Aural Aggravation

Slowwank – 13^th November 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

Chris Tenz is a man who is haunted by memories of a difficult and unusual past. Born in Canada and now resident in London, he was raised apart from society in the confines of a religious cult. His departure from the community resulted in his rejection and excommunication. Adrift in a very different (although no less strange) world, it was through music he grappled with the complexities of life and the complex mechanisms of living with a mind filled with questioning and doubt.

Nails Through Bird Feet is more than simply a collection of songs: five years in the making, it’s the product of an intensely personal journey, an exploration of the artist’s mind, his world and his circumstances. That the album is dedicated to two friends who also broke free of the religion – one of whom disappeared, never to be found, the other whom committed suicide – only adds to the depth of the introspection that this album encapsulates.

If the album’s title and that of the opening track, ‘Cunty’, suggests something heavily abrasive, even thrashy or grindy in nature, then the delicate, whispy folk of said opening track confounds any such expectations. A gently picked acoustic guitar hangs in a mist of delicate, amorphous sound to provide an ethereal backdrop to the vocals which sound desperately lost and aching with mourning and regret.

‘Nails Through Bird Feet’ comes in three parts, the first two segued together, so quiet as to barely make its presence felt within the grooves of the vinyl. The hushed, almost whispered singing feels almost apologetic, scared of its own sound and cautious of its own presence.

The slow, quavering sibilance of ‘Bethnal Green Cellar’ creates a soft, damp and vaguely claustrophobic sensation. It’s hard to really conjure a visual image of the space which inspired the composition: these are not visual songs, there’s nothing representational about them. That isn’t to say they’re strictly abstract, either. Through the compositions – or perhaps more accurately, the medium of sound – Tenz evokes sensations, fleeting thoughts which emerge from the shadows before disappearing once more.

‘And Elbows’ intimates a growing sense of self; the guitar and voice are both louder and stronger sounding – but the muffled sound of a sniff or laboured breath which initially provides a strange alternative percussion eventually builds to so much interference, a disruption to the flow that ultimately derails the song and swallow it up. Again, we find ourselves standing in darkness, haunted by not the song itself, but the hint of what the song may have been had it not been taken from us. It’s in this darkness, the protracted silences, the near-silences where there merest low-level hum we as listeners begin to find those echoes of doubt. Was the song as we heard it? Do our minds fill in the blanks to create a ‘complete’ song from the echoed fragments scratched in the air? Was the song itself real or only imaginary?

The challenge to any artist is to realise the work envisioned in the mind. It’s a further challenge, and one often beyond the artist’s control, to see that the receivers of the work interpret it as intended or otherwise connect with the work’s meaning. It’s in these moments of silence that Tenz communicates and conveys the most. The sensation of waking from a half-remembered dream, bereft and between worlds drifts from every corner of the album.

Although isolation, separation and a sense of unbelonging on so many levels are core both to the album’s creation and its themes, Tenz was able to work with a wide range of artists during the process of its completion.

‘Nails Through Bird Feet III’ emerges to take form, a haunting falsetto rising through a rising crescendo of cymbal-crashing drums and strings that swoop and glide. It sounds far from euphoric, but it does feel like a release.

The bonus tracks contained on the accompanying 7” single reveal further facets of Tenz’s capabilities as the near-invisible creator. The gentle, almost whimsical acoustic folk of ‘Pisco’ calls to mind early Devendra Banhart, but it’s ultimately consumed by a swell of brooding strings and eddying currents of undifferentiated sound before ending abruptly. ‘Glimpses (Doubt)’ meanwhile, somehow delineates post-punk tension to a spectral form, an outtake from 17 Seconds captured as a half-memory, sketched.

Nails Through Bird Feet is sketchy, tenuous, almost impossible to take a firm grasp of. Its contents and form are illusive, evasive, barely tangible and certainly not defined or concrete in any way. Tenz makes no definitive statements and instead leaves everything hanging and half-hidden for the listener to untangle as best they can. There are more questions than answers, but it’s in engaging with these questions that the album, truly begins, not only for the listener, but for the creator.

Chris Tenz Online

Neurot Recordings (CD) Gilead (LP) – 9th October 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

For those who gravitate toward releases on Neurot Records for that Neurosis type sound, Kowloon Walled City’s latest offering won’t disappoint.

For the most part, the instrumentation is slow, deliberate, expansive. At times, it almost grids to a halt between each beat, the low, snarling bass grind. It would be wrong to describe Grievances as being leisurely in its pace, but there’s a certain air about the performance that intimates a band who are in no hurry to reach the end of the songs, or to pander to any convention that suggests metal should be fast. Instant gratification? Forget it. They’ve worked hard to forge this album, and now you, the listener, need to work hard to take the most from it.

As such, Grievances finds KWC making optimal use of the space between each instrument, and between each chord, each note. I’m not referring simply to the separation in the way it’s been recorded, produced and mixed, although the production really does accentuate the spatial and tonal qualities of the music. The vocals, however, are more reminiscent of Unsane’s Chris Spencer than of Scott Kelly, partly on account of the fuzz of distortion that frays the edges of Scott Evans’s visceral howl. In combination, the effect is powerful. When they do pick up the pace, as on the thunderous ‘The Grift’, it’s nothing short of devastating.

