Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Jeugdbrand – 3 × hullo, hullo

Posted: 8 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza – LP Mar 24, DL Feb 28

Christopher Nosnibor

Most blurbs which accompany releases are either factual, unspectacular in their biographical detail, or tedious in their technicality. Some are vaguely amusing or otherwise entertaining, but the words accompanying Jeugdbrand’s 3 × hullo, hullo, courtesy of  Lieven Martens are outright deranged. I mean, there’s a narrative there, but it’s more of a slab of gonzo fiction than anything. And that’s before we get to the whole mole thing….

‘Well, it went like this: I open the glass door to the garden, the early morning coming to its midday end. That everyday anxiety that overcomes late risers from time to time kicks in. “Fuck, almost half a day wasted!” But abruptly, this sentence in my head gets overdubbed by the Queen’s English: “That shit mole, that blimey shit cunt mole!” I see the expat owner of our Airbnb punching his bare fists on his green lawn. A spotless lawn, but with here and there a few molehills. His grass, like a billiard cloth in a smoked bar, serves as a contrasting pathway to the black volcanic rocks at the back of the house. Behind these rocks, the ocean foams and growls. “Luv, get the poison! I wanna finish the bugger now and for good. Bloody hell!” I watch this scene with amusement, until suddenly, when the landlord notices me, he cleans up his act. “Ooh, these are funny little creatures, eh, these furry moles. Cheeky peng. Eh, fancy a cuppa?” The landlord’s head and belly are so ridiculously red that I can almost hear a lobster scream in a pot of boiling water. He looks like a walking can of Spam, its contents cooked by countless days under the Indian Ocean’s sun. The Indian Ocean, where sharks migrate between Africa and Australia. And where the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist bravely builds new islands of trash. Yes, the very true meaning of re-creation. Someone once told me that lobsters don’t really scream.’

I once caught some shrimps and prawns in a rockpool while on holiday in Devon. I was probably about twelve. We took them back to the cottage, and my dad cooked them up, tossing them into boiling water. I understand the sound of them being boiled alive was actually the air escaping their shells, but they did sound as if they were screaming, and I have referred to them as ‘squealy prawns’ ever since.

That I have digressed in response to an epic digression seems only fitting, and all of this seems appropriate when it comes to this album. 3 × hullo, hullo definitely falls into the category of ‘weird shit’. ‘Lonely, Sure, but It Is Getting Late and My Grandmother Is Calling’ flits between blasts of noise, stuttering percussion, jolting rumbles, whistling feedback, mumbling, grumbling, and demented yelling, yodelling and ululation. It’s a lot to pack in to less than six minutes, particularly when it’s six minutes spent scratching your head, looking around and wondering what the fuck is going on.

By the end of the album’s five tracks, I’m none the wiser. It makes me think of when I see a post on social media which is both seemingly cryptic and linguistically nonsensical, and yet it’s followed by a series of responses which bewilder not only in their equally coded babble, but in the realisation that people actually understand the initial post. It isn’t that I don’t get the way language evolves and how each generation develops its own spin, but… words. They mean what the mean, no? No. It seems I am wrong.

In fairness, I do understand the words and the narrative Jeugdbrand offer, it’s just that the narrative is crackers, and it’s fitting because the album is also crackers, a collage of craziness from beginning to end. ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow? I’m Talking About Now, Forget about It!’ starts with a ticking clock and then goes haywire, making for a head-spinning eleven and a half minutes of tribal percussion, drones, discordant church organs, surges of sound add rapid depletions, hollers, yells, grunts, and yelps. Elongated notes quaver, quiver, and fade in and out, while there are twangs of guitar and the occasional, incidental thump and scrape. ‘There’s No Word for Ambient in Dutch’ is dark, haunting – at least after its strange, murky start, reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle’s noisy, oddball experimentalism.

‘Motorcycle Oil on Canvas’ is eleven and a half minutes of spooky, spaced-out woozy, warping drones and oddity, again with snippets of chants, record scratching, clicks, pops, crackles, toots and parps and, amidst the rumble of engines and the snarl of prehistoric reptiles, one finds oneself completely adrift and perplexed. It ends with anguished wailing atop a tempest of noise. There is a lot going on. Much of it is hard to process.

I’m accustomed to all shades of avant-garde and experimentalism, and I’m even more accustomed to my friends defining my musical tastes as ‘weird’, but this is far and away some of the weirdest shit I’ve heard – period.

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Reinhold Friedl & Costis Drygianakis – ta amfótera en / two into one

Posted: 26 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Reinhold Friedl & Costis Drygianakis – ta amfótera en / two into one

zeitkratzer productions – 28th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Reinhold Friedl has been a significant contributor to the world of avant-garde music for a long time, not only as a leading explorer of the potentials of the prepared piano, as pioneered by John Cage, but in excavating the works of historical composers and reconfiguring those of more contemporary ones, leading the zeitkratzer ensemble through performances of Metal Machine Music and selected cuts from Whitehouse’s catalogue.

This particular collaboration coalesced during the pandemic, after which, as we learn, ‘Costis Drygianakis recorded Reinhold Friedl’s special piano sounds on a Blüthner grand piano with a bunch of extremely diverse microphones, ranging from a beautiful old Neumann U67 to a cheap tape cassette machine and even a Dictaphone. The resulting recordings have been classified, selected and processed at his home studio in Kritharia, Greece. No other sounds have been used.’

ta amfótera en is one continuous piece, just over an hour induration, and it’s a journey, to say the least. By ‘journey’, I mean torturous experience. It’s dark, punishing, pulverising, scraping, nightmarish. The first two minutes alone are a soundtrack to extreme horror – fear shaking amidst tremulous piano, heavy discord rumbling low and disconcerting to the point of spiking anxiety, after which there are protracted warped drones and rumblings which drag on, scraping and twisting, sonorous and uncomfortable. Amidst rolling, swirling, churning ambience and awkward, uncomfortable noise, random piano notes spike, seemingly at random. Gongs chime, crash, and clash.

