Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Haswell & Hecker – UPIC Diffusion Session #23

Posted: 12 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Editions Mego – 21st February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker are both prolific as solo artists, each with numerous collaborations with other artists to their respective credits, Haswell also having been a contributor to and touring member of Consumer Electronics. The UPIC Diffusion Sessions are a long-running collaborative project which began in the early 2000s, exploring Iannis Xenakis’ UPIC system as the sole instrument.

As the accompanying notes outline, ‘The UPIC is a computer music system that generates sound from visual input. The original intention of the system developed by Xenakis was to make a utopian tool for producing new sounds accessible to all, independent of formal training. One can locate footage of Xenakis and a group of children making drawings for the system in the 70’s.’ They continue, ‘The duo set off experimenting with a diverse array of hand-drawn images to feed the UPIC system including news photographs of disasters and atrocities, “food porn” through to depictions of the natural world and microscopic images of molecular structures (including ‘the blackest ever black’). The resulting eccentric audio from these images is claimed by the artists to heighten synaesthesia and is as mysterious as it is baffling.

I suppose the potential outputs for the UPIC are as infinite as the inputs, and this alone makes for a fascinating project, and the results here are, indeed, mysterious and baffling. The recording from this session is represented by a single track, just over half an hour in length.

Immediately, trilling oscillator tones rise in pitch – and keep rising, until you feel the pressure build inside your skull. There are glitching spasms of sound which flash across like subliminal messages. The pressure drops and the siren wails fade out, before scuttering blasts of seemingly random noise collage and intersect across one another, buzzing and fizzing, humming and thrumming… the forms move quickly, and shift from dark to light, hard to soft instantaneously. Shimmering sprays of abstract sound burst like fireworks, short interludes of harsh noise wall, microtonal bubbles and ZX Spectrum like babbles and bleeps all intersect or pass within mere seconds of one another. It is, very much, a sonic collage, the audio equivalent of William Burroughs’ cut-ups, an aural articulation of the simultaneity of experience of life in the world. Burroughs’ contention was that linear narrative is wholly inadequate when it comes to representing the real-world, real-time lived experience, whereby overheard conversations, snippets of TV and radio, and all the rest, not to mention our thoughts and internal monologues, overlap, and to present them sequentially is not true to life.

Leaping disjointedly from one fragment to the next at a bewilderingly rapid pace, listening to this is rather like the way the mind, and often conversations, skip from topic to topic without ever seeing any single train of thought to a defined conclusion, bouncing hither and thither in response to triggers and associations which often seem to bear no logic whatsoever.

There are thick, farting sounds, buzzes like giant hornets, choruses of angry bees, weird sonic mists and transcendental illuminations… of course, these are all conjured in the mind in response to these strange, sometimes otherworldly, sci-fi sounds, part BBC Radiophonic Workshop, part tinnitus and nightmare of imagination. Unpredictable isn’t even half of it as alien engines and spurs of 80s laser guns crossfire against earthworks, roaring jets, explosive robotics, skin-crawling doom drone, whispers and whistles, proto-industrial throbs…it’s a relentless blizzard of sound.

‘Experimental’ has become something of a catch-all for music that draws on eclectic elements or perhaps incorporates a certain randomness: this, however, is truly experimental, given that there is no way of knowing how the programme will interpret the input provided. And as much as the output involves oscillatory drones and the kind of synthy sounds associated with analogue, and with woozy, warping tape experiments, it evokes the drones of collapsing organs, wild sampling and everything else your brain could possibly conjure.

At once exhilarating and exhausting, UPIC Diffusion Session #23 is… an experience.

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D L F – Korset i Röjden

Posted: 8 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 7th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I do like an album with a story. With Korset i Röjden by D L F, we get half a story, but one which builds a sense of mystique, enigma, a sort of allusion to local folklore, set out in the notes which accompany the release:

‘There’s a place in the forest, in the shape of a cross, where nothing grows. No one knows how it got there, or why.

60°33’48.6"N 12°39’15.6"E

The two recordings on Korset i Röjden capture sounds and vibrations in and around the cross. A geophone, a few contact mics, an H6, a smartphone, and a broken cassette recorder. Track two, ‘Den onda ska pressas ur’, features samples from a 1963 television documentary, an old Finnish lullaby, and taped interviews with locals from the 1990s.’

