Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

mantank – my misery is your reward

Posted: 11 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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skoghall rekordings – 10th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The notes which accompany this release are more of an anti-pitch than a promotion: ‘depression, dourness, gloom, sex, drinking, drugs and male anxiety – some of it true, some made up.’ I had been warned. Should this maybe even come with a trigger warning?

Hell no. Art is life., and life doesn’t come with a rigger warning. If you truly want to avoid anything that’s a potential trigger, you probably just need to die right now, because there is no other way to avoid everything.

But my misery is your reward is pretty fucking bleak. It’s not Dave Procter’s first foray into acoustic-based musical work, and by no means the first release to feature his first spoken word works, although it is perhaps his first to present both these and an array of other styles with the purpose of exploring a core theme, namely of being fucking miserable.

I should make the up-front presentation of the fact that I am absolutely by no means being critical of the album’s miserabilism. For years, the theme of much dialogue has been ‘we need to talk more about mental health! We need to destigmatise mental health! We need to talk about mental health more openly!’ And I agree without reservation… but… It seems that the limit of most conversations – and this is perpetuated, sadly, by sufferers, and by artists, and by bosses (especially bosses) and by social media –remains at ‘I’m having trouble with my mental health’/ ‘Oh dear’. That is not talking about mental health. But people are not comfortable discussing the details, the way those troubles manifest, what it really means. Tell someone what that really means and oftentimes it will likely be a very brief and one-sided conversation. Male anxiety: are we even close to a place where blokes can sit and talk about their disturbed sleep and panic attacks down the pub with their mates? Are we hell.

The spoken-word pieces – succinct and pithy – are impactful partly because they say so much with so little verbiage, but equally because of the monotone delivery recorded close to the mic, with no studio slickness, no compression or reverb, but dry, as if Procter is leaning forward to confess in low tones the unutterable darkness. ‘no sleep no peace’ is exemplary:

I get no sleep at night

No peace in the day

There’s shit in the kitchen

There’s shit on the floor

There’s shit all on my life

Since you walked through the door.

So many of us will have lived with some squalid fucker at some point, and what may on paper appear trivial can in fact become a living hell.

The majority of the songs are sparse acoustic guitar and vocal works which sit between bedroom gloom and neofolk, with similarly direct and downcast lyrics: ‘the choices are stark enough / between dope / and a rope / it doesn’t take much these days’, he sings on ‘not much’. They’re simple and super lo-fi, and wouldn’t work any other way, because the nature of the recordings imbues them with an intimacy which brings a lump to the throat on many occasions. Even the bits that are made up, because it’s all interwoven and ultimately inseparable.

Elsewhere, ‘the visitor’ has the haunting reverb-drenched melancholy of Leonard Cohen, while ‘his face, my place’ is like a demo for a goth take on the kitchen sink non-drama of The Wedding Present, and ‘when you want her back’ sounds like David Gedge in collaboration with Stereolab.

As the label’s Bandcamp page states, Skoghall exists to present ‘a collection of past and present work involving Dave Procter’, and my misery is your reward is very much a work mines from the archives, ‘originally recorded during several periods of the above in Leeds and Stockholm in 2007 and 2008, although the ideas have been around since late 2005…’ Procter adds, ‘I think they call it catharsis. This LP is meant to be listened to in one sitting.’

Almost twenty years since conception and seventeen or so years since its recording, some may consider it curious that an (extremely) active artist would serve up these somewhat primitive and one might even say juvenile recordings now. But there does come a point in life when, perhaps we make peace with our discomfort and awkwardness and with the distance of time, can appreciate the merits of those works which were necessary in the evolutionary journey to the artists we become. To finally release it… yes, there must be an element of catharsis in casting out those thorny thoughts, the kind of twisty, churny recollections that insist on needling away, years after the fact.

my misery is your reward is a world away from Procter’s work as Legion of Swine or Fibonacci Drone Organ, and even the no-nonsense spoken word of Dale Prudent, and there’s a touching humanity, and the lack of sophistication is an asset when it comes to conveying difficult emotional states in a relatable fashion. Yes, we need to talk about mental health, and what we also need is for documents of unflinching honesty and for artists to take the lead. This is what we need.

