Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Tony Buck – Environmental Studies

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA

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Šarūnas Nakas – Ramblings

Posted: 9 June 2023 in Albums
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Music Information Centre Lithuania – 7th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This is one of those releases where the context counts for almost as much as the content: ‘The cycle of nine vocal, instrumental, and electroacoustic pieces, Ramblings, a large part of which was written as music for the scandal-plagued drama play Literature Lessons by Jonas Vaitkus, was recorded in 1985 in the legendary Vilnius Record Studio, which at that time was very open to experiments. The recordings were made using a multi-channel tape recorder, a borrowed KORG synthesizer, saxophones, a prepared piano, a cello turned into a noisy bass, percussion, and bells. The composer used all the texts and the title for the cycle from the poetry collection Ramblings by Almis Grybauskas. According to the composer, this poetry is minor, cold, and laconic, like his favourite cool jazz style, while the title Ramblings itself raises a lot of questions, is a bit provocative and irritating.’

‘Provocative’ and ‘irritating’ are appropriate enough adjectives, it has to be said. Indeed, ‘ramblings’ suggest something unfocussed, incoherent, unstructured, and this is a wild ride which flies off on tangents every which way. Yet while the shapes of these compositions may be loose, there’s a definite sense of purpose, not to mention an atmosphere about them.

The further story is significant to this release, and it provides not only a fascinating insight into the way politics can often be the enemy of the arts, but also freedom of expression more broadly. It’s also a tale of underground rebellion, defiance, and strength of will.

‘After the premiere of the performance, the composer could have had a very bad ending – after “terrible” reviews and complaints appeared in the press, the Soviet censorship ordered the performance to be banned and the creators punished. Even the head of the composition department at the time suggested that this “cacophony” should be given the lowest grade, condemning Šarūnas Nakas to be expelled from the conservatoire, which would have meant being conscripted into the Soviet army during the Afghan war. Fortunately, professors Julius Juzeliūnas and Bronius Kutavičius saved their student.”

I mean, it is a “cacophony”. Ramblings is a jumbled mass of layered vocals, atonality, and exploratory jazz, the kind of jazz that prioritises performance over listenability, the kind of jazz that’s about the experience, the kind of jazz that’s interested in the relationship between notes and isn’t afraid of dissonance, discord, variable time signatures. At times tranquil, at others ominous and abstract, there are parts of Ramblings which are wild, chaotic, completely unconstrained. This is, of course, just how it should be.

The story continues as to how thew work escaped destruction at the hands of its persecutors: ‘It was the time of cassette tape recorders, and music was quickly reproduced, so Ramblings began its own journey, playing as background music on radio and television but never being published as a complete cycle. Later, only one piece called ‘Merz-machine’ was singled out from the cycle as an example of Lithuanian experimentalism and released in 1997. It then underwent a kind of renaissance: versions were created for different ensembles, including the Czech avant-garde rock orchestra Agon and the London piano sextet pianocircus. The sextet has performed the work more than 100 times in dozens of countries.’

It’s fascinating how an obscure musical work can infiltrate so many different channels, and effectively exist in a life entirely removed from itself. Consider the fact that parts appeared, internationally, unknown and uncredited. This isn’t only the most remarkable example of subversion for a supposedly ‘banned’ work, but also demonstrates how music can take on a life if its own. ‘Merz-machine’ is, without doubt, an outstanding piece, challenging and discordant as it is, but it’s only partly representative of the album as a whole: it’s certainly by no means background music.

The fact of the matter is that there is no one pierce on Ramblings which is really ‘representative’. Ramblings is truly eclectic, and odd, and that’s its design, its objective. From a critical perspective, it’s almost immaterial whether I like it or not – and I certainly like some pieces more than others – but it’s not aiming to please, and certainly not aiming to please all of the people for the duration. Despite being almost forty years old, Ramblings sounds contemporary – and still sounds challenging. That’s timeless.

AA

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LapCore – Fear_of_D[istraction]

Posted: 7 June 2023 in Albums
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fals.ch – 9th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

On clocking this in my inbox, I fleetingly felt a flicker of amusement as I recalled a long-lost article I had written over a decade ago about fictitious musical genres, which included LARPcore, where bands inspired by Viking Metal re-enacted historical battles in full costume. (I also mentioned Symphonic Doom before the term appeared as a thing). Then I realised that, as I’m prone to doing when I’m not concentrating, I’d misread, but then on reading the notes which accompany the new album by Kent Clelland, aka LapCore (which makes a lot more sense in context of what he does musically), my amusement was replaced by a certain crackle of excitement.