This has got it all: mythology, mystery, co-ordinates – a map, in other words – and the kit, the foundations for a sonic retake of The Blair Witch Project, perhaps. There is a strong sense of there being something hat isn’t right. Granted, I get that from simply breathing the air, from turning on the news – but this is quietly unsettling. Very quietly, in places: the first two minutes or so of ‘Korset’ are almost the sound of silence. Turn it up, and there is the sound of air, a soft breeze, perhaps, some kind of background noise. Insects? Footsteps? The rustle of leaves? Perhaps, but just as nothing grows in that unexplained cross marked in the forest, so it seems there is little sound. No birdsong, no… nothing. Has anyone ever run a metal detector over the sight? Considered digging?

I mention digging with caution. There is a wood close to where I live, a portion of which has been decimated in the last three years or so by dirt bikers who have turned the space into a track with jumps and ditches. It’s clearly not just the work of a couple of kids with spades: these are proper earthworks, excavations, the likes of which have involved adults turning up with mini-diggers. I once witnessed a woman challenging a family who had turned up with motorbikes who were revving around and scaring pedestrians and dog-walkers being met with aggressive verbal abuse. My email reporting the matter was of no consequence. Rather like this narrative detour.

‘Det onda ska pressas ur’ offers another ten minutes of haunting dark ambience – unsettling, disorientating. It rumbles and echoes around infinite subterranean corridors, leading to who knows where? There are sounds – possibly the pushing through undergrowth, possibly almost anything else. Wraiths whisper through the clicks and crackles, hums and pops… is that breathing or simply the breeze?

Korset i Röjden tells us nothing, other than that the world is a dark and unpredictable place. It’s a dark and unpredictable album. But it hints that we should fear, and fear the worst. There are dark forces all around, and while the insanity of the world right now is more than reason to take cover, it’s worth remembering that there are other things a play.

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The Legendary Pink Dots – So Lonely in Heaven

Posted: 4 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Metropolis Records – 17th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The arrival of So Lonely in Heaven marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the existence of The Legendary Pink Dots. And it’s a concept album. Edward Ka-Spel sets it out as follows: ‘Way way back in the early days I used to say a lot about ‘The Terminal Kaleidoscope’, a concept comparing the fragile planet we live on to a drowning human being with life flashing before his or her eyes, the images constantly accelerating. It’s 2024, a little over two decades since the turn of this unbearably turbulent century and the concept appears to have become an unlikely soap opera where we are the cast.’

It’s their second post-pandemic album, and it’s weighted with a sense of impending doom and biblical destruction spun in a suitably grand fashion whereby prog meets avant-garde and electronica.

It can be a bit of a gamble opening an album with a long song – the risk being losing the listener before things have even got going. But it’s a calculated risk, on an album where most of the songs are pretty long.

Some of it’s Ka-Spel’s tone and enunciation, but the title track which is that first long song, carries hints of an electronic reimagining of Suede, circa Dog Man Star. That is to say it also sounds a bit Bowie, and a bit Kraftwek, and with some weirdly bits of glitchy noise and reverby piano, it has echoes of Outside.

Thereafter, there are big sounds and big moods and big concepts in abundance, and it’s by no means an easy album to pigeonhole. Space and environmental issues are woven through the twelve tracks, which, as I fumble for a context, evoke equally the whimsical hippy trippiness of Gong and the inventiveness of The Young Gods. ‘Choose Premium : First Prize’ delves into tense electro territory, and presents a rather harder edge than the preceding songs, and it’s here we really begin to feel the sense of the ‘machine’ which is a central focus of the album’s thematic content:

The machine is everything we are. It sees everything, hears everything, knows everything and feeds, speeds, drinks us down, spits us out – we lost control of it at the instant of its conception. You may cough, curse and die, but the machine will resurrect you without the flaws, at your peak, smiling from a screen, bidding someone in a lonely room to join you. It’s an invitation from Heaven, where anyone can be anything they want to be, but it’s a Nation of One. You’ll be everything we are. You’ll be a shadow of yourself. You’ll repeat yourself – endlessly. You’ll be desperate for some kind of explanation. You’ll be lonely. So very lonely…

This is nowhere more apparent than on the sparse, acoustic-guitar centred neofolk bleakness of ‘Wired High : Too Far To Fall’, which swells and soars and expands to immense proportions, as well as plunging to dark, sonorous depths over the course of its seven minutes. Elsewhere, ‘How Many Fingers In the Fog’ has a more post-punk feel to it, but still spun with a proggy haze, and there’s a lingering wistful melancholy which clings to it.

