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REVIEWS part 3
OVAL "Ovalprocess"
CD Thrill Jockey (USA) 2000
This CD was released in conjunction with the touring Ovalprocess Skotodesk interactive sound installation that allows audience members to create their own form of Oval-esque music. If there is a piece of software that can produce the random toy-like beauty of the third track on this CD then Mille Plateaux, 12K, or Mego might as well pack it in and return to hard banging' techno. Snippets of accordion-like sounds and blurred washes of carnival horn marches swirl around a chugging digital stutter perfectly blended into a random-yet-not-random meander. There is still the interplay, at least in my ear, between Markus Popp's opaque intentions, and the end result, which, as with all glitch product (and especially Oval's) results in streams of extremely elegant and seductive sounds. Even if you did have to wade through the odd Adorno or D&G tome to grasp the full meaning of what is at play here this music would still sound as satisfyingly beautiful. Though there still no adequate way to verbally describe, or perhaps even critique the pulsing, detached flow of Oval's music, that "fat frying" computer sizzle that cakes each track remains as sexy today as it did on "Systemiche" or "94 Diskont". Perhaps more so with the emergence of "glitch" as a genre. Oval definitely capture the (pardon) zeitgeist on "Ovalprocess" - giving shape and sonic voice to a post-Y2K mix of paranoia and boredom rendered as the series of queasy, off-speed whirrings and skips that have become the trademark of glitch. And Oval is the Chuck Berry of glitch. "Ovalprocess" is their textbook.
PIMMON "In Conjola Mode / Krimchilla"
7"
Bad Jazz This is a very un-Pimmon release, though maybe it isn't. This little 7" is full of music, almost pop at some points. Side A is weird, a little tune is accompanied with Pimmon style high pitch distortions - of the orchestral sort. While the B-side is a fantastic little ditty which moves along at fast pace. It has drums, a rhythm and well, music, for want of a better word. Great cover, crimson and green on white. Nice little release to add to the growing Pimmon discography. Who knows what is next, a pop music career with beats included? (caleb~k)
PIMMON "Kinetica"
CD (k-raa-k)3
Of the three Pimmon full length albums this has to be my favourite. The release is quieter than much of his other output. The pieces are in no hurry to get anywhere and generally don't. They repeat motifs continuously, over which bleeps and clicks appear and under which deep and often distorted base rumbles along. It fully sounds like an ablum that follows a few ideas through to their conclusion, every track there for a reason. The pieces are still made of 'noise' but there is nothing to blow your ears here. It is this combination of base and DSP which I look for in Pimmon tracks and this release is full of these moments within the quiet and slow moving tracks. Plenty here for ear pleasure. If you want a Pimmon release that you can put on without your mind and ears taking a battering this one is for you. (caleb~k)
Contact: pimmon@broadcast.net
PLOTKIN / PIMMON
Split 12" FatCat (UK) 2000
James Plotkin's OLD were always the most fucked up outfit on Earache (Painkiller? pussies) but that didn't make them any better than, say, Pitchshifter, or Mighty Force, or any other second tier band on that classic UK label's roster. Like Napalm Death's Mick Harris, Plotkin has undergone a dark ambient/isolationist makeover through the last 6 years, meaning that OLD's bizarro Rush meets the Chipmunks mildcore mess is nowhere to be found here. After repeated listens, playing Plotkin's side at 45 gave me the most satisfaction, and this "version" of the side is what I'll review here. The EP begins with shadowy, high pitched fluttering and wildly stereo-separated bleeps swimming over a distant bass tone - a bit like Oren Ambarchi's "Stacte" LPs but with more of an "isolationist" fridge-drone component. The second track's Schulzian angelic choir mixed with what sounds like a looped ukulele offers up visions of cartoon robots doing a luau in Tangerine Dream's mid-70s studio. Like Ambarchi's work the music seems to float in from another dimension - it's not ambient, it's not glitch, nor isolationist nor improv. And my insistence on playing this at 45 throws in a sense of off-speed wrongness that adds up to a comical whole. The last track is a slow dirge that slowly sinks into a distant haze of unfriendly sound that brings to mind the master of low-key, abstract menace - Asmus Tietchens. Pimmon's side (I'll play along and spin it at 33 rpm) shows Australia's Paul Gough improving and expanding the scope of his unique take on contemporary abstract electronics. Gough's side is full of trebly, scratchy, hissy sounds full of earthy "soul". Track two evokes a landscape crawling with densely packed layers of microscopic life. Pimmon provides an alternate approach to "microsound" that avoids the anti-septic white-room ideal of Ikeda or Taylor Deupree. This music has more to do with dirt-covered insects than lab-coated Ph.Ds. The side ends with a beautiful string drone, a Sucide/Spacemen 3 heavenly aria that slowly mutates into something denser and grittier, eventually resulting in an endless floating haze one could associate with an intense feeling of love. And it sounds pretty cool at 45 too.
