Posts Tagged ‘Avant-garde’

Plan Pony – Electric Swampland Home

Posted: 24 April 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 26th April 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Plan Pony – the solo project of Jase Jester, one half of Ombibael / Ombibadger – has been simmering for a while, and we’ve been following his output since the release of the ‘Martyr’ single back in 2020. So I was naturally excited to hear his latest offering.

I felt suddenly uncomfortable, concerned, even, on seeing the accompanying blurbage, which leads with ‘RIYL: Animal Collective, Madlib, Nurse With Wound, Hype Williams, Black Dice’. I mean, I do like a bit of NWW, and don’t mind some Black Dice, but I absolutely abhor Animal Collective. So, so much. Something about Animal Collective radiates muso smugness – something it would be hard to accuse Jase of.

Electric Swampland Home is the first Plan Pony album, and as with previous outings, finds Kester grappling with vintage gear to conjure authentic vintage noise inspired by those early adopters. He’s right when he tells me that emulators simply aren’t the same, and that when technologies were emerging, the sound of the resulting recordings was born of necessity – like when you bounce tracks on a cassette four-track and lose some quality and definition in the process, and the presence of amp hum and tape hiss because amps hum and tape hisses. Adding tape hiss or vinyl crackle digitally is an affectation, and while some may be sold on this kind of nostalgic artifice, it lacks that certain something.

While questions of authenticity provoke heated debate in circles around some genres – punk, obviously, grunge, perhaps to a lesser extent, and right now, indie and alternative as new acts track stellar trajectories seemingly from nowhere while claiming modest grass-roots credentials while obfuscating middle class and public school backgrounds and major label backing, Electric Swampland Home is a truly authentic work. Kester hasn’t amassed a pile of highly-sought-after vintage kit in the way people with hods of cash buy up 808s and Moogs to try to be cool. Electric Swampland Home is the sound of a Boss sampler and an old Tascam digital studio he’s had for yonks, and which by today’s standards are pretty primitive.

From the very start, Electric Swampland Home creates discord and chaos with the woozy, bent, and frankly fucked-up ‘Travelling There’, a loop of atonality that gives way to a rolling rhythm and feedback-squalling bass crunch… and from thereon in, everything goes.

‘The Village’ tosses a salad of tribal beats, twisted Kyoto and a dash of Joujouka. While I’ve never been comfortable with the kind of cultural appropriation that the likes of Paul Simon’s takes on ‘world music’ present, this is something entirely different – a full global exploration which occurs simultaneously. This owes more to the tape experiments of Burroughs and Gysin, Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire than anything else, conveying a sense of the way in which everything happens all at once, and linearity is a construct.

Across the album’s eight tracks, Plan Pony meshes some dense sonic textures and layers of difficult dissonance. Notes and tones bend and warp, things twist and melt and bleed into one another: edges blur and fade. The way the juxtaposing and often incongruous elements are brought together isn’t explicitly jarring, it’s not a bewildering collision of noise, but something rather more subtle – although no less impactful and no less disorienting. As with Burroughs’ cut-ups, Electric Swampland Home captures – recreates, distils – the overwhelming experience of modern life, the blizzard of information, the endless intertext, the diminished attention span, the globalisation and the egalitarianism of everything. That isn’t to say we live in an egalitarian world – but that everything equally demands our attention from every corner of everything, to the point that it’s impossible to prioritise or even reasonably assess what’s of more importance than anything else. And so we quiver, frozen in stasis, poised between myriad options and so often spend hours selecting none of them.

This is nowhere more clearly conveyed on the warped, glitchy layerings of ‘Same Cloud’, which brings everything all at once. On the one hand, it’s the most overtly ‘song’ like piece on the album. On the other, it’s like listening to the radio from the next room while reading a book with the TV on in the background, and your phone’s ringing and next door are doing DIY and your mind’s wondering about what’s for dinner – and this continues into the sample-soaked looping stuttering jangle of ‘Amphibian’.

‘8pm Local Time’ combined field recordings, a low-level quivering bass and squelchy laser-blasting electronics together, and not necessarily in the most comfortable of fashions.

Electric Swampland Home revels in incongruity, in awkwardness, in otherness, and in many ways, it’s a magnificent representation of life in all its colours and chaos, its business and unpredictability. It’s not an easy or immediate album, and it’s not for a second intended to be. It is an unashamedly experimental work, and one which succeeds in its explorations.

