Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Worriedaboutsatan / Capac – Orion / A Well​-​Tuned Suite

Posted: 22 February 2020 in Albums
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This is it Forever – 14th February 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Since whittling down to just Gavin Miller, worriedaboutsatan’s outut has positively exploded, with the latest offering, which Miller describes as ‘quite an experimental little thing’ sees him share a tape – a side each – with Capac.

‘Orion’ is indeed quite experimental, and marks something of a departure for Miller, transitioning through a sequence of passages that rupture forth unexpectedly. At its heart, the piece is appropriately spacey, with squelchy quirts of analogue phase illuminating the smooth, slow-moving expanse of soft drones. It’s dense and atmospheric, and distant rumbles of thunder register like planets colliding way off in other solar systems before heraldic horns and full galactic marching band parades it way through. Gunned down in a blitzkrieg of lasers and noise, leaving an expanse of desolation, a near-emptiness.

Capac’s ‘A Well-Turned Suite’ is altogether darker, an eerie discord creating an ominous atmosphere. The four-piece describe themselves as creators of ‘sonic explorations of the murkier spaces in and between “new music”, and there’s certainly an exploratory quality to this fourteen-minute aural ambulation. At first there is calm, sustained notes that hover and hum for an age, stretching time itself. Gradually, cracks and fissures begin to appear in the smooth surface, and wheezing organ notes begin to twist and disconnect, and over time, the tension rises as atonality takes over. Muffled beats stutter and thump anxiously, and the sloe fade leaves only the whisper of the breeze.

It’s an intriguing release, and the two pieces are unusual and more than contrasting enough to sustain the interest for the duration.

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WAS and Capac

Marzuraan – Ten Years Too Late

Posted: 20 February 2020 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 9th March 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Cruel Nature clearly aren’t going for a major cash-in with this release, a 12-years-after-the-fact album containing the final recordings of a band who, while building a cult national following during their existence between 2002 and 2008, were predominantly a local phenomenon in their stomping grounds around Gateshead. Which means you may be forgiven for not being entirely au fait with Marzuraan and their work, of if you haven’t been o the edge of your seat and dripping with anticipation for this limited-to-75-copes cassette compendium.

For those not up to speed (and I’ll include myself here), the potted history of Marzuraan is that they started out as the duo of Pete Burn (guitar) and Lee Stokoe (Culver) (bass) before evolving into a full band with the introduction of Rob Woodcock (drums) and Stu Ellen (voice). ‘Taking their cue from bands such as Melvins; Black Flag; Harvey Milk; Earth; Godflesh and Loop, they soon cemented themselves as a pivotal band in the North East’s burgeoning Drone-rock / Trudge-core scene. Revered locally with a strong cult following nationally, they released 3 studio albums, appeared on countless compilations and split records influencing bands such as Bong and Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, before disbanding in 2008’. The title, therefore, is on point and self-aware to the max. But t’s never too late, right?

The recordings here – apart from two tracks which featured on an obscure compilation and split 7” back in the day – represent their final cuts, dating back to 2005 and 2006, and they’ve lain neglected in the proverbial vaults ever since.

But if anything, the timing couldn’t be better: what goes around comes around, and heavy music is very much enjoying a renaissance right now, and the north-east scene is also thriving thanks to various acts associated with microlabels represented by Cruel nature and Panurus Recordings.

It’s the seven-minute ‘Morphine Waterfall’ from the Mare Nero compilation that introduces the release, and it’s a dislocated, angular dirge of a tune that plods and trudges disconsolately through barren territory that alludes to early Swans and 90s Touch and Go, along with peer obscuritants like Oil Seed Rape and Zoopsia: it’s grunge distilled and chilled to sub-zero and as it builds toward the end, the guitars become increasingly discordant, while the snarling, rapping vocal becomes increasingly desperate.

