Posts Tagged ‘electronica’

Andy & Grace – Reunited

Posted: 29 September 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
1

Sinners Music – 30th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

As the album’s title suggests, this is not Andy & Grace’s first work together, but does come after some time since their last collaboration. By ‘some time,’ I mean a long time. Like two decades long. As the bio which accompanies the album outlines, they first met in the late 1990s ‘as founding members of the ambient chillout band Chillage People’, under which moniker they played ‘long, improvised sets in sweaty chill-out rooms in gloomy Sheffield clubs’ and resulted in the album Solid Water, released in 2001.

There’s much of the intervening time unaccounted for, presumably because life. So many creatives in all media seem to suddenly disappear from view. Work, families, and ordinary everyday adult pursuits take over and there simply isn’t the time or the energy. Some accept this comfortably, even embrace it, others wrestle with the opposing forces of creative juices fermenting and slowly gnawing at their guts while enduring.

Whatever the reason for the gap in his musical CV, recent year have seen Andy becoming a part of the Electronic Music Open Mic (EMOM) movement, appearing at venues around the North of England playing with his modular synthesiser. This is where Sinner Records come in: Ian J Cole is also a face on the EMOM circuit, a musician in his own right, who recently established Sinners Records. And let’s not forget Grace – that’s Grace Griffin, who at the time of joining Chillage People, was already a highly sought-after live sound engineer, working with some of the biggest names in the music business.

‘You name them and it’s a fair bet that Grace will have worked with them,’ says the bio. On top of that, and being ‘an accomplished musician with a gift for crafting fascinating textures and grooves, she is also an adept photographer and video editor.’

She’s remained engaged in music. There may be a worry that after twenty years and their lives having taken such different trajectories, reconvening would bee awkward, but the clue is in the title, really: Reunited speaks of coming together, coming home and picking up where you left off. And listening to Reunited, for all its crazy crossover and stylistic divergences, it feels like an album that has been dying to get made, whether they knew if or not before they started work on it.

Over the span of thirteen pieces, the pair explore a host of soundscapes and varying moods, all incredibly rich in atmosphere, shifting constantly. The first of these, ‘Deady Long Legs’ transitions from shifting sands of electronic noise to somewhat unsettling echo-drenched ambience, eerie chimes and shooting stars spinning off course against a warping backdrop of slow-melting vintage synth tones and shuffling groundworks, and there’s a lot going on here. It’s an album dominated by rippling waves and space-age spins, and there are some tracks which find the pair go full dance – or EBM or EDM or whatever it is in America. The beats aren’t often dominant, but they are frequently driving. At times, the tones are brittle, reducing from full range to clipped, tight compressions mingling with undulating synths forge cinematic techno.

There are moments of expansive tranquillity, such as ‘Sad Major’, and this is an album that places tone and texture to the fore in terms of the way the sounds are sculpted into songs. It’s immersive stuff, and on a number of occasions I find myself zone out, not through boredom but the music enveloping my mind and body. And perhaps some tiredness, too. But ‘Forty Winks’ a bleepy wakeup, and one suspects the title is a reference to Josh Wink.

Reunited is the sound of old friends coming together and finding they still have an intuitive connection. There are some neat grooves – like the buoyant almost funk-tinged workout of ‘Groovy Machine’ and the stuttering harder beats of the mellow ‘Mallets of Entanglement’, and there are elements of playfulness in evidence, as on the skittering ‘Wasted in Da House’ and the irreverently-titled ‘When A Seagull Ate My Icecream’ – which reminds me of the time a giant cockerel nicked my baguette, but that’s a story for another time.

Reunited is a cohesive work which strolls through numerous different terrains of electronica, and shifts from light to dark, but mostly ambulates the spaces in between in fine style.

AA

Andy _ Grace Cover

David Colohan – Sargasso Sky

Posted: 29 August 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Cruel Nature Records – 28th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The Sargasso Sea is a unique place on earth: situated within the Atlantic ocean, it is the only sea without a land boundary – a sea within an ocean, in other words – its borders defined by sea currents. Its name is derived from to the vast ‘sea’ of free-floating seaweed called Sargassum which occupies the space, and it’s an ecosystem like no other, the aquatic equivalent of the Amazon. And yet its existence appears to be considerably less well-known, despite the success of Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which has been adapted for film, stage, TV, and radio and has been lauded as a pivotal work of postcolonial feminism. And it’s this book which I think of when I hear the word ‘sargasso’ – although clearly, it has absolutely no bearing on this album. What even is a sargasso sky?