For this reason, it’s worth quoting: ‘With Fear_of_D[istraction] LapCore continues his exploration of digital audio synthesis and distortion techniques, researching the complex tonal digital structures he affectionately refers to as cTonality. In contrast to the more upbeat and aTonal album LapCore 132 (his 2017 full-length self-published release), Kent Clelland has freed himself to explore the darker, and more cerebral faces of computer music composition. With multi-channel oscillators he brings sonic entrainment into the musical range of frequencies as opposed to the typical sub-audible entrainment frequencies, composing melodic and harmonic parts with the artefacts to create cTonalities.’

But here’s where it gets interesting, and will likely prove divisive:‘Weaving polymetric binaural oscillators with a lopsided bass drum engine, he lulls your senses into a state of receptivity upon which he then sews synthesised tapestries inspired by his hyper-perceptual, cancer-treatment-infuenced dogma adventures in the pre-pandemic delirium. LapCore produces these tracks as an attempt to preserve his brain damaged audio hallucinations, sharing them in a venue larger than the space between his ears.

‘The performance of LapCore’s Fear_of_Di[straction] (2017-2022) is a 48 minute sonic quilt of recordings of AI Musical Agents during training sessions intricately hand-sewn into the fabricated projection of the audio dimension.’

Yes, Fear_of_D[istraction] incorporates elements of AI. ‘Nooo!’ people will likely shriek and no doubt some will be unhappy even with my writing about this album on this basis for propagating the death of the artist. But the death of the artist – if we take ‘the author’ in a broader context – has long been a preoccupation of literary theory and postmodernism, as far back as Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay of the same title. Yet now, as we find ourselves pondering what some are variously referring to as post-postmodernism or metamodernism, there is mass panic over the chimera we have created with speculation that not only artists but most occupations will be obsolete in a matter of years and we will soon be driven to extinction by our errant creation. I’m reminded of numerous sci-fi novels, not least of all Michael Chrichton’s Prey. Published twenty years ago, it feels more relevant now than ever, as is the way with much true science fiction, which takes current science and projects hypothetically forward, but also demonstrates that this fear is nothing new. And yes, of course, we – as a species – have pursued this end. Our demise through AI seems unlikely, but if it does happen, we probably deserve it.

While AI photos and even falsely-attributed Guardian articles are giving great cause for consternation – understandably – overall, it’s still the potential of AI which is scarier than the current capabilities, and this is nowhere more evident in music, where it’s fair to say that most purely AI generated compositions are toss. But also, in more experimental fields, composers have been using algorithms and customised programmes to generate sound since the advent of computers and synths – and I have covered countless of these in the last fifteen years.

LapCore incorporates AI as simply another tool in his kit, and has used this hybrid of man and machine to forge a work that melds Krautrock and minimal techno, microtonal experiments and harsh electronics to eye-opening effect.

The first of the album’s seven compositions, ‘Stuck Like a Magnet in Switzerland’ is built around grating oscillators and some extreme stereo panning, which is well-executed, and immediately grips both sides of your cranium and squeezes. The flow of blooping synthesised rhythms is rent with a buzzing distortion the like of which some of us will remember as the way a mobile phone signal would interfere with the TV – and at three times the volume of the busy bubbling track, it comes as an uncomfortable moment of shock. All kinds of feedback and interference disrupt the musical melange thereafter, dial-up tones and all kinds of electrical chaos collide and crackle unpleasantly. But being unpleasant doesn’t make it bad: this is one of those works that is relentlessly challenging in its pursuit of ‘difficult’ tones, textures, and frequencies, often simultaneously.