It’s Tar and Girls Against Boys that come to mind through the low-end murk of the chunky riff grind of ‘Golden Roman’, and everything is there for a killer tune but the recording, despite having been remastered last year prior to release. It’s as muddy as hell. It doesn’t actually detract, for what I’s worth, and in many ways is integral to the gritty, lo-fi charm.

It very much sets the level: ‘Muckbucket’ and ‘Blowin’ Cool Breeze’ are built around thumping, repetitive riffs, but the guitars are trebly and skew off at divergent angles.

The final track, ‘Moneybox’, which previously featured on a record split with SINK is a doomy trudge that pushes the influence of early Melvins to the fore as it crawls in a sea of howling feedback and a 23bpm percussive trudge that’s paired with a gut-quiveringly downtuned bass. It’s ace. If you can cope with infinite suspense between drum beats and the striking of a single chord, that is.

Ten Years Too Late shows that Marzuraan were both a band of their time, and a band ahead of their time, sounding utterly contemporary now. Maybe it’s time for a reunion…

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Dystopian Future Movies – Inviolate

Posted: 19 February 2020 in Albums
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2nd March 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

The follow up to 2017’s Time finds the emotive avant-rock guitar quartet moving further into cinematic territory while exploring an expanding range of forms. Everything contained in their previous releases is very much present on the seven songs that make up Inviolate, only so much more in every sense. Everything about Inviolate is bigger, bolder, more pronounced and yet more nuanced, shaper and more keenly felt and articulated. And every corner of the album is imbued with a sense of enormity, both sonic and emotional: Inviolate feels major-scale, from the driving riffs to the heartfelt human intensity.

‘Countenance’, which has been a standout of their recent live sets, kick-starts the album with a short blast of overdriven guitar that hits like a punch in the mouth, before immediately pulling back into a soft, post-rock chime. And so it goes: rapidly alternating between tempestuous bursts of gut-busting overdrive propelled by thunderous percussion and lacework of heart-rending delicacy. Chopping back and forth, it’s almost schizophrenic, and it’s impossible to settle into, and instead, the listener is drawn into an emotional maelstrom articulated through the medium of sound.

Things get darkly hypnotic on the slow-burning ‘Wreckage’, the guitars wrap serpentine around a slow-twisting bass with alternating hypnotism and jarring angularity, and it’s only near the end that the tension breaks in a searing blast of twisted chords, and then they go spiralling off into a jolting sonic cataclysm, it’s with some heavy prog leanings that call to mind early Oceansize. Meanwhile ‘Rules’ is a slow, spaced-out affair that crashes somewhere between shoegaze and grunge. Indeed, placing Dystopian Future Movies in terms of genre is nigh on impossible: the landslide guitar assaults aren’t remotely sludgy, and so they’re leagues away from the stone/doom vogue, and the softer, interweaving passages and crescendos aren’t twee post-rock or even post-metal, although they exploit the quiet / loud dynamics of grunge and the sustained crescendos characteristic of post-rock. And yet I’m reminded fleetingly of a number of bands – all lesser-known, misfit acts from the 90s – The God Machine, Eight Storey Window, Milk.

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Writing on their performance in Leeds supporting Jo Quail last September, I wrote that ‘Their allure is not in the volume or force, but the threat, as if they’ve got a lot in reserve, simmering beneath the surface.’ This is very much true of Inviolate: there’s a lot of detail, a lot of texture, hints of psychedelia and some deep shoegaze as the guitars cascade kaleidoscopically in shimmering sheets of sound. It’s also very much about contrast. But also, on numerous occasions, they come good on that threat, delivering moments of explosive noise. Throughout, the strongest contrast lies in Caroline Cawley’s voice: it’s graceful, melodic, and there’s a soulful folksy feel to it, and even a certain hint of poppiness. Hers is certainly not an overtly ‘rock’ vocal style – post-rock, maybe – and certainly not grungey or remotely metal, and in eschewing any gnarly backing vocals, DFM place a firm distance between themselves and their infinite more metal peers. In fact, they place a distance between themselves and any other band, and utilise Cawley’s magnificently melodic tones to wander some softly rippling sonic waters and darker undercurrents, with ‘All the Light’ heavy on shadow.