The liner notes paint the scene, where ‘A sargasso sky shimmers above a twilit American shoreline, slipping in & out of time. Via a way slowed down take on jazz fusion, limpid pools catch its reflection, ebbing & flowing with the soon to come stars… The cover images taken at Marblehead, Massachusetts depict something of the aura of an area that H.P. Lovecraft considered life-changing. Step into the sea & sky….’

There are many layers, then, to this release, which extend far beyond the surface of the music itself. But when it comes to the music, Colohan presents ten pieces, all comparatively concise (only four extend beyond the five-minute mark, and none reach beyond eight), and the form is ambient yet structured, with rippling washes of synth gliding over the mellow mists of sound which float invisibly through the air. Despite its title casting its eye above the horizon to the sky, parts of this album is given to a preoccupation with the water, still, as exemplified by titles such as ‘Sacred Teeming Waters’ and ‘Longshore Drift’.

Whereas much ambient music is formless, abstract, the instrumentation vague, on Sargasso Sky, David Colohan offers musical works with structure, and with the implementation of identifiable instruments.

‘Longshore Drift’ is led by sparse piano, backed by a sliding, bulbous synth bass that’s extremely eighties in sound, and elsewhere on the album, long resonant voices dominate, from flute to organ. These are clearly synth voices, sounds conjured digitally in response to creative needs but also evolving technology facilitating new music. There are some bold drones which surge and swash on ‘Anoint’, and ‘Summers Old as Stars’ brings late 70s and early 80s synth stylings to the fore, with hints of Tubular Bells and Vangelis, and the myriad music of this era which remained anonymous. But for all that, Sargasso Sky is subtle and it’s still not overtly electro for the most part, and it’s not of the prog persuasion either. But what is it? Certainly, there are parts which do very much pursue progressive forms, and Sargasso Sky is very much an exploratory work: spacious, undefined by limits of composition or instrumentation.

AA

a2197923751_10

Hellas – If We Had Met Earlier Things Might Have Turned Out Differently

Posted: 22 August 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

nynode intermedia – 7th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, a title just captures the imagination. And in some respects, art – be it a book, an album, or a movie, will take one unawares in the same way as a new person. Sometimes, it’s something unexpected at precisely the right time, discovering something you don’t even know you need until it’s there. To select a quote from what may appear to be an unlikely source, ‘just when you least expect it, just what you least expect’, sang The Pet Shop Boys on ‘Love Comes Quickly’. It’s a great line because it so succinctly summarises the unpredictable nature of life, and this wordy title tripped a similar trigger, which, I accept is uniquely personal…. But then, in the personal lies the universal. It must be so true for many that we’ve met the right person, but at the wrong time, for whatever reason.

And so it is that I’m spiralling on a chute of reflection, a wall of mirrors inset with faded and distorted memories of people I’ve met and lost along the way as I begin to ease myself into what ultimately proves to be a remarkably diverse album, with deft compositions flitting between retro electronica, sparse techno, trance and shoegazy electrombience – and a lot more besides. Other times, mood-dependent, I may find the perceived lack of identity frustrating, the gentle mellifluousness without any obvious focus nigglesome, but right here, right now, I’m ready to experience transportation. And having emerged from a journey for the artists, If We Had Met Earlier Things Might Have Turned Out Differently feels like a suitable soundtrack.

As the accompanying notes recount, ‘Hours of recorded improvisations were arranged afterwards to slowly shape what would be the new sound of the duo. After three years of experimenting and writing various compositions the album slowly began to unravel itself and took its final form. Eleven unique pieces — deep explorations of sound — that all have their own story to tell are assembled in this collection of snapshots from the past years.’

In some ways, then, If We Had Met Earlier Things Might Have Turned Out Differently is more of a work of sculpture than composition, moulding and shaping the recordings into pieces with form and structure. Rising from a mist of gentle ambience, ‘Arbour’ soars, but is pinned down by a solid martial drum and ambulant, bulbous bass.

