Posts Tagged ‘Jim Haynes’

Jim Haynes – When The Sky Burned

Posted: 25 June 2021 in Albums
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SIGE Records – SIGE103 – 25th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

It was The Decline Effect, a full decade ago, which provided my introduction to the work of Jim Haynes. It was an album I described as ‘bleak’, commenting on the way it reminded me of ‘Robert Burton’s 17th Century text The Anatomy of Melancholy, which detailed in the richest language the terrible physical symptoms of melancholy and its effects on the humours of the body. It still stands as a fitting description of a work by an artist whose career is devoted to ‘compositions of corrosion, shortwave radio, and tactile noise’.

Haynes’ inspiration for this latest offering was environmental, circumstantial, situational, as he recounts: “I completed this record in the fall of 2020. Much of the western states of the US was ablaze for months. The anxiety of the collective American psyche was ubiquitous, also due to the Presidential elections in November of that year. And When The Sky Burned became an appropriate title given the environmental and political climate of that particular time.”

But what’s also fascinating is the more subtle use of reference, of intertext: Haynes explains that When The Sky Burned When The Sky Burned is ‘also a reference to Zbigniew Karkowski’ – before going on to explain his ‘complicated, if distant relationship’ and subsequent hostility from both Karkowski and Andrew McKenzie, aka The Hafler Trio, for what appear to be the most disproportionate of reasons.

Haynes dedicates the album to both McKenzie and Karkowski ‘whether they like it or not’, writing on the latter, ‘After his death, I most certainly felt a sorrow that the world has lost this artist, but I was also very conflicted as I wish there could have been a conversation about what happened. I don’t think he was capable of remorse or reconciliation, but I wonder if I was wrong in that analysis. So this album is a tenuous homage to Karkowki’s early works – with the chest, cavity rattling lows and the shrill sustained high frequencies. The title in fact is a direct translation of the opening piece to that aforementioned Silent CD – "Als der Himmel brannte." But of course, I can never leave anything so static alone, and the heaps of noise, junk, and dissonance were required."

Haynes is an absolute master when it comes to noise, junk, and dissonance, and When The Sky Burned is abrim with all three.

As album openings go, the first few seconds of ‘Multiple Gunshots’, are striking, shocking, even, as blasts of percussion – which slam like gunshots – hit the listener without warning. They arrive a succession of hard blasts – some warping backwards, and Haynes manipulates them to forge an erratic but devastatingly heavy beat. I’m reminded of how Swans sampled a nailgun and pitched it up and down for the punishing rhythm on ‘Time is Money (Bastard)’, and this builds a grind of rapidly oscillating drones that flicker and shudder. Seven minutes in, the drones rise to a shriek, before obliterative distortion decimates any semblance of musicality. Everything combines to forge an intense and oppressive eleven minutes where little happens other than the listener suffering a brutal sonic punishment.

Between this, and the ten-minute ‘Appropriate to a Sad, Frightened Time’, Haynes presents a series of compositions that really test the listener’s capacity for noise and overall endurance. ‘Abruptly Scattered’ sounds like an enormous generator’s throb, occasionally rent with blasts of explosive treble noise as if said generator is bursting into flames. The tonal separation is well-defined: the bass sends the most uncomfortable vibrations through the pit of your gut, while the shrill, harsh treble smash makes you clench your teeth and fear for your hearing. You swallow hard, feeling uncomfortable, wondering if you’re going to suffer tinnitus or diarrhoea first, and pray it’s not both simultaneously.

Haynes’ explorations are brutal and harsh, and the set as a whole is truly relentless. Heavy crunches and grinding, gut-churning growls are suddenly ruptured by unexpected thacks and cracks, detonations, and the kind of heavy impact that makes the car-door slams used for punches in films sound like friendly pats on the shoulder. Swirling vortices of noise on noise howl and shriek, violent sonic tornadoes that inflict devastating levels of damage tear from the speakers, and even the moments of calm are unsettling, uneasy.

When The Sky Burned is not a nice album, but it’s a remarkable one, one that quite literally crackles with intensity, and genuinely hurts in places. But while it is relentlessly abrasive and often excruciating, Haynes’ attention to tone and texture, and the way the utilises these elements to forge a work of immense range isn’t only admirable on the technical, sonic, and compositional levels, but also results in an album that has massive impact, and is an outstanding example of well-crafted and intuitive electronic noise.

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Relay for Death – Natural Incapacity

Posted: 18 March 2017 in Albums
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Helen Scarsdale Agency – HMS039

Christopher Nosnibor

We live in a world of noise. We live in a decaying, post-industrial world. The so-called developing world is on an inexorable trajectory toward the same calamitous end, a world of tertiary industry and a level of noise – literal and metaphorical – which the framework of postmodern hinted at and but failed to fully appreciate the totality of its eventuality. To contextualise Natural Incapacity requires a certain grounding in postmodernism and the idea of a society defined by information overload. But, to reframe my comment on the shortcomings of postmodern theory, it essentially fails to account for the impact of the culture on those who find themselves existing in that culture. What have we done in making such technological leaps with so little consideration for the psychological consequences? Has the human mind evolved at a pace correspondent with the technologies we’ve made? What does the infinite noise actually sound like in the middle of that blizzard of information?