‘Black-Cloaked’ has everything: a soft, melodic verse shaped by delicate, clean, chorus-dappled guitar that explodes into the most driving of riffs, before the soaring shoegaze sonic blizzard of ‘Ten Years’, a tidal wave of kaleidoscopic guitar shimmering to the close of an album that simply feels immense, and also really quite special.

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Electric Sewer Age – Contemplating Nothingness

Posted: 16 February 2020 in Albums
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Hallow Ground – HG2001 – 28th February 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Electric Sewer Age began as a collaborative project between Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson (of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Coil) and Danny Hyde, who continued the project together with John Deek, who subsequently passed away in 2013. It’s perhaps only natural that a sense of bleakness, of darkness, of a certain sense of grief permeates Electric Sewer Age, as a project strewn with loss.

Contemplating Nothingness is the third release by Electric Sewer Age, and the second one that Hyde finished alone, following on from Bad White Corpuscle, originally released in 2014, and re-released in 2016.

Contemplating Nothingness is pitched as ‘a lysergic tapestry culled from the deep end of the collective pop cultural unconscious’. It begins with some spaced-out trippy, doodly interweaving drones and some disorientating analogue latticeworks and shuffling electronic judderings providing the backdrop to some reverby, echoic vocals before transitioning into woozy dance territory, a stammering heartbeat bass beat fluttering beneath shifting layers of disquiet which collide with elliptical elisions to dance tropes.

‘Got some bad news this morning / which in turn made my day’, Hyde wheezes in a distorted Al Jourgensen-style vocal on ‘Whose Gonna Save my Soul’. I try not to wince too hard and the grammatical error and instead focus on the dark atmospherics the song conjured. Moreover, this single line encapsulates the contradictions which stand at the very foundations of this album, and the track itself delves into swampy dark ambience, dominated by a rhythmic wash, with Eastern motifs twisting in and out sporadically amidst a lower-end washing ebb and flow while the vocal, half-buried, is detached, distant.

Like its predecessor, Contemplating Nothingness is dark and difficult. Slow beats that land somewhere between heavy hip-hop, trip-hop and industrial drive ‘Chebo’, a delirious drag of chimes and electronic ululations. ‘Surrender to the Crags’ plunges into dark, dank, murkiness, but retains that eastern vibe that calls to mind both The Master Musicians of Joujouka and the otherness of the Tangiers scene in the 50s and 60s as depicted by William Burroughs.

‘Self Doubting Trip’ brings a dark intensity that will likely resonate for many: it’s claustrophobic and uncomfortable, and stands as something of a highlight in the way it attacks the psyche. You hate yourself enough already, but there’s a slight comfort in knowing your self-flagellation is not unique as you chastise yourself for simply living.

It makes the last track, ‘Dekotour’, feel like an electropop breeze by comparison, the chiming synth tones more early Depeche Mode than anything, but they bend, warp, twist and weave across one another to create a difficult knot of noise, with a thick, gloopy bass rising into the increasingly tangled textures.

There’s a certain nihilism at the heart of Contemplating Nothingness, which extends beyond merely the title and its implications of introverted emptiness, but it’s paired with a less certain and altogether less tangible levity which lifts it above dark ambience and into a space that’s given to contemplation and awakening. While ultimately minimal, there is variety and depth on display here, making for an album that deserves absorption and deliberation.