Listening to the ominous discordant experimentalism of ‘X’, I reflect on the fact that there was a time I’d have found this boring, just as I’d have cringed at anything remotely jazz-flavoured and sneered at anything overtly dance, before the clattering mess of ‘Techno | Hovestaden’ arrives, chanking and chiming over some ponderous keys, rippling piano, and evolving drones. In the background, as the piano plays mellow chords, there’s a banging tune giving it large way off in the distance, and it’s like hearing a neighbour’s music through your own. It’s irritating, but it’s real: as William Burroughs wrote, ‘life is a cut up’.

‘Ghost’ is suitably eerie, and ‘Shinjuku’ goes all-out tweaking electro, straddling late 90s dance and new age which just shouldn’t work and I should detest, but having lived through this and experienced a somewhat fractious relationship with tunes like ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘Sadeness Part 1’, I’m rather more at peace with the incorporation of diverse elements to conjure sensations of spaciousness and spirituality, as long as they don’t involve pan pipes. Gotta have limits, y’know. This doesn’t actually sound like these musical forebears, but it feels as if there’s a certain context and progression at play here. The present only exists because of the past.

We’re plunged back into ominous drone territory with ‘Odessa’, and its warping grind which quavers up and down is most unsettling, building to a droning roar that’s hard not to equate to missiles and jets as the oppressive buzz grows louder.

The looming brass and slow, deliberate percussion of the spacious ‘Noon’, as it trickles slowly toward the album’s soft ending, with clattering percussion slowly marking a long wind-down before ‘Tide’ smoothy washes everything away to a smooth, blank state once more.

So what does this say? It says Hellas have conjured a majestic work from – well, who knows what source material? How much of this album came to fruition in the wake of its recording? And how much does it matter? It’s not as it’s an AI work, contentiously bypassing human input: pianist Peter Sabroe and drummer Jeppe Høi Justesen, with the assistance of producer Brian Batz have created something with personality, intricacy, depth. If I’d have heard it ten years ago, I’d have hated it: now… it reaches me. It’s an accomplished work, subtly complex and possessing significant depth. It’s amazing how things can turn out.

AA

NNI003_art

Celestial North – Otherworld

Posted: 18 June 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

7th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

A year after unveiling ‘The Nature of Light’ with the promise of a debut album in September 2022, Celestial North’s Otherworld is finally with us. With the title track and ‘Yarrow’ having also built a level of anticipation, it’s left like an album that’s been a long time coming.

Some things simply cannot be rushed, and Otherworld is appropriately-titled, as Celestial North creates songs which sound as if transported from another world, and another time. A she says of the album’s evolution, “I imagined that I was time-traveling through different and exciting worlds. Wandering through the ancient, sacred stone circles at Machrie Moor and then jumping straight into an underground rave in the forest.” And on Otherworld, she transports the listener on these journeys alongside her.

The album opens with the sweeping dreampop of ‘Are You Free’, which begins as a spoken word piece with misty synths, her Scottish accent strong and honest, before piano ripples in and she slides with grace and elegance into her lilting singing voice. It’s a question phrased as a statement, and I suppose it serves to remind us that whatever society’s constraints, we can, to an extent, choose our freedoms.

And yet, for all this ethereality and otherness, Otherworld has a deep-seated earthiness or sense of nature flowing through it. I don’t mean it feels like Celestial North is connected to nature: she is nature, and channels it through her ever molecule.

Raised in Scotland and now residing in Cumbria, Celestial North channels her natural surroundings and their rich, ancient history and heritage. Many artists have promotional photos shot by standing stones and in stone circles, but she describes her music as ‘pagan euphoria’, and listening to Otherworld, you feel that this isn’t image or posturing: these are the spaces where she belongs, and draws the energy from these places. Some – many – will likely dismiss the notion, but many of these locations do possess a unique and indescribable power that goes beyond mere awe. Castlerigg, near Keswick, is one which surprises me every time I visit; yet I have also felt something, like a crackle of electricity, on stumbling upon a minor circle, only half-intact, while in Scotland; the landscape was barren, and gorse had grown beside it, but the full circle was marked by a ring of nettles and a chill ran over me. These are the sensations which emanate from Otherworld.

