Posts Tagged ‘Avant-garde’

Namke Communications – One Year; Two Days

Posted: 24 August 2017 in Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

I know very little about this release, at least in terms of specifics. I do know that it’s the work of the prodigious John Tuffen, who also performs as part of Neuschlaufen and Wharf Street Galaxy Band amongst others. I know its physical edition is in a hand-numbered run of 50 CD-R, housed in a paper foldover sleeve in a PVC wallet, with an appropriately blank image by way of cover art. There’s a bleak, quasi-modernist feel to the night-shot photograph of a structure constructed as some kind of shelter. But a shelter without people and a car-park without car is simply dead space. One Year, Two Days is a night-time work. Recorded at night (we’ll return to that shortly), it’s the soundtrack to empty spaces and time without people. And abstract as the sound sequence are on One Year; Two Days, it’s reasonable to summarise the project as a work about time and space and a certain absence.

I do know that John likes his kit, and to fiddle with it, and that a lot of his works are ‘project’ based, centred around either a piece of equipment (e.g. 808 // Whammy (2016) and Field Memory Recorder (2017) recorded exclusively with a novation circuit) or specific times / locations. I also know that John has been working under the Namke Communications moniker for some seventeen years now, and has built quite a body of experimental work in this guise.

The track titles are simply dates and times, and show that the four pieces were recorded over two days in 2016 – as the EP’s title suggests. In some ways, it marks a continuation of the 365/2015 project, which saw Tuffen record – and release – a track a day for the entirety of 2015.

This project and its predecessor provide a considerable insight into Tuffen’s creative modus operandi, which could equally be described as a work ethic. It’s one I can personally relate to, as I strive to produce and publish at least one review a day. This does, of course, raise the inevitable question about quality control, but there are two very different positions on creativity: the first suggests creativity is something which cannot be controlled, is spontaneous. It says you have to wait or the moment, the idea, the impulse. To wait and to go with the flow. The second says that creativity is like a muscle: the more you do, the more you’re able. In time, quantity begets quality as a committed, systematic approach to making art.

‘2016-08-08-2202’ sets the tone, a distorting oscillation provides the backdrop to creeping notes which gradually rise majestically before bleeding into ‘2016-08-08-2318’. It may be growing later, but the mood grows marginally lighter. The sequencing of the tracks is a major factor in the listening experience here, as there is an overall arc from beginning to end. The mid-section, as represented by ‘2016-08-10-1909’ transitions into hushed ambience, before fragmenting into darker territory with fractured distortion and dislocation taking hold. Eventually, it spins into hovering metallic drones, the frequencies touching on the teeth-jangling.

The final track, ‘2016-08-08-2256’ forges a cloud of amorphous sonic drift, a sonic cloud without tangible form. It’s immersive, but at the same time entirely engaging, as the oscillations and quavering notes which fade in and out of the rumbling thunder slowly dissipate in a drifting mist.

While locked in time and space in terms of their creation, in terms of reception, the four tracks on One Year; Two Days transport the listener beyond both time and space. And herein lies the power of this release, in that it both freezes time, and stretches it out over a frame which has no fixed limits.

HHHHH

Namke Communications – One Year Two Days

Adam Weikert – USIDOH

Posted: 19 August 2017 in Albums
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24th August 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Although he’s released two solo albums under the guise of Wiekie, Adam Weikert is perhaps best known as the drummer of Her Name is Calla. This first release under his own name marks something of a departure, and given its inspiration and evolution, it’s perhaps not unreasonable to say that Weikert’s decision to release an album as ‘himself’ represents a stripping away of the layers of artistry to reveal a work which is more directly personal.

The blurbage contextualises the release as follows: ‘Born years ago as response to cope with a traumatic event of his youth, and revived years later after ill health forced Adam to temporarily stop singing – USIDOH showcases the scattered fragments of poems alongside happenstantial Neoclassically themed works, creating a unique and personal experience.’

