Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Eugene Dubon – Finish Line

Posted: 11 February 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature – 6th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The blurb prepares us for what to expect by explaining that ‘Finish Line is the debut EP from Seattle ex-pat Eugene Dubon’ and promising ‘Seven tracks of rhythmic bass-heavy post-punk fuzz atmospherics, with Eugene’s musings on subjects such as the goldrush and clocks drolly delivered in a dead-pan style. Unapologetic and upfront.’

Only, it doesn’t fully prepare us, because Finish Line is quite extraordinary. In amongst the morass of post-punk-inspired bands and tunes, Finish Line stands out for actually living up to any hype.

The title track smashes it all together: a nonchalant, level spoken word piece is pitched against some layered guitar and swirling noise, but it’s the relentless hammer of the drum machine that defines the sound and sets the parameters for the EP’s six tracks.

‘Last Page’ has a different energy, with a piston-pumping mechanised drum – more Big Black than anything else – keeping things tight against a swirling array of guitar chimes and Dubon narrates from a point of clinical detachment, with ‘Cruising’ proving particularly punchy and percussion-led. And thinking as the album progresses, Dubon’s monotone vocal is more Steve Albini than anyone else: croaking, cool, sardonic, detached.

Dubon’s deadpan delivery renders this as much a set of spoken word backed by music, but it’s not easy to pitch anything overtly literary or spoken word. You kind of lose yourself to the point that the words drift away, the vocals becoming another instrument, and that’s largely on account of the sameness of the delivery, the flat, evenness of it all, his dry baritone isn’t given to variety of tone or pitch, but it very much works with his material.

Halfway through ‘State’, while revelling in the fractal guitars, it occurs to me just how much this calls to mind Kompromat, the most recent album by I Like Trains, and ‘Signpost’ built around a repetitive loop of programmed bass and drum sounds like Sleaford Mods on heavy tranquillisers., with haunting Cure-esque echoes drifting in and out to provide accent and detail.

Rounding off with the slow, gloomy, ‘Conversation With Jean Claude Batois’, we find Dubon wandering into territory that sits somewhere between The Doors and Beat Generation jazz-infused spoken word poetry. It’s not a race to the finish line, but a slow, smoky and soporific meandering towards it. But the change of tempo is well-times, after six back-to-back bangers propelled by piston-pumping beats and snaking chorus-coated basslines. And while Finish Line clearly does belong within that post-punk bracket, it also sets Eugene Dubon apart as having an individual take on the template.

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FVNERALS – Let the Earth Be Silent

Posted: 7 February 2023 in Albums
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Prophecy Productions – 3rd February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When I decided to strike out and create Aural Aggravation, the premise – at least in my head – was that I would write whatever I liked about whatever I liked, although the more detailed version of that was that I would pen essay-length reviews instead of the usual sub-three-hundred-word summaries that were, I suppose, about volume rather than depth. Equally, the idea at the time, back in 2016, was that it would be a vehicle by which to explore my relationship with music as much as the music itself. I haven’t always maintained this approach since: sometimes I’ve kicked out pieces simply chasing hits as the site has grown in its readership; others I’ve simply not felt like going deeper. And ultimately, I’ve thought ‘fuck it, my site, my platform’, and I have to say I’m comfortable with that. The quality of my writing is variable, and my typing and proofing even more so, but that’s part and parcel of keeping it real and with a view to the bigger picture that reviewing has to be – for me – about how I feel about the music I’m writing about. Because music isn’t something to simply be dissected clinically, assessed on technical merit. People listen to music because of the way it affects them, not because they’re on a battle of the bands panel critiquing like they’re judging Strictly.

You’d think that when things are unspeakably bleak and I’m facing struggles of a magnitude I find almost impossible to face, let alone articulate, the last thing I would want to do is wrap myself in a blanket of suffocatingly dark music, and that the last thing I could bear to listen to while in the process of arranging a funeral is anything by a band called FVNERALS.

But then psychology is complex.