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Metalogue – Apposition Breach

Posted: 7 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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10th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Metlaogue’s Bandcamp pitches the project as ‘Industrial/IDM/breakcore with cinematic tendencies’, while the notes for Apposition Breach note how it ‘explores the threshold of geography and inner world – where landscape becomes the medium for emotion’. This, for me, seems to carry almost Ballardian connotations, the idea of inner geographies, the way in which the geometry of a landscape can slide between the literal and the metaphorical, how one can become an analogue of the other. The inner and outer worlds exist almost separate of one another, and the only point at which they intersect is in the mind as one processes the physical world as experienced through the shading of the emotional state. A sunny day may be a joy to behold, but may not bring joy in the face of a trauma. How we respond to our surroundings is influenced by not only circumstance, but the way we react to it. Yet rarely do we pause to consider these variables. Why did you have a shit day at work? Was the work itself shit, or did you arrive carrying the burden of something else which made something comparatively minor a catastrophe? You may walk the same route daily for a year, but it will never be the quite the same experience. The variables are infinite, and on Apposition Breach, Metalogue interrogates those variables and the reflex of memory and their complex relationship on a nuanced suite of compositions, some six years in the making.

The atmospheric ‘Threshold’ draws the listener into that fluid space, where soft ambience wraps itself around hard mechanical drones, and the percussion shifts in pace and intensity, at first muted, subtle, but firing forth in explosive bursts to become the dominant feature, and in doing so marking a dynamic shift in mood. It’s somewhat akin to climbing a gentle hill and suddenly finding a sharp crag just as the wind picks up and clouds darken the sky. The temperate changes with the change in tone.

While the images which accompany the release are illustrative, the soundscapes themselves evoke rusted machinery, dilapidated mills and farming equipment gradually yielding to the elements. As much as it’s industrial, Apposition Breach offers haunting echoes of industry, once-thriving communities and factories abandoned – not the collapse of civilisation, but the decline which comes with ‘progress’. Wraith-like synths wisp and envelop pulverising beats on ‘Triangulation’, a composition which builds and transitions through a series of different forms. The pieces tend to be on the longer side, in excess of six minutes and pushing to almost twelve on ‘Outer Margin’. This gives them time and space in which to evolve at a pace which feels natural and necessary.

‘Ilira’ is ominous, scraping drones create an eerie fog of tension which is punctured by hard, violent beats. Between the snarling mechanical grind of ‘Reflection’ and the dark, pulsating title track, Metalogue conjures an array of sonic sceneries which present a journey of sorts. Not a linear journey whereby one travels from A to B, B to C, but one which seers the retinas and scours the mind with a succession of scenes, flashbacks, rapid cuts, with the effect being not dissimilar to the way memory skips here and there in time and space when triggered by seemingly unconnected and unrelated prompts – a word, a sound, a smell, nothing at all – or a dream, in which one suddenly finds themselves in a different location or setting seemingly apropos of nothing. Just as William Burroughs remarked of his discontinuous narratives that he was not concerned with explaining how characters get from one place to the next, so it is that we, as participants in the immersive experience that is Apposition Breach, find ourselves effectively teleported.

There’s the hard attack of ‘Redoubt’ and the echoing mystery of the swampy but hypnotic ‘Day Marker’, and in between, all shades of hefty percussion and cold, razor-edged synths shiver and scrape kneed and throb to render an altogether uncomfortable experience. Apposition Breach is expansive, ambitious, and meticulously realised.

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Trek with Quintronic – Stranger Than Today

Posted: 5 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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17th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s inevitable that with the sheer volume of music in existence, there will be a fair bit which bypasses even the keenest enthusiast of the obscure. Trek and Quintronic is a pairing I feel I really ought to be familiar with. Emerging in 1980 Paul Wilcox (Trek) and David Kane (Quintronic) recorded two albums, noted for pioneering ‘electronic rock’, with Landing in from 1980, and the self-titled follow-up Trek w/ Quintronic LP the following year, created using an array of synths, plus pedals and six- and twelve-string electric guitars. There was a reissue, entitled Landing Plus, released in Europe in 2012 and the US a couple of years later, which featured the entirety of Trek w/ Quintronic and a couple of additional cuts by way of the ‘plus’, but twelve years on, it’s not exactly easy to come by, and this new release offers something quite different, featuring as it does ‘9 of the original Tw/Q tracks plus 11 new, never released songs written by Paul Wilcox, spanning a period of 40 plus years, all remixed and remastered.’

This means that some of the material was recorded after their second album, without seeing the light of day, while some of the contemporaneous recordings have been flaking away on old tapes since 1980 or thereabouts, and their restoration and repair has been quite an undertaking, achieved quite remarkably by David Lawrie of The Royal Ritual. The aim, as they state on the website, was to ‘present the definitive collection of the best of Trek with Quintronic’, and containing some twenty tracks, this is a wide-ranging, and in-depth summary of their work – and it’s often the case that musical careers consist of considerably more than the material that was released at the time, for whatever reasons.

That ‘You Might be Lonely’ and ‘As We Sing’ first appeared on Landing makes this a truly career-spanning document, which showcases the full span of their musical vision and innovation. It’s often easy to forget just how new to the market (affordable) synths were at this point in time. The advent of 80s synthpop and industrial music came about as a result of the emerging technology, which also, notably, included drum machines. It was a revolution.

