Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Andy & Grace – Reunited

Posted: 29 September 2023 in Albums
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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.

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Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung – Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung

Posted: 27 September 2023 in Albums
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Sub Rosa  – 22nd September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

So many reissues recently have taught me a valuable lesson. I don’t know nearly as much music as I thought I did. Of course, it’s impossible know all the music, and despite feeling I’m reasonably knowledgeable, and compensating what I don’t know with enthusiasm. Time was, I was worried about knowledge gaps: they made me feel stupid, ignorant, and I’ve spent evenings with people who have reeled off bands in genres I’m interested in and not recognised the name of a single one, let alone heard them. I felt like a fraud claiming to be a music enthusiast and worse still, a music writer (I never proclaim to be a music journalist. I write about music, and do so very much from a personal perspective. Sometimes, I stab at maintaining an element of objectivity, but the appreciation of art isn’t objective. As I’ve written elsewhere, the reason we appreciate art is because of the feelings it stirs in us, the way it speaks to us, not first and foremost because of its technical proficiency.

This is a lengthy circumnavigation to the confession that Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung completely bypassed me in the day – in fact, until today, the week of the reissue of their 1995 self-titled full-length debut. I suspect that they didn’t get much coverage in the UK music press, and this was still a while before the advent of the Internet as we know it – and I was a relatively early adopter, setting up my eBay account in 1999 following the demise of Yahoo! Auctions.

As the accompanying bio outlines, ‘The band consisted of four young, ‚classically derailed’ musicians who played their own compositions exclusively their with acoustic instruments such as violin, cello, clarinet and accordion… Their work contained influences from Roma music, Eastern European folk, klezmer and jazz, but was performed with the energy, rebellious spirit and Sturm und Drang of a bona fide punk band. DAAU was part of the fertile Antwerp scene, which also produced dEUS, Zita Swoon and Kiss My Jazz, and soon signed an international record deal with Sony Classical.’

dEUS may have briefly made a mark here in the UK in indie / alternative circles, but the others, not so much, and I suspect that even with its first vinyl pressing, this re-release will likely have a bigger landing in Germany and, indeed, the rest of mainland Europe, than this pitiful island that still celebrates Britpop, and which spent 1995 dominated by turgid sludge by the likes of Oasis, whose pinnacle release (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and Blur’s Great Escape (which was anything but great); the best we got was The Bends, while Robson and fucking Jerome dominated the singles charts for half the year. As if we needed further proof that we’re a small, crappy island with an overinflated sense of self-importance that the longest hangover from the Empire ever. It’s embarrassing, as is the fact that this domestic Brit-centric bullshittery has denied us introductions to many great bands. Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung is a perfect example.

It’s perhaps not hard to grasp why this extravaganza of neoclassical extravagance and its wild woodwind and unpredictable compositional forms didn’t grab the attention of the British Music press, but they missed a work that’s hugely innovative and belongs to no one genre. It’s wild and it’s challenging , but these are positives.

Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung is droning strings, it’s by turns melancholy and slow, and remarkably lively. It’s an untamed beast almost with a life and energy all of its own. But the compositions aren’t in sequence!

‘V Drieslagstelsel’ is the first track, the first of five ‘Drieslagstelsel’ pieces, and it’s followed by the frenzied yet droning folksiness of ‘II Drieslagstelsel’: it’s pretty, but it’s strange. Or, it’s pretty strange. I’m on the fence, while it sounds like they’re stripping the fence with some frenzied violin work. ‘III Drieslagstelsel’ scuttles in with some cheeky chamber stylings before popping in all directions, and it’s kinda cheeky – and perhaps tongue-in-cheeky – jaunty, incredibly busy, and extremely varied. It isn’t the kind of explosive, head-spinning jazz I sometimes find myself wrestling with here, but it covers a lot of terrain in just five and a half minutes, with stage musical qualities pushing to the fore before dipping back down to something altogether less ‘production’ orientated. The last of the ‘Drieslagstelsel’ sequence is ‘I Drieslagstelsel’, and following the frenzied strings and dramatic orchestral sculptures of ‘VI Drieslagstelsel,’ it’s a compact piece of neoclassical music which fulfils the oft-underrated and oft-overlooked purpose of entertaining. It’s a fun and often frivolous piece, in parts a wild hoedown with wind instruments, with an eye-popping energy which delves in to drones and darker territory at times.

