Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Drömloch – Late Style

Posted: 14 August 2016 in Albums
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Kit Records – 31st August 2016

James Wells

The title is a reference to various artists who enjoyed a creative surge in their later years, who, instead of tapering away to an end horizon, defied the conventional downward trajectory to create works which marked a new and noteworthy phase in their already illustrious careers.

As the blurb explains, ‘Ageing isn’t always a dignified, serene fade. The brink before death can be violently creative; it can bring about loss of inhibition, unexpected innovations and sourceless leaps. In art, late style often means an unfettered outpouring. Confined to a wheelchair following cancer surgery, Matisse turned to simple paper cutouts in his later years. The work produced in this period, his ‘seconde vie’, became his most admired – physical restriction had been inverted in an expression of freedom and colour. Goya’s last works were also a departure from former style. Increasingly deaf and fearing insanity, he created a series of dark paintings reflecting this bleak, morbid outlook on life. Sensory deterioration seemed to offer Goya unprecedented vision’.

In recent months, I’ve heard and reviewed a number of albums which use – and abuse – church organs to unconventional ends, although a common thematics are their slow decay and their relationship with their surroundings, the architecture and sense of place. Sense of space is also integral to the instrument’s sound: as grand an instrument as a church organ is, much of its power resides in the natural reverb of the building in which it is installed.

But Late Style is a work preoccupied less with location or architecture, but time, and where the organ’s power is concerned, the focus of attention here is on the diminishment of that power, something which also inspired Stefan Fraunberger’s recent album Quellgeister 2: Wurmloch.

However, while Fraunberger’s work and Michel Moser’s Antiphon Stein were centred around pipe organs, Drömloch’s instrument of choice is a Hohner church organ, a synthesiser situated at the label’s headquarters. And so it is that an instrument which once produced sounds resembling a pipe organ near the end of its life wheezes in a different kind of way, leading to the contemplation that ‘Perhaps circuitry and software can have late style, too.’

As is often the case when process becomes integral to the end product, a little expanation goes a long way: ‘Like creatures and plants, they change over time; they decay, confront mortality, and their functions adapt. This record is a collection of live takes recorded directly from a Hohner church organ at the point of collapse. This circuitry of this hulking synth, long-installed at Kit HQ, has inexplicably decayed over time, rendering its preset drum loops and melodies as raptures of white noise, squelches and and bizarrely spiralling clangs. The result is primitive, aleatoric music – weirdly moving digital swan-songs, each named after the mangled preset triggered during recording’.

Late Style may be dominated by elongated drones and quivering, wavering hums, sounds recognisable as originating from the groan and swell of a dilapidated organ, but bubbling bleeps and less organ-ic sounds are overlaid and cut across these to forge strange juxtapositions.

The first track ‘8 Beat Variation’ finds the organ fading in and cutting out while stop-start percussion and variable echoes and delays disrupt any kind of flow. With volumes and tones wavering and fluttering unpredictably, and extraneous feedback, whistles, crackles and pops interfering with the irregular drum machine beats, the effects is disorientating.

‘Waltz’ sounds very like the time one spends fiddling with a keyboard trying to find the right sound, when every preset just sounds naff. If much of Late Style sounds like s much pissing about, then perhaps that’s largely the point: like many experimental albums – Miguel Frasconi’s Standing Breakage (for Stan Brakhage) captures the artist striving to push a cracked glass bowl to its limits and beyond – Late Style is about taking an opportunity when it presents itself and capturing the outcome. In this sense, it’s a truly experimental work.

The fact that this album, and those mentioned previously, are concerned with the destruction, or death, of an instrument, is significant: the fundamental premise of the avant-garde is that in order to move forward, to create anew, it is first necessary to destroy.

There are also some quite compelling moments to be found here: the surge and swell of ‘OI’ builds an ominous drama, while ‘Key’ is a rather fun exercise is microtonal blippage that sits alongside Mark Fell’s exploratory releases on Editions Mego. However, unlike Fell’s works, Late Style is both more varied and more listenable.

