Posts Tagged ‘Fern’

Fern – Error

Posted: 12 July 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Drek Skivor – 5th July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a little over a year since we last heard from Fern. Previous release, Deformed, was, as I put it, ‘appropriately titled’ and ‘some mangled shit.’ Such is Fern’s approach to music-making, it would seem, seeing damage as potential, an opening, a possibility. It may be a perverse pleasure, but it can be a pleasure nonetheless, to hark at the sound of breakage and malfunction. Perhaps because it’s noise which possesses an honesty that’s rare in so many musical recordings, where the more common ambition is to create the best, most polished, or otherwise superior version of something, be it a song in the conventional sense, or a live recording of something perhaps less conventional. It’s a rational and valid objective, but the reason I suggest that the sound of something broken is honest is because it feels rather truer to life’s lived experience.

How many obstacles must one surmount to achieve that polished definitive version? Moreover, how many obstacles must one surmount to simply get through the days? Life has a habit of throwing shit at you. Just when you think you’re having a good day, an ok week, something breaks – and it nearly always costs money. Your laptop dies, your phone screen cracks or your charger cable breaks. The shower starts leaking or there’s a power cut. Some days – and weeks, and months – it simply feels like everything is against you. Something goes awry at every turn. Life, then, is imperfect, an endless succession of glitches and breakages, against a backdrop of noise and distortion and shouting and frustration and confusion and just a whole load of shit in general.

I arrive at Error having recently had a couple of posts removed by Facebook having been flagged by their bots as ‘spam’ due to my attempts to artificially gain likes by tagging people. Those people specifically being the Aural Aggravation page, the band, and their PR and / or label. Somehow, this is spammier than sponsored links to shit I have no interest in that repeatedly crop up every time I return to the site and spammier than the relentless porn links and so on posted in groups. And so I arrive at Errors frustrated, antagonised, feeling that systems are against me, and feeling – in some way – persecuted, as if this is some deliberate obstruction to my efforts to promote obscure music. Music like this.

‘Is this music the result of a degaussing error? Or is it a long gone and forgotten tape shaped and distorted by time and a chewing cassette deck, still here for us to experience……’ This is the way the release is famed on Bandcamp. And I find that Errors isn’t as messed up as all that. It’s not exactly easy listening, but…

The first track, ‘slip ‘n’ slide’ is a fairly standard work of glitchy minimal electronica: a bit dark, a bit stark, bit trip-hop. ‘abrupt morning’ hums and crackles, and something about the production renders everything muffled, distant, in the way The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds feels simultaneously claustrophobic and distant. It is not a comfortable sensation. It is a work of sonic wizardry, to create a sound which stands at such polarity.

‘mellow dream’ is a more conventional ambient work, a buffeting sonic cloud carried by the wind, although there are some less mellow moments where darkness enters the equation and unsettling undercurrents rumble disquietingly.

‘ignite interlude’ goes all-out on deep bass hip-hop, but sounds like listening to a Wu-Tang side-project from the pavement as it plays from a car pulled up at traffic lights with the windows up, before ‘c’mon intro’ hits a slamming industrial dance seam – but again, it sounds as if it’s bleeding through the wall from next door. The album takes a solid turn towards the dancefloor in its second half, although the insistently percussive ‘bits and pieces’ is more reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle. ‘generative form’ feels like something of a collapse into a formlessness defined only by a looping repetition, emanating a kind of fatigue that paves the way for the suffocating collage of loops and electronica of ‘lambs’ – where they sound as if they’re being tortured and strangled. It’s a scrambled melange of sounds collaged from wherever, which brings the album to a suitably dark and unsettling conclusion.

I’m not quite sure what I’ve heard here, or whether I like it or not, but that, I feel, is the desired effect – and it’s certainly a desirable one.

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Fern – Deformed

Posted: 16 March 2023 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 3rd March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Fern’s Deformed is appropriately titled: this some mangled shit. From the slow, deliberate, rolling grooves that boom and bow through snarled up noise, while against it, crisp, crunching beats thump and stutter, Fern keeps things interesting and innovative, but more than anything, keeps it uncomfortable.

Deformed sits within that bracket of dark ambient that’s deeply dark, but not entirely ambient, and doesn’t for a second let you settle into it, instead twisting and squirming awkwardly, refusing to solidify or confirm to any one fork of style.

