Posts Tagged ‘Art’

Kaan Bulak – Illusions

Posted: 22 November 2022 in Albums
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Feral Note – 2nd December 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

I don’t think – or don’t like to think – that it’s an age thing when I say that at some point recently I started to feel not only a separation from certain aspects of mainstream culture, but a seismic wrench away from vast swathes of so-called culture.

Clearly, I don’t fit the stereotype of my peers who decide on turning 35 that there’s been no decent new music since they were 19 or thereabouts, and immediately perpetuate the generation gap musical position that kids today only listen to shit manufactured crap, even if it is largely true.

But more than anything, I simply cannot grasp the concept of the NFT. I mean, what the actual fuck? Cryptocurrencies are insane and seemingly purely for the ultra-rich, but I kinda get them. But paying for a thumbnail GIF? That’s beyond me.

Kaan Bulak’s Illusions has my head swimming, in that it offers not only a multidimensional sonic streaming experience and a length bibliography, but also comes exclusively as a download and offers an art print, and I find myself wondering ‘How’, ‘Why’? The first why is ‘why did it get so bad?’ Like, how is it that artists hawk this shit? As if signed drum heads and the like weren’t exploitative enough (and believe me, they are, and then some). Stepping back from my knee-jerk spasm, I realise I should perhaps give some benefit of the doubt. After all, artists outside of the mainstream have always been compelled to innovate and to find novel ways of not only reaching an audience, but eking an existence that funds their work.

And as the accompanying text reveals, Illusions has been an arduous labour of love:

‘The album had been in the making since 2013, and its creative journey started back then with the track ‘Falling in a Dream’: it was created with violinist Contrapunct playing the melody, when Kaan Bulak had his studio in a techno club above the dance floor, and the thought came that falling asleep must lead to a noisy dream state. In January 2018 Kaan Bulak recorded a prepared grand piano, improvised and locked himself in until numerous sketches were finished. In 2018-2020 he worked on-off on the tracks, including additional recordings on Wurlitzer, oud, frame drums, and electric guitar, and then actually completed them in the summer of 2020. As visible in the quotes in the appendix, it is about a journey into the self through the help of art and philosophy. Zen kōans create an awareness of the illusions and contradictions in everyday life, art makes them tangible.’

Illusions, then, is the product of an immense journey, and ‘Falling in a Dream’ is in fact the last of the fourteen compositions presented here, in a set that’s a shade jazzy, smooth yet angular and unpredictable, with fast-fingered piano and an understated melding of funk and motoric grooves with a dose of hypnotic Doorsy keyboard drone, not to mention minimal techno and spartan disco. There’s a certain slickness to it, too, which gives the album a kind of polish that may attract radio play.

It’s hardly an obvious radio choice, but it’s an album that clearly warrants some playlisting, by virtue of it being, well, a bit out-there. But Illusions  is solid, and real, and a nice album.

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Kee Avil – Crease

Posted: 7 March 2022 in Albums
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Constellation – 11th March 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Kee Avil isn’t an individual, and isn’t really a band, so much as a concept, a collective, a project, the brainchild of Montréal producer and guitarist Vicky Mettler. Debut album, Crease, is pitched as ‘a singular expression of fractured dream logic concretized in chiselled postpunk guitar, sinuous low-end electronics, a panoply of organic and digital micro-samples creating alternately twitchy and propulsive rhythm, and the anxious intimacy of her finely wrought lyricism and vocals’.

It all sounds pretty grand and sets expectations high. Thankfully, Crease doesn’t disappoint. To manage those high expectations, let’s get it established here and now that it’s not a conventional album, with easy songs with obvious or accessible verse/chorus structures.

‘See, my shadow’ starts out with hints of early PJ Harvey but swiftly spins into industrial post-punk with electro/hip-hop beats, more akin to Lydia Lunch fronting Coil remixed by Portishead. It’s a lot to happen in the space of under four minutes, but then, that’s par for the course here: Crease is as jam-packed with ideas as it is sonic strangeness. It’s not an easy album to get a grasp on, and Mettler comes across as quite otherly. Some may say crazy, unhinged, but it’s not that. It’s just apparent she exists on another plane, and Crease shuns conventional structures in favour of exploring avenues of songwriting that more closely reflect an alternative vision and concept of ‘songs’. I certainly don’t mean that as a criticism, but equally, don’t want to sound like a wanker by saying that this is art and therefor superior. I mean, it is superior, but not because of that. To unpack that a bit, Crease is clearly the product of a quite specific mindset, and a determination to find a means of articulating. And sometimes, to articulate is to go beyond language and beyond conventional musical structures. As such, what Crease articulates is a separation from the rest of the world, the turmoil of the mind, the duality of the internal monologue.

