Posts Tagged ‘Abstract’

Various Artists – Collage Music (28)

Posted: 20 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Institute For Alien Research – 15th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Bath-based microlabel Institute For Alien Research tends to focus on compilation releases, with open submissions, on various themes. One long-running series is Collage Music, each of which features fifteen works, the only stipulation being that their duration is 4:33. Not a second more, and not a second less. They’re not looking for interpretations of John Cage’s seminal work, and as such, the duration is in many ways arbitrary beyond the idea that artists respond to limitations and set parameters in different ways, and as this – the twenty-eighth in the series (as the title indicates) – illustrates the point unequivocally.

With ‘Circumstances’, Support Group ease us in gently with some slightly woozy, echo-soaked, ambience, before Lezet stammer and glitch through a multi-layered slice of abstraction with ‘Colonnades of Fear,’, which may also be ambient, but it far from relaxing, although it’s Robert & Lamy who are the first to venture into much darker territory, with the kind of doomy, drony warped tape and noise experiments that are reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle in places.

The arrival of ‘bruits de la vie’ by samelectronics feels like something of a watershed moment, being the first piece to present big, bold sounds – feedback and immense powerchords, which, instead of feeling heavy or oppressive, open an expanded horizon, to surprisingly uplifting effect. The rough, lo-fi punkiness of ‘Johnny got no respect’ by This is The Utter vs Chelsea comes as a surprise bang in the middle, being the album’s first straight-up guitar-based cut, and it’s a savage semi-cover to boot.

Along the way, there’s a superabundance of weird shit, with collages and field recordings and ethereal haunting soundtrack-like compositions, dark electronica, spaced-out BBC Radiophonic Workshop type soundscapes, and banging dance, courtesy of Sbilts, with ‘Acid Dog’, who mine a vintage techno sound propelled by old-school drum machine sounds. That snare! Samples! It’s a sonic time-machine!

Just as grassroots venues are essential on so many levels, so are labels who put out releases like this. Most of the contents of such compilations is ultra-niche, and will never expand beyond being so – and that’s ok. There is a huge audience with niche tastes who simply aren’t catered for by bigger labels, bigger venues. Most of the acts here are unlikely to ever play to more than twenty-five people, assuming anyone will put them on, and they’re never going to be snapped up by a label which has aspirations of making money. Self-releasing is find, but it’s hard to reach the tiny, fragmented target audience. But a label like Institute For Alien Research, having established a reputation for providing a platform for the full spectrum of experimental electronica and beyond, creates its own niche. It may seem hard to believe when there are maybe a few hundred or so people who are into it, but this really is what the world needs. Capitalism is killing cultural diversity, and it’s killing art.

The fact that Collage Music (28) is a mixed bag is a good thing. It would be all too tempting for the label to be picky, sniffy, selective, and offer up a compilation which is more homogeneous, unified, that presents, ultimately, a curated collection determined by personal taste. And that would have been fine, and entirely their prerogative. But Collage Music (28) is all the better for its wild eclecticism. You might not like all of it – and it would be probably be a bit strange if you did – but in listening to it, there’s a chance you’ll find your eyes are opened to something you didn’t know you would like, and it’s absolutely guaranteed you’ll hear artists you would never have otherwise encountered. So dive in!

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Please Close Your Eyes – Music for Floating

Posted: 12 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 10th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Ambient music is, in many ways, music for reflection. Or perhaps, music which provides the backdrop to reflection. Time was that I had very little interest in ambient music, but I have come to appreciate it has having quite significant functions, whether by the design of the artists or not. Reviewing requires a level of focus and attention that regular music listening does not, and when it comes to ambient works, a greater level of attention is necessary: I feel there is a requirement to tilt the ears and pluck out the details, the textures, to venture into the depths to extrapolate the moods and meanings. Sometimes, I fail, and find my mind wanders down different paths as space opens up through sonic suggestion, and random associations are triggered completely unexpectedly. Regardless, ambient music is generally best received in darkness, or by candlelight. Please… close your eyes and absorb without distraction.