What happened to IV? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Rounding the album off is the eleven-minute ‘Doorloop’, which appears to be a traditional track, and its slow, drawn-out notes are funereal at first, before thing go g=crazy and there are even vocal.

Over the course of these six pieces, Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung brings massive range. Back in 95, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it, and nor would anyone else I knew. But here we are, looking at an accomplished album with much texture and range.

And now, I appreciate it. Perhaps I wasn’t ready, perhaps it was out of step with the times for all but a few – and even fewer here in Britain – but Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung is a remarkable album, and one which is timeless.

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Watch: ‘Air Raid’ by Jeshi

Posted: 23 September 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Both deft and wacky this new single sees Jeshi return with a signature bang. Lyrically, he’s at his best and never sacrifices on ambition even when delving into detail.

Beginning with a knight in a suit of armour wistfully watching videos of galloping horses on an iPhone, the visual is a wild ride from the first frame to its final. Filmed in East London, local landmarks like the historic George Tavern form the atmospheric backdrop to the hilarious ‘Big Knight Out’. Jeshi has cultivated a cult following who expect nothing but the best from the AIM award winner’s visual offerings. It’s safe to say he never disappoints.

The video which was directed by previous ‘Sick’ collaborator Francis Plummer, known predominantly for his photography (Stussy, Bone Soda, The Face), who proves direction is a skill he truly excels in.

With production by early Jeshi collaborators by Max Frith and Cajm.

Jeshi explains the making of ‘Air Raid’: “We went and stayed in this house in the middle of a field in Wales to work on the project and ‘Air Raid’ was one of the tracks we made in that living room. We were all losing our shit so hype on it jumping around the room playing it over and over… happy to have it out in the world now.

Soon as we made the song we wanted to have a knight getting sturdy to it and Francis just built on that for the video idea… we follow his quest through London to link me at the pub.”

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This year Jeshi hasn’t stopped. With the touring schedule of an 80s rock band Jeshi has stunned festival crowds at Glastonbury, Project 6, We Love Green, Outbreak, Dour, Midi, Latitude, Luzern Live, Sundown & Warehouse Projet’s Repercussions. He also managed to fit in playing his first headline show in Tokyo and time to front campaigns with Nike Air Max and Dr. Martens. On top of that Jeshi secured his second Top Boy soundtrack feature with ‘Killing Me Slowly” appearing on the final season opening Episode 2. Cementing his impending global domination fans can look forward to enjoying ‘Protein V2 ft. Obongjayar & WESTSIDE BOOGIE’ while playing the new EA FC24 game (out 29th September).

Since his critically acclaimed EP ‘Bad Taste’, Jeshi has been creating an enviable legacy of work. Arriving in May of 2023, Jeshi shared his ‘era-defining’ debut album ‘Universal Credit’ with the world. Incredibly multidimensional, ‘Universal Credit’ was searing, personal, relatable & humorous. Wowing critics and fans alike it had an undeniable impact.

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Credit: Francis Plummer

zeitkratzer – Scarlatti

Posted: 14 September 2023 in Albums
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zeitkratzer productions / Karlrecords – 22nd September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

SCARLATTI represents something of a departure for zeitkratzer, the neoclassical collective headed by Reinhold Friedl, master of the prepared piano and a renowned avant-garde composer in his own right. While their performance and recordings usually focus on modern composers and avant-gardists spanning Stockhausen and John Cage via Whitehouse and Lou Reed, with a reinterpretation of Metal Machine Music, here they turn their attention to the altogether more historical figure of Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). He is best known – although this is relative – for composing some five hundred and fifty-five keyboard sonatas, and his being a progenitor of classical music. But a large portion of his work went unpublished in huis lifetime, and much has only been available sporadically since.