That there are whimsical, light-hearted moments of plinky-plonky keys and segments of So Lonely in Heaven sound more like wide-eyed stargazing in pure awe shouldn’t trick you into thinking this isn’t a serious album. The medium is the message, and entertainment is a diversion, a distraction, the ultimate lie that it’s ok to sit, sedated, and forget the world. The shit that’s gone down in America is the absolute proof of this: while everyone has been entertained by the circus, a coup has been taking place. This isn’t hyperbole, and this isn’t simply some scuffle in a small third-world republic. Meanwhile, people, especially here in the UK, are largely preoccupied with the current season of Love Island or whatever instead of trembling in fear for the future.

For all the buoyancy and quite enjoyable moments – ‘Blood Money : Transitional’ offers a quite accessible, easy groove beneath its darker surface – ‘business is business’, Ka-Spel sneers over a quite Depeche Mode-like accompaniment.

So Lonely in Heaven is varied, and sometimes sounds as if belongs to another era – but at the same time, it’s unexpectedly and shockingly relevant and now, and is well worth your time – whatever time you have left.

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ILINX – Flipperen

Posted: 30 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza – 27th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Some years ago (like about seventeen years ago), when I embarked on my reviewing journey proper, I was introduced to whacky experimental work and the world of microtonality. It was an absolute revelation. Just as, growing up in the 80s and raised on the Top 40 singles and Now That’s What I Call Music, discovering goth, alternative, John Peel, and Melody Maker completely changed my head, so did entering this new world. Onje thing that completely spun me was the way in which some artists extrapolated and academicized some pretty stupid or mundane stuff. This is a reasonable example. To quote: ‘Flipperen takes the randomness of pinball and turns it into music. Using recordings from old pinball machines, the music mixes chaos and structure, reflecting the Fluxus spirit of play and chance. It’s a wild ride through sound, where things don’t always make sense–but that’s the fun of it.’

Flipperen began as a lockdown / COVID project, of course. As they detail, ‘During the quiet and strange Covid days, Suzana Lașcu, Robert Kroos, and Reinier van Houdt began a recording project based on the soundbites of pinball machines. They visited the empty Dutch Pinball Museum in Rotterdam and captured field recordings of machines from the 1960s to the 1990s. From these, they selected 28 samples to serve as thematic starting points for what they called ‘game pieces,’ recorded in two sessions at Sonology Studios in The Hague. The recordings were then shaped into sound collages using cut-up techniques and probabilistic processes.’

These processes mean that the end product is a very long way removed from the actual sounds of metal balls pinging and rolling about inside a glass-covered case. Instead, landing between Brion Gysin and John Cage, we get a collection of weird and woozy fragmentary pieces – compositions would be something of a stretch – ranging from awkward ambience to crashing and banging that sounds like a prepared piano fitted with lump hammers. There’s playful, whimsical sighing and trilling, psychedelic trippery and some fairly straight jazz-flavoured piano in the mix. There’s Clangers-like whistling and clattering and clanking, pops and thuds, explosive industrial noise and frenzied country. There are moments which sound like someone grunting through a comb with greaseproof paper, others which sound like the strumming of an egg-slicer, others still which create the impression of a piano being dropped down a flight of stairs.

The final cut features twenty-six tracks, the majority of which are around a couple of minutes long, or even significantly shorter. But there are a couple which run to around six and a half minutes of uncoordinated chaos, and it’s a lot to take in.