‘Microdose’ feels more like an overdose, as an angry hornet the size of a lion takes residence in the space at the front of your skull, right in the sinuses, and vibrates your brain without mercy against a backdrop of disjointed techno. This is some brutal synth torture, and elsewhere, there are drones and whistles reminiscent of early Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle, atop dome very DAF-like electronica. ‘Americium’ is busy, a constant drip and froth of watery notes bouncing against one another – and it sounds experimental. And this is the key to appreciating Fear_of_D[istraction]: it’s not a work that tries to pretend to be a human creator hiding behind AI for a laugh, and nor is it the sound of AI running wild. Instead, it’s an album which sees its creator consider the challenge ‘how can we use this?’

If it sounds somehow ‘impersonal’, the same is true of much electronica; by the same token, Fear_of_D[istraction] very much sounds like a guy pressing buttons and twiddling knobs and looking to see just how much disruptive, disturbing synthy noise he can throw over a sequenced beat. The artist isn’t dead yet.

Anne-James Chaton, Andy Moor, & Yannis Kyriakides – Handmade Volume 01: Douceurs

Posted: 5 June 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Unsounds Records – 15th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

These are certainly three names to conjure with as prominent features of the experimental scene. Anne-James Chaton and Andy Moor have collaborated on numerous albums, and I personally discovered them via the Transfer series in 2011, around the same time as Chaton’s Evenements 09, which I found fascinating in its contemporary application of loops and with its parallels to the cut-up technique and Burroughs’ and Gysin’s tape experiments of the late 50s and early 90s.

As the biography which accompanies the release of this lates outing explains, ‘the duo Andy Moor and Anne-James Chaton continue their conversation with a new set of digital singles, diving this time into the rich language of the traditional metiers. The Handmade series is an homage to crahftsmanship through an exploration of the lexicons specific to bakery and pastry making, jewellery, joinery and wrought iron making, that will unfold over the course of 4 thematic volumes. With guest Yannis Kyriakides on electronics they create works where abstract notions mix with tangible ones by linking the arts of the hand with sound and poetry.’

The Moor / Kyriakides collaboration A Life is a Billion Heartbeats proved to be a gripping work for quite different reasons, and one thing that’s always a feature of any work featuring Moor is his versatility, as well as the fact that he doesn’t use the guitar in a remotely conventional fashion.

The two tracks on this single really do showcase the strengths of all three artists, and shows just how collaboration and collectivism can amplify individual powers.

But never mistake ‘art’, however obscure or experimental, for something which is always entirely serious: This, the first of the ‘Handmade’ series – projected to comprise four digital singles, to subsequently be released as a CD album and download, akin to the Transfer series, sees them taking on ‘the vocabulary of pastry making… Side A «Garniture» offers a curious anthology of poetry written by mixing the actions of the pastry chef, units of measurement and figures of speech. On Side B, «Sur Mesure» deploys all the richness of the culinary language when it comes to expressing the scarse [sic] or the plentiful’.

Truth be told, for a non-French speaker, the linguistic twists and any humour associated with the juxtaposition of subject matter and context with delivery are lost beyond the cover art, leaving simply the sonic experience – but this alone is more than enough. Chaton’s monotone spoken word is nonchalant and gives nothing away, while Moor peels off shards of dissonance from his guitar amidst drones and hums and clanks and a distant but insistent clattering percussion. Feedback and irregular discordant chanks and un-chords all crash and slide across one another in an irregular latticework of noise.

‘Sur Mesure’ is less challenging, less overtly difficult and dissonant, and sees the three employ the same elements but to an altogether more subdued and atmospheric effect, making for a good contrast against ‘Garniture’.

There’s no doubt that most would simply file this under ‘weird shit’, but it’s a strong experimental work which delves deep into dynamics, tones, and unusual juxtapositions, and really prods at the neural pathways in the most unexpected ways.

(Click the image for audio)

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David Toop & Lawrence English – The Shell That Speaks The Sea

Posted: 4 June 2023 in Albums
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Room40 – 2nd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve been engrossed by Lawrence English’s works for some years now, and my appreciation of him and his methods were only enhanced when I conducted an interview with him about ten years ago for a now-defunct site (so many are now: the idea that once online it’s there forever has been proven false, and we’re all sitting, bewildered by as rapidly-vanishing archive of the recent past), where we touched on cut-ups and William Burroughs and I was struck by the depth of his knowledge and references.