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Electric Sewer Age – Contemplating Nothingness

Thomas Köner – Motus

Posted: 12 February 2020 in Albums
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Mille Plateaux – 6th February 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Motus is one of those albums that spreads eight pieces across four sides of vinyl. Most of these pieces are around seven minutes in duration, and manifest as grumbling, low-end analogue electronic instrumentals. Indulgent? Depends on your position, maybe. Audiophile quality? Vinyl addiction? While the pieces which make up Motus don’t immediately intimate a need for attention to detail and there’s no scope for the listener to bask in hearing the rich production values optimally through the medium of vinyl, the frequencies and tones that Köner explores probably do benefit from that full-spectrum vinyl sound, the audio uncompressed and benefitting from the full dynamic range, particularly those low-end sounds, some of which are so low as to almost disappear beneath the average listener’s hearing range.

Motus is steeped in theory, which is fitting given its release on Mille Plateaux, which takes t name – and also its ideologies from radical theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, after whose 1980 text Achim Szepanski’s Frankfurt label devoted to minimal techno, glitch, and other various other experimental electronic forms takes its name.

Köner says of the album that ‘Motus is more (to me) than just music made with analogue synthesizers, it is about attitude, a way of relating to sound and the (e)motion it affects. A lifestyle, where movement, being moved and moving become one. My practice is vibrational, about the skin, touch and surfaces and the gaseous medium in between.

Vibrational it is: these pieces tremble and quiver and grate and grind and shudder and shake and judder and growl.

The first piece, ‘EXTENSION (Attack)’ is a low, glutinous throb, a gelatinous bellyache of a pulsation, rent with crackling, grating treble spurs that scrape at the walls of the cerebellum and scratch the lining of the gut. It’s unsettling, and marks the start of the album’s trajectory, which is unexpectedly linear, and follows a slow descent towards sluggish sludge that’s barely a muddy bubble by the end.

Along the way, ‘SUBSTRATE (Binaural)’ is a low, oscillating throb that expands and resonates over seven brain-bending minutes: there’s something about the more subtle of variations having the most torturous effect, especially when there’s a metronomic pulsing beat lurking beneath, while ‘OSCILLATOR (Luminous)’ reduces everything to an ambulating low-end slip and slide, a muddy melt of trudging bumps. The final cut, ‘SYNTHESIS (Carnal)’, takes things lower and slower still, to the point of near subliminality, slowly winding and grinding into the ground.

Motus is an odd one, an album that undermines itself as it evolves, reducing itself to a lesser sonic amount with each piece. And yet, as the sounds shrinks to little more than a gloopy brown puddle, the effect grows.

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Rebecca Foon – Waxing Moon

Posted: 3 February 2020 in Albums
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Constellation Records – 21st February 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

The moon has possessed a mystical power as long as it has a physical one, the pull of the tides and the regularity of the lunar months forces mankind has never and will never assert control over. The waxing moon, when the moon is growing larger in the sky, is considered by some to be a phase of new beginnings. But new beginnings are equally the reverse aspect of endings: if the moon shows us anything, it’s that everything is cyclical. Time is not linear, and linearity is but a construct that facilitates an accessible narrative.

Rebecca Foon’s Waxing Moon is an album that shimmers and glows an ethereal hue: enigmatic, mysterious, and conjuring a sense of otherness, it’s possessed of a magic that’s difficult to pinpoint.

Rebecca Foon is the composer and musician behind Saltland and Esmerine, as well as having enjoyed a lengthy spell with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra. She’s best known for her cello work, but it’s her skills as a pianist and singer that are placed to the fore on Waxing Moon. For Waxing Moon, she’s joined by an impressive array of contributors, including Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire) and Mishka Stein (Patrick Watson) on acoustic and electric basses, Sophie Trudeau (Godspeed You Black Emperor) on violin, Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes) on electric guitar, and Patrick Watson as co-vocalist on ‘Vessels’.

But understatement is the key here, and the composition very much favour the sparse, low-key and minimal, demonstrating with aplomb the truth of the adage ‘less is more’. Instead of pushing the sound outward, she focuses in and goes deep into the heart of the feelings of each song.