Drömloch - Late Style

Hypnopazūzu – Create Christ, Sailor Boy

Posted: 13 August 2016 in Albums
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House Of Mythology – 26th August 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Like Natalie Imbruglia, I’m torn. Fence-sitting is no position for anyone, least of all a music reviewer: ho-hum is no critique. But I’m torn between instinct and critical distance here. Y’see, it’s a fine line between spirituality and pseudomystical bullshit. And the trouble is, one man’s spirituality is another man’s pseudomystical bullshit. The orientation of most organised religions and many other credos includes a certain emphasis on collectivism and unity, but ultimately any belief system or spiritual framework is inherently personal.

This review starts on difficult ground: Hypnopazūzu is a collaboration between David Tibet and Youth. I’m a huge fan of Killing Joke, and can only salute Youth for his production work, despite the fact I’m not keen on many of the major artists he’s worked with. David Tibet is an entirely different proposition and is someone I’ve never really been a fan of. I don’t have any issue with Current 93 per se, and it would be a grave mistake to overlook their contribution to the development of the experimental strain of industrial music in the early 80s. I’ve simply never got into their work. But some of the company David Tibet has kept over the course of his career does give cause for concern, not least of all prominent neo-Nazis Boyd Rice and Douglas Pearce. It would be a mistake to call Tibet guilty by association, but perhaps he should be more careful about the people he works with: Current 93 re broadly associated with Neofolk, and the Neofolk scene is conspicuous for the number of dodgy people connected with it. And beyond that, there are an awful lot of really turgid albums in circulation, which, when not revelling in far-right thematics, are preoccupied with disappearing up their own sphincters while preaching high occultism.

To give Tibet the benefit of the doubt, he presents as a broad-minded individual, who identifies himself as a Christian, but has devoted a lot of time to exploring occultism, Buddhism and Gnosticism, and as such, appears to be genuinely exploratory (rather than hiding behind the pretence of exploration as a means of justifying the use of dangerous imagery), engaged with spirituality in its broadest sense on a purely intellectual level first and foremost. Which brings us to Create Christ, Sailor Boy. How does one position a work such as this?

The press release describes it as ‘transcendent, tumultuous, and tricky, the sound of two spirits skipping as one to create a sidereal glimpse into uncounted cartoons,’ and quotes Tibet as saying, “I am happy always to work with Youth in any way, forever and for ever and always and in all ways… I wait for my Ouija Board Planchette to receive his Mind’s Eye Text.”

I’ll refrain from making any gags about the mind’s eye, third eye, and the brown eye and keep things as objective as possible. In such a context it’s perhaps a mistake to attempt to determine whether or not this is an album of high spirituality or pseudomystical bullshit, primarily in the interest of keeping a certain critical distance. Is it possible to separate the aesthetic from the art? Perhaps: Tibet has also long shown himself to be a man preoccupied with the apocalypse, and the sense of apocalyptic foreboding hangs heavy over this album. In the current global climate, it feels entirely appropriate. These are scary and challenging times, regardless of one’s faith or faithlessness, and in this context, Create Christ, Sailor Boy is an album of our times. It’s the soundtrack to struggle, the soundtrack of desperation, of humanity reaching out and clutching, desperately for something. Anything.

There can be no question that Create Christ, Sailor Boy is truly immense in scope and depth. Particularly in depth. This goes beyond the human condition. And in many respects transcends vague notions of spiritualism. This is not soul music, or even soulful in the conventional sense, so much as music which probes the very core of the soul, pulling hard at the gut. From the opening notes – shimmering, sweeping synths and crashing cymbals – provide an epic and portentous backdrop to Tibet’s evocations of apocalypse and build to a momentous climax. And all within the album’s first five minutes. Yes, this is colossal work that’s epic on every level. Every level. On first listen, I detested this album, but it needs time to grow. And time to grow. Whichever side of the fence you may sit.

‘Christmas with the Channellers’ brings forth an ethereal subterranean atmosphere which typifies the album as a whole. It’s an immense track which brings together heaven and hell in a battle on this earthly domain and as Tibet tears his guts out through his vocal delivery, the enormity of existence is thrown into sharp relief. ‘The Crow At Play’ is a tense colossus, which finds Tibet rasp into a frenzy as he name-checks Gary Glitter. Yes, this is a work’s that’s socially engaged and as such it would be wrong to accuse it of being a work which focuses on the spiritual at the expense of the real world.