As the notes which accompany the album explain, ‘Little is known about Domenico Scarlatti… His music is, so to speak, left to its own devices: free, cheeky, playful, sonorous, surprising… Harmonically strolling again and again into unforeseen regions, the ear leads, not the theory; and also the fingers get their right: playful and haptic it goes. Scarlatti explained, “since nature has given me ten fingers and my instrument provides employment for all, I see no reason why I should not use all ten of them.”

But Scarlatti does not contain music by Scarlatti. Instead, the six tracks presented here are all composed by Friedl in response to Scarlatti’s work.

As such, this is much a celebration of Scarlatti’s ideas and approach to composition and so the explanation of the process and thinking behind it bears quoting: ‘Freedom, friction and listening pleasure instead of convention: “He knew quite well that he had disregarded all the rules of composition in his piano pieces, but asked whether his deviation from the rules offended the ear? He believes there is almost no other rule than that of not offending the only sense whose object is music – the ear.”

‘Reinhold Friedl applied this principle and composed the music for a choreography by dance company Rubato. Dance music drawn from Scarlatti, who was so inspired by dance music. The material of the piano sonata F-minor K.466 is twisted anew in all its richness, shifted back and forth, declined, frozen, noisified, sound structures extracted, floating. Those who know the sonata, will more than smell it’s [sic] shadows.’

The six pieces are indeed varied, in terms of mood and form. ‘lias’ is booming, droning, woozy, slow discordant jazz, low, slow, and with lengthy pauses. It’s not something anyone can dance to, and rather than light and playful, it feels dark and sombre. This is less true of the altogether sparser, but stealthily atmospheric ‘muget’.

‘pissenlit’ blasts in with churning industrial noise, a snarling blast that lurches and thunders, crashes and pounds withy relentless brutality. It’s clearly as far removed from the music of the seventeenth century as is conceivable, but beside the lilting piano and quivering, droning strings and subsequent stop-start levity of ‘reine des prés’ the sequencing of the pieces serves to highlight Scarlatti’s versatility, if not necessarily his predilection for playfulness. The playfulness manifests differently and unexpectedly here: ‘pissenlit’ is in fact the French word for ‘dandelion’, a plant often associated with a certain element of fun, of lightness, so the fact that this piece is three and a half minutes of gut-punching abrasive noise worthy of Prurient or Consumer Electronics is illustrative of the disparity between expectation and actuality.

Discord and discomfort abounds as drones and strings tangle amongst one another, heaving and wheezing and occasionally offering glorious, sun-hued vistas through the breaks in the widely varied forms, which feel elastic, and as if Friedl and co are stretching the fabric of the material to see just how much it will give. And it turns out, there is a fair bit of room. ‘reine des prés’ explores space, the gaps and pauses between the notes, and feels like a sort of musical cat-and-mouse which would equally work as soundtrack piece, but it has a cartoonish quality which means it’s more Tom and Jerry than anything else. But it is by no means flippant, throwaway. Entertainment is serious business, after all.

‘violette des marais’ brings pomp and drama… while the final track, ‘astis’, is skittish, playful but also frustrating in its hesitant, halting structure.

Scarlatti is interesting, entertaining, and bold, going out on a limb to present such an unconventional interpretation of a historical artist’s career. But this is largely the purpose of zeitkratzer: together, they re-present music, excavating the archives but presenting them through a prism of contemporary and avant-gardism, with jazz leanings but without being jazz in the way most would interpret it. In short, zeitkratzer continue to push and redefine musical boundaries, and long may they do so.

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ROHRER / TROBOLLOWITSCH / NAMTCHYLAK – Jeito de Ferver

Posted: 7 September 2023 in Albums
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Sonoscopia sonos – 15th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Trobollowitsch is certainly a name that sticks in the mind, and so it was that back in 2016, I penned a piece on Roha by the Austrian Sound artist. At the time, I struggled to really connect with his conceptual compositions.