‘Drying’ is sparse, glitchy, a clicky clatter and pop of percussion providing an erratic framework for the incidental instrumentation and slowed-down, opiate-haze vocals that are at once sultry and threatening.

‘And I’ is a sparse, scratchy acoustic guitar-based song; the tense picking at times calls to mind early Leonard Cohen, and the atmosphere is muscle-tensingly taut. It’s a masterclass in how less is so much more, and as Mettler’s breathy vocal arcs over the spindly fretwork, a kind of magic happens in the way it draws you in with a hypnotic sensation. ‘Devil’s Sweet Tooth’ lunges and sways, violins teeter on the brink of a breakdown

It’s often difficult to make out the actual lyrics, so you lean in closer in an attempt to get your head and hands around them. You fail, but you’re drawn in closer to the dissonant strangeness that’s more than just music: it’s a world of disconnection and dislocation. It’s unnerving, alien, but likely better than this one right now.

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Exclusive stream: ‘1010’ by Obviate Parade

Posted: 26 May 2021 in Previews and Editorial
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Ahead of the release of the first compilation on the NIM label – the snappily-titled Deprived of Occupation and Pleasure We Feast – Aural Aggravation are immensely honoured to premiere ‘1010’ by Obviate Parade, the exploratory guitar vehicle for Paul McArthur of Damn Teeth.

With lyrics centred around Emily Dickinson’s 1010th poem, it’s a largely spontaneous cut, with all instruments and vocals recorded in a single take (albeit subsequently edited), it’s a magnificent balance of immediacy and controlled manipulation.

Don’t just take our word for it: get your lugs round it here:

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Natascha Gangl & Rdeča Raketa – Superandome / Super Random Me

Posted: 19 December 2020 in Singles and EPs
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Mamka Records – 3rd December 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Just when things threaten to be getting a bit safe and predictable, with many musical artists having found ways of working around Covid restrictions to record remotely, release digitally and promote by means of performing on line or otherwise streaming shows, the ever-restless Maja Osojnik manages to do something truly different and innovative.

The third release on her recently-established Mamka Records is far, far more than just another digital single, and it’s not just about the music, either: it’s about both art and artefact, and forms the very fabric – literally – of an exhibition as well.

With Matija Schellander, Osojnik is Rdeča Raketa, and for this project, they’ve teamed up with author Natascha Gangl and evolved a genre unto themselves, in the form of the ‘sound comic’ (or beautifully evocative ‘Klangcomic’ in German). The concept – whereby, as with comics, ‘where words and images merge into one another, here it is the spoken word and sound which blend together.’ As such, this is a graphic novel in audio form, a juxtaposition of word and sound that conjures an alternative space in between, a cut-up collage of sorts.

But first, the artefact: as the liner notes explain, ‘Each individual record is its own uniquely woven and hand-printed specimen. Woven from the randomly selected strips of paper, cutting remnants from the other works’. Consciously or otherwise, this links the project into the lineage of cut-up forms that feeds through from Tristan Tzara to Kenji Siratori, although perhaps most obviously via William Burroughs. The assimilation and recycling of pre-exiting material taps into the subconscious on a level that’s difficult to explain, conjuring a strange sense of deja-vu, whereby the ghosts of those remnants and scraps of other works forge a subliminal nexus of intertextual references, reminding us of the things we know, but don’t know that we know (to paraphrase Burroughs).

‘Superandome’ very much exists within this territory of the simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, a murky electronic collage – not really a tune or a song but a shifting soundscape – but an immersive experience. Woozy, tremorous synthy wibbles oscillate and ripple and churn, while a mutter of voices gradually rises in volume and pitch until it reaches a helium-filled cacophony or babble. As with any collage, interpretation is as much about rezeptionsästhetik – essentially what the individual brings to the work as its specific meaning as bestowed upon a work by its creator. And as such, I find myself increasingly on edge, the swelling conglomeration of chatter evoking the anxiety of overcrowding and agoraphobia.

‘Super Random Me’- which is exactly the same 4:28 duration as ‘Superandome’ – is a yet more extreme collage as fragments of voices are overlaid and cut in / out over ominous rumbles, eerie drones, and random tweets. Again, it’s disorientating, bewildering – and yet equally, an encapsulation of the experience of life as lives, a clamour of voices and random sounds all at once.