As Oliver Richards – aka Please Close Your Eyes – writes, “Music for Floating is a document of transition. It collects pieces that were made over a three year period, nearly three years ago. They were all made before my last Mortality Tables release, ‘Nibiru’ / ‘Heaven On The Fourth Floor’…It’s a consciously-composed modern classical album. I have no classical training at all, but when I was making it, I set out with the intention of composing for the first time, consciously and intentionally. The music I made before under the name Goodparley was all created improvisationally and instinctively. With this I would step back and ask myself, ‘What am I actually going for here?’”

I ask myself this question often, and not just about creative endeavours, but life generally. How many of us really have any idea, about anything? Music for Floating, then, provides a magnificent soundtrack for contemplation and reflection, on the world, on life, and all things. But it’s not simply an ambient work: it’s a collection of pieces which span a broad sonic range, and while gentle and mellow throughout, there’s much more to it than drifting clouds and soothing sonic washes.

There’s something of an underwater, soft-edged soporificness about ‘The Moment Before We Sleep’, and it’s one of those pieces which lends itself to immersion and letting oneself cut adrift. In contrast, ‘The Hollow’ brings a busier, more bustling feel, not to mention something of a progressive vibe, as synth piano ripples and rolls with waves of energy. Augmented by synth strings and other elongated, organ-like sounds, the seven-minute ‘Piano for Floating’ is a standout, compositionally, structurally, and sonically. It’s subtle, layered, and casts the listener adrift on a rippling expanse of tranquil sound. Music like this has a profound effect that’s both physical and mental: you can feel your spine elongating, your muscles gradually becoming less knotted. I find myself yawning, not out of boredom, but through a rare relaxation.

At under three minutes, ‘Deeper Blue’ provides an interlude at what stands as the notional start of side two, before the six-minute ‘Heaven, Faced: or, The Fairies’ Parliament’, and the epic finale, the nine-minute ‘The Time Before the Last’. The former traces shimmering contrails through an azure sky; it’s the sound of slowly rippling aroura, of silent snowfall in a windless winter sky, of your mind spinning in amazement at the wonder of natural phenomena… while the latter brings slow abstract drifts which evoke the vastness of space, eternal in its expanse. It’s bewildering, but so, so calm… Time evaporates, and nothing matters. There is nothing.

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Tomoyoshi Date – Piano Trilogy

Posted: 25 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Tsuyukusa Records Tsuyu— 8th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Tomoyoshi Date’s biography makes for an interesting read: he’s described as ‘a physician and musician known for his releases on prominent ambient labels such as 12K (US), LAAPS (France), and QuietDetails (UK)’. There’s much to be said for having a creative outlet which is completely separate from one’s day-job, especially when that day-job carries a degree of responsibility and likely brings with it no small level of stress.

Tomoyoshi Date has gone a step further, though. You couldn’t really call being a musician releasing ambient works on avant-garde microlabels a ‘side-hustle’ – which seems to be all the rage of late, and seems to be something people are proud of and the media love as much as they used to love contestants on Big Brother after they’d left the house, rather than acknowledging that this is a symptom of how capitalist structures are failing so many working-class people: this is more of a parallel career, and presumably Tomoyoshi Date’s ‘professional’ occupation affords the time and space to pursue the ‘other’ career.

Having recently written on how the four-CD box by Dolium, and the near hour-long single track album Leaves never fall in vain by Fear of the Object require a certain time commitment, I’m here in the face of not one, but three albums. Because Piano Trilogy is not a set of three compositions, but three separate works, recorded between 2021 and 2024, which collectively form a trilogy, released as a cassette package in an edition of 150 copies. It’s niche, alright, and as I said, there’s no way this would pay the rent as a primary occupation – which is a shame, but it’s the crappy capitalist world we live in, unfortunately. Were things different, I could write about music all day long and put food on the table.

This trilogy is formed of ‘ 438Hz, As it is, As you are, released by LAAPS and selected as one of Bandcamp’s Best Ambient albums in January 2023; Tata, composed for Silver Gelatin’s exhibit at Tata in Koenji, Tokyo; and Requiem, a piece dedicated in memory of a close friend who passed away too soon’ and ‘All three albums are packaged in special jackets featuring found photographs curated by Silverわ Gelatin and are being released simultaneously.’