This latest offering finds him working with Thomas Rohrer, a Swiss musician, who ‘plays the rabeca, (a Brazilian fiddle), and soprano saxophone’, and whose work ‘is largely based on free improvisation, but also engages in a dialogue with traditional Brazilian music.’

The collaboration between the pair actually began in 2017, but they didn’t begin work on any recording until January 2021, when, according to the bio, ‘they embarked on a duo project combining Trobollowitsch’s rotating mechanical turntables equipped with branches, wood and dried leaves with Rohrer’s soprano saxophone, small objects and rabeca… During their collaborative recording process, renowned singer Sainkho Namtchylak from the Tuva region contributed her captivating, versatile voice, which she has used to great effect in a variety of musical genres, including jazz and electronic music.’

Given their diverse background and different modes off operation, this collaboration was always going to be not only eclectic, but a collision of diversity, and the question would always be to what extent do they compliment one another, or otherwise pull in such different directions as to render the work more of a competition than a collaboration? Given that both Trobollowitsch and Rohrer are credited with ‘recomposition’ of several tracks, there’s a sense that this effort is defined, if not by friction as such, then by differences, and a working method which entails dissecting and reconstructing, a restlessness and dissatisfaction.

Crackling static and an electrical hum are the key elements of the title track. It’s somehow both spacious and claustrophobic, and as the sounds rumble and echo around, you feel like your shut right in a small room – more like a walk-in cupboard – as the serrated buzzes and grinding drilling sounds fizz and fret all around, gradually warping and twisting, sometimes ballooning and others shrivelling. Suddenly, I jump. Is that my phone vibrating? No, it’s not, it’s a vibration puncturing the third wall, something that sounds like it’s in the room rather than coming from the speakers, which are by now emanating shrill blasts of feedback.

The sound collaging on this album is something else, leaping into the three-dimensional at the most unexpected moments, and the sounds and textures constantly shifting to forge a work which is more than music, more than sound: this is something you feel, not emotionally or cerebrally, but physically: it makes your fingers tingle and move in a quest to grapple with the details. Sometimes those details are dark and demonic, as on the unsettling ‘Ovaa’. The vocals are rasping, gasping subterranean, subhuman grunts and gasps, strangled cackles that cark and bleat and croak and claw up from the sewers. It’s pure horror.

There are undulating, stuttering low-end bumps, there are hornets the size of buzzards as your car breaks down and your skull slowly crumbles as your brain struggles to process everything… anything. This is a soundtrack to something that simply shouldn’t exist; it’s aa soundtrack to your worst nightmares, as yet unimagined.

The production, the panning, the listening experience of interacting with this in the way it’s intended is terrifying and surprising in equal measure, as tweets and twitters occupy the same space as thunderous thumps and insectoid skitters and metallic scrapes and… there’s a lot going on, and it all makes for in accumulate and intense and really rather difficult sort set – not really of compositions, but largely incoherent audio processes. The accumulations and stacking of the sounds is by no means truly random or haphazard, but their assemblage creates as experience which feels altogether more happenstance. It’s a scrappy, scratchy, stop-start mangling of noise, and at times, it’s scary and strange, at other’s it’s ominous and eerie. It’s unsettling, and difficult to absorb. It’s incredible.

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David Colohan – Sargasso Sky

Posted: 29 August 2023 in Albums
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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.

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

Posted: 22 August 2023 in Albums
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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.

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The Bagatelles – Vol.16

Posted: 10 August 2023 in Albums
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Tzadik Records – 8th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Everything seems to trigger some recollection or another. This is perhaps one of the greater pleasures of interacting with art in any form. As a child, I recall an old bagatelle board sitting in the shed. It always struck me as a quaint item – essentially a wooden board with nails stuck in it, some kind of hybrid between billiards and pinball, with a pile of very heavy, marble-sized metal balls.