The instrumental ‘New World’ get the album off to an affecting start, and sometimes in a world full of ceaseless noise and endless words babbled without thought, it’s easy to forget just how strongly simple notes played softly can be so richly imbued with emotion that they cam be more moving than any lyrical articulations.

When Foon sings, it’s in breathy, low tones, a sultry croon, as on ‘Pour’, which, with its brooding piano, subtly layered harmonies and haunting guitar, or the ominous, string-led ‘Another Realm’, it calls to mind some of Jarboe’s most evocative work. There’s something vaguely Leonard Cohen that goes beyond vague evocations of ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ in the deep melancholy splendour of ‘Ocean Song’, while there’s something of a folksy feel to ‘Dreams to be Born.’ It’s semi-sad, entirely captivating.

The instrumentation and mood are focused on low-key, low tempo, for the most part exploring subtle shifts and microcosmic variations, although landing around the middle of the album, ‘Wide Open Eyes’ steps up both tempo and key to venture into folk-infused indie territory driven by an insistent rhythm and repetitive motif to hypnotic effect.

Waxing Moon is subtle, and has a slow pull that’s almost subliminal. It’s this soft-focus partial abstraction that renders the album so powerful: it’s by no means direct, but nevertheless conveys a deep underlying strength.

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Six Organs of Admittance – Companion Rises

Posted: 1 February 2020 in Albums
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Drag City – 21st February 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

One thing you can never criticise Ben Chasny for is a lack of ideas, and over the course of twenty-two years, he’s pursued a line of technical and theoretical experimentation that’s yielded some remarkable results, perhaps most keenly exemplified by the recent Hexadic trilogy which spanned three years of deep and intensely focused and highly structured theory/practice-based work. The sequence was punctuated by Burning the Threshold in 2017, and is now finally broken with Companion Rises, which the single release of ‘Haunted and Known’ hinted at the form of.

According to the blurbage, ‘methodologically, Companion Rises sometimes recalls the early-mid lo-fi Six Organs records, with digital processes substituting for the analog techniques of yore and, instead of Ben Chasny’s hand percussion overdubs, algorithmic programs generating rhythms’. We also learn that Chasny ‘created all sounds and programs, all the recording and mixed the entire record, also like some earlier ones’, but the emphasis is less on revisiting the past than it is expanding on those early principles and practises to forge something altogether new and quite different.

From the surging synth organ swell of the intro, ‘Pacific’, it’s immediately apparent that Companion Rises is a different kind of beast: too ruptured, fractured and dissonant to be ambient, too vague in form to be conventionally categorizable as a ‘song’ even as an instrumental, it twists and squirms around and creates a certain sense of disturbance, and while it sits apart from the rest of the album in almost every sense, it also reflects the spirit of experimentalism.

Stylistically, it’s a curious hybrid of wonky folk and indie, played rough and loose and recorded cheap. ‘Two Forms Moving’ is a hypnotic, looping affair, that builds layers, and the zany lead guitar work is magnificently at odds with the hypnotically repetitive strum that forms the song’s basis, and it’s as if the two forms are moving in different directions yet somehow collide perfectly.

This is a large part of what makes Six Organs such an enduringly interesting proposition: as much driven by theory and experimentation conducted within set parameters, Chasny makes music that doesn’t quite sound like anyone else’s. Those defined parameters or specific methodologies, often a feature of John Cage’s compositions, are more commonly the domain of electronic or electroacoustic artists, and are more usually found in the domain of the avant-garde, while ‘rock’ music is – broadly speaking – more concerned with concepts than technical executions where compositions are concerned. Companion Rises chucks it all in the blender and whirls up something novel, but without it being novelty: songs are still very much the focus.

Those songs are diverse and tend not to place too much priority on conventions of verse and chorus, but there are hooks, nagging motifs, dainty, dreamy folky atmospherics and lilting melodies, and wrapped up in a lo-fi buzz that’s definitely not Dolby and all the more immediate because of it.

