Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

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

Posted: 1 August 2016 in Albums
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Monotype Records – mono086

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

 

Internation Nothing

Kemper Norton – Toll

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

 

Kemper Norton - Toll

New Rome – Nowhere

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

 

New_Rome_Nowhere

Wolfram – X

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

 

 

wolfram_x_cover

Sanford Parker – Lash Back

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

 

sanford-parker-lash-back-1

Yannis Kyriakides with Slagwerk Den Haag & Silbersee – Lunch Music: Music Inspired by William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch

Posted: 24 July 2016 in Albums
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Unsounds – 55U

Edward S. Robinson

William Burroughs may have become a figure toward whom many hip musicians gravitated towards in the seventies and eighties, but it remains a rather perverse fact that his enduring influence appears to be stronger in the world of music than in literature. It’s true that many ‘alternative’ musicians and counterculturalists latched onto his lifestyle and biographical details more than his actual output, romanticising the idea of the ‘literary outlaw’ but it would equally be a mistake to underplay the effect his innovations in audio, with his tape recorder experiments extending the concepts surrounding the cut-ups proving hugely influential acts like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. It’s a shame, then, that so many of the albums which cite Burroughs as an influence are simply dismal. Burroughs may have referenced various ‘poplar tunes’ in his works and resided in Tangiers in the late 1950s but I haven’t yet established any textual basis to connect Burroughs with bad avant jazz or half-arsed hip-hop.

Yannis Kyriakidies and his collaborators are clearly immense fans of Burroughs, and the CD booklet records that the text for the album is not derived from Naked Lunch, but ‘a Burroughsian cut-up of sorts’. Now, this is problematic in that the cut-up technique came later: there are no cut-ups in Naked Lunch, but I would rather be charitable and embrace the spirit of the album: the words were in fact derived from ‘word frequency analyses’ of the book’s segments, and as such, it’s fair to say that the lyrical content very much captures the essence of the book. I can’t help but be impressed by their referencing of Ian MacFadyn’s essay ‘The Mouth Inside: The Voices of Naked Lunch’, and am equally intrigued by the implication that the album was set to be called simply Naked Lunch: Kyriakideas records in his notes that Robert Ashley, to whom the album is dedicated, implored him to use the title and deal with any copyright issues later, but finds the artist conclude ‘somehow I did get scared by the difficulties.’ But what about the music, and what about the delivery?

The heavy, heavy crackle of vinyl. Scratched as scratched. From the glitching fuzz or white noise croaks the voice of William Burroughs. Slowed, as if drugged. The sound warps and slows, as if the tape is stretches or the turntable drive belt is slipping. As a barbershop quartet croon Gregorian chants to provide an incongruously jaunty backing, his voice is dragged to an unintelligible drone, slower and slower. Finally, all that remains is a faint whistle, clattering and a thumping beat like a heart’s pulse, which eventually, finally slows… and silence. ‘Boy…. Boys…’ sings an operatic tenor voice against a backdrop of springy instrumentation and whistling analogue on ‘Boy’. The vocal harmonies build in layers, skyward. It might not sound like my impression of Naked Lunch, but that’s a reflection of the book’s multifaceted nature.

‘Shakin’’ takes Johnny Kid and the Pirates’ hit and jars and stutters it, one more scratched CD, bowed LP, cassette tape chewed in the machine heads. From the sonic swamp into which the song rapidly descends emerge crawing pterodactyl-like sounds. Like Burroughs’ fragmented, fevered narratives, so the pieces of music are twisted and contorted out of shape, linearity dispensed with in favour of atmosphere and heightened sensation.

Kyriakides returns to the barrelling scrape of badly worn vinyl on ‘Junk World’, while industrial scraping and a babble of voices in multiple languages combine to disorientating effect on ‘Like replicas’, before ‘Speed Days’ moves into the kind of musical territory more commonly associated with Burroughs-related recordings and tributes, with scratching and rattling industrial percussion.

In all, it’s something of a mixed bag, and while I personally don’t love all of the music, I have to admire its spirit.