Her piano-led rendition of REM’s ‘Nightswimming’ is a magnificently-realised slice of quintessentially dreamy indie. Ordinarily, I’d question placing a cover as the third track on an album, but context counts: this featured on a lauded and band-backed charity compilation released by God is in the TV – but moreover, it just works. ‘Olympic Skies’ is breezy, wistful, easy, airy, with a lilting melody that brings folk and dreamy indie into perfect alignment.

The aforementioned title track packs pitter-batter rhythms and sweeping synths and soaring backing vocals which wrap themselves around a fragile, yet confident-sounding lead vocal as it floats on air, before the more overtly 80s electro-sounding ‘Restless Spirit’, another paean to freedom, this time driven by a thumping dance beat. Her voice is unique and complex: it’s quiet, reserved, breathy, with hints of Suzanne Vega and The Corrs, but also Cranes’ Allison Shaw but also Maggie Riley on ‘Moonlight Shadow’. It makes for compelling listening, especially on songs like ‘The Stitch’, which convey powerful, wild-outdoors Celtic pagan vibes – but again, in an understated fashion. ‘Yarrow’ plays the album out with a rolling piano-based post-rock piece that’s sedate and soothing. Otherworld avoids the bombastic clichés which tend to mar much so-called pagan folk or electronic folk: many acts overdo the gothic leanings, and go for bold (melo)drama, which feels contrived and emotionally empty, simply because it’s trying too hard.

For Celestial North, it all comes naturally, and the dancier elements feel comfortable because one doesn’t get a sense of the artist trying to be simultaneously ‘hip’ and ‘deep’; this is simply her music, her style. Otherworld demonstrates that ‘powerful’ doesn’t have to be heavy or hard, and that ‘light’ doesn’t have to mean lightweight or flimsy. It’s accessible, but complex, deep but not dark or difficult. Sit back and let it carry you.

AA

856085

Cristian Vogel – Fase Montuno

Posted: 1 June 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
2

Mille Plateaux – 19th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Fase Montuno is the twenty-seventh release by Cristian Vogel. Yes, the twenty-seventh. Depending on which version you get, this one has seven or eight tracks, all reliant on old synth and drum machine sounds, giving it very much a late 70s / early 80s vibe,

As the accompanying notes detail, ‘This highly personal release is a visionary take on the futuristic potential of Latin American electronica, and promises to be a thrilling journey through Vogel’s musical imagination, every track infused with his signature creativity and energy.

Vogel has lingered on the fringes of dance music for the entirety off his career, and Fase Montuno goes very much all out on accentuating the dance elements of the pieces. That doesn’t mean that Fase Montuno is a chart-dance album, not at all. But with its Larin American influences, it’s very much music you can dance to, if you’re that way inclined – and if you’re not, well, it has groove, and that’s something anyone can get into.

The title track is a busy, bleepy six-minute chiptune that builds layers and energy as it progresses. Things get glitchier and gloopier on ‘Temples in the Sky’ with some busy polyrhythms which flicker over pulsing beats and swathes of swashing synths. It’s sparse, but at the same time there is much happening, sometimes incidentally, sometimes simultaneously.

Always, the beats are dominant, even when pitched subtly. ‘Labyrinth and Warrior’ mines a specific seam of techno I find quite oppressive despite its spaciousness, whereby the repetitions are tightly looped and I find myself feeling as if I’m trapped in a nagging glitch of just a second or two and physically can’t move. Ironic, perhaps, that certain dance music should, instead of moving me, render me utterly paralysed and almost suffocating with claustrophobic panic. But there it is. For those reasons, I find this and uncomfortable experience, and difficult to enjoy.

And so it is that the nagging grooves of Fase Montuno lead nowhere other than inside, burrowing into themselves and clanking away hermetically: there is nothing beyond this is and of itself, and while many find release and escape in this form of music, for me, it’s like being zipped up in a bag where I’m unable to move my limbs and then thrown into a darkened room – worse than sensory deprivation, it’s like the drip-drip-drip of water torture.

I can’t blame Cristian Vogel for my extreme and quite irrational reaction to his music: it’s meticulously crafted, and the frequencies, the mix, are magnificent, and evidence – as if more evidence were needed – Vogel’s enduring appeal in his field.