Both tracks are reworked and edited from a previous work, and so such, are recycled cut-ups that in turn form a self-referential intertext which also challenge the concept of a work of art ever being ‘finished’ or a fixed definite article.

As for the art, in lieu of a conventional single launch, the record was set to be presented as a picture (built out of 110 of the 160 singles) and a video on 17th of December as an Exhibition in the Gallery Kluckyland in Vienna, and the exhibition is scheduled to run until the 3rd of January 2021 – and while at present it can only be viewed from outside, ‘Superandome / Super Random Me’ stands as a remarkable accomplishment that shows once again that it’s the artists of the avant-garde who innovate the hardest. In the year of the lockdown, we need art even more than ever.

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Olivia Louvel – SculptOr [Hepworth Resounds]

Posted: 26 January 2020 in Albums
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Cat Werk Imprint – 7th February 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Walk away… walk around it.’ On the page, the words are devoid of threat or menace. But delivered in a fractured, disembodied voice that carries a strange sense of madness, it takes on altogether different shades of unsettling uncanniness. Amidst creeping fear chords, clicking insectoid flickers and scrapes and scratches, the voice, childlike and compressed warps and twists, as through refracted through a temporal veil or a spiritual force-field of some description. It feels like a communiqué from the other side. The voice is that of celebrated modernist sculptor and Henry Moore contemporary Barbara Hepworth, and this is one of the early moments on Olivia Louvel’s latest release, a work which forms the basis of the artist’s Masters degree, in which she investigates the voice ‘from preservation to resounding, while taking further the voice of Hepworth into the physical space as a multi-speaker diffusion’.

The source material is a 1961 recording of Barbara Hepworth’s voice, recorded by Hepworth herself in her studio in St Ives, the tape’s initial purpose was for a recorded talk with slides for the British Council, with an original duration of thirty-two minutes. Louvel’s resounding is of a similar duration, but instead of a linear narration which details the artist’s working methods, we get scrambled cut-up snippets which strangely still give a semblance of sense, reducing the extrapolations to the barest bones to give a sense of Hepworth’s creative processes and focus. But them, Willian Burroughs suggested that cutting up text (and for the purpose of this discussion, we’ll consider audio a form of text) reveals the truth, and while Hepworth’s talk isn’t brimming with political rhetoric and doublespeak, one feels that Louvel’s cut-up of her words does perhaps bring us closer to the heart of her meaning.

‘Must Carve a Stone’ loops and layers a breathy whisper of the word ‘carve’, which becomes an unsettling mantra. Minimal glitchtronica and hovering, echoing notes provide a ponderous, stammering backdrop to the looping, multi-tracked vocal layerings of ‘I Draw What I Feel in My Body’, and the sparse arrangement creates an uneasy backdrop to the words.

There isn’t a moment that’s comfortable or easy here, and Louvel’s ‘resounding’ of Hepworth is relentlessly challenging as an auditory and sensory experience. But it’s also impressive in the way that it provokes the listener to awaken those senses and absorb a multi-faceted presentation of what it is to be an artist.

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Erik Friedlander – Artemisia

Posted: 20 February 2019 in Albums
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SkipStone – SKST024

Christopher Nosnibor

Pun unintended, there’s something groovy about releasing an album as a triple-deck of 10” records. I was never averse to getting up and turning a record over or changing the disc, even though some releases do take the piss a bit in terms of making work by pressing just one four-minute track into a side of a 12” on an album release. But with the 12 tracks clocking in around six or seven minutes apiece and with two per side, Artemisia seems to balance the vinyl experience and the practicalities of playing records.

Artemisia is by turns tranquil and volatile, and this makes sense in context of the album’s inspiration, whereby, as the press release quippingly quotes that cellist Erik Friedlander distills (sic) the brain-bending powers of absinthe, and the darkness of its murky past into his latest project’.

While perhaps one of the most famous works of art inspired by absinthe is Degas’ L’Absinthe (1875-6), followed maybe by Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker (c.1859), it’s Picasso’s absinthe glass sculptures which captured Friedlander’s imagination in 2015 when he visited MOMA.

“The glasses were pretty… kind of innocent on first glance, but as I looked more closely, I found a dangerous side. The front of each glass is exposed – torn away to show its insides. It seemed like Picasso was saying this is what happens to you when you drink absinthe,” says Friedlander. This viewing spurred Erik, who’s played with a host of artists spanning The Mountain Goats, John Zorn, Dave Douglas, and Courtney Love, into ‘an exploration of absinthe’s mysterious history: beneath a glamorous veneer in 19th century Paris lurked accusations of hallucinatory properties and elusive effects that created an atmosphere of addiction and demise’.