There’s a gothic, church organ feel to the introduction, and its grandeur also makes a nod to the prog past of the pair, but it’s listening to ‘You Might be Lonely’ that the span of their influences coupled with the use of the kit at their disposal becomes apparent: it’s like Hawkwind but with synths, both rumbling and swirling and with additional laser blasts and primitive drum machine knocking out a metronomic rhythm, all coalescing to provide a backdrop to a vocal delivery that’s an overt Bowie rip.

The Bowie influence looms equally large on the glammy ‘All the Rave’, only here with the addition of sweeping string sounds. It sounds remarkably fresh, as well as prefacing – by a long way – the trend for orchestral flourishes which would be a big thing in the late 90s with, and winding up with a big, flashy guitar solo. It’s visionary stuff, and the execution is remarkably sophisticated, particularly for the time.

Some of the songs sound more of the era: ‘Zolian Space’ lands somewhere in the region of OMD and Ure-era Ultravox, but it’s a nifty enough pop song. There are a fair few of those on offer here, not least of all the bouncy Suicide-meets-Bowie ‘White Hoods’, and the hyperactive twitch of ‘Twin Forces’.

The guitars are to the fore on the previously unreleased ‘Built to Average’, hinting perhaps at one of the many directions they could have veered. It’s a solid tune, but coming on like a collision between Bauhaus and Mr Mister, it’s dated more than some of the other material, whereas, in contrast, the spiky ‘Wally And The Rich Kid’ is pure vintage yet still more impactful in its stark, dramatic stylings.

Some of – what at least I assume to be – the later material stands out because it sounds different: ‘Religion’ is slicker, the drum machine in particular more ‘real’ sounding, and in a way it tells a story of technological advancement and its effect on music-making. Objectively, it sounds better, in terms of clarity, fidelity, separation, but for everything that’s been gained, something has been lost, and it’s something that using emulators or even vintage gear can never fully recapture. There was an unmistakeable zeitgeist about the ‘79-’82 spell, which was unique, and Trek with Quintronic were right there and probably didn’t even realise at the time. No-one did, really.

Hindsight really is everything. Stranger Than Today is an outstanding compilation which goes beyond in providing a hitherto unseen insight into the context of their groundbreaking second album and beyond.

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Nate Wooley – Henry House

Posted: 4 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Ideologic Organ – 10th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s already looking like 10th January is going to be an intense date in terms of the sheer volume of releases. Time was when January was something of a quiet spell for new music, as everyone recovered from the Christmas glut, and labels tended not to release much since people were skint. It also used to be the case that unexpected releases would sneak unexpectedly high in the charts, especially the UK singles top 40, with remarkably low sales figures, usually with cult acts with savvy labels whacking out a release that would have barely scraped the charts any other month – White Town’s ‘Your Woman’, released 13th January 1997 and hitting number one in the UK and going top ten globally – however briefly – is a classic example.

There’s no danger of Nate Wooley registering on any charts with Henry House, released on the Ideologic Organ label, curated by Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) legend, and home to a long line of truly magnificent avant-garde and otherwise most unusual musical works, of which this is very much one. That’s not because it’s not good, it’s just that the nature of charts has changes beyond recognition over the last thirty years. There is also the statistic which recently came to light that there was more music released on any single given day of 2024 than during the entirety of 1989. It’s a pretty staggering statistic, and one of many factors when considering just how difficult it is for artists to make a living from making music. Something I have touched on previously is the fact that simultaneous with this explosion of output, culture has become both more homogenised and more fragmented. In terms of the mainstream, this homogenisation has facilitated the advent of multimillionaire and even billionaire ultra-megastars like Taylor Swift – but at the other end of the spectrum, there are tens of thousands of artists releasing music on Bandcamp and Spotify with no backing or publicity whatsoever, to be heard by maybe five people.

But we need music that’s unpopular, that isn’t created with any commercial intent, and we very much need labels like Ideologic Organ to provide a platform and to point us toward the cream of those artists who may not otherwise reach the audience they so richly deserve.

And as an album containing a single composition split into five parts, described as ‘a recurring dream song’ with a running time of some eighty minutes, this is a work which is very much non-commercial in every way.

As the accompanying notes detail, this is a work which combines ‘closely tuned instruments and sinetones, tape-music editing techniques, field recordings, and voice,’ providing the context that ‘this eighty-minute, five-part song cycle is an evolutionary step away from the spontaneity of the free jazz/noise aesthetic usually found in the music of Nate Wooley. Henry House expands on the ecstatic, durational work found in Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition that has been premiered over the last ten years by an ensemble that now includes multiple drummers, guitarists, a twenty-one-person choir, and the composer on amplified trumpet. But its ritual is more serene, more natural, slower.