‘It’s tool time!’ Tibet announces in a wide-eyed and excited tone on ‘Sweet Sodom Singings’. Is the invocation of Home Improvement intentional? It surely must be. There is no shortage of lyrical evidence to confirm that Tibet is as in touch with the upper world and its culture as he is with all things internal and far above the flesh.

Sonically, it’s interesting, too, with tracks like ‘The Sex of Stars’ whipping up a dense sonic maelstrom in contrast with the psychedelic / eastern / industrial crossover of ‘Sweet Sodom Singings’ and the trudging ‘Pinoccio’s Handjob’, the ethereal spacetronica of ‘The Auras re Escaping into the Forest and the and brooding folk of ‘Night Shout, Bird Tongue’. In terms of textural range, it’s hard to fault.

In many respects, I’m still on the fence, but musically and compositionally, Create Christ, Sailor Boy is an impressive work. It may be pseudomystical bullshit, but it’s a powerful album that has a lot of listening hours in it.

 

Hypnozazu - Create Christ Sailor Boy

Shield Patterns – Mirror Breathing

Posted: 11 August 2016 in Albums
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Gizeh Records – GZH68 – 2nd September 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Richard Knox’s musical career is marked by works which are ponderous and atmospheric. Howeevr, his latest venture in colaboration with Claire Brentnall, is distinguished by a leaning toward material which feels more focused, compositionally, and more direct. It’s all relative, of course, and Mirror Breathing is, as the title implies, a work which is hazy, misty, the songs grasping, just for a second, at the ephemeral and reflecting the moments back, refracted and rarefied. Following on from debut album Contour Lines (2014) and 2015’s Violet EP, Mirror Breathing marks a step further into dark pop territory, although dark is indeed the operative word here, and it’s clear that in Brentnall he’s found the perfect collaborator: a person with not only an amazing voice, but an equal understanding of what it takes to forge ponderous, nuanced, atmospheric music. It’s not a matter of drawing out which each brings to each composition: Shield Patterns are built on collaboration and intuition, more of a case of a creative space emerging from a collective ‘third mind’ than the simple coming together to two musicians. 

The musical backing the pair create is atmospheric, and captures elements of light and shade which contrast magnificently; dark, rumbling low-end and industrial scrapes are tempered by ethereal ambient sounds of indeterminate origin. Claire Brentnall’s breathy vocal hangs, spine-shiveringly, over the drifting soundscape. The whole production is draped in a soft-focus feel, a mist which partially obscures the shapes and forms and renders them vague, unfamiliar and ambiguous. This ambiguity and unfamiliarity is an unsettling sensation, and while the graceful vocals superficially soothe, the emotional tension and overall sonic disquiet ultimately leave the listener pulled in different directions, peering into the shadows and wondering what lies just out of view. Arrhythmic percussion echoes in the dark, detonations which send shuddering vibrations through the ground. There’s a stark beauty to ‘This Temporary Place’ that calls to mind Zola Jesus, and elsewhere, dark industrial grumbling tremors contrast with the dreamy, otherworldly atmosphere of ‘Cerulean’.

Julia Kent is an artist who has a tendency to crop up in all sorts of places and with remarkable frequency: a respected solo artist in her own right, she is also a one-time member of Black Tape for a Blue Girl, as well as performing as a member of Rasputina and Anthony and the Johnson, he cello work on three of the tracks here adds further texture to the arrangements. Ultimately, though, it’s the balance of the instrumentation which really makes the album work: there’s a lot going on, with many incidental sounds blended in, but it’s seamless and no one aspect or sound dominates at any point.