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Mat Smith – Central Park: A Picture In Sounds (Performance #2)

Posted: 12 March 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 8th March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Mortality Tables once again bring us a release that’s deeply immersed in the spirit of the avant-garde, and about setting defined parameters within which a project must function. When it comes to such things, it’s not about dictating restrictions, but about providing focus. Not all artists like to work to guidelines, although a prompt can open infinite possibilities for interpretation, and as such, there’s creative potential in working in such a way. And so it is that, as the accompanying notes explain, ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds is a site-specific performance piece, for one or more performers aged between ten and 95 years old. It is a tribute to the multi-disciplinary work of Charles Ives that will be published in 2024.’ We go on to learn that ‘To execute the piece, each performer will refer to a map of Central Park divided into areas representing the life expectancies listed in an 1874 US insurance industry mortality table. Each performer will identify an area of the Park corresponding to their life expectancy in 1874 and make a field recording lasting precisely eight minutes and thirty seconds.’

These are some highly specific instructions, but, once there, what performers are essentially looking at is eight and a half minutes to express as they feel appropriate, and of course, here, the possibilities are near-limitless. How one responds to a setting, a time, a space is, after all, a purely personal thing. Just as no two people’s lived experiences are the same, so no two responses will be identical.

This is a document of Mat Smith’s second performance, recorded on. 9 February 2024, at 16:13.

His own commentary is illuminating, and merits citation here, for context:

‘I was 47 years old when I performed ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds’ for the second time. Although I was a year older, when I looked at the life expectancies table and cross-referenced that with my divided Central Park map, it indicated that I should once again perform the piece near Strawberry Fields… The character of a place is in a continual state of mutability, and that was evident when I began the piece. It was a different season, the trees were barren and sleeping, snowdrops were springing up everywhere, and there were significantly more people in the park than the day I performed the piece in June the previous year. A carpet of dry leaves covered the area I set myself up in, crispy underfoot, waiting to crumble into dust.’

He recounts how ‘Someone at the John Lennon memorial began singing. Somewhere near the path, a street musician with what sounded like an amplified violin began playing a rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’, even though Christmas was retreating rapidly into the past. In between, he would play a plaintive wistful little coda that seemed so at odds with the relatively gleeful ‘Jingle Bells’. Often, his playing is accompanied by the harsh ringing bells of bikes as they whizz along the bike paths…’

His narrative creates a vivid – and moving – picture of the scene. It’s easy to think of these kind of performances taking place either with some sort of ‘arrangement’ and a cluster of observers who are ‘in the know’ gathered as witnesses, or in seclusion; it’s not so obvious to consider the actuality of creating sonic art in a public space, and all of the randomness and happenstance which that entails.

However, Central Park: A Picture In Sounds (Performance #2) captures this perfectly. The combination of the breeze and traffic creates a constant roar in the background. Birds chirp in abundance – far more than one might associate with February, at least here in England – and dogs yap and bark constantly. You can’t move for bloody dogs anywhere, in parks in fields, post-pandemic, it seems as if there are more dogs than people. But for all the ambience, all the thronging noise – and this really does remind that even quiet spaces really aren’t in large cities, with blaring radios and chatter and that constant roar – this is mostly eight and a half minutes of ‘Jingle Bells’ being played on a fiddle. In February. Bloody buskers.

But, as a snapshot field recording, Central Park: A Picture In Sounds (Performance #2), is absolutely alive, buzzing, bustling, busy – a slice of life.

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Ergo Phizmiz –The Tin Drummer Has Collapsed

Posted: 18 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

For myriad reasons, my head’s a shed of late, and I’ve been doing this for coming up for sixteen years now, cranking out reviews on a more or less daily basis, sometimes during certain spells up to five or six in a day and taking in three or four live shows in a week, on top of dayjob and, since 2011, parenting. So I can be forgiven for not remembering every artist I’ve covered, let alone the details. But somewhere along the way, on seeing this arrive in my inbox, I recall that I have written about Ergo Phizmiz. I have no idea what I wrote, or when, whether I dug it or not, what kind of music it was, but I did write. Ergo Phizmiz isn’t a name one forgets easily, after all.