AA

MP60_front

Autorhythm – Songs for the Nervous System

Posted: 10 May 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Thanatosis – THT23 – 12th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I might have ordinarily made some quip about my own system and that of many being nervous, but then I read the accompanying notes and thought better of it, as this album, the debut full-length album by Swedish producer Autorhythm, aka Joakim Forsgren, a visual artist and former bassist of several punk and rock groups, comes from, if not from a dark place, then certainly a serious one.

As the notes explain, ‘Forsgren started to work on what was to become Songs for the Nervous System in 2015, after having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The album is a series of intuitive compositions drawing from the latest medical research on how light and sound at specific frequencies has a potential to affect bodily functions, down to the cellular level. The resulting contemporary but surprisingly human electronic music is a dynamic mix of driving rhythms and meditative soundscapes. While the polyrhythmic beats suggest a kinship to some contemporary club music, the work of Brian Eno would be a more obvious point of reference in its genreless amalgamation of music, life and conceptual art.

‘Except for mixing and minor adjustments computers were shunned, with Forsgren instead relying on an assortment of synthesizers, of roughly the same age as himself and thus all members of the pre-digital generation. Conventional sounds and solutions were avoided, as much out of incapacity as imagination. The name and the impetus for the music were born out of the question of what music his electronic devices and machines themselves would play if Forsgren were not able to play them himself.’

The album contains six tracks, most of which sit within the midrange of around four to seven minutes in length. The first, ‘Clairvoyance’ is seven minutes of squelch and pop dance music that has a real analogue vibe and a nagging insistence, as well as a hint of Factory Floor. The beat doesn’t alter, but the tones shift and layers build.

Sequencing matters here, and two shorter compositions, ‘Doom Variations’; and ‘Neuropathic Factors’ – complimentary pieces which perhaps render the album’s objective to present ‘intuitive compositions drawing from the latest medical research on how light and sound at specific frequencies has a potential to affect bodily functions, down to the cellular level’ most apparent: there are some unusual sounds here, and the interplay between them is unusual and not always easy to consume in comfort. It’s hard to explain just how these pieces are affecting – but they are. Perhaps a greater understanding of the theory and practise may help, but listening to Songs for the Nervous System leaves me feeling too drained to do anything much.

Opening side two, ‘Plasticity’ is a six-minute slow-trip-hop throb kicked along by a vintage drum machine. The bass groove is one you can nod along to, but there are rather more uncomfortable, discordant elements and a strange warping drag that makes time twist and stretch a little. It’s the time signatures: they don’t seem to match up and induce a deep dizziness and a sense of disorientation, of discombobulation. It’s an overload, too much too process. Around the midpoint, amidst laser snaps and synth bass pulations, it slopes down to a point where you feel very much like you’ve stopped for a break before grind an in to our infinite arrival at our, final destination. That final destination is the album’s longest track by far: ‘Intercelular Communication’ presents as an extended audio research piece, and it’s well-realised, but difficult.

Three times I’ve tried to write this review: three times I’ve listened to this album and it’s left me feeling tired and strange and my writing has stalled. Perhaps I’m tired, or perhaps this really does reach the most inaccessible parts, and perhaps it does speak on a very different level.

AA

THT23_front

Elif Yalvaç – My Heart of Noise

Posted: 9 April 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Möller Records – 23rd March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s clear that while the pandemic is officially over, collectively, we’re still very much coming to terms with it, and its aftermath. Lockdown, in particular, has had a deep psychological impact, on so many. Everyone’s experience was, and is, different, of course. I have friends who almost deny to themselves that it happened, that it was a dream or something, and for some of us, in some respects, it’s as though it never ended. This is how people deal with shock and trauma.

My Heart of Noise is not a pandemic album, a lockdown album, a post-trauma album, but as Elif explains, the album “began with a collection of studio and concert recordings from my travels north before the pandemic. It became like a puzzle: I could hear something special, but also that the pieces didn’t fit together well or feel complete. The breakthrough came in realising that this project was meant to be more about creation than preservation, and that it didn’t need to be a literal document any more. It could still be faithful, but instead to the spirit that inspired this music and my travels in the first place, instead of a particular recording. I created new musical starting points, and invited artists I met on my travels plus others, asking them to choose one to begin to work with together. Some artists incorporated our previous recordings, others set off in a new direction, while I shaped the pieces and found a way to connect them together.”

