Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Gintas K – Jingles With Bells

Posted: 14 November 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Birdfriend – 2nd September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K is at it again! Last year I was compelled to break my vow not to listen to, or write a word about any Christmas-themed releases on account of his album, Christmas Till the End, released on December 25th, and now, just when I’m getting into full foaming at the mouth mode over how there’s Christmas stuff everywhere since the week before Halloween, I discover he dropped an album bearing a title with overly festive connotations, which was, in fact, released at the start of September – and which was recorded in July!

Jingles With Bells was, like a number of other works, recorded live, using computer, midi keyboard, and controller.

Despite the album title being in English, and offering something of a play on words with jingles suggesting advertisements as well as festive chimes, the track titles are in K’s native Lithianian, and I’m not entirely sure I trust Google translate when it tells me that ‘irgi dugnai auksti ir aopacia garsai gerai visai’ is ‘the bottoms are also high and the background sounds are quite good’ – although it is a fair description of the six-and-a-half-minute opener. It begins with sparse drips and drops echoing as if in a giant cave, before Kraptavičius introduces his trademark flickering electrostatic glitches and whirs. The layers build as crunches and crackles clamour into a frenzy of fucked-up robotics.

Stammering, fractured beats collide and disperse in all directions, a wheezing, groaning, creaking array of electronic simulations and rapidfire thumps like hammers and nail guns, jazz percussion and despite the complete absence of any actual percussion, Jingles With Bells is marked by a complete absence of any actual beats, instead being driven by clattering short sounds that resemble beats and even trick the ear and mind with their (ar)rhythmic explosions. The last thirty seconds of the seven-minute ‘is to pacio tesinys geras’ (which may or may not translate as therefore the continuation is good’ is marked by silence, and it’s a welcome reprieve from the blindingly busy blitzkrieg blast.

‘istisinis is to pacio’ is a snarling drilling grind of bass, but also introduces the first jangling treble that might pass at a distance as a jingle, but it more resembles a dentist’s drill than sleigh, and the whole experience is less jingle and more nerve-jangling and uncomfortable.

Echoic droplets and sounds reminiscent of jangling jamjars trickle through the album, and the ten-minute monster that is ‘varpeliai noiz bugn bosas neblogai’ (‘bells noiz bugn boss not bad’ – yeah… nah) begins with what sounds like a bath being run down the plug and a crackling blast of blocks of distortion against – finally – chimes. But against a creaking croaking, cracking low end like the bow of a wooden ship breaking against rocks in a storm, those melodic tinkles soon build to forge an oppressive, head-compressing sonic torture; it’s simply all too much. But too much is never enough, and as such, it all adds up to another album that bears all of Gintas K’s quite unique hallmarks forged from some mangled laptop machinations, manipulated in real time.

AA

cover

Let Spin – Thick As Thieves

Posted: 7 November 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Efpi Records – 18th November 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Time flies when… life. And especially when a pandemic and a series of lockdowns rob you of two tears of doing anything. And so it is that Let Spin are marking the ten-year anniversary of their fourth album, Thick As Thieves.

The band are something of a supergroup: Formed in 2012, Let Spin feature four highly acclaimed musicians: Ruth Goller (Melt Yourself Down, Vula Viel), Chris Williams (Led Bib, Sarathy Korwar), Finlay Panter (Beats & Pieces Big Band, Sound 8 Orchestra), and Moss Freed (Union Division, Spike Orchestra), and Thick As Thieves features ten segued tracks of what they describe as ‘adventurous post-rock, experimental jazz’.

Thick As Thieves may be a cliché, but the music it contains is anything but. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Much as it subscribes to aspects of both jazz and post-rock, it’s an exploratory instrumental set that doesn’t really conform to any specific genre trappings, instead borrowing from them in order to form a unique hybrid.

While it’s largely driven by some crunched-up, noodling guitar work, Thick As Thieves very much mines an overtly jazz theme, and while it starts out quite gentle and doodly, on the third track, ‘Red’ it takes a hard lurch into altogether nor challenging terrain, and not just because it gets louder and more percussive: it’s altogether more jarring, the tempos and signatures tumbling into stop/start confusion before the brass ruptures into a cacophonic maelstrom.