But I have grave concerns around future history, or the future of history. While the move to digital was hailed as a move toward permanence, incorruptibility, the opposite has proved true. No-one writes anything down anymore, no-one produces additional. tape copies. If your hard-drive gets fucked, so does your entire library. The Cloud? Do you even know where it is? Does it even exist?

While we reflect on this, let us also consider this album and its slow gestation. David Toop is another artist I’ve spent some time listening to, and writing about, including his Breathing Spirit Forms three-way collaboration with Akio Suzuki and Lawrence English, but this is the first time just the pair of them have worked together, and Lawrence explains its evolution as follows: ‘Over the years, David and I have shared an interest in both the material and immaterial implications of sound (amongst other things). Moreover we’ve connected many times on matters which lies at the fringes of how we might choose to think about audition, our interests seeking in the affective realm that haunts, rather than describes, experience. The Shell That Speaks The Sea very much resonates from this shared fascination… I’m not exactly sure when we first mooted this duet, but I sense its initial trace is now more than a decade ago. I tend to live by the motto of ‘right place, right time’ and I believe David likely also subscribes to this methodology. A couple of years ago, David and I reignited the duet conversation and began exchanging materials. As a jumping off point, I explored a series of field recordings that, for me at least, captured something of this affective haunting that I mentioned previously’.

And haunting it is: ghosts of memories and fragments of half-recollections lurk and loom amidst the thick, dark shadows forged by the unsettling sounds. The title suggests an album of soft ambient washes, a gentle tidal swash, a soothing, tranquil work. It is not.

‘Abyssal Tracker’ is remarkably atmospheric in a sparse, gloomy, sense, and provides a fitting introduction to the duo’s idiosyncratic work, compiling sighs and vocal rasps over elongated strains of feedback and a suffocating atmosphere. Shrill shrieks echo out over eerie notes and a scratching insectoid clamour in the trebly range. Thuds ripple beneath the surface: there is so much texture and detail here, you find yourself looking about nervously, seeking the various sources and to see what’s over your shoulder, or hovering above your head.

Clanks and clatters and clanks and thuds are the dominant features of this album, and is lasers fire into the abyss of emptiness on the dense and disturbing ‘Reading Bones’, which scratches and scrapes, while there are earth-churning low-range disturbances – and words, but they’re indecipherable, spoken in low, whispering grunts, and it’s impossible to decipher even the language, sounding as it does like an ancient incantation.

It’s not all quite so skin-pricklingly tense, but much of it is: ‘Mouth Cave’ is dark, dank, low and rumbling, but has textures and what sounds like the trickle of running water spattering in the background amidst the cavernous gloom, and if ‘Whistling in the Dark’ sounds like a simplistic description, it’s accurate – but also suspenseful, scary and bordering on horror tropes; the whistling is deranged and floats through a heavy, crackling doomy drone. There are more ominous mutterings amidst the creeping darkness of ‘The Chair’s Story’, which feels like casting a look back through the ages through a thick fog at scenes of torture and pain and great sorrow and forward, to a laser-bleeping future.

As I seem to be prone to lately, I found myself nodding through fatigue but also, simultaneously, tense and alert during The Shell That Speaks The Sea, an album which possesses vast sonic expanses and a bleak, oppressive atmosphere. Each track offers something different, and this only accentuates the ‘otherness’ of the music this album contains; it’s like walking through a series of disturbing dreams, whereby each scene presents a new unfamiliar setting, and there are hints of BBC Radiophonic Workshop and vintage sci-fi about this incredibly imaginative work.

It may have taken a long time to piece together, but the results make the labour more than worthwhile.

AA

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Codex Serafini – The Imprecation Of Anima

Posted: 30 May 2023 in Albums
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Riot Season Records – 23rd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having had something of a chuckle at Henge for their pseudo-space mythology and psychedelic psilliness, I find myself squaring up to purveyors of genre-straddling experimental doom, Codex Serafani. Their biography explains: ‘Their journey started a long time ago, some say on Saturn, some say in the subconscious of the human psyche, coming out in different manners through the ages, channeled by mystics, witch doctors, shamans, free thinkers, free spirits. But we do know that what has become Codex Serafini travelled here from their home world on Enceladus in 2019 and crash landed into the music scene of Sussex.’ Of course they did.