And so it is that ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is the sixth release in the second season of Mortality Tables’ ‘LIFEFILES’ series, a series of singles whereby ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events are shared with a range of artists working with sound. Those artists are then free to respond to the recordings in any way they like, either through manipulation or composition.’

Seems I’ve got some catching up to so, since, ‘Season 01 of the LIFEFILES series commenced in March 2023 with contributions from Simon Fisher Turner, Veryan, Xqui, Rupert Lally, Andrew Spackman and Dave Clarkson,’ and ‘Season 02 commenced in September 2023 with contributions so far from Audio Obscura, Todeskino, boycalledcrow, Simon Fisher Turner, Maps and Ergo Phizmiz.’

The one thing about arriving at a late point in a series and not even in the first season of singles, over a TV series is that there’s no cause for consternation over the plot arc or who the characters are or their back-stories. A single is a single, and it should, by its nature, stand alone, free of the context of series or album, and ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ does.

As the accompanying notes inform us, ‘The following three source sounds were chosen at random:

1. Loud bass music played from a car at the Akeman Inn, Bucks (21.06.2021)

2. A rubber lid stretched across a ramekin (07.07.2022)

3. Seren playing an old acoustic guitar (01.11.2023)’

Phizmiz’s response is to hurl them all together at random, too. ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ begins with a roaring barrage of noise, the roaring thrum of an engine and what I understand to be ‘loud bass music’. On ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’, Phizmiz doesn’t collage or overlap the source materials – which would likely have produced an utterly head-smashing cacophony – instead favouring a different kind of cut-up method, akin to the ‘drop-in’ method devised by Burroughs and Gysin, whereby the different segments are dropped in, ‘randomly’. The sources follow one another, and it’s a haphazard-sounding patchwork of unrelated sounds, although the rubber lid and acoustic guitar aren’t as different as one might anticipate.

‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is strange, and interesting, and as an experimental assemblage, it isn’t designed to be accessible or musical, or conform to any conventional expectations of a ‘single’. This is nothing more and nothing less than an artistic response to a set of parameters set as part of an experiment – and one that’s novel in its directness and simplicity.

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Áron Porteleki – Cryptic Bodies

Posted: 6 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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5th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

People often say they hate surprises. I know where they’re coming from, although by and large, the surprise is less the issue than their reaction being seen. As children, we’ve all had the Christmas party and the birthday where we’ve suffered a head-exploding embarrassment where something’s been sprung unexpectedly, and where, as a consequence the walls have closed in and you’ve felt entrapped within a tight, tunnelling space and simply wanted to disappear – right? But there are two kinds of surprises: good ones and bad ones, just as there are two kinds of music: good, and bad.

‘Cryptic Bodies’ is good music, and the perfect surprise, presenting as a discordant chaotic mess of purgatorial abrasion, which smashes its way into a collision of post-punk and… well, what else is hard to say, beyond sinewy, straining dissonance. Really, this is one of those ‘what the fuck is this?’ releases. Personally, I absolutely love this kind of stuff, that’s challenging, shouty, difficult to listen to, let alone define. The music shifts in tone and intensity, a meandering twisting thread of jangliness and extraneous noise that bears jazz influences without being jazz, noise-rock elements without being noise-rock. What does it mean? What is it for? Cryptic is certainly the word, and perhaps it’s best to simply revel in the strangeness than attempt to unravel and decipher it.

But there’s more. The track is lifted from Hungarian artist Porteleki’s forthcoming album Smearing, which is out in March, and it’s not his first work by the title ‘Cryptic Bodies’, as a moment’s cursory research brings us to a ‘documentary’ film on YouTube, uploaded in three parts, which captures Porteleki – a percussionist first and foremost – performing a solo score, which is ‘structured yet improvised’ as the audio backdrop to ‘a contemporary dance piece, where 5 dancers traverse through space, body and time to throbbing experimental live metal music. The work is inspired by ancient bodily practices such as Egyptian mummification and Mesopotamian occult healing rites’.

Being instrumental, and extending to around forty minutes, it’s a powerful soundtrack to a visually striking and remarkably compelling multimedia experience, which also showcases Porteleki’s inventive, atmosphere-building approach to guitar playing. Elsewhere online, his SoundCloud uploads present an array of experimental works, ranging from minimalist dark ambience to wild, maximalist bursts of noise, meaning how representative of the album this cut might be is anyone’s guess. But given the title track, which is currently streaming on Bandcamp, there’s a strong possibility that it’s going to be an extremely varied and extremely unusual collection of highly experimental bits and pieces. ‘No genres’ he states on his Bandcamp. No kidding: Porteleki’s modus operandi appears to be to shatter every mould there is. He isn’t so much leftfield, or outside the box, but outside the field, and he’s burned the box to ashes.

