Posts Tagged ‘Avant-garde’

Mission to the Sun – Sophia Oscillations

Posted: 28 August 2023 in Albums
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Felte FLT-089 – 14th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Mission to the Sun is Chris Samuels of Ritual Howls fame (synths, samples, programming) and Kirill Slavin (vocals/lyrics), and comes recommended for fans of Wolf Eyes, Moin, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, The Legendary Pink Dots, Drew McDowall, Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire, etc.

Sophia Oscillations is their second album, and it pitched as ‘an immersive journey through the dark corners of post-industrial music’, whereby ‘The Detroit based duo continues the sonic exploration started on their debut album Cleansed by Fire, while delving deeper into themes of isolation and lost communication. Christopher Samuels’ synths, samples and rhythmic programming is accented by Kirill Slavin’s haunting vocal delivery as the listener receives intersperse audio recordings from the outer reaches of inner space.’ This may seem an unusual angle of approach given their chosen moniker, but the one place hotter than the sun or the earth’s core is the core of what it is to be human. We still understand space better than we understand the deep sea, and the deep sea better than we understand the human mind. There is much scope for exploration in every sphere.

William Burroughs famously described ‘Scottish Beat’ writer Alexander Trocchi as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’, although he also applied the label to himself, stating ‘In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.’

This is an appropriate context for the eight compositions which make up Sophia Oscillations, which are essentislly beatless but strongly rhythmic in form. If they belong to the lineage of the avant-garde and the industrial music of the late 70s, it equally draws on a host of other, more contemporary threads in order to forge something quite different and ultimately new.

‘Drowning’ surges and pulses, rippling waves washing over a slow-treading bassline which wanders up and down, stepping somewhere between DAF and The Cure’s Carnage Visors while the vocals whisper and wheeze low in the mix, a stealthy monotone that’s both tense and detached. Whistles of feedback strain from the speakers and wrap themselves around the whole drifting expanse. Things take a turn for the abrasive on the title track, with machine-gun blasts of noise cutting through grainy swathes of bleak ambience, gradually fracturing and fragmenting quite uncomfortably.

There are hints of medievalism and classical on ‘Censor Sickness’, but they’re melted into a dark murk of muttered voices and unsettling atmospherics, and the combination is quite unsettling and far from comfortable: if anything, it’s queasy, and the minimal yet noisy ‘Unborn’ pushes this to another level: stark, metallic, robotic electronica, it has an 80s dystopian feel which again calls to mind DAF and Cabaret Voltaire. The late 70s and early 80s were exciting because musicians with limited means – and ability – were finding ways of using emerging, and increasingly affordable – technology to make music which represented the world in which they found themselves. As such, the emergence of experimental electronic music and industrial music was born out of a collision of multiple factors, none of which will ever recur, and for this reason can never be recreated.

Mission to the Sun aren’t attempting to recreate history here, but instead, Sophia Oscillations finds them processing history through their own filters. ‘Attrition’ brings together post-rock and crunching industrial electronica with a dash of Gary Numan and more detached spoken-word vocals, and it’s a hybrid that isn’t easy to process, because it all feels so alienating. But then, articulating alienation always does.

The churning grind of ‘Cornerstone’ sounds like the intro to something by Big Black, but instead of Roland kicking in, alongside a relentless bass, it just grinds on and on, and it’s dark and messy. Once again, Slavin’s voice is half-buried in the mix: it’s difficult to decipher the words, and his voice hovers, blank, flat, vaguely Dalek-like, in the vein of Dr Mix, but less harsh.

Sophia Oscillations is a challenging album. Yes, it’s unsettling, bleak, stark sparse, but the hardest part is the fact it doesn’t confirm to any one genre, it doesn’t follow any obvious or specific form, and it’s not the fact that it’s unsettling and difficult to find a place for it that’s the issue, but the fact it keeps you tense and on edge for its duration. But, perhaps even more than that is the fact it feels removed from anything human. But it’s not so far removed as to be alien. The brain simply isn’t equipped to process the inhuman– or the near-human-but-not-quite, the uncanny, the unheimlich. Because we recognise it, and yet we don’t. Sophia Oscillations brings the challenge right in front of your face. Sit back, draw breath, process. This isn’t an easy ride.