‘Broken, I Told You!’ brings a chubby, strolling bassline that’s got some serous groove in a stuttering sort of a way and packs in some deft runs that weave in and out of the wild woodwind and jittery guitar work that’s disorientating and discombobulating. It’s pretty much ok that this feels a bit weird and woozy: it needs to be. ‘North Sea Swim’ takes things down a way and meanders along before swerving into ‘’Mixed Messages’. ‘Bead’ is perhaps the most overtly post-rock / jazz hybrid work, an expansive succession of crescendos with a soaring sax undulating into waves of stratospheric reverb. Closer ‘Liminality’ is almost nine minutes long, and is a space-rock jazz monster that’s absolutely dizzying.

This is one of those albums that not only feels like its album status is essential – you don’t seek out or skip to particular tracks, but experience it as a whole – but there’s a keen sense it would lend itself nicely to being performed live, in its entirety. It flows from end to end, with judiciously-placed peaks and troughs. The ten songs may be marked out individually, but this really feels like a single continuous piece segmented out into ten slices, and it’s a listening journey. At times intrepid, at times curious, it’s got a lot going on, often all at once. Brace yourself!

AA

LS03 Thick As Thieves FRONT

Eamon the Destroyer – A Small Blue Car – Re-Made / Remodelled

Posted: 17 October 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Bearsuit Records – 21st October 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

To recap on a long and often retold tale of mine: I love weird shit, but I’m not quite so mad keen on remixes – unless they’re inventive and interesting. So what to make of a remix album of Eamon the Destroyer’s A Small Blue Car?

When I reviewed the album on its release back in November of last year – which barely feels like three months ago, let Alone the best part of a year – I was perhaps ambiguous in my appreciation, describing it as ‘downbeat’, gloomy’, and ‘soporific’. It is very much all of these things, but these are reasons to appreciate this understated collection of songs, with their lo-fi bedroom production style being integral to the Eamon the Destroyer listening experience as he rasps away darkly to aa droning backdrop in a crackle of distortion

One frequent niggle with remix sets is the repetition, but here, only a handful of tracks appear twice, with three interpretations of ‘My Drive’, which is fair enough having been the lead single, and dispersed among sixteen tracks in total, it doesn’t feel like overkill.

The reimaginations of the original songs certainly capture their spirit and essence, from the stop/start glitchy gloopiness of the wandering Like this Parade remix of ‘Nothing Like Anything’ to the longer, more abstract reworkings, like the six-and-a-half-minute festival or reverb and cavernous slow-mo, downturned echo that is Société Cantine remix of ‘Tomahjawk Den’ that’s as experimental as you like and quite disturbing in places, to Michael Valentine West’s seven minute spin on ‘My Drive’, A Small Blue Car – Re-Made / Remodelled is the definition of eclecticism. There’s low-level pulsating electronica and swerves into electronic chamber pop, against ambient electro and scraping industrial noise.

Yponeko brings swirling synths and grating distortion together in a drowning space-rock drift, while MVW deconstructs ‘My Drive’ to a junkyard of spare parts that’s somehow elegant and delicate as well as a wheezing, droning hum that wheezes and groans.

There are no obvious rehashings here, no lazy no-effort remixes that do the usual thing of whacking a booming beat behind the original. In fact, there are absolutely no stonking beats, techno or disco remixes here: these are all most sensitive to the original intent. Sometimes there are beats – as on the thrumming Ememe remix of ‘Avalanche’, but it’s a stuttering wall of drilling noise, ploughing into a mess of glitching loops, a mangled cut-up collage of sound – and often there are not: The Moth Poet’s take on ‘Slow Motion Fade’ is nightmarishly dark, a whirling churn of sound, which drifts into sepulchral opera at the end

Across the course of the album, there’s a lot of cut-and-paste splicing galore, resulting in an ever-shifting sonic collage, and John 3:16 brings gloomy, stark industrial to ‘Humanity id Coming’. House of Tapes turn ‘My Drive’ into a throbbing grunge beast, with additional helium. It’s hard to imagine anything further removed from the original, and that includes Halai’s twisted tribal techno take on the same song.

Alongside one another, it should all amount to a horrible mess, but is, in fact, an absolute triumph, because this is exactly how it should be: Eamon the Destroyer’s original work was a kaleidoscope of darkly disorientating oddity, and this revisitation is more of the same, only different. It’s unlikely to land any spins in nightclubs across the land, and even less likely to find any of the tracks landing Radio 1 playlisting, and it’s even unlikely to win many new fans – but then again, Eamon’s acquired some admirably influential fans, and moreover, that’s not really the ambition for any artist releasing work through Bearsuit. And it’s so refreshing when so much emphasis is placed on not just sakes, but airplay, streams on Spotify, and likes and followers on various platforms, that there are still those who value artistic freedom and exploration above all else.