Porteleki clearly likes to push boundaries, and none more than his own. ‘Cryptic Bodies’ offers a gateway into the world of an artist who warrants exploration – but not if you don’t like surprises.

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Lothar Ohlmeier / Rudi Fischerlehner / Isambard Khroustaliov – In the Gloaming

Posted: 1 February 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Not Applicable – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

What we’re given to expect from this three-way collaboration is ‘an album of explorative, freely improvised electroacoustic music by an acclaimed trio of acclaimed genre-defying musicians’. I can’t help but blame the music press – as was, rather than the broken skeleton of what remains of the music press – and streaming algorithms for the obsession with genre. One could probably take it as far back as to the 50s when the press was all over this shocking ‘Beatnik’ counterculture, but to consider more relevant and recent history, ever since the ‘goth’ tag was applied to a fairly disparate selection of post-punk bands – and their fans – categorisation has been the method by which to both shortcut detailed analysis and to market acts. The groupings rarely make sense, or at least never did to me. For example, I loved Nirvana, but had absolutely no interest in, say, Soundgarden or Pearl Jam, who lacked ant of the elements I loved about Nirvana, and to my ear weren’t especially grungy. Bauhaus and the Sisters of Mercy have nothing in common beyond there being an arch, art aspect to their work, and the idea that both Throbbing Gristle and Ministry are ‘Industrial’ is absurd (and while I get that ‘industrial metal’ may be the distinction when considering Ministry, Pitch Shifter, etc,. it’s never rendered any more clear than when the term ‘hardcore’ is used. Many acts claim to be ‘genre defying’, but so few are. That said, the very function of the avant-garde is to defy genre, to smash preconceptions, to push boundaries, to do something different. In the Gloaming, remarkably, is something very different, and is truly ‘genre defying’.

It’s often intriguing to see just what players of such an unusual selection of instruments will produce when they come together and set out with the primary purpose of seeing what happens. Lothar Ohlmeier’s bass clarinet, Isambard Khroustaliov’s electronics, and Rudi Fischerlehner’s drums make for an interesting lineup, and sometimes, even the most experienced musicians will come together and create sound, but it doesn’t really gel. This is most certainly not one of those instances.

The album contains six pieces, and they each explore subtly different musical terrain, seemingly with all participants working on the understanding that less is more. There is a lot of space in which they all breathe and step back from soundmaking to allow the atmosphere to evolve. While the bass clarinet clearly has jazz connotations, this isn’t an overtly jazz album in any sense.

‘Leaf Silhouettes’ is a celebration of discord and dissonance, as clattering drum rattle like bin lids blown down an alleyway in a gale, the squelching electronic sounds conjuring an eeriness amidst seemingly random toots, while ‘Out to Dry’ has an almost sixties sci-fi feel, with hints of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop about the alien ambience, where the electronics take the lead, but remain restrained, with the result being sparse and atmospheric.

If any one of the pieces does have a more avant-jazz feel, it’s the nine-minute ‘Violet Weeds’, where the clarinet tootles and hoots every which way, spreading like tendrils over the bibbling synths. The percussion remains noteworthy for its restraint, as it does over the course of the album. And if ‘End Zone’ employs the same elements, the mood is quite different by virtue of the difference in balance of its instruments. It is, in the main, a subdued, understated piece, but whistles of feedback and extraneous bleeps bringing extra dimensions..

The final piece, ‘Pixel Head’ is a ten-minute monster of a composition, and one which, while spacious, brings so many different ideas and segments that it really does bend the brain.

From the beginning In the Gloaming is a work of intuition, and the interplay between the three musicians is something special.