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Carl Stone –Electronic Music from 1972-2022

Posted: 22 July 2023 in Albums
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Unseen Worlds – 4th August 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having failed to make it to Carl Stone’s show in Leeds the other week – in the same way I’ve failed to make pretty much any shows this year and am largely tied to engaging with music in recorded forms for the foreseeable future, it feels only right that I should compensate in some small way with a review of his upcoming compilation album, a monster career-spanning triple album.

And when it comes to his career, the title sets out the immense landmark it represents. Not just the fact that this release is a summary of a career spanning half a century, but the broader context that there has been electronic music for so long. Village Voice have called him “the king of sampling”. Being born in 1975, I only became aware of sampling in the late 80s, and while Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk and Throbbing Gristle are legendary as pioneers of electronic music, you probably don’t generally think of there being many other artists breaking ground and experimenting as far back as 1972.

The accompanying notes provide an outline that’s easier to quote than to summarise: ‘Electronic Music from 1972-2022 seeks to frame fifty years of Carl Stone’s compositional activity, starting with Stone’s earliest professionally presented compositions from 1972 (‘Three Confusongs’ and ‘Ryound Thygizunz’, featuring the voice and poetry of Stefan Weiser – later known as Z’EV) up to the present. This collection is not meant as a definitive history but rather as a supplement to be used alongside the previous two archival releases. It is simultaneously an archival release marking Carl Stone’s evergreen 70th birthday and a document of archival art. In the spirit of disorienting repetition and layering, call it an archive of archiving.’

This, then, is by no means a retrospective in the conventional sense, but it does clearly trace a trajectory of the evolution of Stone’s work. The album doesn’t spread the tracks evenly, being weighted heavily to certain years, with each year effectively representing an era.

The 1972 material, which occupies side A and represents the early years, is very much a cacophony of loops and echoes, reminiscent of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s tape experiments of the later 60s, and foreshadowing the first releases by Foetus and Cabaret Voltaire, as well as the disturbing drones and processed vocals off Throbbing Gristle, and clearly very much ahead of its time and venturing into the realms of dark ambient before it was even given a label.

Side B leaps forward fifteen years to 1987, with a brace of scraping, discordant pieces, both of which extend beyond the ten-minute mark. The production of these more structure, beat-orientated collage pieces is quite eye-opening: how times and technology change! ‘Vim’, which sounds like a cut-up of The Beach Boys is very much a cut-and-paste assemblage of loops, but the sound is crisp and marks an evolution more of light years than actual years. At ten and a half minutes, it feels it goes beyond proving its point, but then again, perhaps that is a point in itself. It also reminds us of the changing musi8cal landscape: 1987, the year the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu released the sample-riot 1987: What the Fuck is Going On. This is significantly more sophisticated than the JAMMs, and takes a less confrontational approach to the application of the emerging technologies. In contrast, the other 1987 track, ‘Noor Mahal’ combines tribal drumming and hypnotic folktronica, prefacing the airy new age folk crossover forms that would bubble up in Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’ and The Beloved’s The Sun Rising’ a year or two later.

And this is what ultimately threads Stones’ work together. He’s astute enough to be aware that evolving technologies are in themselves the soundtrack of the times, and it’s clear listening to this in sequence that experimental music invites chicken-and-egg discussion as to whether the music evolves because of the way technology facilitates it, or of the technology encourages those who are so inclined to push it to its furthest ends.

There’s just one nineties cut, with the jaunty ‘Flint’s’ from 1999, before the millennium brings a selection of dark jerky pieces (‘Morangak’ (2005) is a particularly gnarly Dalek-like mess of a loop) with two absolute beasts in the form of ‘Ngoc Suong’ (2003) and ‘L’Os à Moelle’ (2007), which both sit around the twenty-three minute mark and occupy a side of vinyl apiece, proving particularly disorientating. The former is also particularly testing, an experience akin to water torture, while the latter is… different by its sameness. Like listening to The Eagles on a three-hour car journey. I woke up with a jolt, my face on my keyboard, realising my review was incomplete and it was fifteen minutes later than it had been, and this track feels like a comment on the time in which it was created. It gets weirder as it progresses, of course.