An album trilogy released simultaneously is a lot to assimilate, and few, if any, listeners are ever going to listen to these three albums back-to-back, not even Tomoyoshi Date’s biggest fans. But for review purposes, that’s precisely the task I have set myself.

Date is clearly a gifted composer and musician, and it’s certainly no criticism to observe that the music drifts by, lightly and effortlessly. Amidst the piano notes which ripple serenely are stutters and glitches which deviate from the more classically-orientated template and explore more electronic, experimental territories. But Date does so subtly, delicately.

438Hz, As it is, As you are is a most soothing work, consisting of four compositions spanning around half an hour. Drones and slow-turning ambient tones, and birdsong occupy much of the space between piano notes, and the effect is relaxing, like a walk in nature. It’s the shortest of the three, with Tata and Requiem both stretching well beyond forty minutes I duration.

Tata is more ‘pure’ piano, and runs for almost forty-five minutes, while Requiem is sparse and melancholy, and stands apart: a pure piano work, it comprises six pieces, all over five minutes and up to more than eight and a half minutes in length, and rich in low-key melancholy.

These are clearly separate and distinct works, but they’re very much complimentary, and work together as a suite.

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Simon Whetham – Successive Actions

Posted: 17 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Crónica – 5th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Simon Whetham’s latest work is a fascinating hybrid which incorporates found sounds and elements of layering in order to create a whole other world, a different dimension. The album itself is part of a larger project, which is more readily explained through quotation than a stumbling stab at paraphrase:

Successive Actions is an iteration of the larger kinetic sound performance project series Channelling in which various motor devices, salvaged from obsolete and discarded consumer technology, are activated by playing sound recordings through them. In turn, this produces new sounds from the devices, which are amplified using various microphones and techniques. The title comes from Dirk Raaijmakers’s "The Art of Reading Machines" as a term for mass production processes. As such, the recordings played through the devices are recordings of other devices used in previous versions of Channelling, in which the sounds used were seemingly mundane sound phenomena that occur unpredictably and irregularly in everyday life, as passing traffic, wind, doors closing. So now the sounds of devices malfunctioning and breaking from their programming are causing further action and disruption.

Successive Actions contains sixteen pieces, although only four extend beyond four minutes in duration, with the majority sitting only a short way over the two-minute mark, giving the album a fragmentary feel. But there’s a strong sense of cohesion, too: the title of each of the pieces ends in ‘action’, from ‘Action’ to ‘Protraction’, via ‘Inaction’, ‘Impaction’, and ‘Abstraction’.

While much of the album takes the form of abstract ambience and general murk, there are moments which stand out with levels of heightened discomfort: ‘Reaction’ conjures the bleak whistling wind of a nuclear winter. ‘Inaction’ scrapes and buzzes; it’s unsettling, but it’s not uncomfortable to the point that it’s unbearable: it just makes you feel tense, awkward. You want to seem a less stressful environment. But there s no less stressful environment, and life is stress: to escape that is to deny the reality of the everyday, for the majority. Under capitalism, we are all stressed, and on Successive Actions, Simon Whetham gives us a soundtrack to that stress and anxiety.

Mass production is, arguably, a fundamental source of our woes in the modern age. The Industrial Revolution brought so much promise, but as capitalism has accelerated and expanded at a pace which exceeds our capacity to assimilate, so it has become an ever-greater source of alienation. And here we are, overwhelmed by the road of the big machine as it continually whirrs and grinds. Sometimes its but a crunch and a gurgle, a hum and a thump. A buzz of electricity, a mains hum, as dominates both ‘Retroaction’ and ‘Counteraction’. It’s a cranial buzz and pushes frequencies which are uncomfortable, and as the album progresses it plaiters, and turns dark.

For myself, I feel a certain sense of release while immersing myself in the textures and layers of Successive Actions. There are moments when the album really achieves a heightened sense of – and in panic, of anxiety, of intensified reality. Other moments are altogether more sparse, steering the listener inside themselves into a the depths of an interior world.