But what are the chances that a I’m writing this review, an article from The Guardian pops up in my news feed reporting on how astronomers have spotted a six-thousand mile plume of water vapour blasting from Enceladus – a small moon belonging to Saturn believed to be one of the most promising places in the solar system to find life beyond Earth? As coincidences go, this was an usual one, and one which befits this band.

With a name which references Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, an illustrated encyclopaedia of an imaginary world, written in an imaginary language, it’s clear these guys have a keen interest in the realms of fantasy and mythology, to state it lightly.

I suppose that the concept piece whereby the concept includes the artist as much as, if not more than, the album goes back to Bowie – but back in 1972, this was new and novel, and moreover, Bowie was unique and an artist whom you could almost believe was from another planet. But even then, however much the concept became all-encompassing, it was also clear that the concept was a persona. But to base an entire career on a persona – not a media or public persona, but a far-fetched one which requires the suspension of disbelief – can be somewhat limiting. Where do you go when you’ve explored the concept to its logical limits?

In creating such a vast and multi-faceted alternative universe, Codex Serafini have ensured an abundance of time and space in which to explore and expand their concept, and rather than it being self-limiting, the challenge will be to test the capacity of their imagination, not only conceptually, but also musically.

While the adage that you should never judge a book by its cover hold some merit, one can tell much about an album by the ratio of its duration to the number of tracks, and The Imprecation Of Anima has a running time in excess of forty-five minutes and contains just four tracks. We know we’re in ‘epic’ territory before hearing a note, and the first of the four compositions, ‘Manzarek’s Secret’ unfurls slowly with a long droning organ (which one suspects is no coincidental nod to The Doors) and chiming percussion. It’s not long before a thick, gritty bass and reverb-heavy vocal incantations are joined by some wild brass to burst into the first of numerous big, jazz-flavoured crescendos. At nine-and-a-half minutes long, it’s epic, but only an introduction ahead of the fifteen-minute swirling mystical monster that is ‘Mujer Espritu’, which brims with Eastern promise and sprawls in all directions at once.

Single release ‘I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust’ is perhaps the least representative song of the album as a whole: it’s snappy, exuberant, uptempo, jazzy, rocky, busy, climactic, and fairly structured – and clocking in at three minutes, it feels like a single when standing alone, but more like an aberrant interlude in context of the album ahead of the seventeen-and-a-quarter minute ‘Animus in Decay’. Now this is a wig-out! It’s heavily psychedelic and transitions through a succession of passages on the path to – what? Enlightenment? It’s certainly a journey, whichever angle you approach it from. It builds and grows in volume and tempo, then falls again and there are some expansive ponderous sections and shifts like sand dunes in a vast sonic expanse.

And so it may be that the concept is a little daft, but they deliver The Imprecation Of Anima – a work that’s as ambitious as it is immense – with absolute conviction, and the vast sound pulls you into Codex Serafini’s (other) world. Inventive and accomplished, it’s a truly mighty record.

AA

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HENGE – Alpha Test 4

Posted: 29 May 2023 in Albums
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Cosmic Dross – 26th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When it comes to spaced-out, trippy conceptual stuff, I can’t help but wonder if large quantities of drugs are involved, or of the creators are just a bit crackers. Their debut album Attention Earth! Featured a song called ‘Mushroom One’, which makes mee think drugs – or perhaps just the image they want to portray. The members of HENGE, Mancunian purveyors of self-styled ‘cosmic dross’ go by the names of Zpor, Goo, Grok and Nom, and Zpor, their ‘front-being’, explains of the new album: “Alpha Test 4 is our third Planet Earth LP release. With each record we have sought to fine tune our extraterrestrial sounds for human ears, optimising these alien frequencies in order to more effectively access the pleasure sensors in the Sapien brain…We believe that the wisest lifeforms are always open to new learning, and we have been conducting our own studies on the human beings that we’ve encountered on Earth so far. We have discovered that exposure to this alien music can have a profound effect on the human nervous system, and have recorded an average increase of 72% in the happiness levels of human specimens attending our experiments”.

If you’re going to do performance, you need to commit to it completely: there can be no half-measures, no stepping out of character off stage, and HENGE clearly live and breathe being HENGE, and one would like to think they’re entirely aware of the absurdity of it all, but happy with the trade of preserving the identities they enjoy at home and in their dayjobs or whatever. I’m going to at least hope that Zpor doesn’t insist that his wife and kids and colleagues address him as such.