‘Intro’, the minute-long splurge of wibbly dissonance set the scene nicely for the following twenty-five minutes of oddball electronica. The liner notes offer ‘Respect to Portishead, aphex twin, faster katt and Mindacid for inspiration (samples)’.

The majority of the album’s ten tracks are brief sonic snippets, most being well under three minutes in duration, and in many respects, Deformed feels more like a palette sampler than a fully realised work – although that is by no means a failing, as it gives the album an immediacy that further evolution would likely dilute.

It’s four tracks in that Deformed really starts to take (strange, twisted, unexpected and indefinable) shape: ‘Greyhats’, a live recording – it’s unclear if it’s live in the studio or soundboard, but there’s no crowd noise and it fades at the end – is aggressive, dark, and difficult.

Immediately after, ‘Heaven in my hands’ is a murky mangled mess of distortion and mid-range, drums overloaded and crackling in a grey blurry sonic haze, and ‘Give Your Soul Away’ is a skull-pounding beat-driven assault, and the samples pile in thick and fast. ‘Porthole’ is dense, robotic, repetitive, and while dance elements are a defining feature of the album’s style, this is by no means a dance album: it’s stark, it’s bleak, detached, and in places, unsettling.

Deformed is many things: easy, predictable, comfortable, are not among them.

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Fern – Illustration of Sound Waves

Posted: 6 February 2022 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 4th February 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Either delayed or having skipped January, Dret Skivor’s latest monthly instalment marks quite a shift from December’s spoken word / harsh noise assault. Fern’s Illustration of Sound Waves belongs to the field of sonic microanalysis: specifically, as we learn from the minimal notes which accompany the release ‘The source of inspiration and foundation for the entire compilation have been the possibilities and limitations of the buchla 208c’. The ‘legendary Music Easel instrument’ is a modular device, and a fucking expensive piece of kit to boot. And yet it, like any other instrument, device, or programme, has its limitations.

Tonal range isn’t one of them, and nor is its capacity to create eerie electronic soundscapes, and there are plenty of both on Illustration of Sound Waves. I would perhaps be interested to hear of Fern’s frustrations, and also his motivation for this intensely-focused exploration of the buchla 208c. Many such releases offer extensive explanations of the process – sometimes to the point of excess,

‘Closed Geometry (Circle)’ bleeps and blips, while ‘Action & Reaction’ paints a haunting scene, based around sharp needles of feedback and warping, curved drones. ‘Blame the Wires’ is a classic modular synth noodle, a cyclical, repetitive motif looping hypnotically over a subdued echo of a beat, pulsing gently in the background. ‘Apparatus A’ sinks deep into the depths of swampy murk. The beats are subdued and muffled, and the entire EQ is pitched into lower and mid-ranges. There’s a slow, growling oscillation somewhere deep in the mix, and it’s a grating, Suicide-like drone that sneers and snarls on the heavyweight ‘Way of the Waves’; waves that pulse and grind and groan and thicken and envelop.

There feels like there’s a distinct and definite trajectory to the album, as the sound grows darker and denser as it progresses: this changes with the pairing of the final two pieces, which mark a rapid return to bubbling, bleeping circuitry and sound, in many ways, like an escalating meltdown of circuitry. This feels like a fitting finale to the album, as well as an apt conclusion as we melt into the waves, drowning slowly in a sea of static.

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Fern – Inhibitory Shortcomings

Posted: 7 March 2021 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 5th March 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Recently-launched Swedish label Dret Skivor has a fairly broad remit in its commitment to being ‘Locally focussed but stretching out to droneheads, noiseheads, ambientheads and weirdoheads across Scandinavia’. Stylistically, it’s pretty much a case of anything goes as long as it’s not remotely mainstream – but that certainly doesn’t mean that anything that’s vaguely accessible is off-limits, and Fern’s Inhibitory Shortcomings, described as ‘is a minimalistic digital multi-tracked adventure’ isn’t unpleasant or overtly challenging to any ear that’s accustomed to alternative electronica.