Recent history, then, is marked not as BC and AD, but BP and AP – before pandemic and after pandemic, and My Heart Of Noise reflects Yalvaç’s attempts to ‘make sense of a noisy world’. And the world is indeed, noisy, and difficult to articulate. There is simply too much noise too much happening all at once. It’s a perpetual sensory overload.

For this, her debut album, Elif Yalvaç involved a number of the people she encountered along the way of her journey, and the title also references this, the way she became the hub in a collective process.

The collaborative aspect means that each track does have a slightly different feel, despite all being centred around eerie ambient soundscapes.

‘Orchestra of Light’, the album’s first track, is a layered composition of dronies and hums and whispers which drift and swirl around some of the mind’s darker recesses. The textures and tones rub against one another and the edges aren’t all smooth, with buzzes and barbed, drilling sounds grating against the grain, meaning there’s a certain friction, a tension, creating a sense of discomfort.

‘Gate Check’, which follows, is softer, but the notes bend and twist and the supple, mellow tones are spun with a sense of the awkward and the uncanny, but nothing so warped as ‘Mielmaisema’, with its collage of human vocalisations and clunking clumps of thuds and thumps Amid whirls and crackles and hums, from which grinding groans of decaying Krautrock creak. It may be less than five minutes in duration but it packs a lot of shiversome strangeness into its short space, in which even chirruping birdsong feels somehow unsettling.

My Heart of Noise is not an overtly collage-based album, but it does assemble many sources and sounds, and often overlaps and overlays them to disquieting effect, and I’m at times reminded of vintage sci-fi and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

‘Cloud Score’ sits somewhere between post-rock and classic drifting ambience, while seven-minute closer ‘Taiga II’ very much feels like the lifting of the clouds and the breaking into light, but at the same time feels like a storm building on the horizon, and ‘Dronasaurus’ indicates that it’s not 100% serious 100% of the time.

My Heart of Noise is a restless work, one which ventures and explores, and never for a moment settles into comfort or conformity. It is not an easy album: whenever things feel like they’re settling into something nice, a cloud of disruption and difficulty will drift over and raise a shiver. You can never really settle or feel at ease with My Heart of Noise – but as a representation off life in the world as is, this is a fair summary. Keep your eyes and ears open: there is always something around the corner.

AA

a3629223309_10

Tim Hecker – No Highs

Posted: 1 April 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Kranky – 7th April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I had been warned. A fellow reviewer who received this before me had said that this album had made him feel ‘unwell’. It was a compliment, of course. This comes as little surprise: Tim Hecker is an artist capable of creating the most intense and all-encompassing experiences, and while the live performance I attended in 2014 may not have made me feel ill, it did make me feel pretty weird, detached, disorientated. As the only artist I have ever known to use more smoke than The Sisters of Mercy and Sunn O))) combined, filling the room to the extent that it was impossible see your own hand in front of your face, let alone the person next to you, Hecker made me feel uncomfortable, and in some way a little scared in a claustrophobic way.

I’ve had a few records which have had a physical effect on me: listening to PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me for the first time with a brutal hangover is one standout experience, its raw and up-front lurching guitars punching my head and stomach simultaneously with puke-inducing results which went far beyond the post-booze discomfort. Because listening to music is not a passive activity, and as well as requiring focus, it would seem also degree of compassion – you feel its force physically as well as psychologically.

The notes which accompany Tim Hecker’s latest album are bold, to say the least, describing the Canadian composer as ‘a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive capitalist ambient currently in vogue’ and continues, ‘Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers – this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined.’

Clearly, this is exactly what I need, having felt tense and on edge, unable to catch my breath properly for several days now. If the album’s title sets the initial expectation, the track titles reinforce the album’s mood: ‘Monotony’; Pulse Depression’; ‘Anxiety’; ‘In Your Mind’; ‘Total Garbage’ – all the shades of dark, of bleak, of miserable, of self-questioning, panic.