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Robert Poss – Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust

Posted: 27 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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25th January 2024

With Band of Susans, active between 1986 and 1996, Robert Poss curved an arc from the New York noise scene towards more of a shoegaze sound. With releases on Blast First and Mute, and featuring a pre-Helmet Page Hamilton on second album, Love Agenda, not to mention a reputation for eardrum-shatteringly loud live performances, the band unquestionably achieved more in terms of influence and cult cred than commercial success (something their final album, Here Comes Success (1995) seemed to acknowledge in its title). But what qualifies as success? Capitalist culture and media tell us that success is a career, promotion, cash, holidays, cruises, bug house big car. But that’s because these are the status symbols capitalism tells us we should aspire to. How about having enough to be ok, a home you like and feel comfortable in, having friends, knowing yourself and being comfortable in your own skin, and having the freedom to do things which give you pleasure? It’s a question of values: what do you value more, time, or money? Status, or the satisfaction of being true to yourself?

There seems to have been a fair bit made of fellow BoS alumni Karen Hagloff’s return to music making in recent years, but not so much about Robert Poss’ sustained output since the band called it a day. But then again, Poss has spent a career being somewhat overlooked and vastly underrated. Both his songwriting and style of playing is quite distinctive and unusual – quirky seems a reasonable adjective, and is certainly not a criticism. The notes on bandcamp note that ‘The release is dedicated to composer/filmmaker/photographer Phill Niblock, a long-time mentor, colleague and friend.’ The timing of this certainly renders this dedication particularly poignant, and also highlights the way in which exponents of avant-gardism feed off one another and evolve one another’s ideas in different directions.

The Niblock connection certainly sheds additional light on Poss’ approach to composition and sound, favouring drones and repetition over rigid verse/chorus structures and progression, and Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust does very much contain, as the title suggests, a miscellany of bits and pieces, ranging from exploratory wanderings to fully-formed songs using conventional ‘rock’ format of guitars, bass, and drums – and on some, there are even vocals, notably the punchy post-punk cut ‘Your Adversary’, which marks a change of style with its murky production and blustery drum machine backing.

The first of these, ‘Secrets, Chapter and Verse’ is a title which could easily be on a Band of Susans release and the song carries that Band of Susans vibe – jangly indie but played loud – and I mean LOUD, with strolling bass running back and forth and up and down beneath the layers of guitar, the vocals low in the mix and serving primarily functional capacity – sonic placeholders.

‘Out of the Fairy Dust’ combines jangling indie and ambient drone and in many respects does carry echoes of ‘Here Comes Success’ – but also Love of Life era Swans – at least until about halfway through where it takes a sudden turn into deeper folk territory. It’s quite a contrast with the deep, ultra-droney sonorous ambience of ‘Foghorn Lullaby’.

Like the epic solo workout that is ‘Hagstrom Fragment’, which comes on like some legs akimbo 90s rock, ‘Skibbereen Drive’ lunges into rock mode, and follows the chord sequence of ‘Flood II’ from The Sister’s of Mercy’s Floodland – and sounds very like it, with its cold synths and crisp drum machine, but without the acoustic guitar detail and lead guitar line. It’s a real contrast to the epic dronescape of ‘Into the Fairy Dust’, on which the drums are a million miles behind the drone as they clatter and roll away, onwards, ever onwards, but also almost entirely submerged in the mix. Elsewhere, with its snarling synth grind, ‘S Romp’ sounds like Suicide doing dirty disco, and ‘Trem 23’ – well, it takes us back to the 23 enigma.

Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust showcases a remarkable diversity of styles, and it’s neither as dry nor as dark as all that, with ‘Imaginary Music On Hold’ presenting a most whimsical feel. As a collection, it never fails to be interesting, or enjoyable, and showcases Poss’ eclecticism and range, and there’s pleasure to be had from listening to a collection of work by an artist who never feels constrained or compelled to confirm to a given genre or mode. It’s something that seems to trouble many people, not least of all labels and critics, that an artist’s creations are based on the pursuit of creative endeavour and interest rather than assigning themselves a category by which they must live. The flipside of this is that it may not feel particularly like an album it its own right, but more like a collection of demos and ideas – and just as the title summarises the contents as three separate elements – Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust – so it feels like it contains the seeds of three separate and distinct projects – a droney one, an indie one, and a dark rock-orientated one. It would be exciting to witness those three projects realised, but what we have here, regardless of future intent, is a document of forward-facing music-making and an artist whose sole priority is doing his own thing. This is, ultimately, the ambition for any artist: to create without concern for commercial matters. And Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust is an exemplary product of creative freedom.