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cover Six Organs of Admittance - Companion Rises

Man of Moon / Wuh Oh – Oporto, Leeds, 30 January 2020

Posted: 31 January 2020 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

My appreciation of Man of Moon is well-documented: so well so, in fact, that a link to my review of their last show in Leeds, where they supported The Twilight Sad at The Brudenell; featured in their sponsored ad for tonight, which is bang in the middle of the UK leg of a significant European tour, that also coincides with independent venue week.

Oporto isn’t a venue I visit often, other than when it’s Live at Leeds, but I have fond memories of thrashing a few chords at the chaotic end of an Arrows of Love gig here some years ago, and the fact it’s still going and housing shows like this is cause for celebration.

Touring the UK not once, but twice with the Sad has served them well, in many ways: they’ve reached a bigger audience, their songwriting has evolved remarkably, and they’ve followed the lead in inviting artists they believe in to be their touring support.

And so it is that Wuh Oh – the musical project of fellow Scot Peter Ferguson – opens tonight’s show with some thumping electronica: he’s dressed in a superhero cloak and has a bionic arm, and it’s all delivered with high theatre and elements of interpretive dance.

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Wuh Oh

There’s a lot going on, with deep, quivering bass and monster percussion driving it all. Sampled vocals, heavily processed feature prominently in a set of all-out euphoric dance. It’s as commercial as it gets in a club context and this is never going to be to my taste musically. But the execution is outstanding, and besides, it takes some serious guts to pull this kind of DJ / mime karaoke shit off, and it’s a stunning performance with all the energy.

As they did at the Brudenell in October, Man of Moon om take the stage to Suicide’s ‘Ghostrider’, and they’re straight in with driving cyclical chords and propellant drumming on ‘Sign’, before debut single ‘The Road’ from back in 2015 goes full motorik psych.

Despite being only two in number, the sound is full and by no means lacking in depth, with the guitar signal split between a pair of two-by-twelve-inch amps, with the speakers placed facing back to the rear of the stage, resulting in the majority of the sound coming from the PA rather than a blast of backline.

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Man of Moon

The set isn’t much different from their last visit, and is primarily constructed with material from their forthcoming album, but they’re tighter and more solid than ever, and the new songs have had time to bed in and take some proper road-testing.

‘Ride the Wave’ brings some thunderous bass, hefty vocal reverb and an insistent rhythm, and elsewhere. samples drift in by way of an intro, and there’s sonorous sequenced bas that churns the guts and an abundance of spaciously atmospheric guitars. ‘Rust’ brings classic vintage 80s electro with heavy Cure filtered through Twilight Sad influence with smoggy guitars and all the emotion. Dynamic and layered, it reaches the parts other songs can’t reach. And it’s this emotional intensity and increasing maturity that’s one of the most striking things about Man of Moon now in contrast to Man of Moon just 18 months ago.

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Man of Moon

‘Skin’, the penultimate track and which featured on the Chemicals EP is a clear standout: while the studio version is smoothed out and leans toward Depeche Mode, live it’s a sharp, tense, uptempo groove and with a massive nagging bass line carry hints of Placebo, and the only criticism is that it could never be long enough. Throbbing dance grooves and cowbell drive closer ‘Stranger’, which threatens to veer off on an extended ace-rock workout, but instead, stops short leaving us wanting more. The album can’t land soon enough.

Kemper Norton – Oxland Cylinder

Posted: 27 January 2020 in Albums
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24th February 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Kemper Norton’s kept a steady trickle of releases coming for some time now, and while the last couple – Hungan (2017) and Brunton Calciner (2019) – had bypassed me until now, the consistency of previous works, from Cam (2013), Loor (2014), and Toll (2016) was more than enough to ensure my immediate interest on the arrival of Oxland Cylinder. His music always has an intrinsic sense of place, however elliptical, and if on the face of it Oxland Cylinder appears to break this trend, the accompanying text is informative:

‘In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the majority of the world’s arsenic was created in Cornwall and Devon. The “Oxland Cylinder” was one of the methods used and was a revolving iron tube used to process and vapourise arsenic pyrites. None of these devices remain intact.’