I write to neutralise, to create distance. If it’s on the page, it’s not me, or my experience, it’s simply words. When I fell and broke my ribs some years back, I tore open the palm of my hand on landing. In shock, the first thing I did on arrival home wasn’t to clean the grit out and sterilize the bloody mess, but to photograph it. My wife asked why the hell I did that. It was a fair question. I hate blood, it makes me feel queasy, dizzy, faint. If it’s my own. A photograph of blood doesn’t bother me. So the photograph created separation. It was a hand, not my hand. If it had been my hand, I’d have probably passed out. A hand is just a picture, it’s just TV, like a movie.

I do not feel as if I am living in my own life right now. It doesn’t seem real. Having suffered a bereavement – expected, but at the same time unexpected – solace emerges from unexpected places. I’m not seeking comfort, and have no interest in exploring where I am on the journey of the five stages of bereavement. I am stepping back, and assessing the scene. It is not my life. And this is the soundtrack to my surveillance.

‘Darkness. FVNERALS have created an album that turns the emptiness of the void and the depth of the abyss into sound with their third full-length "Let the Earth Be Silent". The duo gives sonic shape to the silence of extinction that humankind brings to all life on earth and itself. Depression, isolation, and the despair that this existence brings ooze out of every note’.

Lead single and the album’s opening track, ‘Ashen Era’ sets the tone and is representative of the heavy, harrowing furrow the album ploughs, with warping, disorientating noise and disembodied vocals circulating in a mist around thunderous but muffled percussion. It’s all-immersive, dark, dense, and listening to it feels like being buried alive, but at the same time transcendental.

A crashing gong heralds the opening of the scene that is ‘Horror Eats the Light’, released back in November as a single. It’s a bass-dominated exercise in heavy, droning doom and ethereality.

The album’s song titles really do speak for the album as a whole: ‘Annihilation’, Yearning’, ‘Barren’. This is bleak and harrowing stuff. ‘Yearning’ begins brittle, before exploding into a landslide of crushing guitars bearing down. The beats – crashing a light year apar, paired with bass notes landing like detonations event minute or so, this is heavy, but a different kind of heavy.

‘Yearning’ pitches that kind of Swand circa ‘86 crawling dirginess with crushing weight paired with a sepulchral glooming ambience, while the album’s last track, ‘Barren,’ lives up to its title, presenting eight-and-a-half minutes of crushing gloom with ethereal vocals which ascend heavenwards like angels on a zephyr.

Let the Earth Be Silent feels like the final shudders of a dying planet, the collapsing death throes of eternity. It’s a vast and at times quite overwhelming experience. The sound is immense and there’s something of a ceremonial feel about parts of it, but elsewhere it simply feels like the outpourings of grief and is hard to listen to under any circumstances. It chokes you up. There’s something final and ultimately funereal about the droning organ that hovers out to the end, and it leaves you to reflect on the idea – the end. It’s beyond comprehension. But on Let the Earth Be Silent, FVNERALS have created an album that paves the way towards acceptance.

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Score – COPE

Posted: 4 February 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature – 6th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s something of a relief to discover that Score’s seventh long player for Cruel Nature isn’t some gentle exercise in self-help and mental health wellbeing, or otherwise the soundtrack to some existential post-pandemic breakdown – because the former are utterly fucking nauseating, and the latter, while I’m all for those primal screams of anguish, which I often find relatable, at least to an extent, variety isn’t only the spice of life but the key to staying within the marginal parameters of sane in an insane world. No, COPE, recorded in six weeks at the end of 2022, which somehow feels like a long time ago now already, takes its title from Julian Cope.

As the blurb explains, ‘the album was directly inspired by the musical descriptions to be found in the autobiographies of Julian Cope: Head On and Repossessed. Using Cope’s impassioned words as instructional starting points for each track, COPE references Mott the Hoople, Patti Smith, CAN, Duane Eddy, The Doors, Suicide, Dr John, Sly & The Family Stone and more.’

