Aural Aggravation

Sub Rosa

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve long been an admirer of Sub Rosa’s releases: the label has a particular knack for uncovering weird and wonderful releases, and while not all of them are necessarily to my taste (the William Burroughs LP Break Through in Grey Room is very much my bag and absolute gold; the Charles Manson one less so: no-one would really care less about Manson’s frankly feeble musical efforts if he hadn’t attained global notoriety as a mass murder who implicated The Beatles in his infamous killing spree), their historical and musical value is undeniable. And so we have ‘Kosmic Music from the Black Country’, an archival retrospective of the little known but nevertheless near-mythical Kosmose spanning the years 1973-1978.

Built around the core nexus of Alain Neffe and Francis Pourcel (of SIC renown), Kosmose (more of a loose collective than an actual band) operated as an occasional live entity, playing exclusively around the Charleroi area of Belgium. They splintered in 1978 without leaving any officially released material to document their existence. It’s the kind of stuff of which legends are indeed made.

As their very name suggests, their music is far-out, spaced-out and experimental, a brain-frying amalgamation of krautrock, progressive rock and jazz. Some 40 years on, how do the recordings hold up? There’s a very real danger that a release like this could completely devastate the mystique and the myth. Perhaps the fact their appeal is niche and their legend very much confined to underground circles, there’s less of a risk of the hype overwhelming the output than, say, an undiscovered album by The Beatles, or Bowie, or even, say, King Crimson or Jethro Tull. Aficionados of wild wig-outs – those aware of the band by reputation – are, one might say, predisposed to appreciate these recordings, and will be ultimately thrilled rather than disappointed.

There are many of the standard elements of freeform prog / jazz improv in evidence; lengthy drum solos, prolonged passages of sparse hums interspersed with groans and shrieks of saxophone. There are no shortage of epic grooves. But there’s a lot more besides: this is inventive, atmospheric and psychotropic stuff. There are moments of subtle beauty. There are moments of explosive crescendos and shattering discord. It’s not always easy to tell what instrument is doing what. Swirling drones provide a shifting, shadowy backdrop to creeping flickers. Everything goes every which way, in all shapes and colours.

The tracks – all untitled – trip, swirl and weave into one another to form an immense, dense, whirling psychedelic trip. The recordings have a hazy quality, and the production values – such as they are – are very much of their time. And that’s integral to their appeal: it’s like unlocking a sonic time capsule that’s stored in someone’s brain.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/pSpadjolmA8

Kosmose online at Sub Rosa

Hula Honeys – 17^th November 2015 – hon18

James Wells

I kinda like the idea of future nostalgia. First, because there’s a certain postmodern knowingness about the oxymoronic, paradoxical nature of the concept. It shows a degree of confidence, too, however ironically it’s intended, in the implication that this work has ‘future classic’ potential – unless, of course, it means it’s somehow a soundtrack to future nostalgia, or a comment on what nostalgia may look like. Not that anyone’s looking to the future much right now: nostalgia is big business alright, with people mooning over the most mundane aspects of the past. I yearn for a future in which people reserve their outpourings of nostalgic adulation for things that are actually worthy. Getting misty-eyed over dull as ditchwater bands like Shed 7, or the time when a chocolate bar shared the dimensions of a log and you could buy crisps that tasted of hedgehog. I’m not saying things weren’t better then, but not everything was better, and a lot of the world, from art and culture to consumer goods, was plain cack.

Precisely what this album says about the nostalgia of the future is unclear. Or perhaps it says nothing, and the album’s title is simply an observation of the fact that in time, tomorrow will be nostalgia at some point in the future.

Low-key, minimalist compositions which rely heavily on wibbly, wobbly basslines are perfectly represented in the fonts used on the cover, and sound like the sound of the future 15 or 20 years ago. Juno lays down some chubby, laid-back electro grooves, underpinned by classic retro drum machine beats – whipcrack snare sounds synonymous with machines like the old Roland TR606. It’s a collision of late 70s and early 80s disco and more experimental work with the knowing retro chic and analogue worship of underground dance music the late 90s and, indeed, since the turn of the millennium.

No doubt had this been released in the 80s or 90s to a degree of cult success, people would be excavating it now and hailing it as a masterpiece. Or maybe not? Perhaps it could be interpreted as a satire of sorts. Who can really tell? And ultimately, does it really matter?