If this triggered recollection seems random, that’s because it is, something beyond my control. But then despite everything, it comes to seem relevant, as Vol. 16 – which presents, as the press release puts it, ‘Big Band interpretations of John Zorn’s Book of Bagatelles’. It goes on to explain how ‘Zorn commissioned London-based Jewish composer, Eastmond to make an album from a selection of his 300 pieces: Book of Bagatelles. Arranged for 12 Musicians, the ensemble features some of Europe’s most celebrated creative musicians and improvisors alongside young rising stars of the UK scene.’

My musical palette has certainly expanded through the years, and I have JG Thirlwell to thank for this, as well as Gallon Drunk, for opening my eyes to wild and near infinite possibilities in terms of incorporating orchestral and brass elements into rock and guitar-based music. Everyone needs a route in to forms which aren’t readily digestible and certainly aren’t the norm for most.

There is nothing that’s especially digestible about this raging, ragged, woodwind-blasting behemoth, and that’s as intended. Actually, that’s not entirely true. There are moments, near the start, of the ten-minute opener, ‘Bagatelle #256’ which are immensely palatable in a smooth jazzy way, the kind of smooth jazzy way that might have you nodding along, and your friends saying ‘nice’ in a raspy whisper. But while there are some toe-tapping moments, the majority of this release is eye-popping, bursting as it is with some crazy shit that flies off in all directions at once.

There are some monster stomping moments, ‘Bagatelle #78’ is a proper full on dinosaur thump, and contrasts with the meandering drone of the next track, ‘Bagatelle #143’.

It’s all going on here, and sometimes it feels as if it belongs to a cartoon soundtrack, while at others it sounds like all-out sensory overload. There are some rather nice moments, expansive explorations of soundscapes while afford periods of laid-back-reflection. But then, there are as many moments of truly crazy shit, with everything exploding everywhere, highlighting insane range of this album.

If the climax of ‘Bagatelle #143’ would sit comfortably in the soundtrack to a cartoon, the start of ‘Bagatelle #63’sits in the bracket of headache-inducing wild jazz frenzy. And that’s something that this album quite unexpectedly highlights – the way in which there is no way of predicting the highs and lows and insane range that this album presents. When it’s chilled it’s nice; when it’s racing all over the shop, it’s fucking mental.

The Bagatelles – Vol.16 is all over the place, and it’s a truly wild ride. It goes from oompah to film soundtrack in an instant, and it’s impossible to keep up. And that’s its appeal.

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Sly and the Family Drone – Every Knife In This House Is Mine

Posted: 4 August 2023 in Singles and EPs
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The Quietus

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s not that I like to brag, but I’ve been writing about Sly and the Family Drone since 2012, when they blew me away at the Brudenell in Leeds, with a chaotic, percussion-heavy, audience-participation-led performance (and since when my writing has improved and I’ve become a shade more sensitive, perhaps). Witnessing Matt Cargill standing aloft on a stack of amps while surrounded my members of the crowd battering drums distributed by the band was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life, and I was an instant convert. In some respects, I was fortunate to witness it: in a recent interview, Cargill was at pains to stress that it’s one of those spontaneous things: “It doesn’t happen at every gig,” he warns. “And I don’t want it to become a thing that people expect or are disappointed when we don’t do it. There are times I’ve seen people write, ‘Bring your drumsticks!’ I’ve never said that and I don’t want you to do that! If we were doing it every night people would be, like, ‘Oh, fuck off! They’re doing their schtick.’”

It’s this spontaneity and true commitment to improvisation that is a significant part of the band’s appeal. You never know quite what you’re going to get, and there’s a sense that nor do they: it all unfolds in real-time.