REIGLE, Robert "Tenor Saxophone"
CD Acoustic Levitation (USA) 2000
In this recording, saxophonist and composer Robert Reigle provides a great demonstration of the relationships between contemporary classical and jazz/improvised music. The disc includes compositions by Giacinto Scelsi and Luigi Nono, solo improvisations by Reigle, a composition by one of his collaborators, Christian Asplund, an arrangement of an Albert Ayler piece, and duets between Reigle and an saxophonist from Papua New Guinea based on a traditional piece from that island. The first 5 tracks consist of a piece by an Italian composer, Giacinto Scelsi, with Reigle's own solo improvisations interposed as tropes between the movements. This is a revival of Medieval practice of tropism, in which new music and poetry were interpolated into the text and chant of the Ordinary and Proper of the Mass. They often jumped off from musical or poetic themes of the mass and developed them in personal ways. It is nice to see Reigle using this old structuring device, which evokes connections between contemporary improvisation and much older Western techniques of musical invention. Reigle's tropes use a full range of extended technique and are longer and more extroverted than Scelsi's piece. The transitions between the composed material and the improvisations are effective. Reigle takes a song by Luigi Nono written for piano and voice, arranges it for two saxophones, percussion, piano, and viola, and adds an improvised middle section and accompanying lines. The original song set a poem by an Algerian victim of France's unsuccessful war to hold onto that colony, and Reigle finds in this piece a passionate, lovely, and painful extended ballad. So often contemporary classical music is perceived to be cold and unemotional, where in fact the best of it contains lines that are aching and eloquent. Reigle and his group capture those qualities of the music without sacrificing the fundamental principles of its harmonic and rhythmic language. The most unusual item, at least in it origins, is a duet with Augustine Yendi, a tenor saxophonist from Papua, New Guinea. It is based on a traditional song from New Guinea and has the feel of one of Albert Ayler's hymnlike tunes, both in the structure of the melody and the intense timbre Yendi brings to his delivery. Reigle taught in Papua and got to know the local music and several of the local musicians. Fittingly this duet is followed on the album by a rendition of Ayler's "Universal Indians" done by a large group of West Coast musicians performing as the Ayler Tribute Band (which includes the superb violinist Eyvind Kang). This is a consistently thoughtful album. Reigle puts his extensive technique to good use, and the mergers of composed material and improvisation work really well. Definitely worth a listen. (David Maddox)
Contact:
Acoustic Levitation
2625 East 13th Street, 2k
Brooklyn, NY
E-mail: AcousticLv@aol.com
REPEAT "Select Dialect"
CD Cut Records (Switzerland) 2000
This CD presents Toshimaru Nakamaru on mixing board feedback and percussionist Jason Kahn collaborating in perfect balance. The music this duo produces is a stark and delicate fog of bass rumbles, high-pitched feedback whistles, and sizzling electric crackles with lots of space in-between sounds. Little pockets of noise emerge out of the near-silent ambience. Kahn's percussion is played with the lightest touch, and with considerable restraint. The resulting atmosphere is subdued, almost sleepy, even when patterns merge into something quite rhythmic, as on the third piece, which features a distant but persistent thump throughout the tracks duration. Track 5 is nearly melodic in a Raster Music/Oval sense, as the feedback seems to be trying to coalesce into a delicate little melody. Track 9, at 7 minutes the longest piece on here, adds an almost too-regular latin-esque rhythm that dominates the first half, then fades as slow waves of feedback dominate the "beat". There is beauty and power here as the minimal resources add up to a music that is rich in mood and texture, spare but not stark, wistful but not desolate.
t. nakamura email: setreset@attglobal.net
j. kahn email: kahn@attglobal.net
REPTILICA "Chrome Feather Future"
CD Lens Records (USA) 2000
Wiry no-wave-ish rock, with odd vocals that are chanted in a monotone voice that grates on repeated listens. Musically this fits in nicely with the poppier moments of late 70s Red Krayola and This Heat, "Document & Eyewitness"-era Wire, and early 80s anglo outfits like the Raincoats or Kleenex except with mostly male vocals and a mellower folkier air. Other tracks make use of drum machines and loops, for a weirder sort of pop music closer to the Ralph Records roster than Rough Trade's. I'm not sure what to make of it all - the vocals (for me at least) results in a bit of a difficult listen. There are a few enjoyable tracks, mainly the two instrumental tracks that close the disc, which combine cheap keyboard melodies, scratchy, strummed guitar, and minimal percussion into awkwardly beautiful little tunes. I can certainly imagine Jimmy or Byron drooling over this in a 1987-era issue of Forced Exposure.