Successive Actions is deep, dark, difficult. And so is life. On Successive Actions, Simon Whetham captures it, all elements of life that is. It crackles and fizzes with tension, and tension is high.

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Uniform – Nightmare City

Posted: 21 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Well, this one landed unexpectedly. It’s a welcome arrival, although taking a second hit of material from Uniform’s latest and quite possibly most brutal and challenging album to date does feel like an exercise in Masochism. It’s also a superb example of alternative marketing, landing this alternative version of American Standard less than a month after the album’s release, on digital and tape formats.

Context, from Uniform’s bandcamp: ‘A companion piece to American Standard, Nightmare City is essentially the same record devoid of the rock elements. By removing the presence of traditional instruments, the synths, lap steel, and pianos that sit beneath the surface of the proper album are allowed room to breathe and speak for themselves. The end result straddles the worlds of Basic Channel influenced dub, Tangerine Dream inspired soundscapes, and brutal death industrial.’

It’s a bold move, befitting of Uniform, a band who have relentlessly pushed themselves to explore ever-wider horizons, switching from their original drum-machine driven raw industrial noise to adopting live drumming, undertaking a number of collaborative projects with the likes of The Body and Boris, and especially befitting of this album, where Michael Berdan tore away the last vestiges of artistic separation to rip off his skin and purge the rawest emotions stemming from his dealing with Bulimia.

Nightmare City is another step towards stripping away the layers and presenting the naked self. ‘The bedrock of American Standard stands upon the Nightmare City. It’s not the happiest of all places, but understanding the landscape yields its own rewards,’ they write alongside the Bandcamp release.

One thing about being in a band – even if there are only two of you – is that there’s somewhere to hide, somewhere to transfer the focus. Hell, even performing solo, if there’s noise, there’s something take shelter behind. I’ve always thought that solo acoustic and spoken word performers were the bravest: there is simply no place to hide, and nothing to blur or mask any fuck-ups. Nightmare City isn’t quite solo acoustic, but it is seriously minimal.

Removing the ‘rock’ elements to reveal the bare bones of the songs shows the inner workings of Uniform, and they’re unexpected, to say the least. One would expect them to build up from the elements of drums bass, guitar. But this leads us on a different journey.

Punishing riffs and pulverising percussion, rather than supple layers and swirling instrumental ambience. As the band put it, ‘Although the finished product stands as a culmination of cohesive sounds, the individual threads that weave songs together often provide necessary nuance and exposition all of their own. Each isolated stem might be part of a greater story, but the whole cannot stand as intended without a complex series of seemingly disparate elements.’

Hearing the swirl of these ‘seemingly disparate elements’ feels like hearing the ghost in the machine, a haunting, eerie, ethereal echo, which barely seems to correspond with the structured framework of the final versions of the songs. One might almost consider this a palimpsest, an album beneath the album, submerged by process of layering and erasure. The tracks are – and I shouldn’t be surprised, but still I find I am – completely unrecognisable. Instead of being the punishing beast the album version is, ‘American Standard’ sounds more like one of the epic instrumental segments of recent SWANS works. There’s a muffled thud like a heartbeat on ‘This is Not a Prayer’ which possesses something of a womb-like quality, while ‘Clemency’ feels like a moment caught between heaven and hell, soundtracking the struggle of being pulled between the two in some purgatorial space as ceremonial drums hammer out a doomy passageway and spluttering vocals spew raw anguish.

In common with American Standard is the darkness which looms large, the tension, the suffocating gloom, the discomfort which dominates, and hearing this spectral echo of the album brings a fresh understanding and appreciation of the process and the depth of layering and everything that goes into their material. ‘Permanent Embrace’, too, sounds both like an ascent to the light and a sepulchral sigh, a funereal scene in which the grave suddenly opens like a sinkhole sucking everything down into the bowels of the earth.

Nightmare City is appropriately titled: it is a truly hellish, tortuous listening experience – but at the same time quite remarkable. Uniform, in their quest to do something different, to push themselves and in refusing to conform to genre conventions, continually find new ways to articulate the pain of the human condition.