Grievances is the sound of a world after everything’s collapsed: it’s the sound of rust and decay. Grievances is the soundtrack to an existence eked from what remains on parched, barren wastelands – it’s not post-metal, but post-everything. Yet for all the rage and anger which flows through it, Grievances is an album of reflection. These are dark, powerhouse dirges that tear through the recollections that still aggravate and anguish.

With just seven tracks, it may on the face of it seem a short album, but seven tracks of this sheer magnitude is enough: Kowloon Walled City wring every last drop of rage from their tortured, ravaged souls.

Grievances is an undeniably harrowing, bleak experience. Yet it’s also an album of aching beauty as well as staggering force.

Kowloon Walled City – Grievances Online

Workin’ Man Noise Unit – Play Loud

Riot Season – ReposeLP049 – November 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s no question that it’s easier than ever for a band to get their music out and on a platform where it has the potential to be heard around the globe. But with so much music out there, it’s perhaps harder than ever to get that music actually heard. How realistic is it to actually tap into that potential global audience? Being good, even mind-blowingly awesome simply isn’t enough. Ironically, then, as (major) labels implode, collapsing in confusion over the state of ‘the industry’ one could argue that bands need labels more than ever. But the real point here is that the big money – or even any money – simply isn’t there for any act who isn’t in the upper echelons. Small wonder that even seemingly ‘successful’ bands nowadays have day jobs. For example, Pissed Jeans might be signed to Sub Po, but judging by their lyrics, they’re hardly raking it in as progenitors of visceral grunge.

So, when it comes to the less successful bands… and I say this without wishing to denigrate the achievements of this act but…. well, I suspect the members of WMNU have day jobs, or otherwise got sacked from them for turning up late and hungover, not least of all judging by their self-effacing bio, in which they state ‘Our crummy band is called WORKIN’ MAN NOISE UNIT. Apostrophe, no G. (Yeah, all the good names were taken, OK.) From Reading, UK. We are drums, noise, bass, guitar, vocals, sound, energy, bad jokes, the smell of stale beer on sticky floors. Break out a cold one or two, hit a few chords, see how it sounds. Live, tonight, not sold out.’

Over the last five years, they’ve been busy ‘playing countless gigs, releasing limited run tapes/singles and making a nuisance of themselves on postage stamp sized stages around the country’. They’ve won a few fans and friends along the way, and Play Loud should, if there’s any justice, score them a few more.

Play Loud is rough ‘n’ ready, unpretentious. It’s the kind of riotous racket that hollers ‘release from long hours spent in shit office job’ or ‘hacked off with dealing with customers and need space to vent’. It’s hard-hitting, grimy, feedback-filled rock, rugged, sweaty and unglamourous. You could never describe it as being overproduced, but that’s a virtue: it’s all about capturing the energy and the immediacy of a band giving it a hundred per cent. It’s grungy, lo-fi, and whether it’s the sound or white or blue collar rage, the end result is a beige ring of perspiration around the somewhat worn Asda shirt collar.

This, of course, is the true essence of rock ‘n’ roll: fuck work, play it loud.

http://blackleatherenergy.blogspot.co.uk/

Thomas Ragsdale – Bait

This is it Forever – TIIF022

Christopher Nosnibor

Thomas Ragsdale may be better known as one half of worriedaboutsatan and Ghosting Season – two acts with the same lineup, but subtly different emphases. The solo projects of Thomas and collaborator in sound, Gavin Miller, seemingly prize apart the elementary faces of the two projects to forge sounds that are distinct and individual, while retaining a certain recognisability. Moreover, their independent works do not feel to be in any way a diminishment of their collective output.

For the most part, Bait – a film score to an indie thriller – is quiet, ponderous, reflective in mood and tone, as slowly turning mist-like synths entwine like a science documentary’s visual representation of a helix of DNA. Distant piano notes gently prod and roll, melancholy, evoking a yearning for the post-rock peak of a decade past, but also hinting at neoclassical filtered through a gauze of contemporary avant-gardism and the dichotomous relationship between digital and analogue.

At times, the music feels tentative, so quiet as to be barely present. Of course, in a filmic context this makes perfect sense. But as a standalone album release? In an age of noise – it’s impossible to walk down the street without being bombarded by a million conversations, or so sit on a train without a babble of mobile phone conversations and the bleed of earphones and the sound of someone watching a film on their tablet – such near silence feels daring. It’s almost as though Ragsdale is standing, surrounded by synths and laptops, turning the volume low and reveling in the dead air while challenging the world to shut the fuck up, just for a moment, and hear these notes as they blow in the wind. To take note of the subtle reverb, that faint crackle of distortion, that rumble of low-end noise like a storm eight miles away.