The appeal from a sonic and experimental perspective is that ‘Pinball is a game that combines control and randomness—each action leads to an unpredictable result, and the outcome is always uncertain’, and as such, the patterns which provide the material for these pieces are erratic, unpredictable, and ultimately, not really patterns at all. And so it is that Flipperen shunts forwards and backwards, crackles and pops with zany snippets of this, that, and everything, conjuring a wild collage of disparate elements and all kinds of discord.

As much as pinball machines lie at the heart of Flipperen, it’s really a wide-ranging collage work with randomness at its heart. It’s fun, it’s fascinating, it’s brain-bending – and one might say it’s a work of Flipperen genius – but you definitely have to be in the mood for something quite this far out.

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Charlemagne Palestine & Seppe Gebruers – Beyondddddd The Notessssss

Posted: 25 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Konnekt – 1st February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s perhaps an understatement that Charlemagne Palestine’s body of work is immense, and the range of artists he’s collaborated with quire staggering. Active since the early 70s, it’s likely impossible to give a brief summary of his career or output, and when approaching a work such as this, I find it easier to place career context to one side and evaluate it on its own merits. It may be an admission of failure, a confession to a limited knowledge, but the debates over how a release sits in relation to the other forty or so albums are the place of fan forums.

However, in keeping with his habit of adding many repeated letterssssss at the end of words and songgggggggg titlesssss, Beyondddddd The Notessssss, his collaboration with Seppe Gebruers bears a rather daft titleeeee, of which I shall make no more, other than to observe that this suitably sparse, piano-led work does indeed take the listener beyond the notes as it promises.

Over time, I’ve become quite drawn to this type of album, which seems to proliferate in experimental circles, whereby an LP – released on vinyl, too – will contain just two or three tracks, and the compositions seem to be arranged around the fact that each side has the capacity for around twenty minutes of audio. I suppose it’s because I grew up in the 80s, and was raised on vinyl as the dominant format, but in the world of the mainstream, where an album – approximately forty minutes in duration – would consist of ten, or perhaps nine songs, most of which were three or four minutes in length, and could be lifted as a radio-playable single. In the late 80s and 90s, the 12” would provide longer edits of singles, often aimed at clubs, but discovering the two-track album was a revelation, in that it seemed like a revolution of form. I was unfamiliar with the works of Tangerine Dream, Yes, or Pink Floyd beyond their singles at this time, because… well, because.

Side one is occupied by the twenty-one minute ‘Gotcha I’, a sparse composition where discord dominates to render an uncomfortable listening experience. It feel like semi-random plonking on an out of tune piano. In pinks and pings, plongs and tinkles with no time sequence, no key, and no clear sense of form. It simply is. Notes clash and collide, ripple and rush against one another, sometimes holding back, hanging in suspense. In some respects, it bears a resemblance to jazz improv pieces – and perhaps not entirely surprisingly: this album features two pianists ‘passion for unusual tunings and the playing of multiple pianos’. The result of the collaboration is four pianos, played simultaneously, with each piano tuned in a rather less than conventional way.

It would perhaps be beguiling if it wasn’t so far removed from anything we’ve been accustomed to recognising as melodic. But as it is… everything simply sounds wrong. Atonal, uncomfortable, off-key and off-kilter. The effect is quite brain-bending, because everything feels warped, out of step, uncoordinated. It isn’t, of course: it’s simply how our minds have been programmed and attenuated to conventional note sequences and melodies, and Beyondddddd The Notessssss trashes everything with a joyful abandon. Once you come to accept this, and to reattenuate your own listening to accommodate this strangeness, which offsets the balance, sets one lurching and feeling bewildered, it becomes somewhat easier to accept.

‘Gotcha II’ commences side two where ‘Gotcha I’ / side one leaves off, but tumbles slowly into altogether more spartan territory. Each note hangs. There are moments of silence. Deep, rumbling, stomping piano arrives, dinosaur-like. It’s primitive, but strangely magnificent, carrying as it does a simplicity which is rare. And this simplicity brings with it a sort of honesty. I’m fumbling for words, here, for reasons which aren’t even readily explainable. Towards the end, notes cascade and tumble over one another, culminating in a frenzy of clattering, broken notes, and it’s bewildering.