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Procter // Poulsen – PP8

Posted: 9 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 6th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Traditions are important: they’re grounding, they give us a sense of comfort and safety in their familiarity. In times of tumult, of confusion, during difficult times, they offer a raft to cling to in a sea of unrest. I’m not referring solely or specifically to old traditions, either, especially not the ones where Christianity has usurped pagan tradition, only for these traditions to in turn be usurped by the mechanisms of corporate capitalism. Christmas is the kind of tradition that should be tossed on the fire. What we need is to establish new traditions, traditions which are personal and meaningful – anniversary gigs or meet-ups, for example.

On a personal level myself, since one of the last holidays we made as a family saw us meet my late wife’s step-mum on Lindisfarne on August bank holiday week, and we had been due to stay there in accommodation with a view of the castle, we instead scattered some of her ashes with that view of the castle, and visit the spot around the same time each year before going to the pub we lunched in on that last visit. On the one hand it’s sad, but in such a magnificent and historically-rich location (we got married in Northumberland, and had Lindisfarne fruit wines obligingly delivered directly to the venue across the causeway), this new tradition of ours feels right, and in many ways positive.

The same is true – albeit in a different way, of course – of the traditional reconvening of the pairing of Procter and Poulsen. Something was written about it once, I seem to recall. Two friends, who see one another infrequently, but always make some noise together, and release the results, at some point or another. This is the kind of tradition which possesses real meaning, a symbol of connection. In a way, whatever music the session yields is irrelevant: this is about ritual, and interpersonal resonance.

As the title suggests, this is their eighth collaborative release, and contains two longform tracks, each occupying a full side of a C40 cassette, this time released in a limited edition of six.

There’s no way you’d describe the devastating soundtrack to nuclear annihilation that is ‘A’ as ambient: distorted, mangled vocals crackle out from the howling wails of feedback torn from shredded circuitry in a heavy gale which carries pure devastation. Once that raging storm dissipates, we’re still left with the sonic equivalent of a nuclear winter, the sounds drifting over shattered remains, fragments of things which existed before. Glitching beats fizz out in crackling walls of noise and fizzing distortion. Bleeps and wibbles pop and buzz and there are moments where it’s possible to catch a short breath. Sometimes it’s almost dubby, but it’s always a desert. It’s always desolate. The atmosphere is always thick, uninhabitable.

‘B’ is dronier, buzzier, more overtly electronic – but more like a giant bee hovering in suspension – sedate, bur trapped. As the track progresses – at least in terms of duration – it seems to degenerate, forms disintegrating, fracturing, crumbling, degrading. It’s not done elegantly, aesthetically, but presents as a greyening mess of murk and twisted wires, indistinct moans and Triffid-like clicks and clacks. It’s oppressive, and feels like crawling through the soundtrack to being a survivor of the apocalypse in a bleak 80s dystopian series.

Nothing is comfortable. Nothing is right. Tension and darkness are all around: every inch of this experience is eerie, uncomfortable. You don’t want to be here – but there is no escape. This is sheer horror, without words.

The shuffle into some sort of 80s industrial experimentation with a scratching guitar and stammering heartbeat percussion which soon slips into fibrillation, which comes to pass close to the end, only renders the experience all the stranger, before birdsong and groans hint that perhaps, this is it – you’re here, you’re dead. Perhaps we are all dead already, and life is an illusion. Perhaps this would be for the best.

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Ekin Fil – Sleepwalkers

Posted: 7 July 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 14th June 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

For some time now, The Helen Scarsdale Agency has homed some quite challenging experimental noise and industrial-orientated releases. It seems somewhat incongruous, the name suggesting they’re a stuffy literary agency or something.