‘Henry House is the first long-form piece that doesn’t feature Wooley’s trumpet. It is also the first to be constructed around his poetic writing. Wooley weaves a strange funeral mass for a fictional everyman from isolated phrases culled from essays, poems, and non-fiction written by Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, and Reiner Stach. After organizing the fragments into a dream narrative, Wooley rewrote the text dozens of times, manipulating the stitched-together story until only glimpses of its sources remained.’

It’s ten minutes into the twenty-minute opener, ‘Acacia Burnt Myrrh’ that the poetical oration begins, with the words spoken by Mat Maneri. He speaks in a calm, not entirely flat, but level tone, of geometry, of space, of time. The words conjure abstractions, images, moods, against backdrops of elongated hovering hums, oscillator-driven quivering drones. The words are audible, but comparatively low in the mix, and it’s not always easy to stay focused on the narrative, such as it is: instead, the mind focuses on absorbing the atmosphere. There’s a lot of that, and Henry House is an immense project with near-infinite dimensions. Megan Schubert’s faster-paced, more driven-sounding delivery is quite a contrast to Maneri’s, and from these counterpoints, the album grows in terms of dynamics and depth.

So much happens: listening to Henry House is like reading a book which contains stories within the story, and illustrations in a range of styles. No two tracks are really alike, and the arrangements change across the course of each piece. It draws you into a dark fairytale, a unique world which isn’t exactly scary, but unsettling because it feels unfamiliar, dissonant. The fact that two of the pieces bear the same title only add to the bewilderment. Horns and drones radiate between the narrative segments, and the final piece, ‘Aleatory Half Sentences’ is led by some flighty piano work, which trills and flickers against a heavy, nagging, low-level hum. It’s one that really takes some time to process, but it’s very much worth the effort.

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Flin Van Hemmen – Luxury of Mind

Posted: 2 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Self-Released – 13th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, the notes artists pen to accompany their latest works are somewhat dry, rather technical. Others provide effusive essays, while others still no details whatsoever. Flin Van Hemmen’s words which accompany Luxury of Mind are poetic, somewhat vague and elliptical, but lyrically rich and personal, if vague.

In order to thaw matters of the heart, one must go to where it’s cold.

It was the summer of 2022 and I was finally summoned there.

My personal winter had come, a place at once foreign and familiar.

In a flash I was made aware of all my life’s dimensions – the ones less welcome, or simply too big to face.

My sense of musicianship was temporarily halted, at that point unsure of its return.

Early 2024 I knew my personal winter was waning, and so I started tinkering away again, musically.

The pitter patter of the rain, the orchestra rehearsing their parts simultaneously, the sounds inside the corner store where I buy my daily coffee.

And how do they sound, together?

What indeterminacies reveal itself, or do I pick up on?

That’s my journey and a journey I wish to share with you in Luxury of Mind.

I have elected to quote in full because they are clearly pertinent to the substance of this material. Van Hemmen is clearly and peculiarly specific that he feels the need to share this specific journey, which clearly has involved stasis and self-doubt. Writer’s block? He seems to allude to rather more than that here.

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‘A Picture of Your Face (In the Light of the Fire)’ is bold, choral to begin. It’s not grand in the bombastic sense, but feels deeply spiritual, ceremonial, and for wont of a better word, ‘churchy’. While the sense of grandeur is uplifting, and spiritually powerful, the drone of organ and voices coming reverberating in a large, echoey space reminds that where there is a ‘churchy’ aspect, religion – particularly of the Christian persuasion – for all the exultation, is laced with guilt, apology, pleading – pleading forgiveness for sins, pleading for entry into heaven. And as such, it reminds of the paradox whereby Christians prefer to confess and atone their sins rather than simply try harder not to err in the first place. There are scratches and crackles which rupture the graceful smoothness of the piece, and the title track slips into a darker, danker space, with a sound like torrential rain on a tin roof, with murky ambience lurking about.

‘Eloquence and Grief’ brings new levels of disorientation, sort of a film-soundtrack piece with discordant background babble and crowd noise as an orchestra forges a soundscape which evokes mountains and canyons. Its meaning is difficult to extrapolate: it feels like multiple narratives occurring simultaneously, and the same is true of the eerie dark sound collage of ‘Volition & Velocity I’, and its equally gloomy, dolorous counterpart, ‘Volition & Velocity II’.