Cut forward to 2022, with three much shorter pieces occupying side F, and ‘Walt’s’ presents a different kind of surprise, being bright, crisp, with technicolour energy and it’s almost game-showy. Spinning folksiness with cornball AI –sounding blooping, and also whipping in some Bollywood bang and an 80s synth-pop vibe, it’s dizzying, and these elements are present in varying levels on ‘Kustaa’ and ‘Merkato’ which are overtly ‘world’ music inspired wile spreading in all directions at once. And this, ultimately, is what Electronic Music from 1972-2022 tells us: Carl Stone has spent five decades ahead of and / or capturing the zeitgeist, distilling the essence of the contemporary into a headspinning whirl. This may be a swift tour, but at the same time it’s comprehensive, and well worth exploring.

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Tony Buck – Environmental Studies

Posted: 29 June 2023 in Albums
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Room40 – 30th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

There is no quick way to consider this album. And for many reasons – the first being that it needs to be heard in its entirety before being able to summarise and pass critical comment. The second being that after hearing it, one needs to drag themselves from the wreckage of their psyche and process an experience that is likely akin to a week being subjected to psychological experiments at the hands of the CIA under MK Ultra. Brace yourself…

As his bio points out, ‘Tony Buck is no stranger to the realm of durational performance and composition. As a part of Australian unit The Necks he has been central to defining a reductive, but rich sound language that equally interrogates timbre and time…[and] with Environmental Studies he moves even further into these longitudinal pursuits.’

Longitudinal is one word to describe this album. It’s a single, continuous piece, some two hours in duration, and while there are a couple of five-minute excerpts designed to give potential listeners an indication of what it’s like, it’s simply impossible to convey the experience in snippets. The snippets are lifted from the album’s lighter moments: that doesn’t mean they’re mellow, melodic, but the multi-layered clattering percussion that’s evocative of some kind of space-jungle and brief segment of avant-jazz feedback is nothing in the wider context. And – as I always say – context counts.

While chart music – geared toward snappy three-minute cuts which are 90% chorus – and the inclusion of streams when compiling charts, has effectively killed the album in the mainstream, further afield (and to be fair, you can’t get much further afield than this), the album is still very much a cherished format for both artists and listeners alike. In fact, it’s interesting to observe the rise of the really long album. I will often harp on about Swans releases from the last decade, but they’re not isolated. Frank Rothkkaramm released an album as a 24-hour CD box set – which couldn’t be much more different from Throbbing Gristle’s 24 hours box – as he explored sounds which helped with his tinnitus. Numerous doom, drone, and ambient albums in recent years have really pushed the parameters of an album thanks to digital releases not being subject to the same limitations of physical formats – or the same production costs. Is the medium the message? Perhaps, at least to an extent.

The recorded medium was always an issue: even going back to the height of the classical era, once recording became possible, the media limited what could be released, meaning to hear a full performance of, say, Handel’s Messiah, you had to be there, since even a recording which required a box-set album release required truncation. It also, of course, required the turning of records and the segmentation of the work.

In its day, Earth’s groundbreaking Earth 2 challenged the conventional notion the ‘the album’ – more even than any monster prog releases like Yes’ eighty-one minute Tales from Topographic Oceans and the two-hour plus, sprawling triple YesSongs. Because what differentiates these is the fact that Yes was a lot of noodling wank, while Earth did something different, with a specific desired effect intended, and its duration was in fact integral to its cumulative effect, namely that of a sonic blanket of suffocation. Anyway: the point is that Environmental Studies is an absolutely immense album, and it’s a work that needs to be heard as an album. You may find yourself drifting in and out, but it feels as if this is part of the experience: better to drift than experience in fragments.

The accompanying notes describe Environmental Studies as ‘An incredibly dense matrix of interwoven voices and layers, each occupying and exploiting a unique space within the fabric of the sound-environment, co-existing to slowly reveal themselves in multiple interconnected relationships.’

Immediately from the start, the listener is assailed by a deluge of discord and dissonance and streams of noise. It gradually drifts through an ever-evolving, eternally-shifting journey, where mellow jazz piano and slow-melting notes emerge and drip slowly over cascading cymbals and an infinite array of extraneous sounds which wash in and out. There are passages of supple, strummed acoustic guitar – which get harder and more challenging at times but also explore mellow passages –– and gurgling extraneous nose, straining, clattering. There are sections which so tense, straining and submerged by noise that as feedback twists and turns and groans and hums, that the enormity of Environmental Studies finally hits.

There are infinite layers of percussion rattling shakes and clangerous curiousness, with errant twangs and all kinds of shades of strange, with dingy distortion crashing in heavy amidst the a maelstrom of noise that sounds like a hundred pianos being thrown down a hundred flights of stairs at the same time while someone in the top floor flat blasts a Sunn O))) album at wall-cracking volume and there’s a fire broken out in the basement and it’s rapidly escalating upwards.