Attempts to unravel the meaning of the album’s title, which I take to be more of an initialism than an acronym, during the writing of this review bore little fruit of use. The poems – which are contained in an 80-pagebook which accompany the physical release – are considerably more instructive as to the true meaning of the project. That isn’t to say they’re in alignment with the album’s eleven (instrumental) tracks, because the poems – plural – essentially blur into a single, drifting longform work which has its own shape and tempo, as well as illustrations which augment rather than impinge on the experience. That is to say, the two elements of the project are complimentary rather than directly parallel. Nevertheless, the poems are absolutely integral to the overall experience, rendering USIDOH more of a multimedia work than simply a musical piece.

The words are weighty and the presentation is not only highly visual but intrinsic to the execution. Just as the music on USIDOH draws on aspects of the postmodern and the avant-garde within its broadly neoclassical framework – Wiekert conjures a vast array of atmospheres and emotions through the use of abstraction and semi-ambient field recordings and found snippets in conjunction with mewling saw, sweeping strings, brooding piano and nagging banjo – so the poems pull on high modernism, postmodernism and concrete poetry to further accentuate the lines, disparate and abstract yet unified by virtue of emanating from the same mind, over a period spanning the six years from 2005 to 2011.

‘Die Puppe’ weaves in and out of experimental atmospherics, before ‘Vardøhus Festning’ forges an imposing, imperious mood. ‘Sloth’ is a simply beautiful piano composition, which rolls and drifts mellifluously. There’s almost a playfulness about ‘A Constant Repose’, which first aired via YouTube aired a couple of months ago, the nimble piano work affecting a lightness of mood. But beneath it lies a subtle undercurrent of nostalgic melancholy. And if anything, it’s this emotional layering and the depth of nuance and detail which makes USIDOH such an appealing and compelling work, musically.

As a complete package, there’s a lot to unravel. USIDOH is very much art: Wiekert has poured everything into this, and it shows. There are times when it’s not easy to penetrate, but that in itself is reason to set aside some time to explore a work that multifaceted, deep and resonant, and achieves this without slipping into pretentiousness. There’s no question that USIDOH is ambitious, but Wiekert succeeds in delivering something which conveys the vision.

USIDOH

Marcus Fjellstrom – Skeletikon

Posted: 5 August 2017 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

Fractal, stripped back strumming and spacious strings define the compositions Skeletikon. Having misplaced the press release, I know next to nothing about Fjellstrom’s purpose or intention with Skeletikon.

‘Born out of shattered dreams and an obscured vision of the future, Skeletikon is a delirious yet lucid exploration of the farthest and most conflicted reaches of the heart, teeming with confusion, passion, and ghostly shadows. Being no conventional composer in any way, Marcus stumbles further down his musical domain of detuned orchestral (re-)arrangements and pain-inducing synth passages, arriving at a most unique and personal result.’ So says the blurb accompanying the album.

Across the album’s ten compositions, Fjellstrom explores all of the essential elements, namely texture and tone, atmospherics and dynamics.

‘Aunchron’ is a light, lilting folksy composition that in some respects invites comparisons to early 90s Swans in the way it builds. But it’s a magnificently multifaceted piece, which shifts and glides supply though a series of transitions which head in various directions over the course of its six-minute duration, by turns cascading gently over rippling chimes and rolling through delicate thunder.

‘Skeleton Dance 2’ is dark, tense and atmospheric in a brooding, difficult way: it gives way to the lilting yet urgent acoustic strumming of ‘Modulus’. Dark clouds rumble as they gather under tremulous strings on ‘Arboretum’: less a sonic representation of the breeze through the leaves on the trees in Spring, and more of a haunted forest with growling, marauding hunters lurking in the undergrowth.

Skeletikon is one of those albums which never stays still, which slowly trickles around a succession of haunting sonic spaces and does so incredibly deftly. As such, its impact is subtle to the point of being barely perceptible for the most part. Skeletikon is sparse, and reaches in by stealth.