Julian Cope of one of those people who I’ve long been somewhat perplexed by, and, truth be told, haven’t spent too much time investigating, either musically or biographically. He has always struck me as having a career less centred around his relatively low-key musical output following a degree of commercial success with The Teardrop Explodes, and more around the fact that he’s Julian Cope. Some may want to set me straight on this, but right now, I don’t need to hear it, and a familiarity with the source material shouldn’t be a prerequisite of my ability to critique the work at hand, which interestingly, in drawing on his biographies, only serves to further indicate that Julian Cope spends more time writing about being Julian Cope than making music I need to hear.

COPE is a document to creativity under intense circumstances. To quote from the accompanying notes, COPE was ‘recorded as it was written, in one or two takes in a tiny garage and drawing on an old quote from the arch-druid himself as a creative manifesto: “It had to be very cheap, very fast, very loose. I needed to be an ambassador of looseness”’… ‘COPE is an exercise in embracing limitations and existing in the moment, a lyric-less love letter to Rock ‘n’ Roll itself, and a one-word command to the fried modern human.’

Containing nine instrumental compositions, COPE is a pretty demented journey, an absolute rollercoaster of a ride, that swings between psychedelia and krautrock, twangy desert rock, swampy jazz, with the six-minute ‘Brick’ bringing it all together with a Doorsy kind of trip with the added bonus of some woozy brass in the mix. ‘On The One’ goes deep into a funk workout that grooves hard, but ‘Old Prick’ stands out for its darker post-punk feel that suggests it could almost be a Psychedelic Furs or The Sisters of Mercy demo. The twelve-and-a-half-minute ‘Softgraundt’ is more than just expansive in terms of duration, and is a multi-faceted musical exploration that wanders hither and thither, shifting, evolving, a dozen or more songs in one. And perhaps this is the key to COPE – both the album, and the man. It’s everything all at once, and it’s more than you can really keep up with. It’s a challenge, and one I’m not entirely sure I’m up to, but there’s never a dull or predictable moment here.

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All The Heavens Were A Bell – A Wheel Of Burning Eyes

Posted: 2 February 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 6th January 2023

If James Watts’ social media postings were to be taken at face value, you’d likely conclude he spends all his time loafing about, eating, giving the finger to his cat, shits a lot, and only showers before gigs. These may all be true, but he’s also ne off Newcastle’s most prolific purveyors of noisy shit, recording and performing with Plague Rider, Friend, Lovely Wife, Lump Hammer, Dybbuk, and Möbius, gigging locally on a constant basis, and touring frequently, too.

All The Heavens Were A Bell is a musical vehicle finds Watts collaborating with another prodigious powerhouse for scary dark noise, Esmé Louise Newman (Penance Stare, Petrine Cross, Fashion Tips, 1727), and A Wheel Of Burning Eyes is their second release, which they recorded in the spring of 2022, and it’s pitched – somewhat eclectically – as being ‘recommended listening for acolytes of Sunn O))), Coil, Deleuze & Guattari, Bastard Noise, Sarah Kane, William Blake, Les Legion Noires, Mark Fisher, Black Boned Angel, Laboria Cuboniks et al’.

I’m often intrigued when musical works reference literary sources as influences, especially when they’re not necessarily the obvious ones. Much as I am an immense fan and student of William Burroughs, I am conscious that his influence has been milked dry to a point bordering on desiccation. But what can be drawn from Mark Fisher and the labyrinthine complexities of the writings of Deleuze & Guattari to forge something musical?

Outlining an album created using ‘both self-constructed and commercially available sound machines, exploring the space between free improvisation and absolute intentionality, theopoetics, illness as vector, abstracted ritual, dread drone, trance-formation, black ambience, doomed electronics, hellfire submergence, and ophanim glow,’ A Wheel Of Burning Eyes offers intrigue and a certain intellect as its background.

Extrapolating all of that from the audio isn’t all that straightforward, of course. How it manifests on these two side-length tracks is in a shimmering, shifting wall of billowing noise. It’s not harsh, but it is dense, the churning drone of ‘Usurper, Destroyer’ churns clouds of sound on sound up on themselves, and there may be voices away in the distance or it might be your mind playing tricks or it might be tinnitus. Either way, it’s a gut-shredding experience expanding over eighteen minutes, and it doesn’t soften or diminish at any point – it’s a relentless grating grind of snarling noise as heavy as earthworks, and building to a thick, shredding wall of dense sound on sound that invites obvious comparisons to SUNN O))), but in fact does something quite different – and more intense – with the punishing layers and textures so rough as to tear off your skin several layers at a time.