A Small Blue Car – Re-Made / Remodelled is a source of pleasure, not only because it’s genuinely interesting, but simply because it exists.

AA

a0817555736_10

Watch: ‘Quaternions’ by Tenchpress

Posted: 31 August 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Tenchpress’ bio reads ‘6-string guitar, 12-string guitar, keys (for doors, not the instrument), keys (the instrument, not for doors), concertina, trumpet, a friend’s electric bass, sturm, und drang, 1x LA Galaxy-branded drum stick, free soft synths, A Very Old Snare Drum.’ Which ultimately translates as rather wonky weird shit, judging by their forthcoming album, Tombmagic, released through Cruel Nature in September 5th.

As a taster, they’ve released a video for the track ‘Quaternions’, which bears the distinctive emerging style of Jason Kester.

Check it here:

AA

a2641475574_10

Oscar Quick – Weaponised Soup

Posted: 28 August 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

24th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

There are certain popular adages which are, frankly, and demonstrably, bollocks. The first is ‘if you can’t do, teach’. Admittedly, the state off education here in Britain means that academics at all levels are forced to teach outside their field with the scantest of time to prepare. I discovered this first-hand while working on a PhD thesis on William Burroughs and postmodernism and being tossed a semester’s teaching on Elizabethan literature. But moreover, most teachers wo get to teach in their specialist areas clearly can ‘do’ having attained a certain level of qualification. Can teachers of musical instruments also not ‘do’? Can diving instructors not drive?

And then there’s the popular notion that music reviewers are failed musicians. Perhaps the people who cast this aspersion should speak to Neil Tennant or more pertinently John Robb, Jim Irvin, and Sally Still. I might not point them in the direction of my own ongoing musical activities so much, but would highlight Oscar Quick, the man behind the ‘Needs More Cowbell’ site, where he posts considered reviews of new releases, who has recently turned in a handful of live shows and delivered the album Weaponised Soup.

In his bio, Quick explains how Weaponised Soup ‘features influences from disco, hip hop, rave and progressive rock, while remaining true to its core 80’s post punk sound. Dealing with Oscar’s experiences with insomnia, this record is a stream of consciousness during those many long nights, covering the extreme highs and destructive lows of staying awake for days at a time.’

As a lifelong insomniac, it’s relatable: the output happens because how else do you distract a fevered, restless brain that won’t let you rest? As you may guess, it’s not only a stylistic melting-pot, but also very much an album that jumps all over the place in a way which conveys the mania and erratic impulses that arise from protracted sleeplessness.

Weaponised Soup Album Cover

Opener ‘I Should Sleep’ sounds like The Pixies, only staggering weary with fatigue and mumbling, slurred, and fugue-like. But if you’re looking for reference points, look no further than the title of ‘Assorted Psycho Candy’, which is, unexpectedly, a remarkably atmospheric, downtempo trip-hop / post-rock crossover that finds Quick picking through a medley off musings. ‘Over the Garden Wall’ is a contemplative wash of Cure-esque synths and packs more than its necessary share of cowbell.

Some songs are more successful than others: ‘Chrysanthemums’ is a weird, almost baggy slice of dance that twitches with paranoia and tension and switches into frenetic territory around the mid-point, but the sub-Goldie Lookin’ Chain white rapping takes some absorption., and the New Order-esque ‘Respect for Dinner Ladies’ brings more Sprechgesang and even straight spoken vocals that likely sit in the Yard Act bracket, and in its simmering tension and up-front awkwardness, by accident or design, Weaponised Soup seems to capture the post-pandemic zeitgeist.

Something clearly changed during lockdown: artists are now talking openly about mental challenges and neurodiversity, and embracing these experiences creatively, and this is reflected in a new wave of music that refuses to be bound by genre, as Andre Rikichi’s wonderfully weird exploratory stylistic explosion on which I wrote only yesterday exemplifies.