ROTOR "Aileron"
CD Statra Recordings (USA) 2001
Like the original wave of ambient techno practitioners this CD by New Zealand outfit Rotor skirts a little too close to grandiose prog-rock concepts but manages to impress with its careful mix of glitch beats and non-cliched atmospherics. The thick fog of echo that envelops certain keyboard passages brings to mind Harold Budd (or was it Budd and Eno?) but stretched out into endless languorous passages of barely moving ambience - the shortest piece on here is 15 minutes long and the longest hits the 21 minute mark. The piano-like passages also bring to mind a glitched Moebius and Roedelius mix - or perhaps the moment in Alec Empire's "Les Etoiles..." where he "played" a skipping Cluster CD. The music, though pretty, manages to retain an earthy warmth and grittiness that escapes the "new age" zone it could so easily fall into. Rotor's beats are slow, crunchy and studiously crafted in the spirit of Warp label greats of years past. There are only three tracks indexed on the CD but each track has clear titled division points, further adding to the prog-rock meltdown feel. The second tracks opening segment is the most IDM sounding, with Autechre-ish beats played at a Boards of Canada pace. A beautiful "naive" piano melody adds to the pastoral anglo-electronica feel. The glitch-beats morph into an extended workout of echoed keyboard doodles. The final track begins with an 8 minute wall of rich tape hiss appropriately titled "Reel to Reel" - then some almost-happy breakbeat action pops in to switch gears as the track evolves into another beautiful piece full of sad melodies and downtempo moods. The CD, packaged in a 32 page hardbound booklet, also includes two enigmatic, and appropriately lowkey/gorgeous Quicktime movies viewable through a puzzling hand scrawled little interface that pops up when you insert the CD into your computer. This disc is the sort of uneven but audacious piece of music that makes you wonder where this artist can go to from here. I expect a flat-out masterpiece next time around.
SCHAEFER, Janek "Above Buildings"
CD FatCat (UK) 2000
This is turntable manipulator Janek Schaefer's debut full-length studio CD following an appearance on FatCat's split 12" series in 1998, and a live disc on the Belgian K-RAA-K label. Like Philip Jeck, Schaefer emphasizes the rotating, doppler-efect of a spinning turntable, and his music is full of densely packed walls of mechanically propelled sound. Even the tracks on which Schaeffer drops the record player in favor of organ or prepared piano the music retains a rotational, sensual pulse that I find pretty damned magnificent. The CD flows beautifully and it's hard to pick highlights but here are three of many: "Thousand Camera Corona" is 12 minutes of slowly building swirling drone that could potentially levitate buildings or shoot the unsuspecting listener sideways through time. "Tone-arm Two" is a symphony of stark needle pops that melts into a delicate forest of tingling, nearly inaudible tones that manages to make the grunge in a stuck groove seem like the most sensually exciting thing in the world. "Light Over Las Vegas" unleashes an awesome insect/electric buzz, with a panning effect that'll have you expecting that swarm of mad bees landing on your face at any moment. A truly flawless selection of Schaefer's recent work.
SEO "Slow:."
3" CD-R 5x3 (Canada)
This little 3" CD-R is a wee treasure. Mixing your basic glitch aesthetic with beats of a sort. This is bordering on dance in a fully distorted and out of kilter kinda way. Loads of great sounds both harsh and more than listenable. Seo has been around for a good few years and is now part of a loose group called 5x3 is based in Melbourne and includes SnawKlor, 2Rabbits, Wonderfeel and Beam Up. The group has released 5 3" CDs in an extremely limited fashion, what would you expect living as they do ':in the foothills of patagonia with the glitch-elves'. All the discs are nicely packaged, Seo's one covered in orange +s and -s in very tech fashion. Great stuff. (caleb~k)
Contact: overt@overlobe.com
SISTOL "Sistol"
CD Phthalo (USA) 2001
Sistol is none other than Vladislav Delay, who seems to have taken over Mike Ink's role as the most recorded man in minimal techno. This is some of Vlad Delay's earliest recorded music and for the most part feels like primitive first steps or sketches for the formation of the Vlad Delay sound. While perhaps not nearly as rewarding as some of his best recent work, these tracks still possess an earthy vitality that gives the listener a glimpse of where Vlad's ideas first began to take shape. All the tracks on here show the seeds of his interest in subverting the functions of stripped down techno, but stick closer to a basic thump-thump 4x4 sound than his later sprawling pieces. There is an attractive lo-fidelity to the sound, a scratchy lo-fi grittiness which is similar but not the quite the same as the glitch/hiss symphonies of pole/basic channel. Track 4's sprightly and dance-floor utilitarian bounce has the propulsion of a kompakt 12" and little of the abstract edge of vlad's recent work. Track 8, the 10 minute "kotka" has a feel closer to the fantastic Conoco 12" on Sigma Editions - clicks and beats working through many permutations, sometimes coalescing into a 4x4 groove, and other times breaking down into abstract patterns of stuttering insect twitches. Another facet that makes this music stand out from current Force Inc-styled glitch-techno is that the sound quality (perhaps more due to limited resources than aesthetic choice) has an upfront dryness that sets it apart a bit from the usual shiny and sleek productions of contemporary digital producers.