When I was a child, the warping, discordant intro to ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran intrigued me. It created a palpable tension which affected me inexplicably at the age of nine. Perhaps this brief snippet of sound, dissonant, metallic, paved the way to my later obsession with musical otherness. The specific reason I reference this formative experience is that lengthy segments of two into one sound almost exactly like those opening bars of ‘Rio’ – scraping, discordant, a little like twisting metal.

two into one warps and hums, scrapes and drones, and occasionally plonks and thunks, the sounds rising from a random and seemingly unarranged twisting spill of sonic strangeness. There are chimes, and chsllenges.

There is much space – just as there are whistles and feedback – on two into one. The experience is, perhaps inevitably, disorientating, vaguely bewildering, even. There is something about this work which lifts you off the planet: to attempt to pin it to the particulars of contemporary rock music seems to be missing the point. Explore this release… and discover.

AA

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PIG – Wrecked (2024 Remaster)

Posted: 25 February 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Metropolis Records – 7th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

As Metropolis continue with their run of PIG reissues, the arrival of the remastered Wrecked reminds us of the run they had in the 90s. Having hardened up the sound showcased on debut album A Poke in the Eye… and follow-up Praise the Lard, and having toured with Nine Inch Nails in the Downward Spiral tour, PIG found themselves signed to Trent Reznor’s Nothing label for the release of Sinsation (1995), which melded the more experimental aspects of The Swining and Red Raw & Sore from a couple of years previous and cranked up the guitars – and the sleaze and depravity – to eleven. And after Sinsation came Wrecked, and having returned to Wax Trax!, in the US at least, the album was released first in Japan in ’96 and the US a year later with a substantially different tracklisting – and was an absolute bastard to get here in the UK in either form.

This version brings together the tracks which featured on both the original Japanese edition – which was criminally missing ‘No One Gets Out of Her Alive’ and ‘Contempt’ – and the American edition, which brought ‘The Book of Tequila’ and ‘Fuck Me I’m Sick’ in their place.

Wrecked very much represented PIG at their wildest, most wide-ranging, and arguably their heaviest. The title track drifts in on some mellow steel guitar country vibes and ambient chilling… and then gets gnarly with gritty industrial rigging and snarly vocals that are quintessential PIG. Raymond Watts may not have been in the best place during this period, but creatively… the music he was making was something else, and Wrecked stands up just as well now as it did on release. I’ve mentioned previously that PIG stand apart from their contemporaries, and while Watts was a touring member of Foetus in the late 80s and worked with JG Thirlwell when PIG was born, as well as being a member of KMFDM for a time, as much as those elements of aggrotech and industrial metal are core to the sound, Watts took it somewhere else entirely. Where? It’s hard to say: PIG’s work simply doesn’t conform to any genre forms or models – PIG just are PIG. While a couple of tracks had been previously released in different forms – the original versions of ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ and ‘Blades’ appeared on The Swining, released only in Japan in 1993 (prior to a 1999 US reissue) – it would be wrong to suggest that their inclusion on Wrecked suggested a lack of material, given just how radically different these versions are. The same is true of the reworked version of ‘My Sanctuary’, which appeared on Praise the Lard: expanded, more grandiose, more everything, the ‘Spent Sperm Mix’ taking the track to preposterous heights while audaciously combining industrial, techno, and gospel with orchestral strikes galore.

Since the US and Japanese editions included various alternative mixes, it would have been nice to see this version feature all sixteen tracks featured on the 2017 tour edition, which is arguably the definitive edition. But what we learn here is that you can’t have everything, and this edition at least has the majority of the prime cuts. Sequentially, it follows the Japanese edition, with the tracks which featured on the US release at the end.

The drumming on this album is brutal, choppy, the guitars cutty, stuttering, heavily distorted, but with a bright, clear, digital crispness that really slice hard. Watts growls, snarls and sneers, dark and salacious, and everything about Wrecked is harsh and ugly. ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ is a full-throttle beast of a track, with a sample-laden breakdown in the mid-section, with snippets of reports on American obesity and the like (in place of the sped-up snippet of ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ on the original), and it’s pretty dark and unforgiving.

‘Blades’ is one of the greatest tracks ever recorded by PIG or anyone – it’s one of those songs that just does something to you. The ‘Slash Mix’ on here may not be the best version – for my money, I prefer the more orchestral original, but this rendition is dense and girthy, and fits with the sound of Wrecked. Then there’s ‘Save Me’, the album’s slowie, and so, so powerful. It takes ‘anthemic’ in a whole new direction.

Watts has always made music with a boldly theatrical approach to the industrial template – and Wrecked really turns up the dial on everything – density, volume, aggression, intensity, and this expanded reissue is an essential document in the broader industrial oeuvre. It’s also an outstanding album in its own right.

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Haswell & Hecker – UPIC Diffusion Session #23

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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D L F – Korset i Röjden

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

60°33’48.6"N 12°39’15.6"E

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

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

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

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

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

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The Legendary Pink Dots – So Lonely in Heaven

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA

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ILINX – Flipperen

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA

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Charlemagne Palestine & Seppe Gebruers – Beyondddddd The Notessssss

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jamie Lee – Circuits From Soft Frequencies

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Watch: ‘Blood Money’ by The Legendary Pink Dots

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

SO LONELY IN HEAVEN – THE CREATION

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

SO LONELY IN HEAVEN – THE MESSAGE

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

Check ‘Blood Money’ here:

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THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS | photo: Michael McGrath

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