Bewildering is perhaps the most apposite description of Beyondddddd The Notessssss. The title track, which draws the curtain with a five-minute finale, offers something approaching minimal jazz – with the emphasis on minimal. And jazz.

Beyondddddd The Notessssss goes way beyond the notes, and, indeed, way beyond the rational.

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Jamie Lee – Circuits From Soft Frequencies

Posted: 18 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 17th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Given Mortality Tables’ liking for location-based field recordings, Circuits From Soft Frequencies makes for a comfortable fit in their rapidly-expanding catalogue.

As the liner notes explain, Circuits From Soft Frequencies originated ‘as a four-channel sound art installation developed using field recordings from sites around the South East of England.’

‘Drawing on soundtracks taken from 70s minimalist sci-fi films, both the samples used and the overall composition are based on different terrains encountered during Jamie’s field trips, describing huge shingle beaches, swamps and clifftops. The installation which was exhibited at MK Calling in Milton Keynes during the summer of 2024 also consisted of fabricated ‘cymbal speakers’, incorporating sensor-based technology to respond to changes in their environment.’

The cover art depicts one of the ‘sound mirrors’ which were constructed at various sites around the UK shortly between the world wars as an experimental early warning system, as a precursor to radar. While there are sound mirrors at two sites in Kent, those at Denge are the most renowned and best preserved, and it was here, one assumes, that the recordings of percussion, ‘incorporating cymbals, bells, gongs and clocks’, took place.

The installation, the notes go on to explain, ‘repurposes four cabinet speakers to transmit sounds collected during field trips to sites featuring [the] huge, concrete sound mirrors’.

This release contains a nineteen-and-a-half-minute recording of the installation, and highly atmospheric it is, too. Ther ticking watch not only keeps time, but gives a sense of tension and urgency which runs fast, in contrast to the long, low, reverby thuds and slow splashes of cymbals. That everything – apart from the watch – sounds somehow dulled, muffled – only adds to the atmosphere. It’s likely that this eerie, swampy echoiness is the product of the location, which features not only the thirty-foot concave ‘ear’ shown on the cover, but a two-hundred foot concrete wall. Images of the site stir the imagination, and one gets the impression to actually be in the presence of these strange-looking objects must be truly awe-inspiring. The sounds which emanate from the speakers while listening to Circuits From Soft Frequencies evoke the same sense of the alien, the otherworldly. Spurs of noise occasionally burst through, interjections of dissonance pulse through the building layers of sonic collage to unsettling effect.

It’s a reminder that often, the most alien and seemingly otherworldly creations are, in fact, man-made – and often connected in some way to war, and mankind’s destructive tendencies. I was struck, not so long ago, by the quite chilling experience of touring the cold war bunker in York – not a place of refuge, but a cramped and claustrophobic subterranean observatory which, in the event of the fulfilment of its purpose, would assure the deaths of its crew.

The sound swells and glitches, scratches and hums, and at times exudes a nightmarish quality that makes your muscles tense and your scalp tighten and crawl. It’s a remarkable piece of work, but one of those where the end comes as something of a relief.

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Watch: ‘Blood Money’ by The Legendary Pink Dots

Posted: 11 January 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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“Way way back in the early days I used to say a lot about ‘The Terminal Kaleidoscope’, a concept comparing the fragile planet we live on to a drowning human being with life flashing before his or her eyes, the images constantly accelerating. It’s 2024, a little over two decades since the turn of this unbearably turbulent century and the concept appears to have become an unlikely soap opera where we are the cast. Let’s hang in there….”
Edward Ka-Spel – The Legendary Pink Dots

SO LONELY IN HEAVEN – THE CREATION

So Lonely in Heaven is the new album by the Anglo-Dutch experimental rock band The Legendary Pink Dots, who formed in London in 1980 and are still helmed by co-founder and frontman Edward Ka-Spel. Their second full-length effort since the World stopped for a Global Pandemic, group members were still scattered across three countries and two continents as they began writing it, with ideas spun across Cyberspace for months. However, the magic eventually happened collectively in small spaces with the tape running.