 

Lunch-Music- WEB-350x350

Michael Moser – Antiphon Stein

Posted: 23 July 2016 in Albums
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Edition RZ

Christopher Nosnibor

Returning to a brace of recurrent themes, including that of process as touched on in my write-up of Laurent Perrier’s latest collection of ‘one-way collaborations’, process and place are again key factors in the making of Michael Moser’s sprawling double album, Antiphon Stein. The majority of the sound featured on the album derives from Klaus Lang playing organs in various churches – although the sounds here are very different from those featured on Stefan Fraunberger’s recent album.

As the album cover explains in notes replicated in the press release, Antiphon Stein is a site-specific sound installation in the nave and choir of Minoritenkirche in Krems/Stein that engages with the architecture and sound of this church space. The materials used are hanging and lying flat objects of glass and metal that are played with sound pressure transducers. These objects thus become membranes that resonate in their entire surface and mass, exuding sound to the surrounding space. Of course, the album release is not site-specific, but serves the purpose of transporting the listener to that space, and a degee of visualisaion does enhance the listening experience.

The organ sounds on Antiphon Stein are as much a product of their places, the architectural structures and the decorations within them being integral to their textures. In addition to the organ recordings are drums and percussion courtesy of Berndt Thurner, while Moser himself adds glass plates and electronics. But of course, Moser’s primary contribution is the process. Each source sound exists as a ‘compositional miniature’ of three to seven minutes in duration, but processed digitally to form four pieces each with a running time of approximately twenty minutes. The process is therefore absolutely transformative, and as such integral to the realisation of the end product which bears little semblance to the initial input.

In context, the importance of process is not only significant but central, and the process is many ways is about amplification. The input is relatively modest, in that this large-scale work is constructed from an assemblage of much smaller scale recordings. Specifically, the material itself consists of compositional miniatures of three to seven minutes in duration, which have subsequently been fed through a computer to yield four untitled long-form pieces, each occupying a side of vinyl and running for some twenty minutes each.

The scale of the final work is grand, and it’s not simply about the length of the tracks. The atmosphere is immense, and while there are dark shadows, the overall sensation Antiphon Stein inspires one of awe. The sounds, described as ‘small compositional miniatures of a duration of three to seven minutes’, having been combined digitally to form a vast sonic mass, coalesce to create something which sounds entirely natural. And yet, the work is structured, the realisation of an ambitious project of sonic architecture.

Cavernous echoes amplify the depths of slow, low rumbles. Subtle chimes roll and glissando, throb and whistle. Hums hang heavy in slow-turning air. There is nothing hurried about the way the sounds layer and unfurl, and this deliberate, considered approach to the sculpting of the sound is extremely effective in terms of how the engages the listener.

Perhaps a limitation of the format is the fact that a work that readily lends itself to existing as a single, continuous piece is interrupted by the need to turn the record over. Yet, by the same token, this very act necessitates a physical engagement, and render the tactile qualities of the music tangible.

And so it is that the listener becomes engaged in the process, adding a layer to the process beyond the product itself, namely that of participation, of engagement. And ultimately, this is the level on which the album succeeds. It’s impossible to avoid the sequence of process with Antiphon Stein. And yet the process does not render the material sterile: far from it. If anything, the process is vital to bringing the material to life and is precisely what engages the listener.

 

moser-antiphon-cover

Hans Tammen – Deus Ex Machina: Endangered Guitar Live

Posted: 21 July 2016 in Albums
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Clang Records – Clang 042 – June 10th 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Hans Tammen’s Music for Choking Disklavier was one of the first albums to be reviewed here on Aural Aggravation, back in December last year. Deus Ex Machina finds Tammen continue to explore the possibilities of instruments when played in a fashion they were not designed to be played. Since 2000, Tammen has been working with the ‘Endangered Guitar’, and tirelessly developing its functionalities.

Tammen’s website summarises this ‘Guitar-Controlled Live Sound Processing’ in a fshion that’s more intriguing than explicitly instructive: ‘The Endangered Guitar is a journey through the land of unending sonic operations, an interactive hybrid between a guitar and a computer. The software “listens” to the playing, to then determine the parameters of the live sound processing. The guitar is the sound source, but the same sound is also used to control the software. Sounds of the guitar are processed in realtime, pitch and various other parameters of the actual playing serve as control source of the processing. Currently, additional control sources are provided by a Leap Motion Controller.’ Technical yet simultaneously vague, what it boils down to is that Tammen has devised a guitar / computer hybrid, and in 2004 her introduced a random element to the software.