The whole feel of Luxury of Mind is haunting, unsettling, like walking through the soundtrack to a vague and abstract film, traversing time and space, intersecting scenes of bustling medieval towns, and post-apocalyptic shots of burning villages, intercut with occasional psychedelic visuals, while electronic circuits in heavy rain and church bells chime for the funerals of unnamed bodies. It’s not quite horror, but it’s heavy with gloom and trauma, and, by this measure, Luxury of Mind sounds like the soundtrack to a period filled with anguish and psychological pain. It concludes with the sparse and dank clanks of ‘Last Year in Cantecleer’ – and it must have been a washout.

It feels as if we’re sinking in floodwater, drowning in a tidal wave of toxic bullshit, while all around everything goes wrong. But at least one thing has gone right for Flin Van Hemmen: Luxury of Mind is an album with so much texture, so much depth of texture, so much mood, that it’s impossible to deny its creative success.

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Plague Garden – Under The Sanguine Moon

Posted: 2 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Bleeding Light – 3rd January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Under The Sanguine Moon is the fourth album from Denver, Colorado-based goth rock band, Plague Garden. As the pitch tells it, ‘The album features a prominent vampiric theme. Delve into the catacombs of a nocturnal world, where tales of bloodlust at dusk reign supreme. Listen to fantastical tales of the undead and even a little bit of Greek mythology added in for variety… From the album’s blood-red artwork to it’s [sic] hemophilic lyrics, this LP is bound to please even the darkest children of the night. For fans of gothic rock, post punk, deathrock, darkwave.’

Having got into gothness around 1987, just on the cusp of teenagerdom, I would come to discover that, just as with metal, this was a genre with many disparate threads. The vampiric fascination, which represents the popular image of goth – and espoused by the myriad dark souls who descend upon Whitby for the legendary goth weekends and trace the steps of Dracula following the small port town’s prominence in Bram Stoker’s genre-defining novel – is a league apart from the origins of the music which would come to be synonymous with early goth – predominantly Leeds-based acts such as The Sisters of Mercy, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, The March Violets, and Salvation. You won’t find a hint of vampirism here. Bauhaus’ debut single, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ predates the emerging Leeds scene, and the whole vampire / spooky template can be pinned squarely on this single, which can’t exactly be considered representative of their output as a whole. But still, people like to latch on to easy tags.

This perhaps unduly preface is to say that the goth / vampire thing is something I find difficult to fully embrace. Goth bands doing vampy stuff is simply not the same as Steven Severin providing live soundtracks to classic silent movies.

The other thing I find difficult to really align is that while there is a whole new wave of acts of a goth persuasion emerging, there are a lot of goth acts loitering and lingering featuring older guys – in the forty to fifty-plus demographic, which I will, in the interest of transparency record as being my demographic – doing this. Plague Garden do sit within this bracket.

Under The Sanguine Moon is a solid album. It sits in the third wave goth bracket alongside the likes of Suspiria and the Nightbreed roster of the late ‘90s – brooding, theatrical, with booming baritone vocals that are sort of aping Andrew Eldritch but fall into that more generic ‘fah-fah-fah’ singing down in the throat style. With piano taking a more prominent position among the standard musical arrangement of drums / bass / guitar, Plague Garden create a layered sound which does stand out from many of their peers, and they so absolutely nail that quintessential goth sound with the solid foot-down four-square Craig Adams style bass groove. This is nowhere better exemplified than on ‘Shadows’, with its spectral guitars, the perfect cocktail of chorus, flange and reverb creating that brittle, layered sound which defined the 80s sound.

The vocals are mixed fairly low, and it’s the bass and drums which dominate, and this is a good thing – not because the vocals are bad, but because it puts the atmosphere to the fore, and means the lyrics are less obvious, which is probably no bad thing.

‘The Dirty Dead’ is a crunchier, punkier take on the sound, and carries hints of early Christian Death – think ‘Deathwish’ – and this carries on into ‘Pandora’.

The cover they mention is ‘#1 Crush’ by Garbage, an early B-side that’s one of the hidden gems of their catalogue. Plague Garden’s take is unsurprisingly lugubrious, theatrical, and makes sense as a song selection with its nagging, picked guitar part and crunching percussion.

There’s a flood of blood at the end, with ‘Blood Fingers’ and ‘Blood Debt’ closing the album. The former, haunting, hypnotic, a classic moody goth cut, the latter offering a slower, dreamier take on the former. These guys have got their sound honed to perfection, and if you’re into more trad goth delivered with a more contemporary spin – but not too contemporary – you probably can’t go too far wrong with Under The Sanguine Moon.