STAVOSTRAND, Mikael "Lite"
CD Mitek (Sweden) 2000
Taking off from where Oval's "Systemisch" left off, Stavostrand adds wistful melodies and well placed crunchy loops for a beautifully paced set of delicate glitch tracks. Less drenched in spliff-flavor than Pole, these tracks remain a bit stark and distant, though track 4 almost hits that "house bounce" that Gas nails so effortlessly. Still never as funky as the Germans. Other tracks feature certain rhythmic elements more forcefully pushed forward in the mix, but the overall effect is muted and gray. Final track is a dense blend of rustling and pointillistic sounds over some gently clanging almost incidental rhythmic loops.
Contact: mitek@radiolink.net
STORMCROW "Killer Daddy"
12" EP Adjust Your Head (UK) 2000
Though their website says they specialize in "distressed plunderphonics for the queazy-beat generation" the music on this EP is much more groove oriented that you'd expect. "Killer Daddy" is a somnambulant slow motion groove full of hazy, shadowy echoes. Funk basslines, and a moaning, distorted vocal loop over dark filmic strings add up to a jazzy, smoky vibe somewhere between Illbience and Ninja Tune-style trip hop. Track 2's dubbed out rhythm has a porn-soundtrack feel, and adds some low-key scratching to the mix. The remix of "killer daddy" strips the sonic filigree that gave it it's spooky eerie feel in favor of the rhythm. Again everything seems to move through a thick fog of smoke - ganja smoke in this case. A puzzling release, not as tantalizing as their website makes them seem, though I'm anxious to hear more, and apparently they kill live.
Contact:
P.O. Box 710
Maidstone 87, Kent
ME14 1AJ
UK
E-mail: adjustyourhead@maladjusted.co.uk
E-mail: stormcrow@bubonic.co.uk
Website: http://www.bubonic.co.uk/Menu.htm
SURREALESTATE "Contrafactum"
CD Acoustic Levitation (USA) 2000
This recording by a Los Angeles collective uses a variety of strategies to guide improvisation. It is a large group, with three reed players, five percussionists, two guitar players, and a bassist playing in various combinations. Robert Reigle is one of the members, and like his disc, this recording crosses the line between jazz and avant garde classical music, where figures like Stockhausen, Cage, and Oliveros have experimented with a variety of approaches that are not married to traditional scores and use elements of chance, spontaneity, and intuition. Robert Reigle contributes a number of mostly shorter pieces he calls Contrafacta in which players are asked to listen to one minute of a recording and then improvise in the spirit of that recording. Contrafactum is another one of Reigle's Medieval borrowings, although in this case he acknowledges he is redefining the word - in Medieval practice, a contrafactum set an existing melody to new words. Surrealestate's improvisations are more like commentaries on the source material. Reigle comes up with a varied set of source material: Antarctic seal calls, a composition by Giacinto Sclesi, a Korean shaman's song, a Medieval motet by John Sheppard. Other pieces on the recording use different methods to guide improvisation, such as a series of shapes and images, instructions like play "faster and quieter than possible", or a Charles Ives score. On most of the tracks 9 or 10 players are involved. Surrealestate shows a great deal of sensitivity in improvising ensemble music with such a large group. Probably the most successful piece is Fool's Danzon, by group member Gustavo Aguilar. Aguilar evokes the calm roll of Cuban dance music by building this piece over a simple bass line, and simply by including congas in the mix of percussion. Over this base, the horns and percussionists play in a much more fragmented way, dropping in bursts of sound and laying down sinuous lines that might come from a popular ballad but are squeezed and distorted. The piece has a nice odd, nostalgic feel. (David Maddox)
Contact:
Acoustic Levitation
2625 East 13th Street, 2k
Brooklyn, NY
E-mail: AcousticLv@aol.com
TAKU SUGIMOTO - KEVIN DRUMM "Den"
CD Sonoris (son-13)
This is the third duo album between the two and it is very clear they have a great understanding. Drumm's electronic high and low pitches, various squeaks and bleeps, mix with Sugimoto's very quiet guitar. Sugimoto improvises with much space and room, playing the bare minimum of sound. His audio is produced by various picking and hammering techniques while Drumm's guitar is prepared so as to become an electronic sound source. A fantastic work recorded live in 2000 in Tokyo, and what a cover, white with plain black lettering, the front featuring a platypus - not sure what the connection is. Anyway, words fail under such minimal and quiet wonder. (caleb~k)
TECHNO UNIT 30 "Audiochrome"
CD International Audiochrome (USA) 2000
Larry Kucharz's "techno" project offers cleanly structured tracks full of lush synths and echoed loop percussion. Track one sets up a steady 4/4 rhythm over which metallic chords surge and build - the synths posses a similarly digital sheen to those used by Ken Ishii in his sleek Flare project. This track also makes wonderfully disorienting use of stereo panning on the tingly beats. The twitchy rhythms are reminiscent of YMO and other of the earliest practitioners of post-Moroder and post-Kraftwerk techno. Also reminiscent of Terre Thaemlitz's take on deep house - track two is a perhaps too speedy variation on some of the pulsing beats used in Terre's Comatonse EPs. The rhythmic patterns are a bit dry, though not without a little funk, albeit of the German or Japanese variety.