‘Glowing Light of Ophanim’ references the wheels of the Lord’s Heavenly chariot referenced variously in the bible, and is derived from the Hebrew אוֹפַנִּים or ʿōp̄annīm. Many listeners won’t be that fussed about historical / biblical context detail when immersing themselves in these huge swathes of sound, but they ought to be, not just because it’s a tectonic slab of deep, dark, drone, but because it really does reach the parts so many dark doomy drone noise works never even get close to.

You feel A Wheel Of Burning Eyes resonate and reverberate around your body, encompassing and enveloping. And you know that this is special.

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Remote Viewing – Modern Addictions

Posted: 1 February 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 3rd February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

A shriek of feedback prefaces the gnarly blast of a monster rhythm section, thunderous drums paired with a snarling bass. And so begins ‘Short Distance Runner’, the first of six songs on Remote Viewing’s Modern Addictions. You know in an instant that it’s going to be good.

Of course, you know it’s going to be good before you hear a single sound.

Featuring members of Palehorse, Million Dead, Sly & The Family Drone, Nitkowski and Wound (to name but a few) is quite the underground supergroup. Plus, Modern Addictions is being released on Human Worth, which is in itself a guarantee of heavy, noisy shit of the highest calibre. So yes, you know it’s going to be good. But even then, it’s hard to be braced for something this good.

The guitar alternates between thick, sludgy chords and really sinewy lead lines that buzz and drill, twist and bend and wrap themselves around you and dig in like barbed wire. The tracks are backed back to back, making the cumulative effect of the heavy battering even more acutely felt. Single cut ‘Your Opinion is Wrong’, showcased here in December is broadly representative of the dense, chunky, churning sound of the album as a whole, but doesn’t fully convey the extent of its textures and variety.

It’s not all punishing density, and the band are keen to highlight that theirs is a sound that demonstrates a ‘broader sound that incorporates elements of hardcore, post-rock and shoegaze into the palette of sludge and noise-rock’.

There are some tight grooves amidst the racket, ‘Wasted on Purpose’ effortlessly transitions through a number of varied passages, from full-on balls-out riffage to delicate, evocative swirling post-rock chimes which gracefully convey a very different kind of emotional weight, and if the title ‘Cleveland Balloonfest ‘86’ suggests something bright and airy, sonically it’s more the Hindenburg disaster with it’s slow, low-slung growling guitar that grinds away at a crawl for six and a half anguish-filled minutes.

If ‘Watch Me For the Changes’ is a demonic dirge of epic proportions with a remarkably light ending (and you can’t help but suspect the title is perhaps a reference to the band’s directions for playing it) ,the final track, ‘A.B.B.A. ABBA’ springs an unexpected surprise as the band switch into disco mode. No, of course it doesn’t really. It’s seven minutes of dolorous doom, thick with atmosphere and dripping distortion. It’s the sound of weight so great that it feels as if it’s collapsing in on itself, decaying and crumbling on the way to a slow death, that leaves you feeling hollowed out and devastated. It’s the perfect finale to a superlative album.

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Akustikkoppler – Alles Muß Raus

Posted: 27 January 2023 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

The third – or fourth, depending on your source – album by electronic duo Akustikkoppler, is a work of starkness, of austerity, and a collision of vintage and contemporary, and quite the contrasting experience.

The cover looks like a photo I may have taken from my daily wanderings. I’m not saying it’s a good cover or a bad cover, this is merely an observation. The duo would likely say the same about the cover itself. It’s a snapshot that speaks for itself of the nature off people in our all-waste capitalist society.

I feel an almost inevitable shiver of nostalgia listening to this, despite the fact that the album’s style and sound predate my musical awareness. Instead, it makes me feel a nostalgic tug for my teens, when I was introduced to all of the weird and wonderful, experimental and starkly harsh music that had emerged in the late 70s and early 80s, to which Alles Muß Raus demonstrates a clear lineage.