Bait is by no means an album that grabs you by the throat and shakes you about in order to demand your attention: quite the opposite, in fact. And it’s because of this quiet confidence in its capacity to conjure mood and exist in a truly ambient capacity that Ragsdale triumphs. You’ve read the review bait: now take the hook.

Thomas Ragsdale – Bait Online

Erik Griswold – Pain Avoidance Machine

Room40 – RM468 – 21^st August 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

American-born, Australian-based composer Erik Griswold has spent the last two decades exploring the potentials of the prepared piano. Pain Avoidance Machine, composed against the backdrop of what he described as ‘the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat’ is the soundtrack to Griswold’s unique approach to self-prescribed therapy. The album’s 15 tracks are meditations and aural medications of sorts, in which the instrument itself – he prepared piano – is the ‘pain avoidance machine’ of the title through which Griswold grappled and dealt with the situations bearing down on him.

These compositions don’t sound like any other prepared piano works I’ve heard, and differ on a number of levels. The pieces are highly structured and are built around solid rhythms that sound more like drum machines and click tracks than any organic percussion. Similarly, the clipped notes, in their chiming cadences, resemble electric piano and synths. The result is an album that sounds for the most part like stripped-back, minimal instrumental electro-pop.

That isn’t so say it’s lightweight or in any sense disposable: the dolorously percussive ‘Over’ is slow, ponderous, haunting, while the interloping repetition of a single, simple motif forms the basis of the hypnotic ‘Pendulum Shift’. ‘Hover’ finds Griswold conjure sludgy, doomy bass notes, and the urgent boogie of ‘The Rumble Seat’ crackles with electricity.

The textures and tones are very much points of interest and play a major part in any appreciation of the album; the way the notes interact with one another, the resonances, the hums and buzzes belie their origins and transport the listener into a different kind of space. But it’s the melodies and remarkable tunefulness of Pain Avoidance Machine which gives it a much broader appeal and lifts it out of the category of works that are interesting experimentally, prompting chin-stroking and theoretical discourse, but offer little to the more casual listener.

Erik Griswold Online

Philip Jeck – Cardinal

2LP/DL Touch # TO:98V – 23^rd October 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, the idea that things happen by mere coincidence simply doesn’t seem satisfactory. In the age of hyper-information, it seems almost inevitable that fragments from the most disparate sources will collide. And so it was that last week, I began reading Mark Fisher’s book, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. In the first few pages, Fisher, (who I now know has provided substantial coverage of Jeck over the years, particularly in writing for ‘The Wire’) frames Jeck’s work in the context of the concept of ‘hauntology’, a term coined by Jacques Derrida to explain the eerie nostalgia and uncanny sense of loss prevalent in his work. The name seemed familiar, but I was initially unable to place it, before remembering an email received a day or so before containing a list of upcoming new releases available for download.

Of course, it’s impossible for me to listen to ‘Cardinal’ without searching for the details, the ways in which the compositions evoke notions of nostalgia and a sense of loss as refracted through the prisms of theoretical discourse and personal interpretation. But ‘Cardinal’ is, however you approach it, an album steeped in evocative vibrations, a collection of instrumental works which are almost spectral in their presence at times.

Of the album, Jeck explains, "To make this record I used Fidelity record players, Casio Keyboards, Ibanez bass guitar, Sony minidisc players, Ibanez and Zoom effects pedals, assorted percussion, a Behringer mixer and it was edited it at home with minidisc players and on a laptop computer." He makes it sound so simple, and says nothing of the infinite layers the music on the resulting record contains.

It begins with a huge cathedral of sound, a shifting sonic mass which surges and swells and fills the room, enveloping the listener, to be displaced as it fades into more subtle drama. Eddying sonic mists buzz and cluster, sheltering in corners of sepulchral echoes. Time warps, speeds and slows as notes are stretched, elongated and twisted as they spin in the air.

It’s commonplace for the tracks on albums which broadly fit into the ‘ambient’ territory Jeck explores to bleed together, for the passages to be segued to form longer tracks which twist and mutate, transitioning, leading the listener on an internal journey directed by the soundtrack. ‘Cardinal’ jars the senses and confounds genre expectations: his comparatively short pieces – of which there are 13 here, many of which are under five minutes in duration – fade out or dissipate into nothing, leaving the listener to squirm through the moments of silence which separate them.

‘Called In’ – the album’s longest track by some margin at almost nine and a half minutes – finds fragments of stolen, unidentifiable, melodies scratch through an amorphous hum which at times resembles Gregorian chants slowed to near stasis, with screeds of chilling whistles and high-pitched drones making fleeting flights over the swamps below. ‘Broke Up’, too, finds spectral slivers emerging from a low-level hum which hangs like dry ice

It’s an immense work, deep, rich and evocative. The bonus inclusion of a free download of a 42-minute live recording, ‘Live in Caen’, captured in February 2015, is extremely worthwhile: while the depth and texture of Jeck’s work is perhaps best appreciated in its studio form, his live set – which dares to explore hushed tones to the point of silence in an time of perpetual noise – shows he’s more than capable of creating a rarefied atmosphere in an alternative setting.

Philip Jeck Online