Contact:
International Audiochrome, Inc.
P.O. Box 1068
Rye, NY 10580
E-mail: intaudiocr@aol.com
THAEMLITZ, Terre "Fagjazz"
2xCD Comatonse (USA) 2000
Handsomely packaged collection of some of Terre's 12" releases, plus a bonus disc holding a 57-minute jam recorded in Taiwan. Some of my favorite work from Terre is his vinyl-only material released on his own Comatonse label. This selection of tracks from various 12"s dating back to 1993 is a good introduction to the more beat oriented side of Terre's work. And an introduction is all it is, since at 8 tracks out of a back catalogue of 4 12"s and one CD this is at least half as long as it could have been. Terre's take on deep house is highly idiosyncratic - they bounce deeply enough, but their sequences progress with the same abstract logic heard in Terre's ambient/noisy material such as "Means From An End" or "Couture Cosmetique". The Chugga remix still sounds as "wrong" as it did on vinyl (at any speed) - electronic disco bleeps dance over Terre's trademark echoed piano runs that begin in Liberace territory and end in Henry Cowell's. Those piano touches liven up the unreleased track "Class", taken from a forthcoming 12", which offers a slightly more "breakbeat" rhythm than the customary deep house thud. The other unreleased track from Terre's Neu Wuss Fusion is a loungy ditty with harpsichord-like keys and a tinkling little rhythm that sounds a little Brazilian, or maybe just like the opening of Blondie's "Heart of Glass". After that track, the following tracks - 8 through 82 are all 4 seconds each of near silence. Skip that and go on to the last piece, a bass loop and piano exploration of the more ambient side of Terre's Comatonse sound. Disc two contains one 57-minute piece - "Superbonus" a previously unreleased track by Funk Shui, Terre's "fusion" ensemble featuring him on keyboards and electronics plus a Taiwanese jazz group on bass, dulcimer, keys and snares. This track is an anomaly in Terre's discography, being very similar to the work of Australian ambient/minimal jazz trio The Necks - endlessly building bass and drum patterns played over deep ambient echoes and distant melodic piano filigree. The drummer's gait is a little less metronomic that The Neck's beat keeper, but otherwise the same delicate and dubbed out atmosphere pervades.
Contact: fagjazz@comatonse.com
TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA "no-input mixing board"
CD Zero Gravity 026 (Japan)
The sequences stutter as they loop through, the joints out of place as sound moves and distorts around the mixing desk. Nakamura uses a desk without inputs, relying on the sound of the mixer feeding back on itself. Anyone who has tried this will know that the results are near impossible to control. Nakamura seems to have a pretty good handle on his sounds, though he is happy to admit not a complete one. High piercing frequencies through to deep thumpy bass sounds fill the CD. It was not as quiet as I might have expected, some of the sounds will go straight through your head and into the neighbours house. Nakamura, who used to be a guitarist, has turned to the mixing board as a way to get around a number of issues of subjecthood and objecthood. The mixer is left to its own devices as it creates sounds which are then sampled by Nakamura, live this means on guitar pedals. The CD is very listenable which is the idea. The release is from Transonic off-shoot Zero Gravity. The label releases electronic music toward the more abstract end and have released other artists close to Nakamura in Japan including ISO and Tamura. This is a truly fine listen. (caleb~k)
Contact: setreset@attglobal.net
VARIOUS ARTISTS "Landing"
CD Triton (Austria) 2001
Triton Verlag
This compilation documents a series of performances held towards the end of 1999 at the Tyrolese Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum in Austria. The fat booklet includes graphics taken from the visuals that accompanied the musical offerings, and portray generic Ballard-esque destroyed technology imagery, Mig fighter jets and an absolutely necessary body shot of supermodel Laetitia Casta. Also included is an essay entitled "Techno culture between aviatarics, Avataras and atavism", by Thomas Feuerstein. Lucky for me, the essay is printed in German, relieving me of the pleasure of summarizing its contents. Music-wise, most welcome to me are the inclusion on this compilation of two Austrians whose appearance on record isn't as omnipresent as it should be: Fon and Pomassl. The best track on here is by Fon, previously known to me through an EP of bizarre clicking loops on Austria's enigmatic Laton label. His track "Fonplant" is a fantastic piece made out of what sounds like very loud tape hiss. The massive hiss is faded, flanged, and cut-up into a deep and alien noise symphony, full of rushing water-like sounds and electric clicks and pops. Not too harsh, but not exactly soothing either. Fon's other track here is a fine bit of Pan sonic-ish stuttering rhythm subtly eq'ed and faded. Pomassl, whose masterful "Trail Error" CD also appeared on Laton, provides a fine delicate glitch loop that lacks the heavy bass-presence of his best work. Feuerstein, the writer of the essay in the booklet, throws in a playful set of metallic loops and robotic voices. Groiss remixes Graf for an extended drone-jam clickathon that would be perfectly at home on Laton. Of the remaining tracks, my favorite is Hammer's "Assembler" an understated segment of electric feedback ambience arranged into quiet minimal structures worthy of the earliest Sähkö material. The least successful tracks are the more beat-oriented pieces by Wazac (grungy electro) Martinke/Schon (trip-hop), and the usually reliable head of the Laton label, Alois Huber, whose "CSI" sounds like nothing more than the long intro to a trance or ambient techno track. The final track by Daughters of the Moon is perhaps the worst on here, as it throws into a non-descript sound collage (heavy on the cliched media overload theme) the ever-popular orgasmic female moaning - a trick already passe by 1982. As all compilations, this is indeed a little too patchy, and as a document of a live performance, we are being cheated of half the experience. I look forward to finding more about the work of Feuerstein, Groiss, and Hammer. Fon and Pomassl did more than enough to make me continue wondering why I don't have as many records by them as I have by their countryman Potuznik.