Alpha Test 4 is noodly, doodly, silly fun that harks back to the 70s with its cheesy, wibbly synths and tinfoil futurism that was retro even at the time. It’s not so much prog in its primary inspirations, so much as ‘Where’s Captain Kirk?’

‘DNA’ brings stupid funk and daft robotix vocals and it’s probably fun if you’re into it, but mostly it’s annoying: their space-age daft Punk shtick just feels obvious, derivative, passé. And yes, everything is just recycling now: that was postmodernism, where we accepted that originality was dead and celebrated that the future was built on assimilations and permutations of the past. Progress lay in the innovations of new hybrids and how genres were intermingled, and we reached a point, I’m not quite sure when, where it all came down to the execution. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it… and HENGE do it, and with wild abandon and great enthusiasm.

But great energy does not make for a great record on its own. Alpha Test 4 is bursting with energy and brimming with bubby synths: ‘Ra’ is exemplary, an explosion of Lucozade and Red Bull-fuelled 8-bit twitchy pop that crosses XTC with D‘n’B, and spins in a dash of Eastern promise alongside a swirl of experimentation. The worst excesses of YES are tossed into the mix along with Jean Michele Jarre and Yello. It has its moments, but most of those moments are indulgent and rather corny. But HENGE likely know this and don’t care, because unless they are from another planet and spent their time hovering in space, they’re aware and self-aware, and grasp the absurdity of what they do with both hands before jettisoning the junk, and no doubts regardless of my views – and likely because of them since the chances are everything I dislike is everything fans love – Alpha Test 4 will go stratospheric.

AA

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Boris & Uniform – Bright New Disease

Posted: 24 May 2023 in Albums
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Sacred Bones – 16th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

They’re the first to admit that this pairing may seem like an unusual one, having first teamed up for a US tour in 2019: as the bio notes, ‘Sure, both bands harness the power of big, blown-out riffs, but Boris’s rock heroics, lysergic sprawl, and monolithic sludge summon a different energy than Uniform’s mechanized bombardments and frenzied assaults.’ But often the most exciting and unexpected results emerge when pairing contrasts rather than sameness. Put two drone bands together, you can predict the outcome will be amplified drone; sludge with sludge equals more sludge, and industrial matched with industrial is unlikely to yield any great surprises. Yes, pairing like with like makes sense, it’s safe, there’s an intuition and interplay that comes from familiarity with the territory and the form, and fans will likely be happy being served a double helping of what they like.

But neither Boris nor Uniform are acts who are overly concerned with appeasement: that isn’t to say they don’t care about their fans, but more that they both trust their fan bases to be broad-minded and accommodating of the idea that creative fulfilment is integral to their existence. Even those more casually acquainted with their respective catalogues will recognise that both Boris and Uniform are driven, not by the desire to entertain, but to follow their creative instincts. The way these manifest musically are very different, but in this context, the parallels become more apparent, and it also becomes easier to understand their mutual appreciation for one another. And neither act is new to the spirit of collaboration, with Boris having have collaborated with the likes of Sunn O))), Merzbow, and Keiji Haino, and Uniform having previously released a blistering collision with The Body back in 2018, as well as remixes with Zombi more recently.

It will be news to no-one that this is big on riffs, that it’s loud and heavy, but this is a collaboration like no other: ordinarily, artists will bring their ‘thing’ to the table, and the songs will represent the meeting in the middle ground. This isn’t so much the case on Bright New Disease: the two acts are given equal billing and play evenly to their strengths and stylistic methodologies: but don’t necessarily play ‘together’ in the conventional sense. But when did either Boris or Uniform do ‘conventional’?

The album’s first track, ‘You are the Beginning’, aired online a few weeks ago, is the perfect combination of the two bands’ individual sounds: hard, heavy, the blistering harsh industrial intensity of Uniform, angular, antagonistic, crackling with the punk-tinged rage of Michael Berden, suddenly melts into a wild blitz of fretwork which paves the way for a monster thrash workout. Even the tone and texture shifts from harsh treble to murky mid-range, and it feels like a song of two halves. Quite unexpectedly, it works. When you weight up the value of any collaboration the question is always ‘is it different from or better than their independent works?’ Bright New Disease throws a curveball in that it’s a yes and a no at the same time, and that’s the genius of it.