Again returning to the connotations of the title, if the image of a steamed mirror can be read as a twist on the ‘smoke and mirrors’ metaphor, then there is an element of deception in the way the compositions seem sparse, but are in fact constructed from manifold layers which form strata of remarkable sonic depth and density. The drums may be distant-sounding and low in the mix, but they roll like thunder. In Claire’s vocals, you don’t hear every word, but you feel them. Sometimes she soars so high as to be barely audible to the human ear. Sometimes, it’s less about the actual lyrical content than the delivery, and her voice as of and in itself conveys more than mere words ever could. There’s a quality in Claire Brentnall’s voice which communicates on a subconscious, subliminal level. Her voice echoes in the recesses between the beats, drifts along, enveloped in the gauze-like textures, and occupies invisible spaces between the notes. Hers is a voice which is delicate, but by no means weak; yet the strength of her delivery lies in her ability to convey vulnerability.

From the alluring ‘Dusk’ to the dolorous chimes of ‘Blue Shutters’ and the sinister depths of ‘Balance & Scatter’ with its dark jazz intimations, via the tranquil and sedate(d)‘Sleepdrunk’, the songs conjure scenes of both anguish and ecstasy and often explore the pull of existing in both states simultaneously. Haunting, hypnotic and disquieting, Mirror Breathing is an impressive work that warrants time for thought and reflection.

Shield Patterns - Mirror Breathing

Black Tape For A Blue Girl – These Fleeting Moments

Posted: 10 August 2016 in Albums
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Metropolis Records – 12th August 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a full thirty years since Sam Rosenthal began operating as Black Tape for a Blue Girl. Over that time, there have been ten albums showcasing ethereal, gothic (in the theatrical, brooding sense, rather than goth-rock sense) and dark ambient sounds which established them as pioneers of American darkwave. Perhaps it’s because of their vanguard position that they’ve maintained a relatively modest cult status in the shade of various associated acts and artists they’ve influenced.

These Fleeting Moments, their first album in seven years and released to coincide with their thirtieth anniversary, sees the return of original vocalist Oscar Herrera, after a seventeen-year hiatus from music. It’s perhaps fitting, then, that the album represents something of a return to the roots of Black Tape for a Blue Girl, a name which conjures uncomfortable images while simultaneously evoking doomed romance and the extremities of twisted devotion.

Opening the album with a seventeen-minute behemoth is a pretty bold move. ‘The Vastness of Life’ encapsulates its own essence within its title: a track that builds from a brooding neofolk strum and drifts through a succession of transitions through weeping string and passages and segments of wispy, ethereal ambience, it’s an epic journey which is practically an album in its own right. The twin vocalists emote achingly and pour every last drop of soul into these rarefied moments. Where could any album go from there? With the exception of ‘Meditation on the Skeleton’, with its ten-minute running time, the remaining twelve tracks are relatively concise, with ‘Limitless’ a quintessential example of the 90s goth darkwave sound as exemplified by the likes of Every New Dead Ghost and Suspiria: fractal Cure-esque guitars reverberate around cold synths by way of a backdrop to a melodramatic baritone vocal delivery. But neither track individually represents These Fleeting Moments as a whole. In fact, no one track does, and the album’s diversity is quite something, spanning shoegaze and folk and neoclassical, often simultaneously.

Much of the instrumentation is organic and natural-sounding, with piano and strings at the heart of many of the compositions. These are used to diverse effect, from the sparse, haunting moorlands of ‘Please Don’t Go’ to the insistent throb of ‘Six Thirteen’. But for all the range, all of the grace and elegance, a darkness hangs over every piece: ‘Bike Shop’ is no whimsical indie pop ditty, and elsewhere, ‘You’re Inside Me’ invites comparisons to both Scott Walker and Marc Almond, and ‘Zug Ko-In’ is a slow-turning hypnotic track which calls to mind both The Doors and more recent Swans and features a soaring guitar solo.

It’s an album which is more exploratory and expressive than linear: the track flow together to form a much greater whole, forging a work that’s immersive and meditative. Yes, it’s an album one listens to, and it’s not one to dip in and out of or select highlight tracks from: rather, it’s an album to make time stand still and to get lost in.