An hour in, we’re in sonic purgatory – and it’s absolutely magnificent. The polytonal percussion builds and builds; industrial, tribal, everything all at once, with sonorous drones and crushing distortion and noise and wailing feedback whistling and screaming all the while, it’s a relentless barrage of sound – but not noise, and that’s an important distinction here. There are noises, and they’re collaged into something immense, with the rattling of cages and furious beating of skins.

When it does simmer down, some time further in, we find ourselves in an alien landscape, that’s strangely spacey and tense before the next round of percussion barrels in. Environmental Studies is big on beats, but not all of the beats are big: insectoid skittering and scratchy flickers are as integral to the complex interweaving as the thunderous floor toms and reverberating timpanis, and everything melts together to weave a thick sonic tapestry.

While there is nothing about Environmental Studies which is overtly heavy in the conventional sense, to immerse yourself in the album is an exhausting experience, both physically and mentally. But if art doesn’t challenge, what is it for? It’s merely entertainment. This is not entertainment. But it is an incredible work of art.

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Gintas K – Resonances / Fluxus +/- / Sound & Spaces #2

Posted: 4 May 2023 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been busy’. We’ve probably all heard it: and most of us have probably spoken the phrase. I’m guilty, too, and hate myself for it. Everyone is fucking busy. Too busy to text, to open a message even, too busy to reply to emails, catch up with friends, too busy to fucking live. What is everyone so busy doing, and why is it that in a time when technology was supposed to make our lives easier, and in supposedly affluent western cultures, people are both fiscally porr and time-poor?

Naturally, I blame the current strain of capitalism: keep everyone too busy to live, to breathe, and too skint, and they’re not going to be protesting, they’re going to be too busy wondering where the next meal is coming from to fuck shit up. After everything, they’ve only got the juice to be ‘busy’ bingeing Netflix or the new season of The Mandalorian.

Admittedly, I have been genuinely busy parenting, publishing stuff, and writing a review a day while battling through an evermore overwhelming volume of submissions, but is that really a reason, or just an excuse? Right now, I’m not sorry either way. I keep myself to myself and I write when I can when I’m not doing laundry or cleaning or paying bills or feeding the cat

Gintas K is always busy, and he’s been having albums released at a ratee beyond that at which I can even download them, let alone listen and digest. And so it is that March and April have seen the release of three – yes, three – albums by the prodigious Lithuanian.

I must have been absolutely nuts to have set myself the task of reviewing all three together. The idea was to soak it all in with an evening of electronica, and report on what I expected to be an immersive experience. But knowing Gintas K’s work over the years, this was, in hindsight, an unlikely outcome. The headline here is that there is no overarching theme, there’ s no evolutionary trajectory, and nothing to really take hold of. But that in itself is K’s selling point: his work is exploratory, varied, sometimes playful, and often difficult.

Resonances, the first of these, ‘was recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard & controller on Autumn 2021’ and has been released by Sloow Tapes in an edition of 70 copies. It spins slow-swirling vortices around hovering hums and low-humming drones over the course of its ten, comparatively short (only a couple extend beyond four minutes), ponderous tracks. It’s perhaps one of his more varied works, both sonically and atmospherically – and Resonances really does explore atmospheres and cavernous swampy echoes.

Resonances

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Fluxus +/- is a split collaborative release, which finds him working with Kommissar Hjuler Und Frau on a longform track, while a piece by Wolfgang Kindermann & PAAK occupies the other, and what we get here is just shy of eighteen minutes of really weird shit, bubbling swampy noise and loose collage layering of all sorts of snippets and a mish-mash of all kinds of everything that’s not easy to digest.

And then April saw the arrival of Sound & Spaces #2, which is perhaps more Gintas K’s standard fare of bubbling, foamy froth and stuttering, stammering glitch-heavy sonic mayhem. It stutters and scuffs, bleeps and wibbles, and at times sounds like the speakers are shredding, the cones torn and flapping in the blasts of random noise bursts, while at others… well, at times it’s a foaming froth and as others, it’s really not very much at all. The pieces run into one another to create a continuous stream of crackling distortion and bibbling trickles of tweeting and twittering, and while the effect is the most incomprehensible and difficult to digest, it’s by far the most quintessentially K. If it’s what I’d expected, then what this trio of releases demonstrates is that Gintas K continues to defy expectations and to produce work that’s different and diverse.