That absinthe has – or ever had – hallucinogenic properties appears to be a myth, but the romantic notion of the drink’s properties proliferate in art and writing, and Friedlander’s jazz-orientated representation of the drink and its history is intriguing and at times quite hypnotic. Take, for example the sparsely-arranged, exploratory ‘La Fee Verte’ with its sporadic percussion and mournful strings.

Friedlander’s cello is augmented by a band of collaborators, which includes pianist Uri Caine, bassist Mark Helias, and drummer Ches Smith, and certainly, his cello takes something of a back seat, or at least occupies a less dominant position in these varied compositions which range from the buoyant, focused and direct, to wandering experimental works.

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Erik Friedlander – Artemisia

Capac – Through The Dread Waste

Posted: 23 January 2018 in Albums
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This is it Forever – 28th February 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Capac are an electronic duo, currently based Athens and Bristol. But geography is a state of mind, and while details about the context and circumstance surrounding Through The Dread Waste are limited, the music stands for itself. Yes, it’s supposed to contain ‘ten interpretations of the coldest traditional winter music in the form of dark drone and atmospheric ambience’, but without a priori knowledge of the original versions, all that is left is drone and ambience.

The ‘dread’ ascribed to the ‘waste’ is entirely redundant: waste is surplus, unnecessary, for disposal. Why dread it? The sense of portent, of impending doom… Yes, in a world where there is no time to waste, no money to waste, we may rightly dread it. And yet. The waste: anything waste is unnecessary, and should be confronted, not dreaded or feared. And without value or purpose, anything is waste.

On the subject of disposal, the order page for the physical edition of the album is most telling, containing as it does the following: ‘The physical form and true embodiment of the concept behind Through The Dread Waste… You receive a fire log with a metal plate hidden deep inside. After burning the log, among the ashes you will find your metal plate revealing instructions to access the original constructions of the traditional pieces of music, prior to their deconstruction. Destruction, after all, is a form of creation.’ This echoes a classic and fundamental tenet of the avant-garde, namely the premise that one must destroy in order to create anew.

Postmodernism’s defeatism and acceptance of the death of originality is either the last gasp of the avant-garde, or the point at which is necessarily destroys itself to re-emerge, the creative equivalent of stubble-burning at the end of the cycle of growth and croppage. It would be easy to deride the ‘fire log with a metal plate’ but this is art, and there’s precious little the production and release of music by and large, especially in the mainstream. And this is art which is more than merely willing to be ephemeral, and actually invites its own destruction.

The album’s ten compositions are by no means indicative of a conventional, square set-up, as longer tracks are separated and segued by fragmental pieces. And over its duration, there is a lot of piano, and a lot of space. A lot of space. Through The Dread Waste is a sparse, ominously atmospheric set. This is music to stare into space to. At times, its presence is so sparse as to be beneath detection. The lilting piano, the endless resonant air between them, is captivating, yet so understated as s drift into the ether.

The overlaid and unintelligible snippets of voice on ‘Winter Morning’ call to mind the scratchy, pre-fade in discord of ‘Disintegration’ by The Cure. But here, there is no swampy tune riding in on oppressive drums to hammer it all home. Instead, it drifts into another space, and we consider valiant spaces and parallels. Elsewhere, monasterial voices hover in fogy darkness and drones crackle, from eternity.

As such as it’s a spiritual, transportative, and eventually an immediately accessible release (and not in the same sense of ‘accessible’ which is at the centre of the divisive and heated debate which is raging in the poetry sphere right now). Through The Dread Waste has infinite inroads, and is not abrasive or overtly difficult. Yet equally, it’s not dull or unchallenging. It has melody, and drifts in a way you can get lost in.

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Capac – Through The Dread Waste

Soojin Anjou / Askat Jetigen / Robert Lippok – Gletschermusik

Posted: 30 September 2016 in Albums
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Folk Wisdom – FW007 – 21st October 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

It begins with a drip. Then silence. Another drop. Irregular, both in pitch and distance apart. Bubblish, sloshing. Chiming, ringing notes skip over the swashing ripples. Pipes and people, all passing through. And throughout, continuously, the sound and sensation of running water, or, at last, the evocation of running water. The sounds are fluid, metaphorically where not literally. It’s a graceful, natural sound. But beneath the organic, idyllic surface lies a serious and darker undercurrent.