This set has something of a 90s vibe initially, a woozy wash of electronics, cracking static, and sampled dialogue and horns dominating the eclectic cut-up that is ‘in´ros50’. As such, while inspired granular looping, FM and different sampling techniques. AS such, while inspired by ‘the avant-garde music produced by the San Francisco Tape Center (among others) during the 1960’s’, William Burroughs’s tape experiments, as filtered through the prism of albums like Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, produced with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, also very much seem to inform the sonic collage pieces on offer here.

‘digi´al_r3alm pt1’ and counterpart ‘digi´al_r3alm pt2’ combine clacking, clattering tonal-based percussion with obscure oscillations and a static crackle like a downpour of rain: the latter drags down into gloomy, eerie atmospherics with a hesitant bass throb underpinning insectoid skitterings and dank sloshing washes that slop back and forth listelessly.

It’s a solid drum-based percussion that dominates the beginning of ‘dr3´_0032’ before the tape starts spooling backwards and everything gets sucked back towards it source.

None of the pieces are particularly long – only ‘digi´al_r3alm pt2’ exceeds four minutes – but each is rich in atmosphere and texture, packing in a dense array of sounds that collide against one another, bouncing off the wall of dark subterranean caverns of the mind to conjure some unsettling images. Flittering tweets and scraping squeaks abound, as do dripping sonic droplets that splash into spacious reverberations.

Closer ‘ou´ros51’ perhaps feel the most dislocated and dissonant of all of the compositions, a slow, decaying loop of an analgesic trip-hop beat and blooping laser sounds drags on repetitively, gradually slowing the senses to a slightly disorientated fog of drowsiness.

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Various Artists – Dret sampler

Posted: 24 December 2020 in Singles and EPs
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Dret Skivor – 21st December 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Initially, this review was to open with the line ‘Dave Procter, the man with more musical projects than the devil has names, has been rather quiet of late’ – but the northern noisemonger doesn’t really do quiet, and doesn’t really do fallow periods either. Procter’s full-time relocation to Sweden from Leeds may mean, sadly, that some of the acts he’s involved with – most obviously The Wharf Street Galaxy Band – are on hiatus, but wherever he goes, he makes noise – quite literally, as demonstrated by his ‘noise walks’. Not that ‘hiatus’ really means anything with lockdown putting paid to so much musical activity anyway. It’s a shame, because Dave’s myriad projects tend to be geared to a live setting – improvised, visceral, and loud. On a personal level, I miss his presence on the scene: a man as comfortable in a pig’s head and lab coat as a red boiler suit, it’s his understanding and acceptance of niche I value almost as much as the noise he makes: no audience? No problem. And so with live performances largely off the table, Proctor’s started out establishing his space in Sweden with the set-up of a new label, Dret Skivor, and this early-doors sampler EP gives a taste of what we can expect – which is, for anyone with a priori knowledge – what you’d expect, namely experimental, and noisy.

On offer here are just four acts with a track apiece, but then, as an EP – which would actually work nicely as a 12” with a different running order – it does the job of showcasing exactly what Dret Skivor is about.

Fern’s ‘Low Pressure Wave’ is minimal lo-fi electro, an erratic pulsation and low-thrumming oscillating drone vibrating against one another to build a headache-inducing tension, fading into a simmering wave with scratchy interference. Claus Poulsen brings the noise and then some, with ‘Machines 2 and 4’yelding an absolutely face-melting five minutes of screeding distortion and treble abrasion worthy of Merzbow. It’s a squall of punishing feedback and overload. IJIN also trades in big, abrasive noise, but ‘OH the JOY’ (which I can’t help but read as sarcasm) takes the form of stop/start slabs of noise, with greater emphasis on lower and mid-ranges – although there’s a gum-curling blast f metallic treble that churns relentlessly throughout somewhere lower in the mix. But this track occupies a different territory from the others being showcased here, being a sixteen-minute behemoth that evolves through a series of transitions – yet for the largest part sustains an undulating, howling sustain that drones in an animalistic anguish against a shifting backdrop. It occasionally tapers ad re-emerges, swelling to a thick, nuclear wind of noise that blasts hard against a grinding sonic earthwork of deep, granular noise.

In contrast, Zherbin’s ‘piece for a router, a tape loop and a plastic bag’ feels a little lightweight, disposable, even. But it’s all relative, and in its own context it’s a grainy bit of noise that digs into the cranium with some surprisingly sharp claws.

More Dret, please!

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