aesthetic is a fundamentally shaky one to build a label upon and one that is engineered to be dogged by inconsistency. While other tape labels focus on releases from the more obscure fringes of noise/post-industrial culture, The Tapeworm’s decision to embrace more established artists creates a unique problem for them: someone like Stephen O’Malley is probably not going to release their best work in a limited edition of 100 or 250. Fortunately, some artists (Stefan Goldmann, for example) are more than happy to release their more startling and adventurous experiments in such a fashion, and the format is perfect for enigmatic collaborations as well. Consequently, the label’s oeuvre has been a strange and unpredictable one thus far and that is unlikely to change (and therein lies its charm). Also, it takes some guts (and insanity) to try to market spoken-word tapes of Derek Jarman and Jean Baudrilliard in 2010 (a gamble that actually worked, incidentally).
The most daring and unexpected of these four tapes is by German techno producer Stefan Goldman, whose Haven’t I Seen You Before is culled entirely from guitar improvisations. By his own admission, Goldmann is not a particularly skilled guitarist. However, he was inspired to attempt a guitar album long ago when he heard a story about a bass player from the Berlin Philharmonic that paid an engineer to edit hours of aimless improv into a coherent jazz album. Relying on his own studio wizardry, Stefan finally got an opportunity to attempt a similar feat, cutting and looping his own noodlings into a very meditative and likable suite of avant-garde guitar sketches.
Sweden’s Lief Elggren (Sons of God) attempts a similarly left-field endeavor with his All Animals Are Saints, but does not fare nearly as well. His tape consists of two pieces that combine spoken-word and music, both of which were taken from live performances. The first is a reading of a story about the souls of plants, occasionally punctuated by interludes of crackling noise. The flipside is a story about an organ that Swedenborg owned, followed by a very repetititive, wheezing organ performance. Unfortunately, Elggren’s stories are somewhat dull and weirdly paced (a situation that is not helped by his dry, thickly accented delivery), and the music is far too sketch-like and one-dimensional to justify the lengthy build-up and contextualization. The whole exercise seems very academic and sterile.
The Tongues of Mount Meru, a collaboration between Thorns’ Jon Wesseltoft and Jazzkammer’s Lasse Marhaug, is much more in line with what other cassette labels are releasing. Nevertheless, there is a certain degree of strangeness about The Delight of Assembly. The duo play very sine wave-centric drone music, but it is surprisingly shrill and dissonant. Also, it is quite static: just an endlessly quavering, clashing buzz with only very small-scale variations. I managed to make it through the entire tape once, but it was a hugely annoying and headache-inducing endeavor.
The last of these four tapes is also probably the best. Autodigest’s A Compressed History Of Every Bootleg Ever Recorded gives exactly what it promises, but does so in a mesmerizing, ghostly way. Tape hiss, crowd noise, screams, and distant badly recorded music are all smashed together into a roiling cascade of complex noise. The second side of the tape initially loses some of that momentum, but soon evolves into a similarly twisted (though less aggressive) soundquake. The anonymous members provide a very erudite theory behind their releases (this is actually their fourth installment) that references Baudrilliard’s theory of hyperconformism and explains that their music is created to provide “a space for the analysis and allegory of the catastrophic state of contemporary social and cultural structures.” Usually such a mission statement is a harbinger of very, very bad music to come, but not this time- Autodigest manage to expertly balance their high-concept philosophical roots with an unexpected amount of humor and raw, visceral power. That doesn’t happen very often, but it is a convergence that has found the perfect home.
Newly reissued with different artwork, Porter Ricks' second album is a fitfully compelling and somewhat perplexing mixed bag that I somehow managed to never hear until now. My befuddlement is largely due to the fact that the first Porter Ricks album (Biokinetics) is an all-time dub techno classic, so I would have expected Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner to expand further upon the formula that they had perfected to great acclaim. Instead, the duo took a more stylistically fluid approach, occasionally returning to Biokinetics-style dub, but also dabbling in dark ambient and some unexpectedly funky strains of house music. That said, it is probably wrong to view Biokinetics and this album as intentional statements or clearly delineated phases of a linear artistic evolution, as both releases are compilations of singles and EPs and Biokinetics got all the great Chain Reaction ones from 1996. This one collects all the Force Inc. EPs from the following year, so these pieces could be anything from Chain Reaction-era outtakes to stylistic experiments to a stab at greater accessibility (though that is hard to imagine, given the cold bleakness of Köner's solo work). In any case, there are still enough strong pieces to make this an enjoyable album, but anyone hoping for the focus and distinctive vision of Biokinetics will probably want to moderate their expectations a bit before diving into this one.
