Posts Tagged ‘Glitch’

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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Neuro… No Neuro – Compartments

Posted: 23 January 2023 in Albums
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Mille Plateaux – 20th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Less than a year on from Faces & Fragments, Neuro… No Neuro are back again with another substantial instalment of scratchy, glitchy electronica that’s rich in retro vibes.

Each piece is short – around two minutes – and drifts into the next. As the air floats past carrying soft analogue notes on a gentle waft, you suddenly realise you’re already five tracks in. It’s not that Compartments is undemanding, so much as that it’s subtle, meaning that it circulates in the atmosphere without dominating your headspace in an intrusive fashion.

The beats are backed off, even as they stutter and troll, flicker and jar. There’s a softness about the sounds and the way these woozy, warped snippets trickle together that’s almost soporific, especially when tinkling chimes cascade in ripples.

The Mille Plateaux website describes Compartments as Kawaii-Glitch (Kawaii being the Japanese culture of cuteness), noting that ‘The very artificial glitch aesthetics are not, as usual, depicted by a cold and sterile feeling; but quite contrary have the qualities of an artificial sweetener… Be careful when associating kawaii with just sweet, innocent or cute notions… just as Anime often masks grown-up topics with ‘childish’ surface structures, the album underlies a soft darkness & melancholy. Sometimes the unspeakable comes in disguise. Like the fashion style Yami-Kawaii, a bizarre mixture of kawaii-aesthetics with questions of depression and suicide, this album offers a mixillogical splice of life in which every second might take a turn into the irreal and eerie. To make distinctions between what is real and what are delusions, dreams or nightmares, emotional highs and lows, becomes impossible. In some sense it is ‘too much’ while still minimalistic in style.’

On the penultimate track, ‘Just Crumbling,’ things seem to come apart at the seams as stammering beats fly away from sounds firing in all directions like breaking springs. The temperature drops further at the finale, as those split sprockets echo into the cold night air and as the final sounds of the bonus-length last track, We’ll be Seeing You Soon’, which clanks and echoes for a fill four minutes, fade away, I sit, full, aurally content and calm… and worried. What subliminal toxicity has this album dispersed internally? How will I feel about Compartments once I begin to process and digest its multi-faceted contents? I don’t know but then, I don’t know if II trust what I heard, or my instincts on how to react. There is definitely more to Compartments than first meets the ear.

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Various Artists – Rental Yields Vol 1

Posted: 18 July 2022 in Albums
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Front & Follow and the Gated Canal Community – 5th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s so much to love about Front & Follow and the Gated Canal Community, and I’m absolutely not mocking when I say that Front & Follow have called it a day as a label almost as many times as Status Quo have announced farewell tours, because I deeply admire the fact that label head Justin Watson simply cannot resist a good project, and always returns after every break with a new release beyond bursting with great new music. This leads me to the next reason to love the label: every project that brings the label out of mothballs is for a worthy cause, and to see a label channel its energy into raising funds for charitable causes (without being preachy or holly about it) is truly heart-warming and goes a long way to remining us that human nature is, by and large, giving, and that it’s just the current government and the selfish / stupid anuses who keep voting for them who don’t give a fuck about anyone else. And then there’s the fact that – as previously mentioned – each release contains great new music, and the fact is that Front & Follow’s commitment to providing an outlet to lesser-known acts, including many who’ve not been previously releases, is unstinting. Just as it’s hard to find venues who will give gigs to bands who have yet to play and establish a fanbase, so it’s hard for those same acts to find an outlet other than doing it themselves on Bandcamp and Spotify, with their work being completely buried and diving under all radars in the process.

And so, here we have the first instalment of Rental Yields, a ‘multi-release collaboration project raising money to tackle homelessness in Manchester’. As the press notes explain, ‘Inspired by our current housing system, the project encourages artists to steal (or borrow, nicely) from another artist to create their own new track – in the process producing HIGH RENTAL YIELDS… Over 100 artists are now involved (the spreadsheet is fun), each one tasked with creating a new track from the sounds created by someone else – we are then collating the tracks and releasing them over the course of the next year.’

This is Volume One, and contains twenty tracks, ‘featuring the likes of Polypores, Elizabeth Joan Kelly, The Leaf Library, yellow6, Spaceship and more’, and it’s a cracker. This is no surprise on the basis of the label’s track record, of course. Most of the artists are super-obscure: Solomon Tump, The Incidental Crack, and yol are about the limit of my a priori knowledge, and that’s good: it means the collection is about the music rather than the artists, and people should be interested because it’s good, not because it has some shitty remix of acoustic version of a mediocre name band. It’s good because it’s good. And weird.

And there is nothing mediocre about this. It is a big compilation that showcases the exploratory, the experimental, the oscillating, the avant-garde. Dig, it, and dig it deep.

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Watch: ‘Üble Schlucht’ by Automatisme & Stefan Paulus

Posted: 13 May 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Constellation are releasing three stylistically diverse electronic albums throughout May and June: the dazzling polychromatic avant-jazz-driven Familiar Science by JOYFULTALK (out now); the psycho-geographic glitch-noise minimalism of Gap/Void by Automatisme & Stefan Paulus (out May 20th); and the pulsing corrugated mantric-alluvial Miracles by T. Gowdy (out June 3rd).