SO LONELY IN HEAVEN – THE MESSAGE

The machine is everything we are. It sees everything, hears everything, knows everything and feeds, speeds, drinks us down, spits us out – we lost control of it at the instant of its conception. You may cough, curse and die, but the machine will resurrect you without the flaws, at your peak, smiling from a screen, bidding someone in a lonely room to join you. It’s an invitation from Heaven, where anyone can be anything they want to be, but it’s a Nation of One. You’ll be everything we are. You’ll be a shadow of yourself. You’ll repeat yourself – endlessly. You’ll be desperate for some kind of explanation. You’ll be lonely. So very lonely….

Check ‘Blood Money’ here:

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THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS | photo: Michael McGrath

Trek with Quintronic – Stranger Than Today

Posted: 5 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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17th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s inevitable that with the sheer volume of music in existence, there will be a fair bit which bypasses even the keenest enthusiast of the obscure. Trek and Quintronic is a pairing I feel I really ought to be familiar with. Emerging in 1980 Paul Wilcox (Trek) and David Kane (Quintronic) recorded two albums, noted for pioneering ‘electronic rock’, with Landing in from 1980, and the self-titled follow-up Trek w/ Quintronic LP the following year, created using an array of synths, plus pedals and six- and twelve-string electric guitars. There was a reissue, entitled Landing Plus, released in Europe in 2012 and the US a couple of years later, which featured the entirety of Trek w/ Quintronic and a couple of additional cuts by way of the ‘plus’, but twelve years on, it’s not exactly easy to come by, and this new release offers something quite different, featuring as it does ‘9 of the original Tw/Q tracks plus 11 new, never released songs written by Paul Wilcox, spanning a period of 40 plus years, all remixed and remastered.’

This means that some of the material was recorded after their second album, without seeing the light of day, while some of the contemporaneous recordings have been flaking away on old tapes since 1980 or thereabouts, and their restoration and repair has been quite an undertaking, achieved quite remarkably by David Lawrie of The Royal Ritual. The aim, as they state on the website, was to ‘present the definitive collection of the best of Trek with Quintronic’, and containing some twenty tracks, this is a wide-ranging, and in-depth summary of their work – and it’s often the case that musical careers consist of considerably more than the material that was released at the time, for whatever reasons.

That ‘You Might be Lonely’ and ‘As We Sing’ first appeared on Landing makes this a truly career-spanning document, which showcases the full span of their musical vision and innovation. It’s often easy to forget just how new to the market (affordable) synths were at this point in time. The advent of 80s synthpop and industrial music came about as a result of the emerging technology, which also, notably, included drum machines. It was a revolution.

There’s a gothic, church organ feel to the introduction, and its grandeur also makes a nod to the prog past of the pair, but it’s listening to ‘You Might be Lonely’ that the span of their influences coupled with the use of the kit at their disposal becomes apparent: it’s like Hawkwind but with synths, both rumbling and swirling and with additional laser blasts and primitive drum machine knocking out a metronomic rhythm, all coalescing to provide a backdrop to a vocal delivery that’s an overt Bowie rip.

The Bowie influence looms equally large on the glammy ‘All the Rave’, only here with the addition of sweeping string sounds. It sounds remarkably fresh, as well as prefacing – by a long way – the trend for orchestral flourishes which would be a big thing in the late 90s with, and winding up with a big, flashy guitar solo. It’s visionary stuff, and the execution is remarkably sophisticated, particularly for the time.

Some of the songs sound more of the era: ‘Zolian Space’ lands somewhere in the region of OMD and Ure-era Ultravox, but it’s a nifty enough pop song. There are a fair few of those on offer here, not least of all the bouncy Suicide-meets-Bowie ‘White Hoods’, and the hyperactive twitch of ‘Twin Forces’.

The guitars are to the fore on the previously unreleased ‘Built to Average’, hinting perhaps at one of the many directions they could have veered. It’s a solid tune, but coming on like a collision between Bauhaus and Mr Mister, it’s dated more than some of the other material, whereas, in contrast, the spiky ‘Wally And The Rich Kid’ is pure vintage yet still more impactful in its stark, dramatic stylings.