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Cara & Mike Gangloff and the Great American Drone Orchestra – Knock On Life’s Door

Posted: 4 August 2016 in Albums
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MIE (Vinyl) / Clang (CD) – 5th August 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Classics, standards, call them what you will. There are so many songs that have been performed and recorded and everyone, songs that have become in some sense the canon of American musical history. The majority of the tracks featured on Knock on Life’s Door will be familiar, and if not immediately so, then they will be subliminally engrained.

The songs are all woven into the heritage of American music. These are not traditional folk songs, but examples of ‘modern’ American songwriting (context is important here: modern does not mean contemporary or recent in generational terms, but in the longer view of history (even America’s comparatively short history), the twentieth century is modern. These are songs the origins of which have been largely forgotten, the songs themselves having taken on a life of their own and become a part of the collective (sub)conscious or the canon.

The press release comments that ‘Cara and Mike Gangloff don’t so much reimagine old American music as infuse it with the life it’s always had. A life always just below the surface and a life far beyond the stars.’ It’s perhaps fair to say that as a European – at least geographically and spiritually – my comprehension and cognisance of ‘America’ is somewhat simplistic. However deeply I immerse myself in American music and American literature created in the twentieth century, I remain completely distanced, unable to truly grasp the disparity between the America of TV and film, even the America of art and literature and news reportage and documentaries, and the ‘real’ America, the experience of the American everyday and the true core of American culture And so the life below the surface, the life of these songs and the significance they hold is something I have to ultimately accept is something which will forever elude me. But this does not preclude me from enjoying and appreciating not only the spirit of the album, but also the intent behind these radical reinterpretations of what might reasonably considered ‘important’ songs.

So, as I said, the songs on Knock On Life’s Door will likely all be familiar, at least through the medium of one or another previous version. That’s the nature of classics and standards: so often their origins are lost, the original creator’s input usurped by another or numerous others. The artist – or at least the writer and original artist – is eclipsed by the song. But of course, herein lies the road to immortality as the art takes on a life of its own. Nevertheless, that familiarity will probably be strained on hearing their interpretations, and I do mean this as an unequivocally positive thing. Cara & Mike Gangloff have paid a heartfelt homage to each of the songs, and by no means set out to do them damage or disservice. And yet it’s safe to say no-one will have heard any of the songs played in the way they are here.

The nine-minute rendition of ‘Moon River’ finds Cara weaving around the tune, slowed to an opiate crawl of woozy, undulating drone. The meditative Eastern-tinged blues of ‘Misty’ is a long way from both Ella Fitzgerald and Johnny Mathis, the scratchy strings scraping out a hypnotic sway that transforms the jazz standard into something completely non-standard from whichever perspective one views it. Calamitously crashing percussion and shrieks of feedback punctuate a manic freeform arrangement of ‘All of Me’, which features a vocal performance that’s little short of terrifying in its intensity, sounding more like a challenge than an invitation. The strolling stop/start bassline of ‘Cry Me a River’ hints at something approaching conventional, until the tortured strings and rattling percussion threaten to derail the dual – or should that be duelling? – vocals. ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ concludes the album in a more upbeat, melodic fashion, but the song’s jaunty folk skeleton is crooked and bent out of shape.

Knock On Life’s Door is an album which will perplex a lot of people, and many purists and fans of well-known versions of the songs presented here will likely be affronted by such unconventional interpretations, not only because of what may be construed as Cara & Mike Gangloff’s anarchic irreverence but also the alternative musicality of their arrangements. These are precisely the reasons Knock On Life’s Door is a good album: it’s bold, it’s challenging, and above all, it’s very, very different.

Cara & Mike Gangloff & the Great American Drone Orchestra cover

The International Nothing (…and something) – The Power of Negative Thinking

Posted: 1 August 2016 in Albums
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Monotype Records – mono086

Christopher Nosnibor

The trend for positive thinking isn’t one I’m on board with. Social Media is aclog with well-meaning but vacuous affirmations and new-age wisdom might briefly lighten the bubble some – many – people are content to float around in, but none of it actually does anything to address the underlying causes of the feelings of sadness, melancholy, anger, emptiness which afflict us all. The idea that it’s possible to think oneself healthy or successful – is one which is clearly problematic. That isn’t to say that mental training can’t improve wellbeing, but anyone who supports the belief that positive thinking can cure depression, or remedy the ills of the world is very much mistaken. But any idea looks more interesting and offers new possibilities when turned on its head, so inverting the popular notions of the power of positive thinking is almost certain to spark some flash of inspiration.