Natural Incapacity is an immense work, with a total running time of some two and a quarter hours across its two discs. Housed in a hand-rusted cover produced by Jim Haynes, this is serious art. The album soundtracks not the external noise so much as it does perhaps the internal noise, and the experience of the collapse of everything into an amorphous cyclone of everything happening all at once. The human brain simply isn’t built for the world in which we find ourselves. There’s so much talk of ‘white noise,’ but ultimately, total overload is an entirely different kind of noise, an explosive noise, simultaneously conveyed as the sound of collapse, of panic, anguish, and screaming despair.

Disc one is the shorter of the two, with has a running time of an hour and two minutes. A dark, quiet rumble soon breaks into a dense, harsh wall of sound. Tidal waves crash and planets explode in slow-motion, creating layer upon layer of textured noise that pounds the senses relentlessly. This is heavy, brutal stuff. The violent turbulence is punishing, effecting a psychological disturbance. The moments of calm are but brief and heavy with tension, the suspense of how and when the next wave of noise will erupt. And erupt it invariably does, tearing the fabric of the atmosphere, an annihilative volume of atomic force.

There’s no obvious shift moving onto disc two, but the effect of so much oppressively dense, murky and irredeemably inhospitable noise is cumulative. As the time crawls on, one senses the walls slowly moving closer, the light and oxygen gradually being pushed from the room and the life slipping from one’s soul.

Hums and whirs offer cold comfort in this funnelling fermentation of foul decay as factories collapse in slow-motion under the weight of so-called progress. The absence of vocals renders this even more disturbing, in that there are no obvious signs of human life to be discerned in the churning melee. As such, were reminded of our ultimate obsolescence, and there can be no bleaker prospect than that. Natural Incapacity is nihilistic in the absolute, a soundtrack to the end of time.

 

Relay for Death - Natural Incapacity

Jim Haynes – Throttle & Calibration

Posted: 13 February 2017 in Albums
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – HMS040 – 2nd December 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

My first encounter with the work of Jim Haynes (the musician, not the writer who rose to a degree of cult prominence in the 1960s) came when The Decline Effect landed with me in 2011. Haynes’ territory is the dark, the ambient, the subterranean, but Throttle and Calibration is an altogether harsher work, which emerged from Haynes’ 2015 residency at MoKS in Estonia, where he would collaborate with and contribute to Simon Whetham’s Active Crossover series.

As the blub accompanying the release on the label’s website explains, ‘Throttle and Calibration is the first in a series of albums that find Haynes digging through the Active Crossover archive and grotesquely exaggerating the details into exploded compositions of volatile dynamics, nerve-exposed dissonance, caustic shortwave signal abuse, and a considerable amount of scarred metal. Marked as one of the more discordant works to date in Haynes’ career, Throttle and Calibration finds company near the atonal compositions from Hermann Nitsch and the sour, industrial collages that pock the Nurse With Wound catalogue. Previously released digitally on Crónica, Throttle & Calibration is fleshed out with an additional 20 minutes of material.’ This time around, the augmented digital release is also accompanied by a cassette edition. But, sadly, no vinyl, and no CD. Sadly because

As the blurb which accompanies the release intimates, discordant is it, and Throttle and Calibration does, most certainly, slot into the space where industrial and avant-garde intersect, and this reissue, expanded to eight tracks from the original five, is an essential work within its field. The album finds Haynes in exploratory mode, and he delves deep into the granular elements of sound over the course of this challenging work.

A long, buffeting rumble, like a distant train or the sound of wind on a mountain-top (if there is no-one there to hear it, does the wind still roar around the rocks?) is the first sound. The harrowing bleakness is but short-lived. Explosive blasts of noise rip and tear like detonations, atmosphere and ear-shredding eruptions. Small sonic ruptures are rendered at such volume and intensity as to inflict sensory and psychological.

What exactly is this? The Arctic wind ripping through an empty water tower? Or the apocalypse? It could be either, and may be both. It’s disorientating as well as full-on. Throttle & Calibration is an album which places sound under the microscope, so to speak. It’s not microtonal, but it is microcosmic, at least on the one hand. But in placing its focus on a small corner of the scene, Haynes then blows it up to A3 and zooms in 500%. The effect is terrifying, bewildering, intense, and the results are immense. In Haynes’ hands, mundane sounds are reforged and take on sinister dimensions. His addressing them from alternative perspectives – up close, amplified – is the key to building a new understanding.

A quiet rattle is annihilated by a roar which melts all definition into a whirling multitextural aural vortex in ‘Tabula Rasa’, and over the course of the album, Haynes repeatedly drags the listener through a succession of vertiginous sonic sinkholes. Single impacts – origins unknown and undisclosed – resonate and decay slowly n heavy atmosphere. The spoken word introduction to ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ sets an eerie tone, but this again is devastated in a tinnitus-inducing wall of screeding noise worthy of Merzbow at his most brutal.

It takes time and focus to peer through the harsh noise to discern the textures. Like stepping into the dark from a brightly-illuminated interior space, it takes time to recalibrate the senses. There are quieter passages, but they’re no less intense and no lighter in tone. Ominous monotone drones and hums hang for aeons; time is suspended in space.

Neither the full-throttle abrasion nor the shady, moody spells of dank mental torture offer anything by way of respite or levity: Jim Haynes is an artist who dwells in darkness and creates work that ranges from the darkest greys to the pitchest of blacks. Throttle & Calibration stands at the darker, more violent end of the spectrum. Uncomfortable unpleasant, and unforgiving, it’s a well-realised plunge into the bowels of a new shade of, rendered from the terrains of the everyday.

 

Jim Haynes – Throttle and Calibration