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Phill Niblock – Looking for Daniel

Posted: 25 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Unsounds/Echonance Festival – 2nd February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s never a comfortable experience to learn of someone’s passing, even if it’s someone you’re only really aware of rather than familiar with. My knowledge of Phill Niblock and his work was relatively scant, although I had written about a few of his releases over the years. I wasn’t particularly enthused by Touch Five back in 2013 – an album I would probably appreciate considerably more now. This likely says as much about me as it does Phill Niblock, but does perhaps indicate just how artists who fully espouse avant-gardism are always ahead, and tend to only be truly appreciated later. And so, to learn of Niblock’s passing only this month, from the press release which accompanies this release was a… moment, a cause to pause.

And so as I read how this release serves to ‘commemorate the late Phill Niblock with this release made in close collaboration with the composer,’ and features recordings of some of his very last compositions just before his passing in January 2024. ‘The two works on this album, ‘Biliana’ (2023) and ‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ (2019) represent the hallmarks of his unique approach to composition where multiple, closely-tuned instruments and voices are used to create rich and complex sonic tapestries…

The fact that he was still composing up to the age of ninety is remarkable. The fact these two pieces don’t feel radically different from much of his previous work is impressive. And yet, in context, the fact that these final works are such long, expansive, and unsettling compositions feels fitting.

To understand and contextualise the pieces, it’s worth quoting directly: ‘In Biliana, written for performer Biliana Voutchkova, her violin phrases and vocalizations carve out a deep sonorous space full of fluctuating overtones. By emphasizing on the physicality and materiality of her sound, the piece gives us the sensation of stepping back to reveal a singular portrait of the musician. ‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ was recorded by two Netherlands based ensembles, Modelo62, and Scordatura ensemble from a live recording made at the Orgelpark, Amsterdam during the Echonance Festival in February 2023. It is a complex work comprising of 20 parts, where lines seem to emerge and disappear out of a landscape of harmonies and sonic spectra. There is also a voice hidden in this mass of instruments, just like in Biliana, giving both works an added human element – something that always emerges out of Phill Niblock’s seemingly dense musical constructions.’

Each piece takes a long form, extending beyond the twenty-minute mark.

A decade ago, I bemoaned just how ‘droney’ Touch Five was, how it was impossible to perceive any tonal shifts. Listening to ‘Biliana’, I’d have likely posited the same complaint, bit with hindsight and personal progression, it’s the eternal hum, the intense focus on the most minute and incredibly gradual of shifts, which are precisely the point and the purpose – and the things to appreciate. On the one hand, it is testing. It’s minimal to the point of a near-absence, an emptiness, but present enough to creep around your cranium in the most disquieting of fashions.

It’s not uncommon to lie awake and night or have deep pangs of regret which knot the stomach when you replay that awkward exchange, that time you said the wrong thing, the occasion when you plain made a twat of yourself one way or another. The same anguish hangs heavy over reviews where I’ve simply been wrong. There’s no way of undoing them – and to repost or revise down the line would be disingenuous, an act of historical revision. You can only correct the future in the present, and not in the past. We all know how rewinding history to make a minor alteration goes. Before you know it, your hands are fading and you’re about to become your own father or something.

You almost feel yourself fading over the duration of ‘Biliana’ as the eternal glide of string sounds hangs thick and thickening in the air and somehow at the same time remains static. Where is it going? Where are you going? Everything feels frozen in time, slowed to complete stasis in a slow-motion drift. Wondering, waiting… for what? A change. But why would change come? Breathe, let it glide slowly over you, however much you feel a sense of suffocation.

‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ begins sparser, darker, danker. Ominous, string-line drones swell and linger, here with scraping dissonance and long-looming hums. Nothing specific happens… but it crawls down your spine and you feel your skin tingle and creep. Nothing is quite right, nothing is as it should be.

Over the course of his long, long career as a defining figure of the contemporary avant-garde, Niblock was outstanding in his singularity, and the unswerving nature of his compositions, a vision which, as this release evidences, remained unaltered to the end.