Their subsequent releases since my introduction in 2012 have never disappointed, and for me, at least, the best thing about Sly is that they embrace the difference between the live and recorded media. As such the recordings are the recordings, the performances are the performances. Explaining the difference to The Quietus, Cargill says “It was nice to be able to do all that spatial and stereo stuff which we wouldn’t be able to do live,” he says. “Because of mics on drums and stuff, it just doesn’t really work in that way. So we were able to spend a bit of time just working on that and doing some quite weird-sounding drum stuff which I’m really happy with.” The same article also explains, ‘The passages of manipulated drumwork are bookended by the band performing together in full skronking and lumbering flow and, in a move that vaguely echoes the ecstasy of their live sets’ endings, it finishes with a warm and symphonic cacophony of horns. “It’s kind of a pieced together track but I think it works as an entire piece,” reflects Cargill.

They have forged a career – or perhaps eked one, on the breadline, with a cult reputation which exceeds the returns a fringe act can attain in this crappy climate, a climate whereby post-Brexit overseas travel is prohibitive and not just financially – from being far out. Embracing elements of jazz and noise and a whole spectrum beyond, it’s fair to say that this is an act who plough their own furrow, and for that, respect is due, and them some.

This latest release is – as ever – an interesting one. It’s a limited lathe-cut 12” released via The Quietus, a publication with an immense reputation for its championing of the weird and the wonderful, and which perhaps more than any online publication with a significant readership plugs the gap left when Sounds, and then Melody Maker ceased to be. For non-subscribers, it’s available digitally via the usual platforms.  The ones I don’t use or advocate. But I digress. ‘And Every Knife In This House Is Mine’ is Sly at their best.

As a single track – less a composition than an exploration – with a running time of twenty minutes, it’s an EP or an album by some bands’ standards, but what it ultimately is is an immersive experience which sees them make the most of having access to studio facilities to push their sound further in different directions.

It’s a shrill, rippling wave of feedback that pierces the eardrums in the opening seconds which announces its arrival before a tempest of crashing drums, wayward brass and extraneous noise deluges in, and more happens in the first forty seconds of this tune than the entirety of many albums. Shortly after, it settles into a thunderous groove, the rhythm section grindingly heavy while wild horns – Kaz Buckland’s alto sax and James Allsopp’s baritone sax interplay is a back-and-forth that is timed with perfect precision.

There’s a lot of reverb, and a lot of space here. They pull back from the brink of pure chaos and meander through some expansive gentler passages, before, each time, exploding into a wild crescendo. It’s hard to differentiate snarling electronics from barking vocal yelps , and there isn’t a second where there isn’t something happening. It’s impossible to maintain a commentary on this sequentially.

A tumult of noise, bleeps and glitches, bloops and whirls, all fuse to form a wild cacophony, and it’s pure bliss to yield to this sonic tidal wave. But over the course of the track’s twenty minutes, there are constant ebbs and flows, the lower-level churning swashes rendering the louder segments and extended crescendo’s all the more impactful.

Things get decidedly Throbbing Gristle around the midway point, with swampy electronics and groaning low swoons taking things down, disrupted by random clatterings of percussion, before things take a turn for dark around the fifteen minute mark, with drones that sound like a 747 heading towards the ground in a nosedive… and then the climaxes with an extended jazz frenzy, and… woah.

Running through every form and texture, Every Knife In This House Is Mine is both exhilarating and exhausting… and everything you would expect from Sly and the Family Drone, and all that jazz.

AA

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Loaf of Beard – Dog

Posted: 3 August 2023 in Albums
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skoghall rekordings – 4th August 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This one feels like it’s had more build-up than any previous releases on either of Dave Procter’s labels, the recently-founded skoghall rekordings,, or the more established noise-orientated Dret Skivor: there have been numerous one-line quotes, snippets of lyrics from the album posted on social media in the last month – and it’s certainly piqued my interest as to just how far this latest project will take things.