The International Nothing have built a career on inversion, as previous albums The Dark Side of Success, Less Action, Less Excitement, Less Everything, and the mega-ironically Mainstream attest, not to mention their very name, a name which connotes inversion of something to present the absolute absence of anything, on an international scale. In context, I get the impression that The Power of Negative Thinking, housed as it is in a rather surreal cover depicting drawings of mythical cross-breeds floating in the air amidst fluffy clouds, isn’t entirely serious in its titling. Nevertheless, anger, frustration, sadness, can all be channelled creatively to yield powerful artistic results. The International Nothing is ‘psycho-acoustic clarinet duo’ Michael Thieke and Kai Faganaschinki, working here in collaboration with Christian Weber (double-bass) and Eric Schaefer (drums and percussion) (collectively, the ‘something’).

The album’s seven experimentally-led (but very much not improvised) tracks are not negative in the sense that they express or articular any explicit negative emotions, there’s no nihilistic noise or an overt espousal of any ideology, philosophy or mindset. What the pieces do convey is an ominous atmosphere which is ambiguous. And that ambiguity provokes a sense of creeping doubt. Contrary to the popular consensus, doubt is not necessarily a bad thing: uncertainty requires consideration, appraisal, in order to pursue a resolution of certainty. Certainty without discourse is simply blind faith. ‘The Golden Age of Miscommunication’ could well be a term applied to our present times, and the track’s plucked double bass and skittering rhythms which stop and start is disruptive, and a reminder that to reach the truth, one must question and challenge the facts as they’re presented. To accept unquestioningly, to allow oneself to become comfortable, is to be complacent and complacence brings vulnerability. The easy comfort of the snaking groove which emerges, only to fade to nothing, can be read as a metaphor, it’s disappearance a reminder of the importance of being prepared for unexpected change. The lugubrious ‘We Can Name You With Their Names’ is built around a strolling bass and scraping clarinet drone which is soon drowned to a long-building swell of percussion and a shrieking howl of treble. ‘Long Bow Glowing’ may be brief, but it’s dark and ominous, a foreboding bass drone is disturbed by hovering, high-pitched hums.

Sonically, the tonal explorations are highly engaging in themselves: the ways the clarinets resonate against one another is fascinating, and a defining feature of the work of The International Nothing. The additional instrumentation brought by the Something bring dynamic range and a real sense of depth to the pieces. Compositionally, this is a dark and thought-provoking work, although its weight lies as much in its connotations and implications and the work it invites the listener to involve themselves in which provides its real power – the power of negative thinking.

 

Internation Nothing

Kemper Norton – Toll

Posted: 30 July 2016 in Albums
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Front & Follow – F&F043 – 26th August 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Kemper Norton’s previous releases, Carn and Loor were respectively located in specific rural locations and the city. In contrast, Toll heads off-shore, and it begins with a swell of sound as grand as the ocean, but very far from an attempt to recreate the sound of the tide, a vast, grating, rolling buzz. It soon becomes clear that this is neither an ambient album which strives to recreate and convey the kindness and cruelty of the sea, and nor is it an ocean-inspired drama (I would contend that The Christmas Tree Ship EP by I Like Trains is pretty much the ultimate in this field).

Toll is a complex work, which is inspired by – and interrogates – two very different pieces of history – specifically the lost Cornish kingdom of Lyonesse, and the 1967 sinking of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker. Both are stories set in the same geographical space, a stretch of ocean off the west coast of Cornwall. To bring together what could be considered a mythological disaster – and thus in the literary, classical sense, a tragedy – with a modern-day disaster, is a bold and ambitious project, and it’s the duality of ancient and modern which finds Toll pulling in different directions. And yet this is not an album built on conflict, but an attempt to reconcile very different histories, united by location.