Tammen’s collaboration with Lars Graugaard under the Infernal Machines moniker, which came out earlier this year, was more about utilising the Endangered Guitar in a tempered, moderated and counterbalanced way. In contrast, this live recording, the title of which references the theatrical practice of lowering a ‘god’ character on stage using a cable device in order to resolve a troublesome situation in the plot of a play, and in which Tammen casts himself the role of the actor, lowered to the stage to daringly intervene, is built on improvisation and a wide-ranging exploration of the hybrid instrument’s capabilities.

Tammen writes of the computer crashing while performing, and of how wildly unpredictable the whole setup is, and this very much translates into the audio captured on the album.

Scratched overdriven chords and discords splinter and snarl. Massive, distorted, overloading sludged-up Sunn O)))-like drones rumble on… and on… walls of sound collapse in on themselves. Pickups cut in and out intermittently, feed back and crackle. Occasionally, recognisable notes – albeit notes that sounds like a version of Metal Machine Music are distinctly audible. There are no tunes to be found here, and often, it doesn’t even sound like a guitar. On ‘Transaxle’, the guitar effects the sound of violin strings being scraped, against a droning, wheezing sound like a deflating bellows, while on ‘Interlude at Rake’, it conjures a techno sound, replicating synth stabs and booming bass beats. Rapid, looping modulations, bleeps and squiggles replicate the effect of analogue synths, with sounds which would be at home on a track by Factory Floor or Whitehouse, and elsewhere, dark ambient passages hum, rumble, grind and billow and grating industrial barrages relentlessly assault the senses. At times, it hurts. But it’s also entertaining and often enjoyable: Deus Ex Machina is sonically challenging and one can’t help but contemplate just how the sounds of a guitar can be mutated in real-time to create the diverse and sometimes utterly insane sounds captured here. It’s by no means a novelty album, either: the concept of the Endangered Guitar may sound like something of a gimmick, but Tammen demonstrates that his leading preoccupation is with innovation for the purpose of creating new sound, and more importantly, creating something with those sounds.

 

 

Hans Tammens - Deus Ex Machina

Laurent Perrier – Plateforme #2

Posted: 18 July 2016 in Albums
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Baskaru – karu:39

Christopher Nosnibor

Within the domain of the avant-garde, there is a recurring thread of self-reflexivity, and a focus on ‘the process’ which borders on obsessive. Many artists have offered theories on the benefits of collaboration, with the practices and methods of another person facilitating fresh approaches to creative processes. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin famously cited Napoleon Hill’s bestselling self-improvement book from 1937, Think and Grow Rich, having latched onto the concept of ‘the third mind,’ whereby the coming together of two individuals brings forth an unseen collaborator in the form of a third, superior mind. Needless to say, collaboration is not for everyone, but Laurent Perrier is very much an advocate, as this release which finds him working in collaboration with three notable artists, namely Francisco Lopez, Tom Recchion, and Christian Zanesi is testament to. But all is not quite s it may seem: Perrier’s Plateforme series, of which this is the second release, offers an alternative interpretation of what collaboration means, with the tracks each standing as what he terms a ‘one-way collaboration’.

The idea works on the basis that Perrier takes sounds provided by his ‘collaborators’ and uses those sounds – and nothing else – to create the pieces. This approach naturally pieces. Raises questions around the nature of the relationship between the artist and the ‘text’ (in the broad sense of the term). Is Perrier the architect, designing and constructing the tracks from raw materials? Is he even the composer? Or do these pieces represent remixes of unmixed material? To what extent can the ownership of each piece be aligned to the collaborator, and how much falls to Perrier, the one who sculpts the raw materials into something? In terms of process, one is also compelled to ask, to what extent do the ‘original’ sounds define the character of each individual artist’s work?