Not that far, my notes suggests, but that’s no slight. You see, Procter’s output is copious and widely varied, from the abrasive noise of Legion of Swine to the recently-released acoustic protest songs of Guerrilla Miner. In between, there’s the grumpy spoken-word-with-noise of Trowser Carrier and the technical experimentalism of Fibonacci Drone Organ. But – and this is something I can say from personal experience – Procter is also a strong collaborator, one who’s open-minded and intuitive, but at the same time always retaining his own unique style as a clear element.

Loaf of Beard’s debut, Dog, features ‘2 British immigrants in Sweden point the finger at the state of politics in their home and former home countries, in a number of musical styles’. When they say ‘a number of musical styles’, it’s like listening to Joh Peel in the 90s, where baggy indie and experimental stuff would be crammed back to back with trance and grindcore. It’s all good, but it’s like a musical fancy dress party, with the pair tossing on different outfits and doing a different genre to go with it. And sometimes, it’s as if they’ve thrown on flares and a biker jacket, or a cocktail dress and a gimp mask by way of a combo.

‘Zippy Was a Blairite’ raises the curtain on the album in a post-punk style, and harks back to arguably one of Procter’s most popular and cherished musical vehicles, The Wharf Street Galaxy Band, with a nagging, elastic bassline pinned to insistent drums. Here, they’re programmed rather than acoustic, but that crisp, cracking vintage snare sound serves the purpose well of (re)creating the sound of the early 80s – but it’s the sound of the 80s as reimagined by Sleaford Mods, a primitive loop providing the musical accompaniment to the lyrics… and those lyrics are bitter. And at the risk of sounding like a crackling piece of overplayed 80s vinyl with a scratch, the current renaissance of the sound of the dark days of Thatcher in Britain is no coincidence. After thirteen years of austerity and the quality of life of the average worker being eroded faster than the world’s glaciers are receding, the mood is gloomy, angry, nihilistic. We can’t even think about protesting without risking being arrested. ‘The middle of the road is sitting on the fence’, Proc half-sings, half-speaks, reminding us of something many of us knew at the time, but chose to overlook because it meant getting the Tories out: New Labour was a long way off left in real terms: ‘pseudo-left credentials, politics so central’, as they summarise, chucking in a well-placed ‘motherfucker’ for essential emphasis.

Following ‘No Puffins for You, Lad,’ and Dale Prudent’s piece about pigeons, ‘Birds’ revisits the avian fascination that’s been a long-running theme in Procter’s work, and it’s a semi-ambient, spoken-word piece, which collides with the gritty chug and hyper-energised pumping of ‘Hund’, which comes on like Metal Urbain. ‘It’s a man in a frock!’ It’s a succinct summary of the indignation of the culture wars that obfuscate the real issues that are crippling the country.

That snarling glammy stomp of ‘Boothroyd Every Time’ is pure quality, and celebrates both a strong woman and a fellow Yorkshire person, and if ‘The Atrocity of it All’ is a less than subtle hectoring rant about the fucking state of everything it’s entirely justified, and the mangled, frenetic groove of ‘Cock’ may not be sophisticated, but it drives to the heart of the way the rich are milking the country dry while blaming increasing wages for inflation. Funny how wages are going down but profits aren’t isn’t it? No, it’s not remotely funny. Cock. Yes, Richboi Sunk, we’re looking at you.

‘Vote your life shitter / get your life shitter!’ Procter repeats over and over on ‘Lagom Murder Diaries’ and it doesn’t matter if he’s preaching to the converted here. Fuck. Just tell it to anyone who will listen: vote tory, get fucked. ‘Shithouse’ is comedically loose slacker funk, which finds Dave having a stab at rap. It’s not really his forte, but there’s a nice bassline and nagging guitar that’s a bit Orange Juice. It’s an odd mess of a tune that sounds a bit like a more tongue-in-cheek Yard Act.

‘Good’ sounds like Chris and Cosey but with that classic Northern flat vowel delivery in the vocals adding to the gritty groove as they sneer at the cuntiness of greedy capitalists. As if there are any other kinds.

Dog is fun, challenging, and tells it like it is. Fuck the Tories.

AA

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