As the blurb explains, ‘Inspired by the rough commercial industrial surroundings of Schusters Studio back then in Hamburg, Alles Muß Raus was produced on vintage and modern equipment. The two artists combine past and future to a sparkling, shimmering darkness.’ And industrial it is – not in the Ministry sense, but in the spirit of the early innovators utilising primitive synths, drum machines, and tape loops. And it ignites a spark of excitement, in that even now, this kind of music doesn’t sit comfortably with anything in the sphere of ‘normal’ music. The nostalgia, then, is in remembering how hearing TG, Test Department, DAF, et al for the first time completely changed my world, and my concept of what ‘music’ could be.

The analogue drum machines, mixed to recreate the sound of the late 70s and early 80s with a dominant synthetic snare is a defining feature. The first track, ‘Entrümpelung’ is a head-cracking, gut-smashing sub-bass groove that’s anything but vintage and pulls you in before the bass-driven churn of ‘Mitnahmequalität’ steps boldly into grinding, bass-led Throbbing Gristle-influenced industrial. In contrast, ‘Mittenmang’ is almost playful, with tempo changes and some d‘n’b rapidfire drumming bouncing alongside some busy, bloopy electronica. One of the shorter tracks, ‘Horses And Carriages Burn’ hints in the direction of The Cure’s ‘Carnage Visors’ while recreating the spirit of ‘Pornography’.

Entirely instrumental and assimilating so many disparate elements, despite some insistent grooves and accessible, melodic ,moments, Alles Muß Raus certainly isn’t a pop album, but contains many elements of electropop, even if the shade is turned down to twelve. While Kraftwerk may be an obvious touchstone, the vibe that radiates from Alles Muß Raus is much more DAF, with insistent, snare-driven beats driving relentlessly to define the sound and structure of a varied and meticulously arranged set.

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Neuro… No Neuro – Compartments

Posted: 23 January 2023 in Albums
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Mille Plateaux – 20th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Less than a year on from Faces & Fragments, Neuro… No Neuro are back again with another substantial instalment of scratchy, glitchy electronica that’s rich in retro vibes.

Each piece is short – around two minutes – and drifts into the next. As the air floats past carrying soft analogue notes on a gentle waft, you suddenly realise you’re already five tracks in. It’s not that Compartments is undemanding, so much as that it’s subtle, meaning that it circulates in the atmosphere without dominating your headspace in an intrusive fashion.

The beats are backed off, even as they stutter and troll, flicker and jar. There’s a softness about the sounds and the way these woozy, warped snippets trickle together that’s almost soporific, especially when tinkling chimes cascade in ripples.

The Mille Plateaux website describes Compartments as Kawaii-Glitch (Kawaii being the Japanese culture of cuteness), noting that ‘The very artificial glitch aesthetics are not, as usual, depicted by a cold and sterile feeling; but quite contrary have the qualities of an artificial sweetener… Be careful when associating kawaii with just sweet, innocent or cute notions… just as Anime often masks grown-up topics with ‘childish’ surface structures, the album underlies a soft darkness & melancholy. Sometimes the unspeakable comes in disguise. Like the fashion style Yami-Kawaii, a bizarre mixture of kawaii-aesthetics with questions of depression and suicide, this album offers a mixillogical splice of life in which every second might take a turn into the irreal and eerie. To make distinctions between what is real and what are delusions, dreams or nightmares, emotional highs and lows, becomes impossible. In some sense it is ‘too much’ while still minimalistic in style.’

On the penultimate track, ‘Just Crumbling,’ things seem to come apart at the seams as stammering beats fly away from sounds firing in all directions like breaking springs. The temperature drops further at the finale, as those split sprockets echo into the cold night air and as the final sounds of the bonus-length last track, We’ll be Seeing You Soon’, which clanks and echoes for a fill four minutes, fade away, I sit, full, aurally content and calm… and worried. What subliminal toxicity has this album dispersed internally? How will I feel about Compartments once I begin to process and digest its multi-faceted contents? I don’t know but then, I don’t know if II trust what I heard, or my instincts on how to react. There is definitely more to Compartments than first meets the ear.