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A New Line (Related) – A Quarterly Update On The Sadness

Posted: 30 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Sound in Silence – 5th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

As my final review of the year, what could be more fitting than a work, the title of which, suggests an element of reflection on the recent past. Businesses provide regular reports, people and musical ventures tend not to, with perhaps the notable exception of Throbbing Gristle, but then, they were an exception to more or less everything before or since. Their debut album proper, The Second Annual Report, which followed a brace of cassettes, The Best of Throbbing Gristle Volume I, and The Best of Throbbing Gristle Volume II, set new precedents in so many ways.

Arriving to the latest release from A New Line (Related) – the solo project of Andrew Johnson, who has previously released music as a member of bands such as Hood, The Remote Viewer, and Famous Boyfriend among others, one feels compelled to wonder ‘just how is The Sadness, and how has it been of late?

This is his third album, which we’re forewarned is an ‘immersive’ work, which ‘balances between minimal techno, dub house and ambient pop.’

‘Calapsis’ drifts in with low-key beats pulsing beneath delicate waves which ebb and flow subtly, gusts of compressed air which build to a hypnotic close. It’s not until the glitchy, disjointed groove of ‘3AM Worry Sessions’ arrives that we begin to get a sense of The Sadness. Stress and anxiety manifest in many ways, and while worry and panic may manifest differently their cousinly relationship It heaves, jittery unsettled and tense, conveying an uncomfortable restlessness.

The globular grumblings of ‘The Ballad of Billy Kee’ emerge from a rumbling undercurrent or mirk to glitch and twitch like a damaged electrical cable sputtering and sparking. Elsewhere, there’s a certain bounce to ‘Only Star Loop’ which gives it a levity, but the scratchy click of cymbals which mark out the percussive measures feels somehow erratic and the time signatures are apart from the bubbling synths and the distant-sounding, barely-audible vocal snippets, which give echoes of New Romanticism. Overall, the track has an elusive air of whispering paranoia.

In many ways, not a lot happens on A Quarterly Update On The Sadness, and the sparse and repetitive yet curiously dynamic title track is exemplary. It leaves you feeling strangely disconsolate, bereft, not only as if you’ve perhaps missed something, but that you’re missing something – not from the music, but from your own life. It seems, in conclusion, that The Sadness is thriving in its own, understated way.

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Ian Wellman – Can You Hear The Street Lights Glow

Posted: 29 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 3rd January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Ian Wellman’s works are usually responses to environmental issues, be they derived from articles covering global matters or more immediate or personal situations. His latest, Can You Hear The Street Lights Glow, sits very much in the latter category, as he details in the accompanying notes, which I shall quote in full:

I moved to Pasadena during the fall last year. One of the first new sounds I noticed were the mercury-vapor street lights that filled the air as the sun went down every evening. Under the sidewalks, exhaust vents hummed along to the song of crickets and the rumble of traffic. Being away from the inner city, more individual details in the soundscape emerged.

As a way to explore the new area, I walked around at night with my equipment. I placed geophones and contact mics on every metal surface I could. I ran electromagnetic sensors across electronics accessible by the sidewalk. I put mics out on quiet streets, behind shopping areas, and in parking lots. I felt very compelled and inspired to listen and learn about my new home. Can You Hear The Streetlights Glow? is the result of these listenings.

Certainly, the first part of this is something I find quite specifically relatable – not due to relocation, but to finding myself suddenly discovering a heightened awareness of my immediate surroundings. Like many people, I used to walk around with earphones in, listening to music to cut out the noise around me. This was essential on my daily commute, as listening to music as I walked through town created a separation between home and work, and while on the bus from town to the office, it shut out the babble of other people, and created a barrier between myself and anyone from work on the bus who may have been inclined to strike up a conversation. And on the way home, the same was also true but listening to music also helped me decompress – or mirror my angst – after a day in a noisy open-plan office. Lockdown changed that. I suddenly felt the need to be alert in case of approaching runners or cyclists or people kicking off in queues for the supermarket because someone wasn’t observing the two-metre rule or otherwise losing the plot over COVID restrictions. In short, I was scared – terrified, even. Not so much of the virus, but other people. I felt I needed to be on high alert at all times, because people are simply so unpredictable. One byproduct of this was that when I left the house form my allotted hour of exercise, I became acutely aware of the quietness – the absence of the thrum of traffic, the absence of chatter, and in their absence, I could instead hear the wind, birdsong, my own footsteps. In fact, I could hear everything. In the quiet, the small sounds were suddenly so much louder. The quiet wasn’t nearly as quiet as it first seemed. It was the aural equivalent of one’s eyes growing adjusted to the dark.

The auditory voyage of discovery Wellman charts on Can You Hear The Streetlights Glow bears clear parallels to my experience, but takes things a step or three further with his use of an array of equipment in order to capture sonic happenings in these spaces and his interrogation of the sounds in order to reach a deeper, more intimate understanding of his environs.