As we continue to crawl from under the psychological rubble of the pandemic and successive lockdowns, into a new world that’s not brave, but fearful, tremulous, and ultimately fucked-up and swinging ever further to the right, these are truly terrible times – but as history shows, terrible times tend to spur the creation of great music. With Weaponised Soup, Oscar Quick forges a small but unique space in that fucked-up world, and it’s very much a good thing.

Derby-Uni-UGG-038

Andrei Rikichi – Caged Birds Think Flying is a Sickness

Posted: 28 August 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
2

Bearsuit Records – 31st August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

I may have mentioned it before, but I always get a buzz when I see a jiffy marked with an Edinburgh post stamp land on my doormat mat and I realise it’s the latest offering from Bearsuit records. Because while whatever music it contains is assured to be leftfield and at least a six on the weirdness spectrum, I never really know what to expect. That lack of predictability is genuinely exciting. Labels – especially micro labels which cater to a super-niche audience tend to very much know their market, and while that’s clearly true of Bearsuit, they’re willing to test their base’s boundaries in ways many others don’t dare.

Andrei Rikichi’s Caged Birds Think Flying is a Sickness is most definitely an album that belongs on Bearsuit. It doesn’t know what it is, because it’s everything all at once: glitchy beats, bubbling electronica, frothy screeds of analogue extranea, mangled samples and twisted loops and all kinds of noise. As the majority of the pieces – all instrumental – are less than a couple of minutes long, none of them has time to settle or present any sense of a structure: these are fragmentary experimental pieces that conjure fleeting images and flashbacks, real or imagined.

‘They Don’t See the Maelstrom’ is a blast of orchestral bombast and fucked-up fractured noise that calls to mind JG Thirlwell’s more cinematic works, and the same is true of the bombastic ‘This is Where it Started’, a riot of rumbling thunder and eye-poppingly audacious orchestral strikes. Its counterpart and companion piece, ‘This is Where it Ends’ which closes the album is expensive and cinematic, and also strange in its operatic leanings – whether or not it’s a human voice is simply a manipulation is immaterial at a time when AI—generated art is quite simply all over, and you begin to wonder just how possible is it to distinguish reality from that which has been generated, created artificially.

Meanwhile ‘At Home I Hammer Ceramic Golfing Dogs’ is overtly strange, a kind of proto-industrial collage piece. ‘What Happened to Whitey Wallace’ is a brief blast of churning cement-mixer noise that churns at both the gut and the cerebellum. Listening, you feel dazed, and disorientated, unsettled in the stomach and bewildered in the brain. There is simply so much going on, keeping up to speed with it all is difficult. That’s no criticism: the audience should never dictate the art, and it’s not for the artist to dumb things down to the listeners’ pace, but for the listener to catch up, absorb, and assimilate.

‘Player Name: The Syracuse Apostle’ slings together some ominous atmospherics, a swampy dance beat and some off-kilter eastern vibes for maximum bewilderment, and you wonder what this record will throw at you next.

In many respects, it feels like a contemporary take on the audio cut-up experiments conducted by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the late 50s and early 60s, and the titles only seem to further correspond with this apparent assimilation of thee random. I suppose in an extension of that embracing of extranea, the album also continues the work of those early adopters of sampling and tape looping from that incredibly fertile and exciting period from the late 70s to the mid-80s as exemplified by the work of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Test Dept, Foetus. These artists broke boundaries with the realisation that all sound is material, and that music is in the ear of the beholder. This strain of postmodernism / avant-gardism also follows the thread of Surrealism, where we’re tasked with facing the strange and reconciling the outer strange with the far stranger within. Caged Birds Think Flying is a Sickness is an album of ideas, a pulsating riot of different concepts and, by design in its inspiration of different groups and ideas, it becomes something for the listener to unravel, to interpret, to project meaning upon.

Caged Birds Think Flying is a Sickness leaves you feeling addled and in a spin. It’s uncanny because it’s familiar, but it isn’t, as the different elements and layers intersect. It’s the sonic representation of the way in which life and perception differ as they collide.

AA

a3019257531_10

gintas k – Mountains, runlets, caves & cascades

Posted: 21 August 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

gk. rec. – 13th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Since taking control of his own release schedule – in addition to various releases via various labels – Gintas K’s output has shifted from rivulets to cascades, with this nature-themed album being just one among countless releases, live performances, exhibitions. soundtrack and compilation appearances so far this year, and, not least of all, Lėti in May, released on venerable experimental label Crónica.