Initially inspired by an expedition to the Tujuksu glacier near the Kazakh city of Almaty, Gletschermusik began with the recording of sounds of the glacier, at an altitude of 3,500 metres, melting. Many artists would have been content to have left it there: field recordings can be fascinating in themselves, and Geir Jenssen’s Stromboli – recorded at the edge of the crated of the bubbling volcano – stands as one of my favourite field recording releases of all time. The recordings, made by the placement of highly sensitive microphones in the crevices of the glacier, proved to be just the beginning, though, and the project would evolve through a succession of life performances and an international conference.

With climate change being perhaps the greatest challenge to face humanity at any point since prehistory, it’s laudable to find artists engaging in such a way, without taking a messianic stance. Gletschermusik is a project born out of a genuine desire to raise awareness and prompt discussion. Be honest, who even knew there were glaciers in Kazakhstan? And yet, as far back as 2003, there were reports emerging that the glaciers in the former Soviet republic were melting at an unprecedented pace. It’s a project that provokes thought.

Subtly, and intelligently, the project reminds us that water, and the planet, is mutable. Gletschermusik (literally, ‘glacier music’) takes the sounds and images of the melting glaciers as its inspiration, but ventures out in various different directions. As such, this is a work which has been composed and performed rather than belonging to the world of field recordings. Sonically, it’s a wide-ranging electroacoustic set. While ‘Winter into Spring’ highlights the small changes the seasons bring, in relative terms, the album as a whole is concerned with the long-term changes and the effects of global warming. ‘Eiskritalle’ introduces dynamic drumming, while ‘Geologdun Yry’ takes the form of an acoustic folk song. It is, by its nature, a highly personal response to the natural world and man’s difficult relationship with his environment. Consequently, the individual pieces do not necessarily evoke glaciers, or if so, not in any conventional sense in terms of the languages of music or criticism: there are no icy synths or interminable crawls to be heard on Gletschermusik. Similarly, the drama of such cataclysmic ecological and environmental change is not expressed in dramatic, tempestuous crescendos that boom foreboding. Gletschermusik is remarkable for its delicacy, its easy musicality. It’s rare and also extremely welcome to find a work which is conceptually heavy but handled with such lightness.

 

Gletschermusik

Bell Monks + Gregory Taylor – Brocades + Palimpsests

Posted: 16 September 2016 in Albums
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clang records – clang045 – 19th August 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

A note hangs in the air, sustaining, resonating, slowly decaying. Just before silence encroaches, the next note is struck. It hovers, hangs and gradually fades. A slow, oscillating drone crawls beneath. There is movement, but it’s evolutionary.

‘Brittle Evenings’ is led by an unfurling picked guitar line, deliberate, ponderous, reminiscent of the later Earth albums. Ghostly tones remain, sonic erasures which correspond with the idea of the palimpsest, and offer clues to the way the pieces formed. 14 short, quiet guitar pieces penned by Bell Monks for an art opening in 2012 provided the basis for the work. Later, they invited Ben Willis and Matt Sintchack (contrabass and saxophone respectively) to play over the tracks. Despite the addition of these new layers, they still felt the work seemed incomplete, and so called upon Gregory Taylor to rework the tracks digitally. Finally, with over 100 minutes of audio, it was Lars Graugaard’s editing which shaped the ten pieces which comprise the final track-listing. As such, the album is the result ofnear-infinite layering, relayering, additions and deletions.

But as to where one individual’s contribution ends and another’s begins is impossible to determine, and the beauty of the album is the way in which the parts blend, smudge, and blur together, folding into and over one another, obscuring, reshaping and remoulding to accommodate or obliterate previous layers and edits.

Each piece is also formed around shifting tones and sounds, the shapes and structures indistinct, fluid. Indeed, very little of the original guitar work is in evidence on listening to these pieces. Warm tones and an organic feel permeate the album’s fabric, although this is touched by a counterpoint of mechanical sounds, whirring, grating, rumbling. As one layer of sound fades, another emerges, leaving the shadows of the one before. Long, mournful strings quaver over rippling electronics and dulcimer-like chimes flicker in soft washes of sound. On ‘…Et Tremblant Feuilles’, perhaps the album’s most linear piece, a sonorous bass with gothic overtones builds a darkly ominous atmosphere.

The semi-industrial dark ambience of ‘Caress of Sun’ is constructed of layers of sound, heavy drones and interminably elongated scrapes, growing denser, deeper and more abstract as it progresses, emerging in a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic world. It isn’t until the album’s eighth track, ‘Sublimation Residue’, that the guitar becomes prominent once again, and once again, it gradually fades out to be engulfed by a soft sonic cloud.

 

Bell Monks Gregory Taylor

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