The results are quite fascinating, and range from a cluster of brief snippets, of under a minute and a half to just over two minutes, to more expansive segments – 5G Antenna Power Box is almost five and a half minutes, and ‘Mercury-vapor Lights’ is a full twelve and a half minutes in length. The titles of the pieces are location-specific, and some are quite evocative in themselves – notably ‘Time Depleting on Bird Scooter’ and ‘Gas Pipes Behind Smoothie Shop’. On the one hand, they’re utilitarian in their descriptions; on the other, they create an image of a filmic world in which sound events happen in particular places.

Most of those sound events are different levels of hum and drone, but these varying levels of low-level throbbing serve as reminders of how mankind has interfered with the naturally-occurring sounds which are the true sounds of the outdoors. While I am likely to note the hum of the power lines as I pass a pylon, and so on, I am still attuned to the wind in the trees, the scurry of squirrels. The sounds on Can You Hear The Street Lights Glow are all entirely man-made, mechanical, and despite Wellman’s relocation to a more rural setting facilitating the opening of his ears, the locations are all noteworthy for their constructed, non-natural nature. People may interpret this differently, and Wellman’s intentions may have been different again, but the leading thing I take away from this is just how hard it is to truly escape the mechanised world we’ve made. But equally, Can You Hear The Street Lights Glow is a document which highlights the extent to which even in silence, there is sound – lots of it.

AA

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Glim – Tape I

Posted: 27 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 13th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Nostalgia is a subject I’ve touched on on a number of occasions in recent pieces, because it’s become something of a preoccupation in contemporary culture. Arguably, this is the natural evolution of the postmodern, an epoch in which the new was primarily a fresh – or not so fresh – permutation of the old. The culture of the twenty-first century has been marked by an ever-increasing acceleration of more of less everything: the accelerated communications and technological innovations and ensuing blizzard of media Frederic Jameson wrote of when defining postmodernism has gone into overdrive, and we’re now moving at a pace whereby we’re nostalgic for breakfast by lunchtime.

Nostalgia is big, big business, and this has been no more evident than in the response to ABBA’s hologram shows and the Oasis reunion. This isn’t to overlook other huge musical events – Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, for example – but it’s fair to note that she’s been established for over a decade and a half now, and can’t be viewed as representing ‘newness’ in any way – especially given that four of her last six albums were rerecordings of previous albums. This encapsulates the way in which culture laps up endless recycling on account of its familiarity.

Comfort culture is rather like comfort food: you know what you’re going to get, there are no unpleasant surprises, there’s probably not a great deal of chewing involved, and it’s less scary than the unknown. The world’s gone to shit, and people feel a real and quite desperate need for that blanket of safety and reassurance that there are still at least some things you can rely on. The good old days have happened, they’re fixed and can’t be taken away. And nostalgia has a universal appeal, because it’s something we all feel for certain things at certain times. We tend to feel – and I accept this is a colossal generalisation – that our childhoods and teenage years took place in simpler, better times. They didn’t, but because we didn’t have the burden of adult responsibility, and were discovering things for the first time, they’re coloured with brighter hues.

This latest offering from Glim – a project by Vienna based musician and composer Andreas Berger – is steeped in nostalgia. Berger outlines the inspiration and creative methodology with enthusiasm:

I have a particular love for cassette tapes and how they can influence the character of sound – even just by the simple fact of being played on different quality sources. I like the way they can color audio material, especially when using lower-quality gear. It adds modulation, sometimes (a long time unwanted) degradation of sound, but also gives a certain nostalgic touch – at least for me.

I recorded (and played) most of the material on an old Walkman cassette player, and what I got in return were some faded sonic Polaroids which might trigger a hidden memory or at least evoke a vague feeling of nostalgia.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, Tape I is only available as a download, or to stream online. The tape revival remains some way behind vinyl, despite the format being considerably cheaper to produce. Perhaps it’s because tapes just don’t have the same effect on Instagram, or hung on your wall.

Having grown up in the cassette / tape era myself, I can vouch for the unique nature of the format. When I started making music, I would sketch stuff out with a condenser mic on a portable tape deck, later progressing to a four0-track portastudio, bouncing tracks down to create additional tracks. Each stage would erode the quality of the audio by some incremental degree, but what it lost in fidelity it would gain in character. You just don’t get those happy accidents with infinite digital tracks, just as you don’t get the same sense of the personal with a link to a playlist as one-off compilation tape with handwritten track-listing, smudges and misspellings and all. Don’t get me wrong: tapes were a massive pain in the arse, difficult to skip tracks, easily chewed, easily overrecorded – and for these and other reasons, I have not leaped aboard the tape renaissance train. I’m happy with my memories, thank you, and don’t feel the need to start spooling reels with a biro to remember the good old days of recording songs off the radio.

