Posts Tagged ‘minimalist’

T.N. – Siddung

Posted: 2 January 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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15th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

This is an odd one which will likely baffle and bewilder many of those who encounter it – which will likely be far fewer than it deserves. It’s rare for a track that isn’t thrash or grindcore to run to less than a minute and a half, for a start. I know absolutely nothing about T.N. beyond that they’re from Spain, but T.N.’s ‘Siddung’ is a sliver of minimalist hip-hop that sends a shiver down the spine.

If commercial hip-hop has come to be synonymous with bragging and banging, flashing cash and blades, it’s worth remembering that its roots were a different kind of ‘street’, and with acts like Last Poets emerged from spoken word, the jazz and beat scene of the late 50s, giving a voice to black culture and the civil rights movement.

This track is something of a hybrid – it’s ‘street’ but it’s introspective and uncomfortable, and after an atmospheric introduction, halts just as it seems to be finding its groove. It’s difficult to unravel the track’s meaning or intent: ‘siddung’ is patois for ‘sit down’ – as the cover art relays in a literal sense – but beyond that…?

It feels more like a sketch than a complete song, but one could imagine an album containing maybe twenty or so of these vignettes would add up to paint a quite compelling picture.

She Spread Sorrow – Orchid Seeds

Posted: 21 August 2023 in Albums
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 4th August 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

She Spread Sorrow is the musical vehicle for Italian artist Alice Kundalini, and over the course of a number of releases, the majority via Coldspring, she has explored a minimal industrial style, stark yet dense, and characterised by an eerie, whispered vocal delivery.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Orchid Seeds was originally published as part of the instantly out of print On Corrosion – a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection also stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, an imprint founded in 2003 and dedicated to post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, existential vacancy and then some.’

Four years on, it finally gets a standalone release, both digitally and on vinyl.

Kundalini states that the album, “is about 5 different women of my family. Each track is about one of them with their difficult story and strengths. My family is totally destroyed now, no relation between anyone, but in the past there was a strong tradition of women with

interesting personalities.”

And even by the standards of She Spread Sorrow, Orchid Seeds is stark and eerie, dark and unsettling. The reverby, robotic vocals that whisper and moan over the sparse backing of ‘The Solitude in the Giant House’ may set the tone, and with a vintage drum machine thudding and clopping in the background, it has that late 70s vibe – somewhere between Young Marble Giants and cabaret Voltaire.

Things twist into darker territory with ‘Star’ as strains of feedback and grating, serrated synth ripples fizz and crackle beneath her gasping monotone vocal. This is much more reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle. It makes for a tense eight minutes: so often, when acts capable of producing great and heartstopping noise show such restraint as to keep it minimal yet audibly straining, the effect is amplified. This is one such composition; you find yourself moving to the edge of your seat, limbs tensing, waiting for something that never comes.

While the songs are about different people, ‘She Didn’t Care’ and ‘Queen of Guilt’ show opposite aspects of a theme, and perhaps provide some insight into the dynamic of the familial relationships and why they collapsed. The former is built around a stammering beat and hovering, hesitant synthesized organ hum; the sound and overall performance is primitive, immediate, while in contrast, the latter is dominated by a slow, heavy beat defined by a thunderous, reverberating snare, over which a simple synth wanders as echoed vocals drift, fuzzed and breathy and way off in the distance. The effect is some king of industrial dub, and it’s unsettling but not altogether unpleasant, perhaps because it contains stripped-back elements of common pop and dub tropes and so its oddness is countered by a certain stylistic familiarity.

The fifth and final track, ‘The Fortune of Others’, builds through serrated oscillations to grind away for what feels like a slow-throbbing eternity of electronic claustrophobia. It’s important to bear in mind the context: this is an album that’s equal parts narrative and concept, and the execution really pushes the concept to the fore, building the atmospheres of moments missed.