Sound & Spaces #2

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Two Dogs – Mom’s Birthday

Posted: 21 April 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Everest Records

Christopher Nosnibor

Guess it pays to learn to trust your sources: if I’d seen pics of these guys or simply seen mention of this release in passing, passing is precisely what I’d have done, without a second thought. It would have vert much been my loss.

A skim over the press release cause me to take pause as I read that ‘Two Dogs are Beat Keller on guitars and Joke Lanz on turntables and voice, both based in Berlin. An uncompromising union of two musical individualists who are shaking up the noise world.’

Shaking up the noise world, are they? In that case, I’m all ears to hear what these two Swiss musicians who ‘oscillate between perfect dissonance and intelligent harmony’, and who, ‘with their stripped-down instruments, Lanz and Keller create a unique language somewhere between pavement poetry and free improvisation.’ The pair both have impressive resumes, which even mention artists I’ve heard of.

‘Mom’s Birthday’ is the first track and lead single from their debut album, Songs from the Trash Can. It’s a short (sub-two-minute) glitched-out collage of whacky shit which finds Lanz half-speaking, but almost shouting, about the events which befell him on waking, namely his inability to find his toothbrush or toothpaste. But, here’s the real wince moment: he got drunk and forgot his mum’s birthday. Ah, shit. So he sings an off-key rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ by way of a belated apology. As you do when you’re probably still drunk from the night before.

‘Mom’s Birthday’ is discordant and chaotic and sits very much at the experimental end of noise: it’s also very much of the lineage from early 80s tape-looping noisemaking – think Foetus’ Deaf!.

It’s a fitting companion to ‘In the Pub’, the quirky track that’s available to stream as a taster for the album, which, with tongues firmly in cheeks, pokes droll fun at English pub culture with an astuteness of observation that should shame most natives, and in just two minutes, they capture the reasons why I avoid town pubs and miss Europe, and why these guys are great.

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Two Dogs (uncredited photo)

Tom Belushi Jazz Trio – Death Mast LP

Posted: 31 March 2023 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

I get a lot of weird shit come my way. I guess it’s to be expected: I review a fair amount of weird shit and it just snowballs: weird shit finds me. And this is very much weird shit. Despite some serious deliberation, I can’t decide where the emphasis lies in that statement.

Details about the artist or the release are practically non-existent, but it doesn’t take too much digging to establish that the Tom Belushi Jazz Trio aren’t a trio and they don’t play jazz.

Having released an EP (also entitled Death Mast) and deleted it almost instantaneously, Tom Belushi Jazz Trio seem determined to render themselves as evasive frustratingly obscure as is conceivably possible. But this is clearly not simply a musical project, so much as an exercise in postmodernism that revels in ephemerality. With CD copies of this release being limited to single figures, I’m reminded of various crackers projects by Bill Drummond and The KLF, among others, whereby the objective seems to be to create an objet d’art that’s so scarce it’s beyond reach even before it’s released, essentially only existing in legend.

Slapping synths, gloopy stuttering beats, warping irregularities and groaning keys redefine the sound, along with snippets of robotic, autotuned vocals. Oriental motifs are dominant in this instrumental album’s ten exploratory tracks, which appear to be largely AI in origin. Because yes, it’s taking over the world. Think you can hide or linger on the peripheries now? You’re simply deluding yourself.

There are some nice sounds – and some naff ones – all balled together in an eclectic hotchpotch of ersatz electronic collaging. ‘Traitor’s Gate’ is a droning shanty that’s actually got human vocals; it’s woozy, disorientating in an uncanny sort of a way.

The titles are daft, absurdist, Dadaist or abstract, and littered with references, many of which are obscure – ‘Luke Haines. I Have Your Hat’; ‘No Mark Wynn’;(a particularly cheesy and overly synthetic slice of r ‘n’ b); ‘Stairwell Crooks Shutterstock Dust Jacket’ but ultimately seem to present as little true meaning as the music itself (and I can’t ever recall having experienced any dilemmas over purchasing avocados).