The explosive ‘Weaponized Grief’ is a sub-two-minute blast of feedback and fury, and another thing which is notable about Bright New Disease is just how short the songs are. While there are a couple over four minutes and the finale, ‘Not Surprised’ does just creep over five minutes, the majority are significantly shorter, and condense a lot into those brief times, too.

‘No’ goes all-out grindcore / thrash in a two-and-a-half- minute flurry of churning guitars, but at the same time there’s something vaguely Spinal Tap – or Melvins –about its overblown excesses, and this may be a short album, but it’s high impact, and that’s true of much of the album: they slam down riff after riff with relish. ‘Endless Death Agony’ brings together the boldest excess of Boris with the most brutal attacks of Uniform, with a shrieking guitar solo fading out ahead of a most punishing riff with more solo mania blistering and melting on top, before the megalithic slow grind of ‘Not Surprised’ drags its way through the pits of hell.

Apart from the gloomy atmospheric suspense of the intro to ‘The Look is a Flame’ there really isn’t much respite on Bright New Disease. It’s harsh, heavy, relentless, by turns sludgy and slow, or otherwise frantic, frenetic, explosive – and packed with surprises, from the murky ambience of ‘The Sinners of Hell’ to the bubbling electronica of ‘Narcotic Shadow’ that sounds more like DAF collaborating with A-Ha and the straight-up glam pop of ‘A Man from the Earth’. Never could I have anticipated describing anything involving Uniform as ‘glam pop’. But then they kill it hard with ‘Endless Death Agony’, which is some brutal shit. Bright New Disease is everything all at once: it’s often punishing, sometimes spectacularly theatrical, and (almost) always heavy, but it’s smartly realised and expounds the importance of identity as both bands showcase and celebrate theirs in triumphant tandem.

AA

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Omnibadger – Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III

Posted: 8 May 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 26th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

If ever a band could be defined by constant flux and evolution it’s this Derby duo, who began life as Omnibael before becoming the more frivolous-sounding Omnibadger. Working their way through doom-grunge riffery to all-out industrial electronic noise, theirs has been an interesting journey thus far, and one that it would seem is by no means over yet.

So many acts set themselves into a mould and stick to its form for the duration of their career. Some may find a market and thrive in it, but for many, it becomes a trajectory of diminishing returns as they plough the same rut over the course of successive albums, as things become evermore predictable and wearisome, and people lose interest. But then, so many acts make a radical shift and lose a substantial part of their audience in the process. You simply cannot win.

Only, Omnibadger have done things differently: they have spent their career trying to decide who they are, meaning each release has been different, with one release often landing leagues apart from its predecessor. To say that they’ve spent their career deciding may suggest that search is now complete, but that would be a wrong conclusion: that quest continues, and likely will: Omnibager exist to eternally push the boundaries, to seek, to progress, to evolve. There is no linear progression, only expansion.

It all kicks off from the outset with ‘Lick One’, and it gives little away in many respects: it’s a semi-ambient collage of rumbling noise which gives way to tribal percussion, and it’s a confusion of collage that’s difficult to find a hold in. But that’s no criticism: it’s tedious knowing what you’re going got get for the entirety of an album from the first four bars. And this isn’t a ’bars’ album: it’s a hotch-potch sonic soup where rhythm really is not a dominant element, and at times isn’t even present at all.

‘Speeding Ground (Part 1)’ is an epic electronic exploration, stun lasers and gleeps and glops and trilling top-end drones shrill and challenging, like a Star wars scene – and then it goes hypno-prog, a thumping rhythm backing a screeding sheet of noise. And on it goes, thumping and thundering a relentless beat. At Nearly fourteen minutes, it’s a monster.

‘F.I.X.’ slams in some gnarly electro stylings, with undulating synths and insistent, fretful beats twitching away as a backdrop to howling vocals. It’s as if Gnaw Their Tongues and Cabaret Voltaire had bit in a head on collision. There’s no winner here, just a mangled, smoking mess. And as if to reinforce the point, ‘You Never Tell Me What You Think’ crashes in with a nagging bass groove and aa shedload of aggro, and battering away at a simple monotonous grind while the vocals are mixed low in a ton of reverb with the treble cranked to the max, it sound like early Revolting Cocks. Elsewhere, ‘But What I Want Is Not the Most Important Thing Right Now’ spins like an outtake from Pretty Hate Machine, all mangles electronics and gritty guitar.