It’s the happy accidents, the whorling analogue fogs, the fuzzy edges and softened-off corners which define the eight pieces on Tape I, unnamed beyond sequential number. But while I feel richly textured, immersive atmosphere, and the pull of strains of sonic palimpsests filtering through the recordings like ghostly whispers, vague, elusory, like memories which linger in the hard-to-reach recesses of the mind, and with a somewhat grainy texture like an old photograph or a photocopy of a photocopy, akin to the kind of fanzines which used to circulate in the eighties, I don’t feel as if I am truly connected to Berger’s sense of nostalgia.

Herein lies the paradox of memory, and of nostalgia: as much as there is a unification to be experienced from reminiscing with friends about those good old days, we each harbour subtly different recollections of those experiences, and as such, our experiences all differ. It also highlights the scope for the disparity between intent and end product. ‘1_4’ is incredibly haunting, eerie, and a quite magnificent exercise in ethereal dissonance, and ‘1_6’ is at times barely there, thin streaks of aural contrails drifting through a big and darkening sky. I feel a certain melancholy, a creeping chill, perhaps, but not any real sense of nostalgia. And yet it’s apparent that his creative process has involved a quite intense and personal engagement with the source materials and the tools necessary to create this diaphanous gauze of slow-drifting ambience. This simply highlights, however, the way in which, while large social brackets have a collective appreciation and nostalgia for one thing or another, the detail, when boiled down to an individual level, looks very different when viewed from that specific individual perspective. It’s here where you realise that you are completely alone: not even your partner or your best friend sees that shade of green or purple the same as you do. No-one else’s perception is entirely aligned to yours, and no-one sees, or hears, the world in exactly the same way.

AA

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Tomas Järmyr – Entrails

Posted: 23 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Lamour Records – 16th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

When you read that someone is exploring metal, the likely response is to think it’s a metal album in terms of genre. But not Tomas Järmyr: his explorations into ‘the deep frequencies of metal’ are quite literal. ‘Using only cymbals’, the notes accompanying the release explain, ‘Järmyr creates a slowly rotating musical sphere that holds beauty, deep emotion, and fierce heaviness… Entrails is an album that shows the core of his artistic expression and serves as the perfect introduction to Tomas Järmyr as a solo artist.’

As titles go, Entrails is unquestionably visceral in its connotations – another thing which would, for many, suggest a ‘metal’ album rather than a ‘metal’ album. But here we have an album containing a single track, which runs for thirty-eight minutes, consisting of nothing but cymbal work.

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Photo: Thor Egil Leirtrø

In the context of a full drum kit, cymbals provide expression, and also an amount of ‘fill’ to the overall sound, not only of the kit, but the band, creating a wash of resonance in between the notes of the instruments and the beats of bass drum, snare, toms, etc. How do cymbals stand up when separated from everything else?

In the hands of Tomas Järmyr, we come to appreciate the range and versatility of the cymbal. Size certainly matters, and Järmyr’s setup which spans small, light crashes to huge, resonant, bell-like peels, against a backdrop which builds from a delicate clatter to a clashing, splashing tempest, is educational.

There are passages where the clatters and chimes diminish, and make way for dank, atmospheric reverberations which evoke the gloom of subterranean caverns, dark ambience which bears no discernible resemblance to anything remotely percussive, at least to the average ear – or mine.

Sometimes, with experimental music, the mystery is an integral part of the appeal: I prefer not to know which instruments have been used to create which sounds, and similarly, knowing how certain synths or laptop-based programmes have been used to conjure alien sounds feels like something of a spoiler, because I find myself scrutinising the sound and seeking to pick apart its construction. On Entrails, the opposite is true, because most of the sounds simply do not correspond to the source. So on the one hand, Entrails does lay bare the guts of the instrumentation: on the other, as I sit in the swirling drone which fills the room around the eighteen-minute mark, I find myself perplexed and in absolute awe at the creativity of the musicianship. How does anyone come to discover that cymbals have the capacity to be this versatile, to create sounds like these? Who has both ready access to this many cymbals and the time to explore their sounds and the way they interact with one another in such detail?

Sometimes the crescendos are delicate, slow-building: others, they explode unexpectedly. At others still, the sensation is more like an outflow of molten lava from a volcano.

Järmyr’s metal album may be devoid of guitars and guttural vocals – or, indeed, any vocals – bit it is still, for the most part, a heavy album, issuing forth an immensely dense, dark atmosphere, not to mention some quite challenging frequencies, spiking at the top end while rumbling heavily around the lower sonic regions. Ominous, oppressive, Entrails is not a fist-forward punch to the guts, but instead prods and pokes. The effect is no less potent.

AA

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