The album closer ‘Boy With Wound’ is a haunting, creepy composition, and while it employs myriad classic tropes common to music which is designed to instil certain sense of dread, of trepidation, it’s also a musical journey through a series of tense moods and nerve-jangling tension.

Skeletikon is not an album to enjoy, per se, but one to experience at leisure and to slowly absorb. It’s an album with the capacity to affect the listener, and to effect the psychological axis upon which they ordinarily exist.

Marcus Fjellstrom – Skelektion

Splitter Orchester / Felix Kubin – Shine on you Crazy Diagram

Posted: 31 July 2017 in Albums
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ChristopherNosnibor

The split album seems to be in vogue again, and it’s a format which perhaps offers more scope for artists who don’t trade in punchy little tunes than the split single or EP. Shine on you Crazy Diagram may only contain four tracks and have a running time of just over thirty minutes, but it allows both contributing acts to showcase the range of their sound by presenting expanded, developed musical works.

The two tracks by Splitter Orchestra explore and examine weird digital percussion: the ever-shifting pitch creates the illusion of ever-shifting tempo (or does it? Perhaps the tempo does shift albeit subtly) beneath whistling contrails of feedback. They sputter and scrape and drone and hum. ‘Diagram 1’, at under four and a half minutes, is but a prelude to its counterpart, ‘Diagram 2’ which hums and wheezes for almost eleven minutes. There are rhythms in the mix, but they’re pinned back in the mix and bounce around against a shimmering backdrop of feedback and extraneous noise.

Kubin’s compositions are altogether less overtly structured, or at least rhythmic, as swampy swashes and thumps rumble and eddy before – from seemingly out of nowhere – faceripping blasts of distortion roar and blast. ‘Lückenschere’ is constructed around a clattering, shifting rhythm.

‘Lichtsplitter’ clatters and moans and hums and drones for an eternity, before stepping up about ten gars. By the end, one has a fair idea of what it just be like to stand within two feet of a Boeing 474 taking off.

This is, without doubt, one of those releases which lends itself perfectly to vinyl: it is, after all, an album of two halves. They compliment and contrast, and showcase two quite different sides of the experimental digital coin.

There’s a digital bonus track from the Splitter Orchester. ‘Diagram 3’ is a ten-minute extravaganza of thick, impenetrable hums and drones. It might not exactly change the complexion of the release, but it does unquestionably fill out and round off the intangible, non-physical format nicely.

Splitter Orchestra Felix Kubin

Yannis Kyriakides – Subvoice

Posted: 29 July 2017 in Albums
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Unsounds – 57u – 10th February 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Unsounds have a history of releasing magnificently-packaged albums, and Subvoice by Yannis Kyriakides is up there with the best of them. The double CD is housed in a chunky hardcover book binding, which contains an actual book, some forty pages in span.

My introduction to the concept of the subvoice came via William Burroughs, who, around the time he was exploring the myriad potentials of the cut-up technique, made innumerable audio experiments. While most of these involved tape splicing, dropping in and cutting out, some investigated the subvoice in a most literal fashion. Some of these barely audible and even more barely listenable recordings appeared on Nothing Here Now But the Recrdings on Industrial records, with the liner notes describing ‘Throat Microphone Experiment’ – if memory serves – as a not entirely successful attempt to capture subvocal speech.

The definition of ‘subvocal’ is ‘relating to or denoting an unarticulated level of speech comparable to thought’. Kyriakides describes the works in the collection as ‘an investigation into ideas of voice and language [which] range from works in which text is directly encoded into music… to ones in which the voice is examined, dissected and pulled apart’. He explains that ‘in both approaches the underlying idea is to explore what happens when material has a clear semantic form, whether communicated in text or speech, is translated into musical structure’.

While thematically and theoretically linked, the nine pieces – which have a combined running time of almost two and a half hours – are from quite distinct and separate collaborative projects Kyriakides was involved in between 2010 and 2015.