Clocking in at over ten minutes, final track ‘Equations for a Falling Body’ is the album’s second monolithic piece, and it grinds and scrapes and sheers and saws it way through its duration. Within a couple of minutes, it’s built to a full-throttle racket of discordant electronic chaos, a tempest of noise.

That’s ultimately a reasonable description of Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III (their second album, which is largely guitar-free) overall: audacious, like Throbbing Gristle ironically calling their first (and second) release ‘best of’ and their second album First Annual Report.

By way of a ‘difficult’ second album, with Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III, the only difficulty is for the listener, who is faced with a harsh and challenging listen. But for all of its racket and unpredictable nature, the experience is rewarding, and even enjoyable in a perverse way.

AA

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Trowser Carrier – A Flower For My Hoonoo

Posted: 5 May 2023 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 5th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The liner notes to Trowser Carrier’s A Flower For My Hoonoo, originally released in some form or another back in 2013, say everything you need to know about Trowser Carrier – the duo consisting of Dave Procter (Voice) and Java Delle (Noise) – and their purpose.

‘Noise and vocal delivery tend to occasionally focus on edgelord taboo subjects. Trowser Carrier are not like that. After 10 years, Trowser Carrier once more ask the following question – why can’t noise be nice? Find the answers amongst harsh noise and insipid words.’

Procter in particular is no stranger to the noise scene, performing as Legion of Swine and Fibonacci Drone Organ, among others, not to mention countless collaborations. and he’s no doubt encountered more than his fare share of edgelords along the way. Like many makers of noise, he’s also a fan, but not incapable of critique and criticism, and not without humour. And as such, A Flower For My Hoonoo is something that you could describe as a humorous act of rebellion – and since noise and all of the serial killer and pervo shit that is often the subject matter of noise that’s designed to shock ‘normal’ society – this is a rebellion against rebellion, an attack on cack cliché, a parody of po-faced posturing.

The result is a collection of pieces that resemble Alan Bennett fronting Whitehouse, and the track titles largely speak for themselves: ‘a nice cup of tea’; ‘this ketchup is nice’; thanks for hoovering’; and ‘I remain you humble servant’ are all representative – and it’s perhaps as well the titles do speak for themselves since most of the actual words are, in true noise fashion, largely inaudible for blasts of intense pink, white, and brown noise layered up with distortion and overloading synth meldown. ‘sausages for supper’ extols the virtues of vegetarian sausages, with lines like ‘my body is a temple… and I don’t eat The Lord’s creatures.’

From the words it is possible to make out, ‘nice’ is probably the word which appears with the most frequency after ‘the’, and the bland lyrical niceness, a porridge-slick spill of pleasantry worse than saccharine sweetness in that it’s a world of magnolia in word form. It’s like being forced to sit in a corporate ‘wellbeing’ room plastered posters of motivational quotes, only instead of pictures of beaches and sunrises as the backdrop, there are images of crashed cars and slaughterhouses as the ear-shredding electronic racket blasts relentlessly. The fact that they’re short bursts – most around the minute mark – doesn’t make it any easier on the ear: if anything, it’s worse, as the stop-start nature of the sonic assault has the same effect as various methods of torture. The ear-shredding blasts are of the bubbling crackling fucked-up analogue kind.

The ‘mix’ versions of the tracks – which double up the sixteen tracks to thirty-two place the vocals up to the fore and back off the noise (which is different), meaning Dave’s sappy words are nauseatingly clear as he gushes gratitude for tine spent washing dishes together and courteous manners.

The contrast between the aural punishment and the fist-clenchingly pleasant banalities of the lyrics is amusing and frustrating in equal measure. Procter utters these grovelingly insipid lines in a blank monotone, often repeating a singe verse twice to fill the minute of noise as it froths and sloshes and foams and bubbles and drives the meter needles to the upper limits of the red.

It’s overtly silly, but does make serious points about the genre trappings and songs lyrics and musical forms more broadly.

AA

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