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Reinhold Friedl / Martin Siewert – Lichtung

Posted: 10 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Karlrecords – 21st January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Reinhold Friedl’s career has been long and interesting, and continues to be so. The list of collaborations on his resumé is beyond outstanding, and he has taken the concept of the prepared piano, as first conceived by John Cage, to limits beyond imagination. As such, while the idea may not have been his own, Friedl’s advancement over the last twenty years has been the definition of innovation. But what makes Friedl such a remarkable figure is his capacity to explore so many different and divergent avenues, and to turn his hand to so many different projects – and this latest, with Martin Siewert is exemplary. Siewert’s instrument is the guitar, but his style of playing is far from conventional, tending to conjure atmosphere from feedback and sustain and otherwise working the space between the notes instead of blasting chords. As such, this is an inspired pairing.

Lichtung blasts in with a thick, heavy, grindy drone that almost borders on Sunn O)) territory: the twenty-four-minute first track, ‘Genese’ is a journey, which begins with an all-out assault of thick, gut-twisting drone and shards of shrieking feedback which twist into a maelstrom of chaos before receding to reveal altogether more tranquil shores. From this, it builds, a droning, churning wash, buzzing drones and dramatic crashes. And from the rising tempest, lone piano notes rise… These particular notes are identifiable as a regular piano, rather than a ‘prepared’ one – but that’s the nature of the tweaked instrument: random items on the strings create random sounds. It’s a curious array of sounds, and over the course of the track, the sound rises and falls, ebbs and flows, but the water is always choppy, the storm building and rumbling before it rages its full force. ‘Genese’ feels like it could be an album in its own right, but there’s a whole lot more to come.

‘Gedstade’ is a mere interlude at five minutes in duration: with plinking, plonking random twangs and scrapes and woozy drones, not to mention extraneous noise and crashes and more, it’s strong on atmosphere and oddness.

Often when interacting with music, or when critiquing music – and these are two different, if quite proximate experiences – I will ask myself, or otherwise consider, ‘how does this make me feel?’ Because ultimately, music, like any art, is about the experience of the recipient, and that experience defines its success and / or impact. To expand on that, and to clarify, many may dislike and so decry a great work of art on account of their singular experience, because it’s difficult to rationalise or otherwise quantify said work. As a critic, to baldly declare ‘they’re wrong’ would be a mistaken and to devalue the experience of others. But if others share a very different experience… then that is their experience.

And so we arrive at ‘Gestitche’, the album’s third and final track, a fifteen minute exploratory work which begins with crashes of low-end piano which sound like thunder and shake the ground beneath this exploratory composition. It’s heavy, doomy, dolorous. The scratchy, discordant guitar work only accentuated the album’s immensely broad sonic range. Squalling squealing guitar ruckus and feedback riot tears its way through the tempest of noise and plunging piano and sputtering sparks of wires. As the track progresses, things evolve and escalate, the thunder builds to a tempest, and at times you feel thoroughly assailed.

To my ears, then, Lichtungis a compelling experience. Lichtung is unquestionably niche, like all of Friedl’s but that in no way diminishes its value. And the joy of Friedl’s work is its variety, and the way in which he interacts with his collaborators. To this end, this album is a work which brings joy.

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ØrsØ – Terms and Conditions EP

Posted: 5 January 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Lake of Confidence – 15th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having worked for far too many years in financial services in order to pay the bills, ‘terms and conditions’ is a term that weighs heavily on my soul and my psyche. All that small print… the devil is in the details, and there’s a good reason customers often feel swindled by the inclusion of impenetrable clauses written in language which only someone with an advanced degree in legalese could even begin to decipher. The title, then, brings fitting connotations to a complex and detailed work, although, mercifully, it’s more rewarding than frustrating and doesn’t leave you feeling bamboozled and shafted over.

Label Lake of Confidence – which sounds like it’s on the moon – informs us that ØrsØ’s debut EP ‘is a reflection on our civilization, offering a gripping critique of consumable culture and post-social network alienation.’ They also describe his style as a fusion of ‘experimental music, indietronica, dark wave and English-speaking pop’, and ‘English-speaking’ is right: ‘Unreal Moment’ has the nagging industrial-strength electro pulse of DAF paired with the electro pop layering of early Pet Shop Boys, topped with a vocal delivery that alludes to the monotone nonchalance of The Flying Lizards.

ØrsØ’s brilliance lies in his ability to amalgamate such a range of elements while still keeping the compositions relatively simple, structurally and in terms of things happening at any given time. These songs – and they very much are songs, even if conventional hooks and choruses aren’t dominant features – are clever and carefully constructed. ‘Dancing Girl’ has something of a recent Sparks vibe about it, while he channels shades of Bowie in the vocals, and this is accentuated on ‘To Yourself’, which could be an outtake from Outside.