The first piece on disc one, ‘Words and Song Without Words’ is the shortest work, being a couple of seconds under ten minutes, but appropriately introduces the kind of sonic palette Kyriakides and his collaborators – in this instance, Francesco Dillon, who contributes cello – work from. ‘Paramyth’ is eerie, disconsolate, the cracked ramblings splayed in all directions over tense piano and uncomfortable strings, but ultimately peters out into something softer. Skittering strings scurry busily in brief and disjointed flurries, hectically flying here and there, on ‘Toponymy’. Muffed voices bring a discomforting sense of the unheimlich, a sense of the intangible and of something just out of the reach of understanding.

Ominous notes hover and ring on the last piece on the first disc, ‘Circadian Surveillance,’ a twenty-five minute exercise in haunting atmospherics, where distant voices are barely audible under a rumble of turning static and hovering notes which resonate into dead air.

Onto disc two, ‘Der Komponist’ – a composition for orchestra and computer – begins quietly, ominously, with protracted near-silences between delicate, low, slow builds, before horns begin to add cinematic drama. It’s very filmic, very – for wont of a better word – soundtracky, and is reminiscent of some of JG Thirlwell’s more recent orchestral works. The climax is a slow, swelling succession of surging brass, underscored by a rippling digital churn.

‘Politicus (Dawn in the Giardini’ is perhaps the lightest and most playful composition of the nine, and utilises the variability and versatility of the prepared disklavier. The original work was a twelve-hour sound installation. The booklet explains the technical aspects in great detail, and Kyriakides outlines the way in which algorithms based on speech drive the formulation of the piece, here in an abridged fourteen-minute segment. The immense complexities behind the composition are completely hidden from the listener, with the surface completely masking the mechanical depths.

The final piece, ‘Oneiricon’ is a work for ensemble and computers. It’s an exploration of dreams, and is often subtle to the point of subliminality. And because Subvoice is very much a ‘background’ work, while it often drifts for significant stretches without really pulling particularly hard on the attention, it does mean that its immense duration is not an issue. Equally, because Subvoice is a collection rather than a work conceived as a single continuous whole, it’s possible to listen and appreciate in segments, without absolute commitment. And it is an album to listen to and appreciate: Kyriakides’ compositions are varied and textured and demonstrate an attention to form and sonic detail which extends far beyond the basic premise of ‘the voice.’

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Sly & The Family Drone & Dead Neanderthals – Molar Wrench

Posted: 6 July 2017 in Albums
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Hominid Sounds – 30th May 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Matt Cargill’s project still has one of the best names around: it’s not only an example of punning genius, but also one of those band names which sets expectations as to what you’re going to get musically. I say musically, but that’s very much a matter of perspective. SATFD don’t make music in the conventional sense, and Molar Wrench is as sonically challenging as any of the previous releases SATFD have put out. On this outing, they’re joined by Dutch/British free jazz unit Dead Neanderthals, to form what they describe as ‘the ultimate tag team of the murky European underground’.

Given that the two acts featured on a split release last year, this collaboration seems like a logical progression. It certainly marks a departure for Sly, in that the trademark subterranean grind of endless, dark drones and unsettling atmospherics is matched with and at times consumed by the maddest jazz shit going.

The album contains just four tracks, but packs in a hell of a lot of racket. It all kicks off with a frenetic, a wild, free jazz cacophony, a melange of clamorous, ultra-hyped parping horns, sonorous lowed drone and is dominated by truly frenzied, cacophonous bent. Circuits fizz and hum while the percussion thrashes and crashes arrhythmically, throwing the listener around with reckless abandon a rollercoaster of tempestuous sonic mania.

There are two ‘Muck Man’ tracks and the first is ten minutes of slow, throbbing churn made up primarily of low and mid-range sludge, the drums holding a ragged but hard rhythm amidst a maelstrom of thick, dirty, pulsating noise. It’s almost a riff, but more a succession of waves in a rhythmically surging sonic tide, a with the density of liquid mud. Immersive would be one word.