VARIOUS ARTISTS "No Watches. No Maps"
CD FatCat (UK) 2001
This is FatCat's compilation of demos. This is packaged perfectly - cover photo of a ragged brown mailer the likes of which must litter Dave Howell's living room. The music on here is a bit erratic - most comps are, but comps of unsolicited material perhaps more so. But there is some good music on here. The most interesting tracks are the ones that leave you thinking, "I wonder what the rest of their tracks sound like?" The worst are the ones that leave you with little doubt as to what the rest of their tunes sound like. If an outfit cranks out a piece of clanky mid-period Autechre/Aphex idm, well you get the point... So here's the best: the (perhaps too obvious) opener by QT? - 58 seconds of fast cut digital noise - it'll knock your dick in the dirt. Jetone offers up ping-pong melodicism - nice and low key with a slow distant rhythm. Mokira's track is a variation on the good bits of mid-period Autechre with the addition of some nice Mika Vainio-like whistling tones plus not a small bit of noise. Opaque's harsh 80's industrialism is a bit jarring and welcome - who let Throbbing Gristle into this joint? Meek is nice flanged out low-key noise - hissy and organic. And the best is Chib's freaky bedroom tune, which lands somewhere between Barrett and the Residents. A nice place to be. I could handle a full CD from any of the above mentioned outfits. Everything else, at the very least, is very well executed and recorded. So if you like anything from melodic post-rock ala Dylan Group to distorted fuzzy breaks, stoned jazzy illbience or complex drum'n'bass there should be plenty for you to dig into here.
Contact:
Fat Cat
PO Box 18212
London
EC1V9NQ
UK
E-mail: info@fat-cat.co.uk
VARIOUS ARTISTS "Bip-Hop Generation"
CD Bip-Hop (France)
This compilation on a new French label is the first in a series intended to document, as the lovely booklet informs us, the international "machines, modulations, modifications, sampling, glitches, clicks & cuts... creative electronica, experimental IDM" scenes. Inside a nifty, elegant but playful looking digipack are 9 offerings from Marumari, Schneider TM, Massimo, Goem, Ultra Milkmaids and Phonem. Of the aforementioned, only Massimo could be considered an "unknown", though he's already had material released by Falsch, Mego and Staalplaat. Marumari's music is slow motion synth-pop, somewhere between OMD and BOC, with tinny, laid-back beats. The presence of some glitch elements can't disguise that this music has too much in common with Jean Michel Jarre or 80s Tangerine Dream. Schneider TM provides the best sounding piece on this comp, 8 minutes of grimy electronics punctuated by ping-pong beats and synth squiggles. Not too aggressive, but just noisy enough to seduce the listener with it's lively electric feel and metallic echoes. Massimo's tracks are stark and hyper-minimal, a bit below the level of Ikeda or Deupree but getting very close. His second piece, "where's your heel" is the better of the two, with its slower tempo glitch loops and bass-booming sounds. Both of Massimo's tracks are perhaps too long - at 7.5 minutes each they don't offer enough to hold the listener's attention. Goem's ultra-skeletal constructions are always welcome, and this clicking loop over a rushing-water like drone doesn't disappoint. After the preceding 25 minutes of minimalism, Ultra Milkmaid's "Mystic 2k" sounds nearly symphonic. A mix of repetitive organ-like patterns and dubbed-out distant echoes brings to mind such names as HNAS and Nurse With Wound. Again, the track overstays its welcome but is nevertheless quite beautiful. Phonem's tracks close out the CD with very digi-grungy cut-and-paste breaks over those (prerequisite?) childlike melodies so beloved of the "experimental IDM" set. The Ronald Reagan snippet that begins the final track is the oddest moment in what is a basic Squarepusher-esque labyrinth of breaks.