Although a broadly ambient album for large segments, Toll deviates from this or any genre category frequently, and widely. Toll’s preoccupation is more with narrative and themes than with atmosphere alone, although this is not to say it isn’t a deeply atmospheric work. To this end, the album does not restrict its form to any one musical mode, and ‘The Town’ takes the form of a lyric folk song, but performed as a sonic wash that’s a cross between folktronica and ambientgaze. Meanwhile, the echo-blasted vocal of ‘Black Silk’, accompanied by a drone and distant percussion owes more to Suicide and Massive Attack than anything from the worlds of either ambient or folk. The instrumental passages hover and hum, sometimes intimating trepidation and others tranquillity, but oftentimes with darker undercurrent eddying beneath the surface.

Two-thirds of the way though the album, ‘Agnes and Louisa’ forges a deep, rumbling, rolling rhythm, a swell of sound which grates and wheezes, with electronic interventions, while the sparse, lilting electronic folk of ‘Coming Home’ is quietly menacing. The final track, ‘The Tide’ brings the album to a perfect conclusion: a magnificently balanced synergy of folk and electronica, traditional and contemporary, it builds a haunting surge of sound and emotion.

What Toll ultimately conveys, by oblique means, is a sense of the intrinsic nature the relationship between human geography and physical geography, community and place. History is every inch as integral to the shaping of a location and those who reside there as geography: past events etch themselves into the landscape and the collective conscious, however discreetly, and similarly legends are imprinted in the backdrop of local life. Toll is not an easy or immediate work, but it is one which is deeply evocative and highly thought-provoking.

 

Kemper Norton - Toll

New Rome – Nowhere

Posted: 29 July 2016 in Albums
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Room40 – RM487 – 20th May 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Location is a state of mind. The abstraction of the cover art – an image of clouds with the colour balance altered to give it a greenish hue – and a conspicuous absence of any text provides an indication of the contents it houses. In fact, it’s a nice-looking package overall: the back cover contains ink with only the words ‘New Rome’ and the simple but distinctive Room40 logo, both in small type. Embossed, white on white is the album’s title. It’s larger, but still easy to miss in the wrong / right light. And just as the attention to detail is what renders the initial engagement and the tactile experience special, so it is that the tactile elements of the music – the tone and texture and the significance of details all too easy to overlook while observing the bigger picture – make this album what it is.

To give some background: New Rome is the latest project from the Polish composer Tomasz Bednarczyk. He merged in the late 2000s with a succession of albums which proved somewhat groundbreaking, combining pastoral tonality with ‘grainy smears of pulse and rhythm’ and heavily imbued with a personal quality which was melancholic yet lilting in tone. Having explored other avenues with other projects, New Rome marks something of a return to this earlier territory.

The album’s ten tracks are comparatively brief, and in some respects have a certain sketch-like quality. But the fact they are brief and fade out where so many other artists would extend the pieces out for an eternity means that there’s a freshness about Nowhere: with each track presenting a different shade, texture and tone, there is a rare sense of movement about the album. Many of the soft and delicate, nebulous cloud-like drones which drift and turn are what one might call ‘conventional’ within the field of ambient and chillout music, but the undulating, interloping synth motifs and small but twitchy little rhythms give the pieces an underlying energy. ‘Venus’ hums, the note hanging for an age before flickering beats and extraneous sounds, like the wash of waves, disrupt the stillness. And yet, while the notes swell and sink, an air of tranquillity remains. ‘Dive’ is much dense, the deliberate, pulsating beats more pronounced, dominant even, but above all, Nowhere is defined by balance, with no one aspect of the sound taking primacy. And this is ultimately the most important detail of all. The bigger picture only exists because of its symbiotic relationship with the constituent parts, rendering Nowhere a magnificently realised work.

 

New_Rome_Nowhere

Wolfram – X

Posted: 28 July 2016 in Albums
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Monotype Records – mono102 – June 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been eleven years since Wolfram last released an album. But the gap between albums no longer seems to be such an issue as it was: the industry has changed and now that, beyond the mainstream, at least, labels have significantly less power, artists are generally free to release material when they’re ready. Or when they can find an outlet. Or when they have the time outside the day-job, or the funds to do it. There’s no long-winded explanation for the space between Wolfram’s releases, and ultimately, it has no bearing on the simple fact that there’s an album.