The aforementioned ‘Monotony’ pings a single note back and forth for almost eight and a half minutes. Drones build sonorously behind it and swarm the mind as the volume grows and then shrinks again, and the buzzing and extranea become siren-like. And so, there is movement behind the tedious repetition, but it’s tense and unsettling. Moments of levity which appear to suggest tranquillity is within reach prove to offer nothing but false hope as we’re soon plunged into the gloaming, or otherwise into glitchy, lurching passages of unease. Soft sounds which ought to be mellow and soothing are rendered uncomfortable, or mournful, or both.

‘Lotus Light’ initially intimates a Krautrock pulsation, but some bending frequencies and melting notes swiftly take this trip on a rapid descent. If the lotus flower is supposed to signify rebirth and enlightenment, then this is one which is wilting, poisoned, and if eating the lotus is supposed to provide a conduit to pleasure, this is the soundtrack to picking the wrong plant, as everything rushes forward too fast and you’re not in control. You don’t feel right: you feel drugged, delirious.

‘In Your Mind’ picks and stabs away with tempo changes galore, surging and sweeping this way and that, echoing reverberations around the cranial cavities before booming stabs of synth blast through the drifting haze, before ‘Monotony II’ returns like a waking memory of a traumatic dream from the night before. The trilling saxophone does nothing to calm the mind or the mood. And over the course of more than eight minutes, ‘Anxiety’ recreates the experience if that increasing heartrate and the clenching of every muscle perfectly. That is to say, it’s brilliant, and also brilliantly difficult, and potentially triggering to some. The flickering, fluttering electronic throbs are practically Jean Michelle Jarre reimagined as a fibrillation.

No Highs is a difficult album, but how difficult depends on our headspace: from a certain perspective, it’s a cinematic electronic set, but from various others it’s the soundtrack to being unable to settle, to relentless tension, to jitters and fretting, and worse. The notes oscillate and you clench; sudden spurts of sound burst and you jump momentarily., before ‘Sense Suppression’ pulls you down, slowly, into a sea of sound, before the album drifts away to nothing on the drifting tides of ‘Living Spa Water’.

No Highs is sad and dark and deeply affecting, and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect. Listen and share the suffering.

AA

a2157297652_10

Tom Belushi Jazz Trio – Death Mast LP

Posted: 31 March 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

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.

AA

54d90880-c561-48af-aa9e-fda70c47391e_thumb_400

Bruno Muerte – Errors

Posted: 18 March 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

24th February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This Oxford based act describe themselves as ‘Techno Western New Wave Electroclash’ and ‘Synth lovers’. Unfortunately for me, this description conjures images of moustachioed hipsters circa 2009. The pair may well, be, choosing to keep their mugs off the record, and I’m all too aware of just how the field of instrumental electronic music is very much the domain of middle-class white guys tinkering with expensive toys. This lack of cultural diversity may be a leading factor in there being so much sameness stylistically.

Sameness isn’t really a criticism one could level at this album, for while it does assimilate many common tropes of contemporary synthesizer music – in that its inspirations are often retro in origin – stylistically, Errors offers a broad range.

‘Science of Errors’ is a punchy piece of electropop with some big, bold proggy sections that surge along in a rush, and it’s a strong start. ‘Conga Cop’ is very much a tune of 80s TV show vintage style. It’s extremely busy in terms of arrangement, stabby synths shooting over a hectic rhythm and samples flying around there and there, before going altogether more minimal on ‘Phil D’Ophear’, a much darker slice of techno where the dense bass dominates. Elsewhere, ‘Wibli Wobli’ packs a driving, energetic groove.

Errors is big on ideas: it’s positively bursting with them, and consequently, there is a lot happening, sometimes, if not all at the same time, then densely packed together, to the point that sometimes it feels as if there’s too much happening. And not all of the ideas necessarily work perfectly: the Clangers whistling over a microtonal waltz on ‘Satomi’ is novel and fun, but little more, but it’s Bruno Muerte’s willingness to experiment and the mix-and-shake approach to making music that’s a large part of the album’s appeal.

As they write in the accompanying notes, ‘One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist without errors.’ It’s refreshing to hear: Errors, then, is not a quest for perfection, but a celebration of imperfection and the joy of being creative. And ultimately, it’s joy that Errors brings.

AA

a2776445249_10

Older Entries
Newer Entries