Some of – what at least I assume to be – the later material stands out because it sounds different: ‘Religion’ is slicker, the drum machine in particular more ‘real’ sounding, and in a way it tells a story of technological advancement and its effect on music-making. Objectively, it sounds better, in terms of clarity, fidelity, separation, but for everything that’s been gained, something has been lost, and it’s something that using emulators or even vintage gear can never fully recapture. There was an unmistakeable zeitgeist about the ‘79-’82 spell, which was unique, and Trek with Quintronic were right there and probably didn’t even realise at the time. No-one did, really.

Hindsight really is everything. Stranger Than Today is an outstanding compilation which goes beyond in providing a hitherto unseen insight into the context of their groundbreaking second album and beyond.

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Nate Wooley – Henry House

Posted: 4 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Ideologic Organ – 10th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s already looking like 10th January is going to be an intense date in terms of the sheer volume of releases. Time was when January was something of a quiet spell for new music, as everyone recovered from the Christmas glut, and labels tended not to release much since people were skint. It also used to be the case that unexpected releases would sneak unexpectedly high in the charts, especially the UK singles top 40, with remarkably low sales figures, usually with cult acts with savvy labels whacking out a release that would have barely scraped the charts any other month – White Town’s ‘Your Woman’, released 13th January 1997 and hitting number one in the UK and going top ten globally – however briefly – is a classic example.

There’s no danger of Nate Wooley registering on any charts with Henry House, released on the Ideologic Organ label, curated by Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) legend, and home to a long line of truly magnificent avant-garde and otherwise most unusual musical works, of which this is very much one. That’s not because it’s not good, it’s just that the nature of charts has changes beyond recognition over the last thirty years. There is also the statistic which recently came to light that there was more music released on any single given day of 2024 than during the entirety of 1989. It’s a pretty staggering statistic, and one of many factors when considering just how difficult it is for artists to make a living from making music. Something I have touched on previously is the fact that simultaneous with this explosion of output, culture has become both more homogenised and more fragmented. In terms of the mainstream, this homogenisation has facilitated the advent of multimillionaire and even billionaire ultra-megastars like Taylor Swift – but at the other end of the spectrum, there are tens of thousands of artists releasing music on Bandcamp and Spotify with no backing or publicity whatsoever, to be heard by maybe five people.

But we need music that’s unpopular, that isn’t created with any commercial intent, and we very much need labels like Ideologic Organ to provide a platform and to point us toward the cream of those artists who may not otherwise reach the audience they so richly deserve.

And as an album containing a single composition split into five parts, described as ‘a recurring dream song’ with a running time of some eighty minutes, this is a work which is very much non-commercial in every way.

As the accompanying notes detail, this is a work which combines ‘closely tuned instruments and sinetones, tape-music editing techniques, field recordings, and voice,’ providing the context that ‘this eighty-minute, five-part song cycle is an evolutionary step away from the spontaneity of the free jazz/noise aesthetic usually found in the music of Nate Wooley. Henry House expands on the ecstatic, durational work found in Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition that has been premiered over the last ten years by an ensemble that now includes multiple drummers, guitarists, a twenty-one-person choir, and the composer on amplified trumpet. But its ritual is more serene, more natural, slower.

‘Henry House is the first long-form piece that doesn’t feature Wooley’s trumpet. It is also the first to be constructed around his poetic writing. Wooley weaves a strange funeral mass for a fictional everyman from isolated phrases culled from essays, poems, and non-fiction written by Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, and Reiner Stach. After organizing the fragments into a dream narrative, Wooley rewrote the text dozens of times, manipulating the stitched-together story until only glimpses of its sources remained.’

It’s ten minutes into the twenty-minute opener, ‘Acacia Burnt Myrrh’ that the poetical oration begins, with the words spoken by Mat Maneri. He speaks in a calm, not entirely flat, but level tone, of geometry, of space, of time. The words conjure abstractions, images, moods, against backdrops of elongated hovering hums, oscillator-driven quivering drones. The words are audible, but comparatively low in the mix, and it’s not always easy to stay focused on the narrative, such as it is: instead, the mind focuses on absorbing the atmosphere. There’s a lot of that, and Henry House is an immense project with near-infinite dimensions. Megan Schubert’s faster-paced, more driven-sounding delivery is quite a contrast to Maneri’s, and from these counterpoints, the album grows in terms of dynamics and depth.