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Fågelle – Den svenska vreden

Posted: 22 January 2023 in Albums
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Medication Time Records – 27th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

My first encounter with Fågelle was supporting Big | Brave in Leeds last spring. Despite suffering some technical difficulties and being on before a band so mighty that I still haven’t quite got over the experience, I wrote that ‘Fågelle proves to be an absolute revelation’.

The release of her new album, album Den svenska vreden (The Swedish rage), affords proper time to digest, and to reflect on this. And live, I remarked on her understated presence and the variety, shifting from quiet restraint to some heavy noise, and with experimental elements. Those are all present here, to forge what the press release set out as ‘collage-like soundscapes made with twisted field recordings, mobile memories, digital trash, dark electronics, and howling choirs while moving between harmony and noise.’

For the most part, Den svenska vreden is subtle. There are soft, electronic washes and the slightest of glitches ripple and stutter almost subliminally. The layers rub against one another to create tensions, but still, the overall mood of the album is comparatively light, particularly given the album’s title and her explanation of the album’s context and contents.

“I was so angry and had been for years.” explains Fågelle, “A kind of adult rage that was new to me. Feeling forced to accept and stay in circumstances making me miserable. To patiently suffer now for a better future. But also, a subdued Swedishness that doesn’t hold space for flaring, tearing, wallowing rage but rather pushes it down from the surface and inwards. Question is, where does the rage go, and which forms does it take? That became a starting point for the record where I kept exploring my personal boiling points, pressures and releases, where to hold my rage, in words and in the body, as a swede and as a woman.”

She continues, “Swedish social norms value the level headed and emotionally subdued. There is a pressure put especially hard on women to function like social glue and to always be consensus oriented. It’s a pressure to practice self control, a self choking of non-agreeable ideas and feelings. Rage being one of them.”

As such, one senses the rage is very much tempered by the Swedish restraint. And that’s something that there is a strong sense of, listening to Den svenska vreden – that there is in fact far more beneath the surface, simmering.

‘Slavar’ is dark and tense, tentative, mysterious. In contrast, ‘Aldrig mera här’ is almost minimal pop in its flavour. As a prelude to the soft folk reflections of ‘Fåglar’, which in parts invites comparisons to Suzanne Vega while in others goes quite wonderfully weird, ‘Tredje långgatan tretton’ begins as hushed ambience and builds into dramatic strings. It’s on the title track that the rage burst forth, manifesting as two minutes of mangled noise, and the album culminates in a thumping burst of beat-driven electronica which I wouldn’t go so far as to describe as dance, but it’s certainly got enough groove to get down to.

There’s a sense that Den svenska vreden reflects its creator: complex, inscrutable, enigmatic, and multi-faceted.

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Beats & Pieces Big Band – Good Days

Posted: 17 January 2023 in Albums
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Efpi Records – 27th January 2023

James Wells

Twittering birdsong and delicately tranquil tunes may not be things you’d immediately associate with jazz, but this is how the third studio album from Beats & Pieces Big Band announces its arrival. But as the track’s title suggests, you should wait: because in a moment, they’re offering up strolling, rolling sultry piano and bold brass on ‘op’ and we’re plunged deep into big band jazz territory.

There’s a lot of that, but the most striking thing about Good Days is its variety. The droning nine-minute ‘elegy’ is a sparse dirge of a tune, but it’s soft, contemplative, and ‘cminriff’ saunters into sultry, smoky territory with effortless ease.

The technicality of the playing is something else – and I really mean something else, on another plane.

Mojo have described them as ‘Spine-tinglingly good’, The Guardian love them, and the press release suggests parallels and links with not just Charles Mingus, Keith Tippett, Gil Evans, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra, but also suggests ‘there’s also a post-rock undertow to many of these tracks which shows a consciousness of such contemporaries as Björk, Radiohead, or Everything Everything’.

