Aural Aggravation

May 2024 / July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K is possibly one of the most-featured artists here at Aural Aggravation, and I’ve written about his work elsewhere, prior to establishing this site. I’ve often commented – sometimes flippantly, sometimes in sheer awe – at his rate of output, but it seems appropriate to make the observation once again, since a little while ago I found myself simply swamped and a shade overwhelmed by the volume of submissions I was receiving. Electroacoustic Space Drumming landed in my inbox and I failed to so much as open it, let alone download it. Then, Outsider’s appeared, reminding me I was behind on things, only to discover that a split tape release with Jacob Audrey Taves had come out in between the two.

The first of the releases, Electroacoustic Space Drumming, comes courtesy of London label Anticipating Nowhere Records, as a download and limited cassette (in an edition of 20, more than half of which have gone already).

The titles are incomprehensible to me, but I very much doubt this will make any difference to my appreciation of this jangling, bleeping glitchfest. The six tracks do very much sound like a circuit meltdown, the digital xylophonic cadences interrupted by sudden jolts or sound and stuttering microbeats like an Action Man marching band trapped inside a jam jar half-full of water. Creaks, groans, and splashes abound and contrive to create a complex and layered work.

It’s difficult – if not impossible – to unpick everything that’s going on, and consequently, you simply sit back and let it wash over you. But that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable, or easy to do so.

And then there is Outsider’s, with its questionably-placed apostrophe in the title. Outsider’s what, precisely? And with twenty-three tracks, released digitally and as a colossal five disc CD work, it’s an absolute beast.

The five CDs make sense in a way which is less apparent on the digital release, as there are essentially five segments or suites, with the tracks belonging to each names with a suitable prefix: jazz, crunchy, noise, drones, and piano stuff. Each contains between three and six pieces, effectively an EP’s worth apiece.

In truth, the track titling isn’t especially helpful: the six tracks of the first set, ‘jazz’, and entitled ‘jazz good’, ‘jazz also good, jazz prolongation’, ‘jazz’, ‘jazz’, and ‘jazz.’ Spoiler alert: there’s nothing especially jazzy about the ‘jazz’ cuts, but there’s electronic percussion that cuts through foamy bubbling washes and a disarray of oddness that sounds like machine gun fire, and glitches aside, it almost feels co-ordinated. And no-one needs a jazz prolongation, although this decidedly unjazz cut, we can forgive.

The four ‘crunchy’ cuts are riots of bleeps and squips, a riot of sound that’s no more vigorous than on the first, ‘crunchy.geras greit.’ The two pieces simply entitled ‘crunchy’ combine haunting, hovering tones, and collapsing circuits and lurching synaptic stutters, like exposed wires sparking as they swing, and things become increasingly scratchy, scrapy, a frenzied buzz of fractured, fizzing, fucked electronics.

The three ‘noise’ pieces build in their noisiness, but at heart aren’t all that dissimilar from the ‘crunchy’ pieces, although perhaps quieter and less overwhelming, and overwhelming it is. Then again, the ‘drone’ pieces aren’t especially droney, and more represent explosions of frothing discord, and the final suite, ‘piano stuff’ is a cacophonous conglomeration of bubbling noise down a drain.

These recordings remind me of my early days of reviewing, back in 2018 or so as my introduction to truly avant-garde, experimental electronic works, and Gintas K – perhaps one of the first acts I discovered as an exponent of dripping, bleeping, weppling, weirdness. All this time later. he’s still proving to be a rare master of electronica. Come 2024, and Gintas K is still right there at the forefront.