This uneven and eclectic collection of songs makes a lot more sense if one considers how they were originally released, as the album is essentially four stand-alone singles and their flipsides. And in classic dub fashion, the B-sides tend to be variations of the raw material from the A-side, so there are basically four separate thematically unified clusters of songs here. There is one notable exception, however, and it is the album's longest and strongest piece: "Scuba Lounge." I do not believe it ever surfaced on a single before appearing on this full length (the Trident EP featured a different "Scuba" piece), but it definitely sounds like it should have been on Biokinetics. It opens in deceptively formless fashion, elegantly blurring together burbling scuba sounds and ominous industrial ambiance, but soon coheres into a killer menacing groove of gurgling bass and seething, slow-motion crunch. The other pieces closest to the Biokinetics vein are "Redundance" series from the Vol 1 and Vol 2 EPs. My favorite of the lot is "Redundance 3," which combines the relentless forward motion of its shuffling beat with an impressively gelatinous and gnarled sounding synth motif. The remaining four "Redundance" pieces are a surprisingly varied lot, taking roughly the same themes in very different directions, as Köner and Mellwig alternately veer into hissing, coldly futuristic ambient ("Redundance (Version)"), a sensually kitschy vintage burlesque show groove ("Redundance 5"), and—weirdest of all—a Bo Diddly beat ("Redundance 6"). Similarly wrongfooting are the pieces from Explore/Exposed and Spoil/Spoiled. For example, "Explore" sounds like a New Jack Swing groove augmented with a very insistent wah-wah guitar theme, which the flip resembles guitars from The Church mashed together with a hypercaffeinated, percussion-heavy, and out-of-control strain of synth pop. That said, "Spoil" is inarguably the biggest shock of the album, as an unrelenting house thump barrels along with a very in-your-face funk bass line and some jangly guitars. It sounds far more like a purposely ham-fisted house remix of an A Certain Ratio single than anything I would expect from Porter Ricks. The smeared, hallucinatory, and submerged-sounding flipside ("Spoiled") is right up my alley though, approximating a building-shaking rave as heard from a neighboring alley. While I wish I loved more than a handful of songs here, I am delighted that this reissue called my attention to a few old classics that were new to me, as Porter Ricks has a tragically lean discography for an influential project that has now spanned a quarter century.
This latest collaboration between Nurse With Wound’s Colin Potter and guitarist/Twenty Herz label-head Paul Bradley is an experiment in returning to an earlier, less complicated way of making an album: only two guys in a studio with some instruments. Despite that, it is not a stunning or radical departure from either musician’s past solo work, though it bears a stronger resemblance to ambient’s early days than usual. It was an inspired move in theory, but the end result suggests that making music the complicated way might be a still better idea.
The premise of The Simple Plan is an appropriately simple one: record an album in real-time using real instruments with virtually no aid from computers or digital processing techniques. For this purpose, Bradley and Potter employed an array of analog synthesizers, guitars, and effects pedals. The challenge of this endeavor was further enhanced by the fact that Paul Bradley had never played a synthesizer “live” before. He seems to have managed just fine, however.
The album opens with the delicate, shimmering swells of “Embrace,” a piece very much in the vein of Eno’s pastoral early ambient works. It is “ambient” in the truest sense of the term, as it is very easy to forget that it is even playing due to its slow-moving subtlety and consonance. Nevertheless, I found it to be quite a beautiful piece once I gave it my full attention. While overtly it is simply a slowly drifting cloud of sound, there is quite a bit of action taking place in a small-scale way: the timbres and volumes of tones shift, disquieting passing tones wander in and out, and the notes smear and bleed together to yield slight dissonances and oscillations.
As it turns out, ”Embrace” is a bit of an aberration. It is by far the most placid and nuanced piece on the album, as the remaining four songs tweak its template with an increased focus on low-end and density. Also, while “Embrace” contentedly floats along for the entirety of its 18-minute duration, the remainder of the tracks merely use that as a starting point before snowballing into something more hefty. The differences between the songs are not huge, but they effectively serve to differentiate them. The title track, for example, leans much more heavily on a central droning tone and gradually escalates in power while maintaining a faint swaying pulse. Also, it ends with the unexpectedly melodic bloops and bleeps of a static-washed coda. The longest piece on the album, “Gloaming,” places even more emphasis on rhythm, coalescing into a heavy throb while Bradley’s guitar loops glisten above it. It is also one of the most intense pieces on the album, as the loops gradually mass to form a thickly layered and somewhat distorted middle section. The piece that follows it, “Alta Mesa,” achieves a similar display of power by gradually swelling to an engulfing roar.
The intended purpose of this project was to “create a simpler, more organic piece of work.” In those regards, it is a mixed success. While certainly restrained, the ebbing and flowing interplay between notes in “Embrace” sounds vibrant and alive. However, the actual sounds are still very artificial: the guitars rarely sound like guitars and very few sounds are less organic than analog synthesizers. Also, while the recording process itself was simple, the music is actually quite a bit busier and less spacious and intimate than much of Paul Bradley's solo work. When the process is taken out of the equation, what is left is merely a decent, albeit somewhat regressive, ambient album. Several other artists could have made an album like this: Bradley and Potter’s plan, while admirable, was either too simple or not simple enough to betray much personality or uniqueness.
(Note- the currently sold-out limited edition of this album came with a bonus disc (Accreation) of reworked versions of the songs made without any limitations at all. It is significantly better than The Simple Plan, which makes its unavailability perplexing.)