There’s little explanation behind Mountains, runlets, caves & cascades, beyond a selection of quotes from HP Lovecraft and the detail that the album’s six pieces were ‘played, recorded live, at once without any overdub; using computer, midi keyboard & controller’ in 2020, and one suspects Gintas has a hard drive bursting with such recordings just waiting to be edited and mastered to form unified documents of his tireless output.

The first five pieces form the larger work that sits under the album’s overarching title, numbered one to five. They’re sparse, minimal, echo-heavy, like wandering around in a vast cavern while droplets fall into the subterranean lake that occupies the bottom, and who knows how deep it may be, how many tunnels are filled with millions of gallons of water that have run down through the ground and into this naturally-carved warren of rock-lined corridors beneath the ground.

In places, barely perceptible glimmers of sound, like bat sonar, jangle in the upper reaches of the audio spectrum. I’m reminded of the cat repellent device in my back yard, and I wonder if to some, these passages would actually appear as silence – or if for others, like my ten-year-old daughter, they would find the pitch unbearable and have to run from the room covering their ears. Quiet gurgles and trickles are the primary sounds on ‘Mountains, runlets, caves & cascades #3’ and I find myself feeling altogether calmer, picturing myself in a pine woodland with steep banks. I picture in my mind’s eye local scenery like Aysgarth Falls and Ingleton Falls and find myself at ease – but this being Gintas K, there’s disruption afoot, and blips and squelches zap in seemingly at random to remind us that this is digital art, and the fourteen-minute ‘#4’ marks the full transition into digital froth and sluices of laptop-generated foam.

And so it trickles into ‘#5’ which brings more bleeps and blips and jangling and some high-pitched rattling that for some reason makes me think of seeing footage of milk bottling plants in the 80s – back when milk came in glass bottles, and I trip on this trajectory of nostalgic reverie until the arrival oof the unsettling final track, the eight-minute ‘eastern bells’ that’s a slowed-down yawn of sound, metallic reverberations ringing out into the silence, echoing in the dark emptiness in ebbs and flows, like a conglomeration of sounds, drifting in a breeze.

Mountains, runlets, caves & cascades is a supremely abstract work, and while it’s not a huge departure for Gintas K, it does represent one of his softer, gentler, sparser and less frenetic works. It’s by no means an album to mediate to. But it is overall fairly sedate, and it not only allows, but encourages a certain quiet reflection.

AA

a3599404171_10

Darkroom – Fallout 4

Posted: 20 August 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Expert Sleepers – 25th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Fallout 4 is, as the title suggests, the fourth album in Darkroom’s Fallout trilogy.

Darkroom have been going for more than twenty years now, and have built up an extensive catalogue centred around fluid ambient work, which they’re keen to point out ‘stretches the definition of the genre to its limits in many directions: from quiet, introspective and naturalistic through celestial and melodic to intense, abrasive and synthetic.’

In presenting three longform compositions, Fallout 4 affords the collective to fully explore all of these elements.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Darkroom’s music has always been played not programmed, with a focus on human interaction and capturing the magic of live performance’, and the first two pieces hark back to the last performance of their 2012 tour. ‘It’s Clear from the Air’ is hypnotic, rippling, mesmerising, low, undulating drones providing a subtle low end to the textured interweaving synths that overlay subtle yet complex rhythms.

It bleeds into the twenty-five minute ‘Qaanaak (Parts 1 & 2)’ and immediately the tone is darker, denser, with a grumbling low and needling pulsations that create tension within the suffocatingly thick, beatless smoggy atmosphere. You find yourself lost, in suspension, somewhat bewildered as the tones twist and change. Electronic flares whip and lash as stuttering beats emerge through the relentlessly nagging pulsations, and continue to shift and mutate to a broiling, bubbling larva as booming bass tones surge and swell. The rhythm grows in urgency, but it’s muffled, constrained, which heightens the experience of a sense of airlessness and entrapment and as much as the throbbing oscillations are indebted to Can and Tangerine Dream, their abrasive edge hints at the uneasy, wheezing synth grind of Suicide.