There is a definite sense that Perrier has worked with a strong intention to preserve the identity and integrity of each of his collaborators in these three pieces, and here I would return to Burroughs and Gysin, who claimed “A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images — real Rimbaud images — but new ones”. This is a premise with which Perrier would appear to concur: his aim is not to vandalise or otherwise desecrate or stamp his own identity on their sounds, but simply to shape and order them. So, a collection of Francisco Lopez sounds arranged, mutated and mixed results in a nee track by Francisco Lopez, forged with the assistance of Laurent Perrier.

And it works, with or without detailed knowledge of either the work of Laurent Perrier or his collaborators, with Plateforme #2 featuring three long-for tracks which explore texture and tone in a variety of ways, and with each track displaying a distinct ‘personality’.

Francisco Lopez’s material emerges as screeding scrapes and drones, barrelling hums, crackles and slow-motion explosions, fizzing static. Harsh blasts of drilling, rumbling earthworks and abstract noise fill the air. Elongated hisses, like air escaping from valves or burst pipes and storm-force winds all amalgamate to create big, big sounds and a sense of immense space.

Hinting at vintage science fiction and horror movies, long, low, ambient drones hang and turn slowly, to be rent with shrill shrieks of treble, and blizzards of looping lasers to conjure a strange, alien landscape in sound in the Tom Recchion collaboration. Jump cuts extend the filmic analogy. Spectral tracings haunt the longest of the three pieces, with Christian Zanesi’s sounds building from a whisper to a scream; around the mid-point, the piece has evolved to a veritable tornado of sound which blasts from the speakers with breathtaking force.

 

Laurent Perrier - Plateforme 2

 

Laurent Perrier – Plateforme #2 Online at Baskaru

IX Tab & Hoofus – The Blow Volume I

Posted: 17 July 2016 in Albums
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Front & Follow – F&F044 – 8th July 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

With this release, Front & Follow inaugurate a new series of split cassette and download releases. The premise is that the artists are given a side apiece, and while the idea is that they’re encouraged to collaborate, it’s essentially down to the acts involved. This first ‘Blow’ release features a total of nineteen tracks, with ten from Hoofus, seven from IX Tab and a brace of joint efforts.

The ten Hoofus track are first, and if the titles, in their evocations of ancient lore, mysticism and history, seem at odds with the bubbling synth cycles which form their fabric, then it’s a reflection of the infinite contradictions which define Hoofus’ enigmatic sound. Shimmering, throbbing and needling, the scratchy, fuzzy tones cover the full sonic spectrum in infinite, iridescent hues. Occasionally sliding into unusual time signatures and oddly dissonant passages – the wonky keys of ‘Twentythree Seven’ shouldn’t work, but instead it’s rather magical – their ten tracks are beautifully weird, and weirdly beautiful. The notes roll and bend, wobble and warp, layering up to form a rich latticework. The effect is to create music that transcends music, enveloping the listener in a thick, pulsating aural blanket. It’s an immersive, multisensory experience, akin to how I would imagine simultaneously being under water and watching the Arora Borealis.

IX Tab’s eight tracks are quite different in tone: more overtly electronic, bleeping, swooshing and rippling notes scurry across one another in vintage sci-fi style. The dizzyingly hectic compositions are contrasted by sedate ambient segments. Samples – snippets of dialogue and lopped phrases – feature heavily, and there’s an overtly experimental air to the tracks. Trilling pipes and rattling chimes flit alongside woozy, opiate drones and church song. The nine-minute ‘The Herepath Comes Away’ is a magnificently expansive, atmospheric work, and something of a standout as it leads the listener on a curious journey of the mind.

The two collaborative tracks, credited to Hoofus & IX Tab, work precisely because they sound like a hybrid of the two acts. ‘The Ministry of Ontological Insecurity’ features sampled voices repeating the statement ‘I don’t believe in me’ (occasionally interspersed with variants ‘I don’t believe in you / him/ her / them’) over a drifting dark ambient backdrop fractured with incidental sonic incursions. ‘The Ploughs & Machines’, which closes the album also incorporates samples and woozy electro oddness with shifting time signatures to mesmerising and disorienting effect.

Individually and collectively, Hoofus and IX Tab have conjured an album that reaches for the outer limits and transports the listener to them and then beyond.

 

Hoofus IX Tab

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