The notes which accompany this latest offering from Ekin Fil are instructive and informative, in terms of expectation and context, and as such, worth reproducing here:

‘The drone-pop consternations of Ekin Fil emerge through vaporous tone and forlorn, distant song, as if plucked from a dream. These exist on their own accord, moving with their own internal logic of an emotion heaviness that belies any the passing observation of this as mere shoegazing ambience. Her songs, her compositions find themselves adjacent the fragmented etherealization of Elisabeth Fraser’s voice from a forgotten scene of a particular David Lynch film, as a ASMR trigger for Proustian recollection. Something profound. Something hidden. Something desolately sad.’

Do I want to feel something sad? This is a question I asked myself in all seriousness. Everyone has felt deep, desolate, profound sadness at some point, to varying depths and degrees, and while wading through the mires of a recent bereavement I find I can be set off easily and unexpectedly. But sadness is necessary, and is sometimes something to be embraced. To embrace sadness is not the same as to wallow, and to face sadness squarely is to accept its presence, and perhaps begin to make peace with it. And only in making peace with it is it possible to begin to move on.

The album’s first piece, ‘Sonuna Kadar’ is a billowing cloud of thick ambience, suffocating, disorientating. Occasional chimes do little to light the way, and the vocals drift, lost, lonely through this tentative space. Things grow darker still with ‘Stone Cold’: long noes echo out like sirens, and soft, fizzy-edged notes ripple before being absorbed by cruising waves of thick, heavy sound. The organ is almost without question the heaviest of sounds, a droning, wheezing sound that has the capacity to be uplifting, but, more often than not, is slow a d mouthful. It’s a synthesized organ drone with slowly throbs away on ‘Reflection’, too lugubrious, soporific effect.

Vocals echo as if reverberating in caverns, cathedrals, while the instrumentation is abstract, its direction unfathomable. ‘Sleepwalkers (Version 2)’ is heavy with atmosphere, and the experience is haunting.

The absence of percussion or structure renders these pieces formless, rootless, shapeless, and consequently they hang like heavy cloaks which drag the head down to the ground, and, staring at your feet you contemplate the weight of the world.

Sleepwalkers is one of those albums which seems to build in effect cumulatively over its duration, and wile it’s not overtly heavy with, say, distortion or volume, it brings a weight that drags you down, and the final composition, the ten-minute ‘Gone Gone’ pulls the shoulders down.

Listening to Sleepwalkers doesn’t fill me with sadness, as much as a sense of unease. It does unquestionably bring a sense of weight, but on listening I feel a sense of uneasiness and uncertainty more than anything. But music presents much of what you pitch in and bring to it. With Sleepwalkers, Ekin Fill presents music with open doors. What will you bring?

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Photographed By Lightning – Music for Strangers / Music from Nowhere

Posted: 22 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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8th June 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

This release is as intriguing – and strange – as its enigmatic and beautifully-crafted handmade packaging.

Music for Strangers continues the reissue programme for releases from underground experimental duo Photographed By Lightning, and arrives on the heels of NO, Not Now, never which represented their first new material in twenty years. For this one, we dive back twenty years, to 2004, the most prolific year of their career, until, suddenly, it halted.

While Blood Music (also 2004) consisted of a large number of comparatively brief pieces, Music for Strangers is a very different proposition, featuring as it does four longform tracks, with a couple around the ten-minute mark and a couple around the twenty. Each simply bears a numerical title.

The original release – produced in a CD edition of 100 – was disseminated not for sale on line or anywhere, but by covert means, with copies being left at random in public places. This was quite a thing in avant-garde circles for a time in the years after the turn of the millennium, particularly when MySpace was at its peak, and something that I myself participated in, leaving various pamphlets in pubs and the like, and slipping A5 leaflets various books in WHS and Waterstones. Why? Because.

Dave Mitchel and Syd Howells – aka Photographed by Lightning – are very much part of that avant-garde milieu. Something has been lost over time, and now there’s a certain nostalgia for it, meaning that the arrival of this reissue carries a certain resonance beyond the thing in itself.

There are bits of vocals interspersed here and there – abstract enunciations and discombobulous jabberings – and they emerge for fleeting moments amidst sprawling expanses of strange, otherworldly instrumental passages.