The third piece, ‘Tuesday’s Ghost’ is perhaps the most conventionally ambient’ of the three, and is certainly the most overtly ‘background’ as is swims and floats and chimes along fuzzy lines of slow decay and loose, vague forms that have no shape, rise and fall. There is a discreet linearity to it, as it gradually, and subtly builds in depth and density, and it’s here that it become clear just how essential that human element is to Darkroom’s work – that sense of musicians bouncing off one another and understanding one another through intuition. There is no substitute for it, and you simply can’t programme the dynamics of form. It’s this intuitive, natural fluidity that breathes life into the compositions, and in turn, it’s this sense of life that the listener connects to and engages with. Fallout 4 may be ambient at heart or by genre… but it’s also far beyond the frontier of ambient.

AA

a2945227307_10

nihiti – Sustained

Posted: 31 July 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , ,
0

Lo Bit Landscapes – 7th July 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Life has felt somewhat relentless of late. I do mean this on a personal level, although this is perhaps as much a result off external factors as anything else. The pandemic turned me into an addict. An addict of 24/7 steaming news, of doomscrolling, of relentless checking of social media. When things are constantly happening constantly evolving, it’s easy to find yourself dragged into the whirlwind, and ultimately to depend on the maelstrom. Silence becomes scary. You’re overwhelmed by the volume of emails, texts, FaceBook messages and WhatsApps and find yourself begging for them to stop, but when they do, you panic that something is wrong, that there’s something more sinister afoot, something isn’t working, or that perhaps you’ve died and haven’t realised.

Lately, there’s been a tidal wave of music that’s been created as a reaction to life in lockdown, to social tension, to the mental health pressures of contemporary living. And I’ve been lapping it up, I’ve been loving it. Because people are bringing issues out into the open, and speaking in their own voice about the difficulties we’ve all been facing, relaying those relatable traumas. But I’ve started to feel more like a silent counsellor rather than a music critic. It’s a truism that a problem shared is a problem halved, unless you’re the recipient of all of the sharing. Sometimes, you need a break. Sometimes, you need to let all the tension go, and to simply float.

Nihiti’s Sustained is the perfect antidote to all the tension. It consists of three slow-moving ambient works, extensive in their duration. The shortest, ‘Tetrachrome’ is almost ten minutes long, and it opens with the immense, twenty-one-and-a-half-minute soft soundscape of ‘Stellar Observer’. I sit back by candlelight and close my eyes, and feel my jaw slowly unclench, and my shoulder blades gradually begin to loosen. It’s soporific, deep ambience that washes over you and with washing waves of sound and soft, elongated mollifies drones that drift like vapour. It isn’t without turbulence, but said distortion and treble waves crash a way in the distance and charge against a backdrop of slow undulations. The broad, textured sounds are indeed sustained, for what feels like eternities, and the yawn that swells in my jaws is one of relaxation rather than boredom.

There are glitches and switches in ‘If the Colour’ that disturb the flow, and you almost feel yourself tripping momentarily, like a sleep twitch, but things soon right themselves again, and you resume your calmness, despite scratchy samples and moments of dissonance, because in the overall sensory experience, Sustained is slow and gentle.

Breathe it in, absorb the vapours. Ignore the distant voices as they whisper and echo, and assume they mean no harm, despite the darkening sky toward the end. Let it simply hang in the air: sit back, turn down the lights, and tune in to your inner voice instead of the inaudible mutters. Trust your instruct. Trust the space. Absorb the calm.

AA

a0264725976_10

E-volutionary Echoes: Kevin Thorne / We Be Echo interviewed by John Wisniewski

Posted: 28 July 2022 in Interviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

On leaving the seminal is supremely underground Third Door From The Left in 1981, which emerged from the early Industrial scene as represented by Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, Canadian Kevin Thorne began recording as We Be Echo, before halting abruptly in the mid-80s. After some time out, and some time spent working as LivingWithanAngel, Thorne resurrected We Be Echo, since when there’s been no looking back.

The pandemic proved to be a fertile time for Thorne, knocking out three albums and an EP in 2021. 2022 got off to a strong start with E-volution. With another album in the pipeline, John Wisniewski was fortunate to get some time to pitch some questions to Kevin Thorne about his remarkable recent output and reflect on his extensive catalogue and 40+ year career.

JW: What is it like recording your latest We Be Echo 2022 release, No Truth, No Lie? You have been recording for about 40 years now. What has kept you going?