Whether or not you hear these – and I have to admit that I personally don’t so much, and I didn’t find my spine tingling either, although my ears were definitely totally grooved – there’s both a busy and a smooth element to Good Days as notes twist and spial against busy percussion. ‘blues (for linu)’ sounds like a sleepy improv based on Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’. ‘woody’ gets woozy and goes all out on the bold brass, before the album is rounded off as it begins, with a snippet of a ‘reprise’ take on ‘wait’.

And at the end of the day, Good Days brings the swing – and if you’re talking jazz, that’s just what you want.

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Conflux Coldwell – Music for Installation

Posted: 13 January 2023 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

Coldwell’s own notes which accompany this – truly epic – album explains and articulates it best, when he writes ‘This new retrospective is certainly not your typical album. Each track is almost an album in its own right! The material sees CC at his most experimental, stripped back, noisy and immersive. Following on from last year’s Music for Documentary Film, this collection gathers together some of Michael C Coldwell’s sound art work and music written for exhibition and gallery contexts.’

This is very much one of the benefits of the digital format: there is no restriction of duration on account of data capacity. Time was when physical formats restricted the running time of a release, with a vinyl LP optimally running for around forty-five minutes but having the capacity to squeeze in about an hour, with CDs being able to hold seventy-two minutes and while a cassette could – precariously – take two hours, no-one released a two-hour single cassette.

Conflux Coldwell’s collection of installation works is immense, and with a running time of around two-and-a-quarter hours, it’s in the realms of recent Swans albums. While it’s by no means a brag, I’ve endured longer, notably Frank Rothkamm’s twenty-four-disc, twenty-four-hour Werner Process, and am also aware of Throbbing Gristle’s legendary 24 Hours cassette box set, but the point is, Coldwell has really made the most of the space available to him here.

I sometimes differentiate albums as being foreground or background, and Music for Installation is very much background, the very definition of ambient. That isn’t to say it’s uninteresting or unengaging. It’s simply a vast set of field recordings and sound collages that make you feel as if you’re in a certain environment. Unlike the aforementioned Swans albums, which I find are difficult to listen to because they require a commitment of time to sit with them and focus, to actively listen, Music for Installation is a very different beast which works while rumbling on while you’re doing other things. And as an experience, this very much works.

The fifty-five minutes excerpt (!) of Remote Viewer is exemplary. Passing cars, scrapes, drones, the sound of metal on metal, clanking, indistinguishable muttered dialogue, and extraneous sounds that range from – possibly – the rush of wind to the sound of feet gently passing on creaking timbers, all sit side by side and overlap in various shapes to create a latticework of real-life founds the likes of which you probably would ignore if you even noticed them at all under normal circumstances. Of course, if this is an excerpt, where’s the rest? It’s the kind of immersive soundwork that could run for hours and that would be perfectly fine.

The live performance of ‘Dead Air’, which runs for an album-length headline performance is superb. It’s testing, but it’s also magnificently executed. The sounds and textures are balanced, but the overall sound is gloopy. The result is a piece that’s creepy, evocative, and dissonant, and built around wailing whistles and pulsating drones that coalesce intro their own organic rhythms, drawing together elements of Kraftwerk and Throbbing Gristle to conjure a dark, dingy soundscape.

‘Dismantle the Sun’, running for fourteen minutes feels concise in comparison. It’s barely there for the most part, the most ambient of field recordings. It’s hard to identify any of the individual sources, but again, there are rhythms that emerge from the rumble off passing cars and the whisper of the wind, and the piece transitions both sonically and spatially as it progresses, at times evolving from a whisper to a howl. One feels a sense of movement, which in turn creates a sense of disorientation, although the voiceover detailing ‘solar oscillations’ in the closing minutes provides a certain grounding.

The final brace of compositions, ‘Alternating Current’ and ‘The Specious Present (How Long is Now?), which have a combined time of around ten minutes feel like barely snippets or sketches in comparison to the other three immense pieces, but what they lack in duration, they compensate in depth, being richly textured and showcasing some interesting beats and conjuring some dark, confined spaces. And for all its vastness, Music for Installation is quite a dense, claustrophobic experience at times – and it’s a quite remarkable experience, too.

AA

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