Said album begins with a long wash of sound which resembles the sea, swelling and swelling to a wash of fizz with ‘W:X:swarm’. From amidst the pink and white noise frequencies emerge small sonic details: a buzz, barely audible and yet distracting. In a sense, the importance of minutiae and detail is a key theme of the album. Small and seemingly insignificant in themselves, these features become impossible to unnoticed once they’ve caught the attention. So, the fact each track is a minute longer than the one before may not be significant in itself, particularly given that the tracks segue into one another to create on continuous track, Yet the designations of the individual tracks to correspond with sonic shifts between each passage and the increasing running times are indicative of an internal logic which overarches the album as a whole.

Beyond X (the album) being part of ‘a wider project consisting of miniCD-R, CD and audiocassettes on a special box, produced in limited runs of just 25 copies (budget is a factor, but there’s also a cult appeal in rendering work clandestine and unavailable to the masses), the significance of the album and individual track titles is not clear. But then, mystery is also part of the appeal. And of course, X is that unknown, indefinable quality.

‘exploded view’ is perhaps the strongest example of Wolfram’s interest in contrast and his ability to forge tonal conflict. Crackling static first brings light interference to tranquil drones, slowly but surely growing in intensity and volume, until an angry, angular, sawing buzz all but engulfs the soft tones beneath. ‘N:xizhe’ is a dark, sinister piece which rumbles and groans, distant inhuman sounds evoke fearful sensations as they rise and fall to silence again over a sustained, low drone. And, indeed, there is a definite progression and trajectory through the six-track sequence, with each piece being darker and more threatening, culminating in the bleak ‘Secret Humans’. Insect skitters flit across a low, undulating drone, straining mechanoid hums and grinds labour amidst the seething swarm. It isn’t human, but alien, burrowing into the brain through the ears and disturbing the cranial cavities and the ravines of the mind by pouring doubt and discomfort into every channel. It’s far from simple, but it’s highly effective.

 

 

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Sanford Parker – Lash Back

Posted: 25 July 2016 in Albums
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My Proud Mountain – 22nd July 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

It takes a while to get going: the first minute and a half is simply drifting sound, like the distant sea. But Lash Back is an album that takes it time to build atmosphere. Parker may be the lauded producer and electronics wrangler behind some of metal’s more intriguing contemporary acts, but Lash Back is certainly not a metal album. But it is dark and as innovative an album as you’re likely to hear this year.

Stammering snare drums add an element of unpredictability to the sedate and solid bass-led rhythm on opener ‘Psychic Driving’. As the layers of sound overlay one another, forming a towering sonic cathedral, one is increasingly moved to awe. The stark industrial electronica of ‘Knuckle Crossing’ hangs over a slow, deliberate beat, shifting shapes and textures shading shadows and conjuring an air of coldness and dislocation, while ‘Slow Children’ broods ominously. Parker’s compositions, and their execution, show extreme restraint, the emphasis very much on building tension rather than looking to grant its release. Just as the invisible monster is always scarier than the one which reveals itself, the undefined threat and menace that lurks on, and beneath, the surface of the tracks, is more powerful than their realisation.

There are sustained sonic attacks, and plenty of them for those who relish the blistering noise assault: the aforementioned ‘Slow Children’ does eventually burst into a steely crescendo, and the slow surge of all-engulfing noise that is ‘Low Gaps’ is breathtakingly dense, with heavy hints of Prurient in its tone and the juxtaposition of synth sounds more commonly found on commercial dance albums, with mangled industrial noise, and the sonorous mechanical grating of ‘Sheep Slaughter’ is every bit as abrasive as the title suggests; it’s a soundtrack of pain, of death, of mass-scale killing.

Lash Back is by no means an accessible or easy album, but then, it isn’t meant to be, and Parker has produced something that is unusual and unsettling, and which conforms to precisely nothing.

 

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