KT: I sold off all my gear in England (in the early 90’s I believe, as my last release was ‘I Dance In Circles’ on LiveEvil’s A Conclusion Of Unrestrained Philosophy compilation CD in 1989), and stopped doing anything musically. It was a dark time for me. In 1998 I moved to Canada, and once settled I started experimenting with music again, this time digitally. It wasn’t until the pandemic started and I bought a bass guitar that I did so in earnest. Music flowed out of me almost faster than I could get it recorded. I released Darkness Is Home, The Misanthrope and Isolation in 2021, followed by E-volution in 2022. I’m over halfway through my second album this year, No Truth, No Lie, which has a somewhat different feel to it than the previous releases, and I’m immensely proud of the tracks on it so far. I have several other tracks recorded and finished that I feel are good but just don’t make the cut for this album.

I record because I enjoy it. Especially this past two years, when it’s been my therapy. Since Gen dropped her body, it’s also been my way to keep communication open. When a track comes together particularly well I feel Gen’s presence. I still get a thrill producing a song that I love, and I will continue recording until that stops.

After I release a new album I tend to go through a mini depression. Because I love the album so much, and out so much into it, when I release it into the world and it gets virtually no response, it is upsetting. But after a couple of weeks, I get the urge to record again.

Any trends that you have seen come and go?

I’m not a trend watcher.

Where do you find inspiration to compose?

I think that the way I create music is quite unusual in that I don’t know where the song will take me, I have almost no control in the matter. It evolves from a bass and drum beginning (occasionally guitar and drum), then goes where it wants to, it feels like it has almost nothing to do with me. If I try to create something in a particular way, it generally moves itself the way it wants to. I still work full time, so I mostly record on weekends. I get up around 8am, go grab breakfast then relax for a bit and if I feel like it I go into the studio and record. Often nothing happens, occasionally a track comes together really fast. Sometimes it takes a few listens before I can appreciate what it could become. I usually record drums/bass (often several tracks of bass), then listen to that and wait for the lyrics to arrive… sometimes that’s easy and sometimes not. Then I flesh it out with more guitar or bass. I record the vocals in the basement when I’m alone (I’m still stupidly shy about singing), Listening to the track on an old iPhone with headphones while using my iPhone to record. On two of the songs on the upcoming album I started with lyric thoughts and recorded using them – the lyrics and vocals were recorded in one take with no editing, giving it a more “live” feel.

Any favorite electronic and industrial music artists?

Major Influences are TG, PTV, Cabs, but I listen to a lot of different kinds of music. Not much electronic or industrial these days though.

image3

Image provided by artist

You worked with Raye Coluori in your early days. What was that like?

Raye was great to create with, and we still chat and record on occasion. I was sick with Covid when he was in Toronto recently so missed out on a physical catch-up which was upsetting.

Recording with TDFTL was fun, our music was created in a similar way to we be echo, we started with drum and bass (me), and Raye (guitar or keyboard) and often some pre-recorded speech, then built it up from there. We recorded everything in case something worked. I think Raye still has the rehearsal tapes. I have one somewhere. His confidence really helped me boost mine. We played two binaurally recorded gigs, that we released on tape. For one track on our “Face The Firing Squad” cassette, we used a drum track sent to me by Mal (Cabs), and made good use of the Roland Chorus Space Echo I bought from TG’s Chris Carter. I still feel this album stands up, even after 40 years!

We have recorded and released one track together since I moved to Canada, and hope to do more, always seems I’m busy when he’s not and vice versa.

Later you recorded Ceva Evi. What was that experience like?

Recording on my own meant I could record what I wanted when I wanted which was very freeing. I loved the idea of using Gen’s Tibetan Thighbone trumpet on a track but couldn’t get it organized for the regular edition release, however Dave Farmer (iham) sorted it out for the special edition and he and Gen both play on the track ‘Inside Life’s Wire’.

Any future plans and projects?

I recorded a track with Iham that he will be releasing as a 12” single, and we are working on a new track now. The music we record leans more toward industrial than mine does.

I just finished a collab as Dream Duchess with Marcy Angeles that’s available on her bandcamp. I also sent out bass and drum stems of a track to a few people to see what they would do with it and have had some pretty amazing responses, but not enough to make it a release yet.

I’m also working, when time permits, on another album of old music (“Forgotten Beats”) that hasn’t seen a release yet, or was released in a very obscure manner originally.

Is there anyone that you would really like to collaborate with?

I’m open to collabs. There are many people it would be an honour to work with.

AA

a1280685993_10

Older Entries
Newer Entries