‘Muck Man Part 2’ is altogether more low-key, a dark, atmospheric piece that manifests as a prehistoric sulphur swamp in sonic form. Slowly, the murky drift builds to a screaming tempest of noise; the brass develops from a low drone to a shrill shriek of pain and the drumming transitions from a sedate trudge to an explosive riot of noise, abrasive blasts of snarling electronica and whatever the fuck else bursting in waves of sonic shock.

The title track closes off the album, and it’s an eleven-minute trudge that calls to mind the claustrophobic brutality of Swans’ ‘Young God’ EP. The plodding percussion provides a doomy and tense prickling spine to the oppressive grind that lumbers on for what feels like a skull-crushing eternity.

There is a definite structure to Molar Wrench, in that it starts off wild and winds down to a grinding crawl, but it by no means feels like the energy displayed at the outset dissipates as the album progresses. It’s more a case that having exhausted the listener with frenetic kinetics and gone all-out on the attack at the front end, the album seeks to bludgeon the listener into submission in the later stages. And highly effective it is, too.

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Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche – Pas pire pop, I Love You So Much

Posted: 19 June 2017 in Albums
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Constellation

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been 29˚C in the shade today. I’ve been awake since 4am for the second day in a row, and at work in the day-job since 7:30am. I’m a flustered, strung-out sticky mess, dying of hayfever, trying to hold it together and keep myself cool and hydrated with a constant flow of Scrumpy Jack. It’s not working. But I am: instead of kicking back or chilling out, I’m desperately trying to chisel out words in my cramped home office space where it’s so humid I can barely breathe. And instead of taking the easy option of one of the million mellifluous ambient works in my never-ending to-review pile, or taking a soft hit with some straight ahead metal or whatever, I’m battling with this dizzyingly diverse effort by Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche.

Sold as a kraut-rock ensemble, Montreal collective Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche (which translates, I believe as ‘with the sun coming out of his mouth’) pack myriad influences into their second album. Although containing ten tracks, it’s ostensibly an album built around three primary movements.

Psychedelic rock, krautrock, desert rock, punk rock, noise rock, afrobeat, experimental pop, post-rock, electronic; all are touchstones for Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche.

The album’s first track, ‘Trans-pop Express I’ manages to combine hypnotic psychedelic desert rock with wibbly analogue retro-futuristic spacey electronica and some kind of warped gospel/country infusion. It bleeds invisibly into the hypnotic pulsating riff-trippery of ‘Trans-pop Express II’

The opening minutes of the second movement ‘Alizé et Margaret D. Midi moins le quart. Sur la plage, un palmier ensanglanté’ (of which there are three parts) marries a martial beat to some skittering world music vibe and tops it with a desperate, yodelling vocal holler that’s far wide of carrying a corresponding melody, or even a tune. Over the course of the piece as a whole, the band push into new territories by unconventional roads. This is essentially the key to the pleasure to be found in Pas pire pop. Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche are clearly a band who please themselves first and foremost, and enjoy themselves in doing so. And yet they largely swerve indulgence by virtue of their sense of movement: the tracks build and bed, trip and transition: the explosive crescendo at the end of the aforementioned first part of ‘Alizé et Margaret D’ is killer, and immediately loops back to the opening proggy motif on the second part. It’s like skipping back in time, like a glitch in the time continuum. It’s a minor detail in many ways, but it’s also a minor work of genius.

The final movement – in a colossal five parts – begins with a sweeping orchestral cascade which gushes every whichway over a thumping dance groove. It’s merely the beginning of a crazy journey through jazzy math-rock and noodlesome post-rock via some hefty noise and some Talking Heads-y post-punk oddness that works its way to a nifty finale by route of a tightly-woven funk groove meted to some clattering drums while whizzing electronic details fly like comes into the distance.