Contact:
B.P. 64
13192 Marseille Cedex 20
E-mail: ip@bip-hop.com
VARIOUS ARTISTS "Motorlab #1"
CD Kitchenmotors (Iceland) 2000
This CD, smartly packaged in a translucent red "gatefold" folder documents a series of performances organized and commissioned by the Kitchen Motors label in Iceland. The idea behind these commissions was to invite artists of different backgrounds to collaborate together in a performance situation. The results are not ground breaking, but do provide worthwhile moments of home listening pleasure. The disk begins, as it should, with a piece by Stilluppsteypa providing music for texts by Magnus Palsson. The notes inform us that the performance of this piece was a "two and a half hour meditation on alcohol, spiritualism, folklore and banking". What you get on disc is 27 minutes of scratchy laptop improv of variable density and especially volume. The piece is nearly inaudible for almost 7 minutes as the track opens, then vast swirling collaged dsp sound alternates with more sedate near-silence. The segment at the 15 minute mark gets electrically rough and loopy. Those trademark Stilluppsteypa purring drones whisk us through the 20 minute mark. The second piece is by Hilmar Jensson, Ulfar Haraldsson, Johann Johannsson and the CAPUT Ensemble, a ten-piece chamber orchestra. This piece is a beautiful and mysterious sustained string drone enveloped by low volume scratchy digital grunge. Next up is Hispurslausi Sextettin, an outfit performing on instruments made from "industrial materials", banging out 9 superb minutes of rumbling metallic percussive noises, random and abstract with a feel closer to NWW than the Neubauten worship I was expecting. The final track is written by The Hafler Trio's "Andrew McKenzie" and Johann Johannson and performed by Icelandic outfit Curver, last seen on some World Serpent releases. This final piece "Telefonia", uses as its sound source messages left by the audience on the composer's answering machine. It's a low key barely tangible mess of ambient sleepy shudders overlayed with collaged snippets of tinny voices flowing in and out. The piece ends with a ridiculous full 20 seconds of wild enthusiastic applause. Who's the joke on?
VARIOUS ARTISTS
"The Complete Death of Cool: Parts 1 & 2"
CD Leaf (UK) 2001
Assembled by Si Begg and one Zygmunt Janowski this "Negativland-inspired" (that's what they tell me) compilation has the feel of a drunken inside joke but at least it's an enjoyable one. 38 tracks from 19 contributors listed on the nice gatefold booklet offer up a mashup of quirky synth pop melodies played through glitchy digital effects which collapse under messily cutup breaks, preset keyboard rhythms and extremely stupid voice samples. The overall mood is I guess one of stupidity - perhaps best demonstrated by the 30 second track 16 credited to The Hibiscus Geronimo III Players, a set of rich textured belches captured on tape followed by the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket exclaiming "what the fuck is that". Also of note: the promo pack for this release includes 3 little stickers proclaiming: "this is stupid", "music is stupid" and "i am stupid". Thanks fellas. Maybe you have to be a cynical drunken DJ to appreciate it all but the pieces flow smoothly - perhaps too smoothly - this feels more like the work of a single individual than a comp in more than a few spots, or at least some weird radio show heard late at night through an alcoholic fog. The people on here are mostly unknown to me except for Jamie Liddell, Neil Landstrumm and Cabbage Head which is actually a Si Begg side project. Mouse on Mars appears as Mou Ars On (good one boys) and contribute a twitchy little electro cut full of sped up voices and subtle outbreaks of distorted glitchy noise. UK "real band" Sand offer a fast jazzy horn-heavy groover that is prevented from being normal soul-jazz by a spoken word sample and faint feedback eruptions. Most of the artists listed on here, especially the more outrageously named ones are presumably Si Begg, but only Si knows for sure. Regardless of who does what this CD offers plenty of sampled orchestras, hip hop beat loops, brash electro rhythms, chirpy synth melodies and sampled noises and voices explicitly designed to aggravate. Aggravating, but not without a bit of charm - a quality I could never accuse Negativland of posessing. But perhaps this is too slick to be effective as some sort of Negativland-styled culture jamming - the rough edges of Negativland's music always branded them as outsiders - these techno boys are too hip for their own good. Favorites from me include track 19 - a cheesy Beck-ish synth pop ditty from Cursor Miner that is a pretty well executed attempt at mimicking the futuristic sound of 1981 as viewed from the laptops of 2001. Also "good" is track 34, Van Der Hoogs Country Curative's country hoe down ("will the circle remain unbroken") overtaken by mechanical breakbeats and out of control echo. Great stupid fun - that sums up the whole set. Many of these artists have websites linked to through the Noodles site - Cursor Miner has an especially attractive one as far as content is concerned (http://www.cursorminer.com/) with a bunch of realaudio samples.