The EP’s five tracks showcase the work of an artist who possesses a high level of musical articulacy, matched by a high level of experimental curiosity. There isn’t a weak track here, and significantly, no two tracks are particularly alike: the last of the five, ‘Follow the Wind’ brings a more overtly dance feel, with a pumping bass beat and rippling, trancey synths, but at the same time, there are hints of The Human League and Visage in the mix.

In an ocean – not a lake – of retro-tinged, vaguely dark-hued synthy pop, ØrsØ’s ‘Terms and Conditions’ stands out as being more detailed, more nuanced, and more inventive in its assimilation of wide-ranging elements – and the results are accomplished.

Madrelarva – Tierra de Silencio

Posted: 18 December 2023 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 24th November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Spanish electronic musician Julio Tornero has been producing minimal techno, IDM and experimental music since 2015. He’s one of those people who has a million different projects and as many different pseudonyms, also recording as Dark Tibet, Oceanic Alpha Axis, Sequences Binaires, with his work published by a multitude of labels including Fmur, Intellitronic Bubble, Detriti, Phantasma Disques.

I never cease to be amazed by artists who simply effuse and froth with creative output: how do they do it? How do they have the time, let alone the headspace? Given the economics of art in the 21st century, the likelihood of a life on the further recesses of obscurity in the most obscure of genres could provide a living seems improbable, but then to have the capacity to produce art after the slog of a day-job seems almost superhuman. And this, this is not just some easy, off-the-cuff, going-through-the-motions half-arsed toss-off.

Tierra de Silencio is pitched as ‘A homage to the formative years and evolution of electronic music’, with nods to Nurse With Wound and other progenitors of that nascent industrial sound, which was born primarily out of a spirit of experimentalism, and a desire to be different, facilitated as it was by emerging technology.

It’s perhaps hard to really assimilate now how the late 70s and early 80s witnessed a technology explosion, which not only witnessed the advent of new synths and drum machines, but saw them become available on a low-budget, mass-market basis. But while many bought them up and started making synth pop, some oddballs did what oddballs always to and decided to push the kit as hard as they could. And some of the results were utterly deranged. Tape loops and all kinds of messing yielded results with varying degrees of listenability, from Throbbing Gristle to NWW to Foetus and Cabaret Voltaire.

With only four tracks, this is one of those albums which would lend itself to an extravagant 2×12” release, with a track per side, since these are very much longform works, with ‘Duermevela’ stretching out beyond seventeen minutes, and the title track lasting more than a quarter of an hour. But if the expectation is for a set of compositions which are primitive, difficult, and in some way steeped in nostalgia for that early 80s noise, this isn’t that album. Despite the analogue feel, Tierra de Silencio finds Tornero exploring the spirit of the period, rather than striving to recreate the sound.

The first track, ‘Metamorph’ splashes in at the dancier end of the spectrum with some hard groove vibes. Fast, urgent, flickery, and glittery, it’s a shimmering curtain of electronica which ripples over a driving, dynamic beat that doesn’t let up. It’s got heavy hints of DAF, but it’s still not without a taste of Yello or Chris and Cosey. And it keeps on going for eleven and a half minutes. In time, the beat peters out and we’re left in a whirlpool of fizzing electronics.

The aforementioned ‘Duermevela,’ the album’s second track, draws on 70s electronica, with endless bubbling, rippling synths and incursions of altogether harsher sounds. Blasts of dark noise deluge over the bleak explosions of dankness. The beats are busy, and also metrononomic, and the effect is mesmerising.

Something dazzles for a moment. Then the lights flicker. What is this? This is likely panic. Negatividad Absoluta binks, bonks, bleeps and tweets, and the atmosphere is 70s sci-fi, something on the cusp of strangeness, jarring, alien, robotic. There are crunches and fizzes, crackles of distortion, and top-end tones ping back and forth like ping-pong.

Tierra de Silencio is very much an album which pushes an experimental vibe, while maxing out on what feels now like more contemporary dance tropes, largely on account of the rippling synths and glooping repetition. But it also incorporates elements of Kraftwerk and early Human League in its deployment of those vintage synth sounds and layerings. It’s an intriguing and entertaining work, and it passes hypnotically in what feels like no time at all.

AA

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