I’m oozing perspiration from every pore, especially the backs of my various joints: the knees, the elbows, the groin, and I find myself contemplating the complex musical conjunctions within the framework of the shifting tubular geometry of my limbs in context of the insane, overwhelming heat and its effect on my capacity for focused, linear thought, as if existing in some stylized Ballardian landscape of the mind.

 

Avec le Soliel

Micah Gaugh – Stars Are A Harem

Posted: 30 May 2017 in Albums
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Sê-lo Net Label – 12th May 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

This isn’t an album that’s easy to position, but I’m not about to labour any hyperbolic proclamation that it’s genre-defying or even unique in its hybridity. The press blurb pitches Stars are a Harem as a modern day answer to Miles Davis ‘Kind of Blue’, where the music is steeped in the avant-garde tradition while being accessible to the public ear thanks to “pop” recording techniques and a softening of the harsh sounds associated with the 1960s avant-garde amidst American jazz music.

I’d actually go so far as to say that aside from some unconventional structure as some unusual and incongruously explosive percussion – and perhaps a tendency to incorporate unexpected stops and starts to stutter the flow of the subtle, mellow and overtly jazz-inspired instrumentation – Stars Are A Harem is a raw and soulful work which has mass appeal.

Gaugh has one of those voices that wows people: you just know that casual listeners catching him perform a low-key club show (and I rather suspect that’s the kind of show Gaugh tends to perform) would absolutely melt and rush to the merch stall once they’d done clapping their hands off, even if they hadn’t quaffed a quart of prosecco. Yes, he has soul: deep, deep soul. And however wayward or experimental some of the songs are in their conception, and however ‘jazz’ the pieces are stylistically, the execution is smooth.

Alongside urgent, arrhythmic drumming, not to mention segments of deftly created and technically impressive drumming, strolling soothing and strolling basslines, pegged back and considerate (even when they build to the calamity of thunder) are a consistent feature of Stars Are A Harem.

While Stars Are A Harem clearly and explicitly exploits the wilder tendencies of avant-garde jazz stylings, it also does a while lot more. Moreover, while Stars Are A Harem excitingly finds Micah Gaugh mine an avant-garde seam, the more experimental tendencies are kept rigorously in check. And herein lies the album’s greatest achievement, in that it’s an overtly accessible and enjoyable album, but one with unconventional undercurrents, pitching to the underground and the overground at the same time.

 

 

 

Micah Gaugh – Stars Are A Harem

GIW – Never Is Always

Posted: 27 May 2017 in Albums
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ti-Records – TIRECS004

Christopher Nosnibor

What do you need to know about this album? Well, GIW is the solo project of trumpeter & performer Pablo Giw. He hails from Cologne, Germany, and Never is Always is his debut album.

‘Morning Machine’ finds Pablo spin some rhythmically-intoned spoken word that’s archetypally beat in its style and delivery. Slow, subsonic trip-hop beats glitch beneath warping free jazz parps which cut their way across spaced-out drones.

A nagging looped motif provides the core of the framework of ‘What’s Outside Isn’t There’, and it’s around this that changes in tempo and tonality, force and spirit that the atmosphere and mood of the piece shift over its duration. The blurb describes GIW as ‘having electronic music in mind, but creating it by acoustic and instrumental means’, and while there are times when his plays the trumpet like a trumpet, over the course of the album’s eight tracks, he demonstrates a stylistic eclecticism and inventiveness that’s hard not to admire.

Never is Always finds GIW striving to ‘redefine his role as a trumpet player and us[ing] his instrument as sound generator for complex harmonic layers, a drum machine or as a filter for his voice. It’s when GIW pushes his boundaries the furthest that he’s most impressive and successful compositionally, and while the more obviously trumpet-led, jazz-flavoured compositions like ‘The Golden Calf’ aren’t short on late-night hot city isolation tension and atmosphere, even with the swaying rhythms which underpin its loose groove. Far more interesting are the swelling cathedrals of unsettling noise which form the fabric of the short but intense cracking blast of ‘Right Endeavour,’ which forges a dense noise which is both electro and other-wordly in its manifestation.