‘One’ (denoted as ‘I’ on the CD version) combines swampy abstraction and space-rock bleeepery to disorientating and atmospheric effect, which descends into dense murk in the final minutes before silence descends for a full minute. The silence is even more disconcerting than the sound which preceded it. The truth is, silence unsettles us, scares us even. It’s the reason some people can’t stand to be alone, and the reason many simply can’t shut the fuck up for a moment: they can’t handle silence, and find silence more terrifying than darkness. I suppose that while both are forms of sensory deprivation, in the modern world, while darkness still feels like a natural phenomenon – if your blinds or curtains blank out light pollution and you switch off your electricals – silence is almost beyond comprehension. There is always traffic, a distant siren, a phone vibration, the wind, rain, the babble of one’s own internal monologue. When was the last time you can honestly say you experienced true silence? That isn’t to say that with the hum of the hard-drive and my laboured hayfevery breathing, in connecting with this album I did, but the abrupt end of sound emanating from the speakers, in a time when a minute feels like an eternity, really struck me, left me feeling… what?

But at thirteen minutes, this is merely a prelude to the second track, a plunge into the subterranean swamps which drags the listener deeper into suffocating darkness for an immersive but uncomfortable nineteen minutes. There’s dadaist quirky playfulness in evidence here, the sonic equivalent of shooting water pistols and throwing overripe windfall berries at random passers-by, which redresses the balance against the backdrop of tetchy, grumbling noise created first and foremost to antagonise – which is course it does. It tests the patience and challenges the senses, with bubbles and ripples echoing as if from within a cave – for extended periods, as the sounds gradually mutate. For a spell, it sounds like water-filled lungs laboriously respiring, which makes for more difficult listening than it may appear on paper, drifting into something resembling the relentless rock of nodding donkeys at an oil drill site, and creeping into ‘Three’, it’s like sneaking down into the sewers to escape one threat only to be confronted with another.

Music for Strangers is certainly their darkest, most suffocating work, stretching dark throbs and abstract sound to the absolute limits and nudging beyond.

The bonus disc which is part of the physical release, containing Music from Nowhere, offers further insight into their prolific and prodigious experimentalism at the time, providing jut short of an hours’ worth of additional material. That it’s essentially more of the same only heightens the effect.

Given the varied and experimental nature of their output, there isn’t really a definitive release which encapsulates the work of Photographed By Lightning, and Music for Strangers isn’t really an entry-level release – but this does very much encapsulate their experimental spirit, their singularity – their awkwardness – and knack for creating difficult soundscapes.

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BMH – Killigrew

Posted: 13 June 2024 in Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 7th June 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Mortality Tables have continued to release titles from their ‘Life Files’ series at a remarkable rate, with instalments 18 and 19 landing in May, and hot on their proverbial heels, this, number 20, in the first week of June.

The premise remains consistent, namely ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events [which] are shared with a range of artists working across different disciplines. Those artists are free to respond to the recordings in any way they like. And so, as ever, the field recordings, courtesy of Mortality Tables main man Mat Smith provide the foundation and inspiration.

Killiegrew Monument is a peculiar thing. Located in Falmouth, and intended as a memorial to the last surviving member of the Cornish family, the monument is a sharp obelisk constructed in 1738. It looks altogether more contemporary, and ultimately anomalous with its surroundings. And one might say that this release is similarly anomalous. I can imagine that beholding this curious construction would inspire an array or reactions. But why the fuck would you play a stone monument with a sharp stone? Is that really one of the responses you’d likely have to coming face to face with such a construction? Well, perhaps, if you’re possessed of an avant-garde mindset, whereby instead of reflecting on the origins of The Wind in the Willows, you find yourself contemplating ways of making unusual noises.

Once again, when it comes to the ‘Life Files’ series on Mortality Tables, we don’t know what the source materials actually sound like.

‘Killigrew Monument Played With A Sharp Stone (Part One)’ is an odd sound work: there’s chatter and ambient drift and scratches and shuffles and scrapes, but what on earth is going on? Seagulls wheeling and cawing – and on those squawks the sound echoes and reverberates, and the collage of sound collides with a strange rendition of ‘One, two, three four five, once I caught a fish alive’.