The Montréal label has shared a video from each of these fine albums. Check ‘Üble Schlucht’ from Gap/Void by Automatisme & Stefan Paulus here:

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Worriedaboutsatan – Bloodsport

Posted: 24 March 2022 in Albums
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This is it Forever – 25th March 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

There are many artists who can boast bodies of work that are solid, and illuminated by outstanding gems along the way, but there are few artists with bosies of work as consistent as worriedaboutsatan. Fifteen years into the project’s existence, that’s a significant achievement. Some artists go off the boil or seem to struggle with maintaining that level once they achieve a certain degree of success, whether it’s simply through a perceived pressure to deliver something or create something that will replicate whatever it was that achieved that success, or simply diminishing returns, but worriedaboutsatan, despite having tracks featured on Coronation Street and Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation documentary, not to mention radio play on both 6Music and Radio 1, and the very vocal support of one Ian Rankin, remain unstinting in their path.

Operating solo since 2019, Gavin Miller has maintained a constant flow of output: so constant that since Providence last May, Miller’s slipped out a brace of album-length single track releases (Circles I and Circles II) and an EP Live from the Studio that entirely bypassed me while I was, well, I don’t know, what was I doing?

The thing about consistency is that it absolutely does not equate to sameness, and worriedaboutsatan’s output is defined by its evolution, incorporating wide-ranging stylistic elements from delicate post-rock to pounding beats within the overall sphere of haunting, reflective ambience of varying shades of darkness and light. And while satan’s sounds exist in a rarefied space all of their own, no-one lives in a complete bubble. We live in dark times, and not insensitive to this, this latest offering finds Gavin channelling that global turbulence through his work.

Bloodsport promises a departure, and it delivers. Miller describes it as ‘still very much a worriedaboutsatan album, albeit a fairly angry one.’ It’s a fair summary. The intro piece, ‘Je Suis Désolé’ is a classically ‘electronic’ composition with oscillating waves cutting across one another, but the treble tones sound like sharpening knives, and it has an edge that scrapes at the skull quite unexpectedly.

Making a linguistic and stylistic switch, ‘Bis Ich Komme’ is slow and dubby, a dense bass and backed-off beats holding the structure of a drifting ambience, before it solidifies and hardens around the mid-point. There’s a tension, a simmering aggression in the tone of the barbed synths, something uncomfortable and uncertain in the samples, before jungle beats hammer through the woozy, stomach-clenching undulations like machine gun fire

Released ahead of the album as an EP with three remixes, ‘Sigourney Weaver Fanclub President’ is the theoretical lead single, and it’s a brooding eight-and-a-half minutes of echoes guitar sustain and crashing sheet metal. It’s the sound of shattering destruction and trepidation. It’s classic ‘satan in that it’s all the layers, all the atmosphere, but it’s also steelier, with a certain bite previously unheard.

The two parts of the centrepiece, ‘An Absolute Living Hell’ are definitive and are a statement in themselves. Dark, dank, oppressive, bass-heavy and bursting with shards of extraneous noise, rippling in deep, deep echo, this diptych is the soundtrack to this bleak moment in time. ‘Part 2’ goes full industrial with a throbbing bass and crashing percussion worthy of Test Dept or Neubauten.

The stark robotix of the brief but claustrophobic ‘Perfekt’ makes for possibly the least WAS-like track of their career, before the metronomic thud of ‘Slur They Words’, dives headlong into the territory darkest hi-hop: the origins of the vocals are unclear, but they’re abrasive, and ‘Apex Redditor’ draws the curtain in a bleak fashion, but with a redemptive hint of a rippling piano and twitchy percussion that – I hope – alludes the prospect of a new dawn. Because surely, surely, there has to be a light at the end of this tunnel.

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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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Teruyuki Nobuchika – Still Air

Posted: 29 December 2016 in Albums
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Oktaf – OKTAF#13

Christopher Nosnibor

Still Air is the third solo album by Japanese electronic musician and soundtrack composer Teruyuki Nobuchika. Promising ‘electronic abstractions and classic sensitivity’ with ‘influences in a minimal ambient music context’, Still Air is very much about the atmospheric background, in the most fundamental of terms. Nobuchika creates ambient music which is subdued, toned down, quiet, devoid of beats and overt structures. Still Air is an album which, first and foremost, drifts.

Microglitches, the soft hiss of a vinyl groove, a barely discernible click disturb the almost pure ambience of the title track, and introduce Nobuchika as a musician with a keenly attenuated ear for subtlety and nuance. Across the album elongated drones, backwards hums and soft, supple strings create delicately atmospheric background compositions. What renders them interesting is the way in which Nobuchika filters in tiny incidentals, brief brushstrokes which add layering and depth. Rays of light filter through swirling fogs, chimes and tinkling notes ripple mellifluously amidst soothing washes of cloud-like sound.

The measure of any music is what kind of response it engenders in the listener. More often than not, ambient works evoke a sense of vague, relaxed enjoyment, but little more, as a tranquil boredom slowly takes hold. Still Air achieves something similar, but without the boredom. It’s a pleasurable experience, and one which offers an unconventionally three-dimensional ambient experience.

 

Teruyuki Nobuchika – Still Air