If the dreamy soul which occupies the first half of ‘I Saw You – Trouble’ is unremarkable s of and in itself, the fact it sounds like it’s a synth tune is indicative of Pablo’s technical abilities, and when it skips into darker, glitchier terrain around the mid-point, the context is rendered even more impressive.

‘Hain’ barrels into avant-garde technoindustrial territory, with clattering, clanking percussion and blasts of white noise that calls to mind the experimentalism of early Cabaret Voltaire or Foetus.

Never is Always is nothing if not varied in its approach and style, and in being something of a mixed bag isn’t wholly consistent. However, it would be wrong to be overly critical, and not only because it’s GIW’s first effort but because it’s the work of an artist willing to explore, to experiment, and to throw it all out there. It’s less a matter of variable quality as a matter of taste, and while I abhor anything that whiffs of ersatz Beatnick bollocks, that’s just me, and what really matters is that Never is Always is an ambitious and eclectic effort which shows that we’re looking at an artist with substantial and possibly unique potential.

TIRECS004_front

Agnes Hvizdalek – Index

Posted: 15 May 2017 in Albums
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Nakama Records – 27th February 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

You think of the human voice and you’ll probably immediately cast your mind to speech and singing. But the extremity of the range of the human voice is truly remarkable, and extends far, far beyond these limited parameters. Index sees Oslo-based Agnes Hvizdalek explore, over the course of forty-seven minutes – mastered as a single track – the potentials and possibilities of her vocal cords. The CD’s packaging offers nothing but a fingerprint by way of an explanation, but thankfully, the accompanying press release assists with the provision of context and framing the ‘pure vocal sounds that oscillate between fragility and levity, in the most well-shaped musical manner’ by explaining the way in which they’re ‘interwoven with, and set in contrast to the buzz of the city sounds and the building acoustics’. That city buzz is São Paulo, and the album was recorded at the bottom of a 60-metre-high chimney at the old factory “Casa das Caldeiras” in the heart of the city with the world’s largest helicopter fleet. As such, Index captures the correspondence between the individual and environment as well as exploring the limits of the individual themselves.

It perhaps goes without saying that this is about as far into avant-garde territory as it possible to get: a work of pure experimentation, of parameter-pushing and prioritising process over end product. That doesn’t mean that Hvizdalek’s concept is entirely original: Mike Patton’s Adult Themes for Voice (1996) stands as a bewildering document of one man’s immense vocal capabilities. It’s largely unlistenable, at least in anything more than small doses, but at least it’s broken into bite-sized chunks of sonic derangement. Hvizdalek makes no such concessions to accessibility, and while many of her vocal acrobatic are less extreme than Patton’s, Index is nevertheless a hugely challenging album, a morass of saliva and tongues and brain-bending bleating and blowing.

To describe the various sounds would be essentially pointless – not only dull, but abjectly failing to convey the actual experience of the album. So, Hvhizdalek hums and drones, wheezes and moans, ululates gutturally and breathes like a bellows. She squeaks and snarls and snarks and spits. But what’s remarkable is that while at times she sounds perfectly human and natural, oftentimes the sounds issuing forth from the speakers sound like no creature on earth. And yet the bewildering polytonal rasps and drones sound like no instrument known to wo/man either.

There’s no way in the world anyone is ever going to sit down and play this album for pleasure. I write as someone who’s actually spent the best part of an hour with these sounds rippling and bouncing from the speakers wired to my laptop wearing pyjamas and a bemused expression. A part of me feels obliged to give the album at least one more run-through, but the fact is, while I have absolute admiration for Hvizdalek’s artistic commitment and vision, I simply can’t face it, at least not now. This is absolutely no sleight on Hvizdalek’s work: Index is a true work of art. It’s a work to ponder, to reflect on and to sample when the mood takes. This may not be often, but in a world cluttered with sonic wallpaper, there’s a real need for an album like Index.

Agnes Hvizdalek – Index

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