Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

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.

 

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Wolfram – X

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Sanford Parker – Lash Back

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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

Martin Creed – Thoughts Lined Up

Posted: 14 July 2016 in Albums
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Telephone Records – 8th July 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Wakefield-born and Glasgow-raised Martin Creed probably has a fair few detractors. The Turner Prize has a peculiar tendency to wind people up, art fans and critics and the general populace alike And so, while in art circles he’s known as a self-effacing, playfully provocative artist, to many, he is known as being the 2001 winner of the Turner Prize-Winner, who became infamous overnight for his installation piece, Work no. 227: the lights going on and off.

For many, such a work would be an unbearable albatross, but Creed is one of those people who’s always onto the next thing before the dust has settled around the thing before, and he’s a true polyartist, who has, seemingly, no fixed medium of choice, instead preferring to let his creative impulses flow through whatever medium he feels fits best. And throughout his career, the ever-idiosyncratic Creed has made music, with Thoughts Lined Up representing the latest in a long line of releases.

Judging by the cover image, and Creed’s spectacularly diffuse output, the title seems rather incredible. By which I mean, it’s hard to believe he could line up his thoughts in a queue for the checkout: this is a man who thrives on chaos, disorder, who eschews organisation and conformity in favour of free-flowing creativity, anarchy and all things random.

The title makes more sense in light of the artist’s own explanation of its meaning, which is refreshing in its simplicity: “It’s called Thoughts Lined Up because that is literally what it is,”, he says, “just all these bits – these thoughts – put in a row one after the other, trying not to worry about what they add up to. Most of it started as audio notes recorded on the Tube or in the street – just little everyday mantras that you say to yourself as you go along; things that come up in your head, and that help keep you going, or that sometimes you want to go away…”

And so, the end product is an album that in many respect is a one-stop compilation, a work which wouldn’t be much further from a concept album if it tried – unless that concept was a haphazard collection of songs thrown together and sequenced one to twenty-four out of conventional and commercial necessity. One kind of gets the impression that if all of the album’s songs could have been arranged to play simultaneously, then that’s how they would have been presented. The thoughts are lined up, in a sequence, but this isn’t a linear album or a collection of songs unified by anything beyond the mind from which they emerged.

According to the blurb, the album was Recorded at ArtSpace, Brixton, and mixed by Liam Watson at Toe Rag Studios, the album was recorded to 1-inch tape in one week just before Christmas 2015, and mixed with sonic impresario Liam Watson, in glorious mono, on the ex-Abbey Road EMI desk at Hackney’s legendary, analogue-only Toe Rag Studios. Yes, mixed in glorious mono. On the one hand, given the audio technology we have now, however much one may adore the inimitable sound of analogue, to master an album in mono is simply perverse. On the other, it’s another manifestation of Creed’s rejection of convention, and at the same time can be seen as an observation on the way listeners actually hear music nowadays: just as everyone seems to be obsessed with shooting optimal quality photos with digital SLR cameras only for them to be viewed on piddly mobile phone screens via Facebook, so the idea of superior audio recordings to be consumed through shit iPod phones, laptop and mobile phone speakers seems absurd. And Martin Creed revels in those absurd contradictions, and does so with grace and humour, and not with one eye firmly set on the mass markets.

And so, the songs are amusing, entertaining, whimsical, wonky. Some sound half-finished, many evoke the spirit of the Bonzo Dog Band, while others call on psychedelic folk traditions, and other still call to mind the choppy sound of the early Fall albums, and Creed is unafraid of cumbersome or cliché rhymes. It’s a haphazard, hit-and-miss affair, but it’s zany and it’s fun and Creed’s singularity and disregard for marketability is admirable.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/167247762

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Martin Creed Online

ISKRA – Ruins

Posted: 13 July 2016 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 1st July 2016

James Wells

Christ. Everything louder and faster and more gnarly than everything else. The drums are so fast the individual beats blur to form a sound that resembles the whupping of a helicopter’s rotors. The guitars, a frenetic blizzard of movement, form a blanket of sound, but there are actual notes in there – lots of notes, tumbling over one another at such speed as to be almost inaudible individually to the human ear. Screaming solos rear up from the thunderous tempest, brief but shrill and completely wild.

It’s everything you’d expect from an album released on Southern Lord, and from a band who’ve tagged the album on Bandcamp with the terms ‘anarchist metal black metal blackened crust death metal metal punk victoria bc grindcore Victoria’. The lyrics are as unintelligible as the band’s logo, but the sentiment is clear.

It’s seriously black and it’s seriously crusty, and a gloriously angry and relentlessly bleak, venom-spewing example of dingy, dark metal. The title might refer nihilistically to the ruins of civilisation or of humanity, but could equally be a pointer to the ruins of your eardrums and psyche after hearing this savage album.

 

ISKRA - Ruins

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