Contact:
E-mail: noodles@posteverything.com
E-mail: noodlesfoundation@talk21.com
Website: http://www.squat.com/noodles
VOLVOX
"The Damage Begins at the Mouth"
CD Dual Plover (Australia)
"It's about... it's more unsaid than said, it's better unsaid than said, more done than said, things rising to the top of the fluid and putting their fingers out, and waving horrible horrible, making horrible rooster signs, and flying around on unpleasant rubber-band-driven gliders, into tubs of strangely enriched cream. And... bouncing."
This is a very good description of what is to be heard on this disk and hard to follow up so I won't, much. Volvox came from the vibrant 80s electro music scene in Australia. Think Severed Heads and SPK mixed with Lester Vat's literally nerve damaged vocals. His singing is playground servant ramblings from a fully messed up soul, in the best sense. This album was recorded and released in limited numbers in 1996, the band breaking up without ever playing outside of Melbourne. This has to be the weirdest CD in my collection, by far, and I mean really weird. (caleb~k)
Lester Vat (Volvox front man) on Volvox.
http://www.dualplover.com/INTERVIE/VOLVOX/Volvox.htm
WIL WEB
"Starboard Home"
Cassette Racing Room (UK) 2000
Low-key music with a Residents or Der Plan-like feel but without either of those group's creepy menace. The mood of these keyboard-driven ditties is awkwardly melodic - like a nerdy, slighty tougher Young Marble Giants. Like the Lode Runner cassette on this label this is a very well recorded live sounding release. The weird synth melodies on side A reminded me of Asmus Tietchens' "Biotop" from so long ago. With the addition of pensively plucked guitar, this is slightly perplexing neo-primitive music. The B-Side offers more Residents-inspired wackyness full of rough and human charm. I could easily see Wil Web on A-Musik, somewhere between Felix Kubin and F.X. Randomiz.
Contact:
Racing Room
37 Egmont Rd
New Malden, Surrey, KT3 4AT,
UK
WORKMAN, Dion and THOMAS, Rohan "k"
CD Sigma Editions (UK) 2001
Sigma promos come at me from all directions - Australia, Holland and now good old NYC, though their new contact address is actually in the UK. This most recent batch of Sigmas includes the latest from Dion Workman (also in Parmentier), this time in collaboration with Thomas Rohan. The two tracks on here have the feel of some of Bernhard Günter's music but made with a tingly sound palette closer to someone like Ryoji Ikeda. The first track is barely even there - the silence dominates the piece, as faint whistles fade in and out of the sparse mix. The results are extremely minimal - and not exactly easy to listen to. The delicacy of the whistling tones is attractive, but over the course of 21 silence-heavy minutes not enough to capture my full attention. Parts of the second track remind me of how my ears feel after a loud rock concert - a dense but very muffled drone envelops everything, like a thick blanket around my head, while the faintest high-pitched whistles move in and out of audible range. The feeling is very claustrophobic, and the music is felt subliminally more than explicitly, since even at full volume the CD sounds can't overpower the ambient noises surrounding the listener. Though mostly a very quiet piece, the sustained tone held at the 9 minute mark has the same effect on the listener as a slightly friendly water torture might, as the tone builds and builds into a distant hum that seems to be burrowing it's way through the listener's ears.
YOKOTA, Susumu "The Grinning Cat"
CD Leaf (UK) 2001
Yokota is far removed from the overly ironic world of most contemporary electronic music - if nothing else, have a look at these track titles: "Sleepy Eye", "Tears Of A Poet" and "Love Bird" - not exactly the sort of cynical wordplay you'd expect from the UK's Leaf label. Whatever the themes of his pieces might be, Yokota is a master of delicate looped minimal music that shares structural elements with Reich and Glass-styled minimalism as well as house music while sounding like nothing else but Yokota. Many of the tracks on here take simple breakbeats and add layers of looped handclaps, sampled "ethnic" chants and melodic, rolling piano lines. Like Nobukazu Takemura's post Acid Jazz, pre-Glitch work (the Issey Miyake CDs perhaps - though nothing here is that dainty) this piles on the whimsical childlike melodies a bit too much on a few tracks but the rough sonorities of some of the sampled bits always keep the music from becoming too sugary. A hissy piano loop, a tune played on a harp, and a distant sampled yell are assembled into brief tracks that I never tire of coming back to. Most tracks hover around the 3 minute mark and definitely do not overstay their welcome, which is genius touch in music so tied to looped sequences. Yokota seems to have an endless supply of warm chamber-like melodies with an antique feel - sort of Scott Joplin meets Steve Reich through Erik Satie - over which he can float his gently tinkling samples and subtle rhythms that suggest house music while remaining abstract. A subtle and perfect work.
Contact: leaf@posteverything.com
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