So much happens: listening to Henry House is like reading a book which contains stories within the story, and illustrations in a range of styles. No two tracks are really alike, and the arrangements change across the course of each piece. It draws you into a dark fairytale, a unique world which isn’t exactly scary, but unsettling because it feels unfamiliar, dissonant. The fact that two of the pieces bear the same title only add to the bewilderment. Horns and drones radiate between the narrative segments, and the final piece, ‘Aleatory Half Sentences’ is led by some flighty piano work, which trills and flickers against a heavy, nagging, low-level hum. It’s one that really takes some time to process, but it’s very much worth the effort.

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Flin Van Hemmen – Luxury of Mind

Posted: 2 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Self-Released – 13th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, the notes artists pen to accompany their latest works are somewhat dry, rather technical. Others provide effusive essays, while others still no details whatsoever. Flin Van Hemmen’s words which accompany Luxury of Mind are poetic, somewhat vague and elliptical, but lyrically rich and personal, if vague.

In order to thaw matters of the heart, one must go to where it’s cold.

It was the summer of 2022 and I was finally summoned there.

My personal winter had come, a place at once foreign and familiar.

In a flash I was made aware of all my life’s dimensions – the ones less welcome, or simply too big to face.

My sense of musicianship was temporarily halted, at that point unsure of its return.

Early 2024 I knew my personal winter was waning, and so I started tinkering away again, musically.

The pitter patter of the rain, the orchestra rehearsing their parts simultaneously, the sounds inside the corner store where I buy my daily coffee.

And how do they sound, together?

What indeterminacies reveal itself, or do I pick up on?

That’s my journey and a journey I wish to share with you in Luxury of Mind.

I have elected to quote in full because they are clearly pertinent to the substance of this material. Van Hemmen is clearly and peculiarly specific that he feels the need to share this specific journey, which clearly has involved stasis and self-doubt. Writer’s block? He seems to allude to rather more than that here.

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‘A Picture of Your Face (In the Light of the Fire)’ is bold, choral to begin. It’s not grand in the bombastic sense, but feels deeply spiritual, ceremonial, and for wont of a better word, ‘churchy’. While the sense of grandeur is uplifting, and spiritually powerful, the drone of organ and voices coming reverberating in a large, echoey space reminds that where there is a ‘churchy’ aspect, religion – particularly of the Christian persuasion – for all the exultation, is laced with guilt, apology, pleading – pleading forgiveness for sins, pleading for entry into heaven. And as such, it reminds of the paradox whereby Christians prefer to confess and atone their sins rather than simply try harder not to err in the first place. There are scratches and crackles which rupture the graceful smoothness of the piece, and the title track slips into a darker, danker space, with a sound like torrential rain on a tin roof, with murky ambience lurking about.

‘Eloquence and Grief’ brings new levels of disorientation, sort of a film-soundtrack piece with discordant background babble and crowd noise as an orchestra forges a soundscape which evokes mountains and canyons. Its meaning is difficult to extrapolate: it feels like multiple narratives occurring simultaneously, and the same is true of the eerie dark sound collage of ‘Volition & Velocity I’, and its equally gloomy, dolorous counterpart, ‘Volition & Velocity II’.

The whole feel of Luxury of Mind is haunting, unsettling, like walking through the soundtrack to a vague and abstract film, traversing time and space, intersecting scenes of bustling medieval towns, and post-apocalyptic shots of burning villages, intercut with occasional psychedelic visuals, while electronic circuits in heavy rain and church bells chime for the funerals of unnamed bodies. It’s not quite horror, but it’s heavy with gloom and trauma, and, by this measure, Luxury of Mind sounds like the soundtrack to a period filled with anguish and psychological pain. It concludes with the sparse and dank clanks of ‘Last Year in Cantecleer’ – and it must have been a washout.

It feels as if we’re sinking in floodwater, drowning in a tidal wave of toxic bullshit, while all around everything goes wrong. But at least one thing has gone right for Flin Van Hemmen: Luxury of Mind is an album with so much texture, so much depth of texture, so much mood, that it’s impossible to deny its creative success.

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