Francis Juno Online

Christopher Nosnibor

I know virtually nothing of Lärmheim, other than the fact it’s the musical vehicle of Henri de Saussure. Having misplaced the press release, it transpires information on the website and Facebook pages is sparse, and most of the reviews in circulation are in German. The limited details culled from Facebook show the Swiss artist was born in Geneva in 1989, studied drums, piano, tabla, and bass clarinet, and is currently using ‘synths, software, hardware, drum machines, vintage gear and lots of coffee’. But ultimately, knowledge of Lärmheim or its creative force counts for very little in the face of this utterly overwhelming album.

Not so much a collection of musical compositions as an electronic explosion, Cent Soliels is everything, all at once. Looped beats and tapes spooling at five-speed, surging synths warped woozily amidst crackles and static, circuits spinning in overdrive to the point of meltdown. Stuttering, stammering, everything is jammed up to the max.

There are brief moments of calm respite, but there’s interference, fizzing currents sparking in exhaustion. Passages of sweeping euphoric dance, some of which explore dizzying time signatures and synth wizardry which demonstrate almost progressive leanings, are ruptured by barrelling screeds of white noise, while heavy beats blast like detonations, adding to the violent tumult of sound. Brutal barrages of noise worthy of Whitehouse erupt at every turn, and when moments of silence fall, the effects is just as devastating.

http://music.laermheim.ch/

Mind Travels / Ici d’ailleurs – MT05 – 11^th December 2015

The rusted Burroughs adding machine on the front cover hints at the album’s contents in more than one way: like the crumbling staircase on the back, it’s an image of decline, of decay, a reminder of places, scenes and memories forgotten or fading. And then of course, there is the work of the adding machine’s inventor and head of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I descendent, William Seward Burroughs II, infamous author of Naked Lunch and literary inventor of the seminal cut-up method. It’s fitting, because Oublier is a work which plays on the mind through dislocation and juxtaposition, an album that plays on the mind in some of the ways Burroughs’ texts do.

I’m not only referring to the way Burroughs’ most radical work create a simultaneous sense of real time and dream time through the formation of jarring narratives, or the way past, present and future to forge a disorientating and endless present though the dislocated anti-narratives formed by means of the cut-up here. Burroughs is renowned for his prescience, his forward-thinking and his dystopian take on science fiction. Closer reading of Burroughs’ works – in particular his final trilogy, but also texts like The Wild Boys, as well as the cut-up trilogy of the 60s – reveal an author capable of deep nostalgia.

In merging the very different styles of Geins’t Naȉt and Laurent Petitgand – renowned respectively for industrial collaging in the vein of Throbbing Gristle or early Neubauten, and film scores, Oublier offers a sonic work which challenges the listener in unusual ways. By unhooking the conventional temporal bearings of composition, they have forged a work which elicits an almost subconscious response.

Delicate, picked acoustic guitar flicker in and out from an ever-shifting terrain in which electronic and acoustic music and sources indistinguishable in origin push, pull and twist against one another. Stealthy basslines, gentle melodies and echoes of grooves are submerged in extraneous sound on sound, pink noise static hiss (‘Kenie’). Dark atmospherics and sonorous booming low tones contrast with surging tides, obscuring enigmatic, haunting vocals (‘Ghost). ‘Je ne Dors Plus’ is hypnotic, unsettling. Clattering industrial mechanoid rhythms rumble around degraded fragments and snippets. Orchestral strikes rupture dingy desert soundscapes on ‘Brass’, half Foetus, half Master Musicians of Joujouka.

The pieces on Oublier are fragmentary and non-linear, and exist as memories, overwritten and partially erased, palimpsests of faded nostalgia. There are moments through which the listener is led through gentle, sweeping melodies, aching with beauty but tinged with sadness at the corners. Rainfall, whispers – sometimes sultry, sometimes threatening – echo in empty rooms, abandoned but adorned with the spirits of lives past. It isn’t an album you interpret in a concrete definitive sense, and certainly, that any response is by no means fixed or preordained: instead, the supple, shifting nature of the pieces offer fleeting insights and evocations which appeal to the listener’s own experiences and the recollections stored in the memory banks. It’s evocative not of anything explicit, but of vague sensations: the listening experience is therefore shaped by what the individual listener brings to the album. As such, it’s a work which offers an intensely personal listening experience.

This is precisely the aim of the Mind Travels series, which has been little short of of inspiring and inspired, and Oublier offers a veritable palace for the mind to wander in. Sit back, listen, and forget…

Geins’t Naȉt + L Petitgand – Oublier Online