Death Mast is one of those albums that was probably more fun to produce thana it is to listen to. It does have considerable novelty value, and it does have lots of ideas, but few seem to be explored in any real depth or fully realised, and as such, the main idea seems to be the concept for the creative process – or should that be ‘creative’ process?- rather than the end product. But with the ideas and even the passages within the tracks being as fleeting and as ephemeral and impossible to locate as copies of the album itself, what are we really left with? Ultimately, Death Mast presents more questions than answers, a point of discussion more than a musical project. But, if there is one conclusion we can draw from this it’s that there is no need to worry that AI will bring about the end of music as we know it. At least, not this week. Welcome to the post-postmodern age.

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Listen: ‘Epidendrum Nocturnum’ by Botanist

Posted: 22 March 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Plant-based metal avant-gardists BOTANIST have seeded the new track ‘Epidendrum Nocturnum’, which is named after a ‘nocturnal’ species of the orchid family (common to South Florida but also growing in the Caribbean and all the way down to Brasil), as the second single taken from their forthcoming album VIII: Selenotrope. The album is planted for blooming on May 19, 2023.

Listen here:

BOTANIST comment: “For VIII: Selenotrope, I wanted to limit myself to only dulcimers, drums, bass and voice”, mastermind Otrebor explains. “For the voice, I decided to have an album without any screams or harsh vocals whatsoever, and instead to rely on the whispers that speak to the listener as messages in a dreamlike state. As the album progresses, melodic choirs are increasingly introduced. These choirs, which have progressed in form and presence since I started Botanist, see their biggest role ever on VIII: Selenotrope. The song ‘Epidendrum Nocturnum’ is one of the album’s darker pieces. Its churning main section gives way to a cathartic landscape in which whispered elements underpin melodic choral paeans to flora that bloom in moonlight.”

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Botanist by Tony Thomas

Watch: ‘Abyss Perihelion Transit’ by Dødheimsgard

Posted: 16 March 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Following the announcement of their forthcoming album Dødheimsgard return with their exceptional first single ‘Abyss Perihelion Transit’. The ten minutes plus track weaves a sombre tapestry incorporating elements of multiple sub genres in the world of Extreme Metal and thematically tackles ideas of epistemological dualism.

Regarding the single Vicotnik had the following to say:

“The whole album revolves subjectively around perception, experience, psychology, objective/subjective reality vs external pressure, tropes, taboos, the laws of motion/causality which influences one’s life. The subjective perception of reality vs the objective causal effects of reality and how they are bound interact. Epistemological dualism.”

Vicotnik continues:

“I guess mental health, or rather instead of health, let’s call it mental condition is a big topic on this record. Not as in a complaining way, or as a good or bad notion, but rather a subject’s study of his own psychology (en)during everything.

Like the ambiguity of Being. What is Being? Is it a meta-physical stratum of subjective emotionally fuelled notions or is Being just explaining a physical object that is, therefore being. Epistemologically I guess these lyrics dwell a lot on naïve realism vs representational realism. Cognitivism vs behaviourism, and then bringing it all to an artist context obviously. So, it is experiential renditioning, not solution driven.”

Accompanying the single is a video and single cover art from visionary artist Costin Chiorenau who brings the disparate and incredibly solemn existence of ‘Black Medium Current’s first single to life. Working together both the song and the video evolve over the course of the ten-minute run time to create something truly visionary both in a sonic and visual context. Costin elaborates on the video below:

“I’ve been following Dødheimsgard for 20 years now, and the genius of Vicotnik always captured my highest focus, being at the same time a huge inspiration, both musically and aesthetically. I always perceived Dødheimsgard being more as an artistic movement than a black metal band, another aspect which excites my creativity and I feel fulfilled that I could express all this passion through the ‘Abyss Perihelion Transit’ art video and single cover.”

He continues: “When I first heard it, I felt that void left behind by the desperation of the root-sense of old structures of perception. That void, which shakes the black matter foundation every time when manifestations tuned with and born in the past overleap the fresh sight of the present which fights hard to penetrate the dense walls of repetition. The main characters of this movie are the absence created by the vanishing old, the observer in search of a new fitting cloth of identity for its avatar and the desperate need of giving shape to the yet-not assimilated nor understood living new.

Secondary characters are different types of glitches in the matrix between self-imposed reality and the golden mean dream state, measuring systems for various types of space found between the layers of perception and the omnipresent shadow. These characters are interfering one with another in a multiverse of contrasts between defined and undefined, forming a brick-dust flavoured whole, at times exotic, at times smoked in bitter nihil. These characters are also the topics spoken but the energy of this song, by the voice of now and I consider the proper ones to be dissected through art.”