Immediately, we’re transported to England’s south coast over a century ago, and not only to a bygone era but a practise essentially lost to history. And in this context, Oxland Cylinder takes on layers of meaning and caries a certain historical weight.

If the first piece, ‘halan 5’, which introduces the album with discontiguous electronic scrapes and buzzes, and a swell of bleeps and bloops, an analogue bubblebath that slowly eddies and swells, feels like so many other post-Tangerine Dream ambient electronic drifts, it’s also an evocation of a process akin to alchemy, only instead of turning lead into gold, it turns minerals into alloys, including lead.

Oxland Cylinder forges temporal spaces through the medium of sound, slow-spun ambience that conjures a certain mental blankness into which the listener is free to project their own sense of alternating coastal countryside and industrial production. Some will likely visualise Poldark, although the ruins that remain today tell little of the intense labour, heavy mining and vast engines involved in the extraction of ores and pyrites and their conversion to various alloys as lined the south coast at this time.

‘Dark as a Dungeon’ finds the first occurrence of vocals: it’s a sparse shanty with ringing electronics building a glistening, metallic backdrop to the lilting vocal melody. Singing about mining against funeral echo-laden rings feels like a sad thing.

Oxland Cylinder is as rich in evocative depth and subtlety as the south coast is in social and industrial history, and an absorbing album irrespective of context or intent.

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Kemper Norton – Oxland Cylinder

Olivia Louvel – SculptOr [Hepworth Resounds]

Posted: 26 January 2020 in Albums
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Cat Werk Imprint – 7th February 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Walk away… walk around it.’ On the page, the words are devoid of threat or menace. But delivered in a fractured, disembodied voice that carries a strange sense of madness, it takes on altogether different shades of unsettling uncanniness. Amidst creeping fear chords, clicking insectoid flickers and scrapes and scratches, the voice, childlike and compressed warps and twists, as through refracted through a temporal veil or a spiritual force-field of some description. It feels like a communiqué from the other side. The voice is that of celebrated modernist sculptor and Henry Moore contemporary Barbara Hepworth, and this is one of the early moments on Olivia Louvel’s latest release, a work which forms the basis of the artist’s Masters degree, in which she investigates the voice ‘from preservation to resounding, while taking further the voice of Hepworth into the physical space as a multi-speaker diffusion’.

The source material is a 1961 recording of Barbara Hepworth’s voice, recorded by Hepworth herself in her studio in St Ives, the tape’s initial purpose was for a recorded talk with slides for the British Council, with an original duration of thirty-two minutes. Louvel’s resounding is of a similar duration, but instead of a linear narration which details the artist’s working methods, we get scrambled cut-up snippets which strangely still give a semblance of sense, reducing the extrapolations to the barest bones to give a sense of Hepworth’s creative processes and focus. But them, Willian Burroughs suggested that cutting up text (and for the purpose of this discussion, we’ll consider audio a form of text) reveals the truth, and while Hepworth’s talk isn’t brimming with political rhetoric and doublespeak, one feels that Louvel’s cut-up of her words does perhaps bring us closer to the heart of her meaning.

‘Must Carve a Stone’ loops and layers a breathy whisper of the word ‘carve’, which becomes an unsettling mantra. Minimal glitchtronica and hovering, echoing notes provide a ponderous, stammering backdrop to the looping, multi-tracked vocal layerings of ‘I Draw What I Feel in My Body’, and the sparse arrangement creates an uneasy backdrop to the words.

There isn’t a moment that’s comfortable or easy here, and Louvel’s ‘resounding’ of Hepworth is relentlessly challenging as an auditory and sensory experience. But it’s also impressive in the way that it provokes the listener to awaken those senses and absorb a multi-faceted presentation of what it is to be an artist.

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