There’s lots of processed echo and cawing gulls at the start of ‘Killigrew Monument Played With A Sharp Stone (Part Two)’, as well, and it does, in some respects, sound like someone crooning abstractly into a child’s echo mic just to see how it sounds. The longer of the two pieces, at almost thirteen minutes in duration, it creates a deeply strange and disorientating atmosphere, which is likely evocative of this curious monument, which stands out of time and out of keeping with its surroundings as a testament to human folly, and, ultimately to vanity.

Too abstract to be ‘songs’, too much happening to be ‘ambient’, the result is a haunting and somewhat disorientating soundwork of a rare quality.

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Adam Wiltzie – Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal

Posted: 12 April 2024 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Kranky – 5 April 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Stars of the Lid are one of those acts who seem to have spent a – now lengthy – career on the fringe, an ultimate cult act who’ve built a substantial following without ever being well-known. Here in the UK, at least, they’re strictly a 6 Music act. With Brian McBride’s passing last year, their future remains unclear, but in the meantime, Adam Wiltzie, who had already been active for some time as a solo artist, offers up a new set of drifting, dreamy, discombobulating amorphous ambient works in the form of Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal.

Sodium Pentothal is (to quote, unfortunately, Wikipedia), ‘an ultra-short-acting barbiturate and has been used commonly in the induction phase of general anesthesia’ and is also perhaps better known as a ‘truth serum’.

We recently aired the opening track, ‘Buried At Westwood Memorial Park, In An Unmarked Grave, To The Left Of Walter Matthau’ here at Aural Aggravation, and it’s inevitably tempting to infer connotations from this title in context of events – something the album’s title wouldn’t seem to necessarily counter. But Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal seems to be preoccupied with memory and place in a broader sense.

We’re infirmed that the album ‘took shape following a move north from Brussels into the Flemish countryside, although it was initially inspired by a recurring dream wherein “if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.” The album uniquely evokes and evades the allure of oblivion, keening between beauty and ruin, forever unresolved.”

Dreams have a way of staying with you, and of twisting your psyche in some unsettling way, the more vivid ones lingering and replaying for hours, even days on end, the vaguer ones leaving you feeling somehow disjointed and in a slip from being in step with the world, partially detached, partially disconnected, as if looking at your own life through a window. Recurring dreams can prove particularly unsettling, and have a way of encroaching on your waking hours, assuming a reality of sorts.

The track titles, in the main, tell us very little, presenting mere abstractions, although one suspect they carry significantly greater weight of meaning for the composer. Bereavement and loss has a way of bringing layers of meaning to the slightest things, often unsuspectingly – a sight, a sound, something not even remotely directly related, has the capacity to trigger a memory, which in turn has the capacity to elicit an emotion or some not-quite-definable internal response. It’s often fleeting, or otherwise vague and indefinable, something impalpable and beyond reach, leaving a certain pang of bereftness – in much the same way as if waking from a dream.

Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal is not a dark or heavy album, but one which is dense in its atmosphere and carries a certain air of melancholic reflection in its drifting waves. This melancholy may well be as much a reflection of the way places – even unfamiliar locations – have the capacity to stir memories but indirect association – again, a sound, a smell, a certain shade of lighting, the angle of a tree, a riverbank – prods a deep corner of the memory most unexpectedly, causing memories we didn’t even know we had, or still had, to trickle forth, vaguely, out of focus, out of context, and sometimes you wonder if is really is a memory or a fragment of a dream.

There are some deep, rich, grainy textures to be found here, and ‘(Don’t Go Back To) Boogerville’ brings some dark, heavy strings and sonorous scrapes to close the album – which, incidentally, contains only nine tracks. Loop’s Robert Hampson was an inspired choice for the album’s mixing, bringing the layers of organic-sounding drones to the fore.

Returning to the press notes, ‘Wiltzie cites the barbiturate of the title as both muse and sacred escape: “When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some, so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.”’ With Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal, he has created that perfect escape. This is an album that lends itself well to listening – or half-listening – by candlelight with a slow-sipping drink, and to simply drift and nod to.

AA

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