Watch the video here:

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Sara Persico – Boundary

Posted: 13 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Karlrecords – 10th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When I started out reviewing, I always thought how cool it would be to get to hear new releases by acts I like in advance, and to opine on the latest releases by acts familiar to many. But I’ve come to realise that the real joy – and what I now see as my purpose – is to discover and share new and lesser-known artists. It is a gift which keeps on giving, for I hear so many people in my demographic moan about the lack of any decent new music. It’s simply not true: they’re just not looking in the right places (and their idea of ‘decent’ music tends to be rooted in their youth and coloured with nostalgia, which is sad really. Opening one’s ears and opening one’s mind is the key to keeping young. Or something). Of course, it’s always subjective, but there is a rare exhilaration and delight in – after all this time – hearing something that doesn’t sound like anything else.

And so here we have the debut EP from Sara Persico, which prefaces a full album in the pipeline. It doesn’t remind me of anything – but it does give me a rush, but also chills me to the bone.

It’s dark and it’s stark, and it’s challenging.

According to her bio, she was ‘born and raised in Naples, Berlin-based sound artist/vocalist Sara Persico cut her teeth experimenting on the fringes of Naples’ fiery underground experimental/noise scene, developing a technique that would integrate her voice with analogue electronics, field recordings, and samples.’

Fiery would be a fair description of the six tracks on Boundary, released on cassette. It’s big on bass and beats. Big big big. The percussion bashes at the cerebellum and kicks the cerebral cortex, while bass resonates through every fibre of the body. This dense and weighty stuff. It’s the elements of dance music slowed to a glacial crawl. Instead of making you want to move, it absolutely freezes you solid, tense, immobile. And as for Persico’s voice – it’s something else. She sounds tortured, trapped, and transcendental.

Stripping things back to a stammering, glitched drone on ‘Exit’, she switches between ethereal lilt to banshee howl, and the two are overlaid in a sonic collage that’s compelling and terrifying simultaneously. ‘Under the Raw Light’ is tense, aggressive, even, in its ferocious beats and Persico’s voice that sounds as if it’s coming from the other side, frenzied, tortured. In contrast, the closer, Umbilical’ is a disconcerting spoken word work pitched against a thudding heartbeat and muffled bass. It leaves you feeling… what? Detached, in some way.

Despite being built around familiar elements, Boundary doesn’t sound like anything else, and launches Sara Persico as a unique and exciting voice.

AA

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Gjerstad / Moberg / Nilssen-Love – Time Sound Shape

Posted: 17 December 2022 in Albums
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PNL Records – 16th December 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Nice… as you’d probably expect from this three-way collaboration, Time Sound Shape is a work of atmospheric instrumental experimentalism with some strong jazz leanings. That’s not smooth or mellow jazz, of course: more the weirdy, spaced-out non-musical kind of jazz. So not so much nice, as awkward, uncomfortable, challenging. This is not jazz of the cardigan and slippers variety, and you certainly wouldn’t play it at a dinner party, apart from perhaps at thee point when your remaining guests have overstayed their welcome and you want them to fuck off home.

Time Sound Shape is a single continuous piece with a running time of a full-length album, clocking in at precisely forty-nine minutes, and it’s a great example of intuitive improvisational collaborative work, and it sounds far better than the clunky text-based cover art suggests.

There are some dissonant, discordant, even outright difficult to digest crescendos, and moments of queasy chamber orchestral meanderings, as they tweet and toot together in a sort of droning solidarity. It begins gently enough, with some trilling woodwind courtesy of Frode Gjerstad who brings flute, and clarinet to the party as well as sax, but it doesn’t take long before things shift in numerous different directions.

There are moments that almost feel ‘continental’ in vibe, perhaps not least of all on account of Kalle Moberg’s accordion work. And all the while, Paal Nilssen-Love brings texture and atmosphere with his application of a wide selection of Paiste gongs, bringing doomy dolorous chimes and rolling thunder. At times, the crashing gongs are strong enough to vibrate the internal organs within the ribcage.

In many respects, Time Sound Shape delivers precisely what you would expect from these three musicians coming together, and yet at the same time, it brings more. It’s a richly textured work, that evolves as it progresses, and it never stays stull, and yet the changes are often subtle. Time drifts and bends as the sounds transition, changing shape. Let yourself be carried.

AA

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