Without more detail – and let’s face it, more detail would likely be unsettling, even potentially traumatic – it’s impossible to determine the full extent of the meaning and also the pain behind the title. But for better or worse, the prospect of taking a firm grasp on the album seems to grow ever further away as it progresses. There is something magnificently and also frustratingly elusive about Orchid Seeds, and however deep you delve, however long you seek it, one suspects it will remain eternally beyond grasp.

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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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elkyn – something

Posted: 26 February 2021 in Singles and EPs
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17th February 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s completely fitting that ‘something’, the new single from the Leeds-based artist elkyn is accompanied by a truly expansive video that slow-pans an immense landscape – a slow-panning view over a valley in the Lake District which touches me more than I’d have expected. But then, The Lakes is my happy place, a space away from the world and while the swinging pan shot is close to inducing motion sickness, it’s also a perfect accompaniment to this dreamiest of tunes.

The track follows up on last year’s single ‘if only it was alright now’, as well as the debut EP Beech. The song maybe but a mere two minutes and ten seconds of acoustic guitar, simple synths and basic drum machines, backing Joseph Donnelly’s hushed, introverted vocal musings, but it’s a world unto itself. And being drawn into that world is a breathtaking experience, and one that is far, far greater than the music alone.

The vocals are a soft wash that melt into the marshmallow instrumentation, meaning you focus more on the overall tone and atmosphere than the words themselves – words that according to the liner notes contain ‘a heart-felt personal confession of feeling hopeless and desperate.’ That’s certainly a relatable emotion, and, paired with the visuals, combines a certain tension and a sense of claustrophobia and entrapment with magnificent space and freedom.

The sensation is vague, the mood is intangible yet touching, and ultimately, elkyn has – again – delivered ‘something’ special.

Gintas K – Extensions (NEUS-318 2020)

Posted: 31 August 2020 in Albums
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29th August 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

True to form, details of the theory or process behind Gintas K’s third release of 2020 are sparse: ‘Played & recorded live by Gintas K 2019. Recorded live at once, without any overdub; using computer, midi keyboard & controller assigned to vst plugins’.

What he presents here are three longform compositions, between fifteen and twenty-one minutes apiece, each accompanied by an ‘extension’ piece, of around five minutes or so, which tacks on to the end. The pieces are untitled, beyond ‘Track One’ and the date and what I assume to be the end time of recording.

K works from a palette of synapse-popping digital froth, tiny bleeping tones that fly around in all directions like amoeba in a cellular explosion, which builds to some neurone-blasting crescendos of whirring electronics and fizzing bursts of static and sparks. Amidst a swampy swirl of squelchiness rises a hum of interference, like an FM radio when a mobile phone’ been left next to it. ‘track one’ dissolves into a mass of amorphous midrange; its counterpart ‘extension’ reprises the glitching wow and flutter, ping and springs of the majority of the preceding twenty minutes, and follows a similar structural trajectory, only over a quarter of the time-frame.

‘track two’, recorded the following day in November of 2019 is, ostensibly, more of the same, with birdlike tweets and twitters fluttering around random clunks and thuds. Here, initially, there is more restraint, fewer fireworks, and more space between the sonic somersaults, until, briefly but intensely, about five minutes in, when a fierce blast of static cuts the babbling bleeps, washing away the sound to silence. Granular notes trickle in a minuscule but rapid flow which hurries keenly toward the conclusion, only to return for the extension piece, sounding rather like the tape being rewound.

Bloops, glops, tweets and twangs abound once more on ‘track three’, and if the pieces on Extensions are given to a certain sameness, it’s testament to Kraptavičius’ focus and dedication that he explores such a small sonic area in such intensely obsessive detail. Gintas K creates intensely insular music, which picks through the details of its own creation in a microscopic level, and if his spheres of reference seem suffocatingly introverted and inwardly-focused, then that’s precisely because they are, and it’s welcome. Instead of eternally reflecting on his emotions, like so many musicians, his work emerges from an infinite loop of self-reflectivity concerning its own content, and as such exists in a space that is free of such emotional self-indulgence. If this is indulgent – and perhaps it is – it’s equally scientific and detached, which very much paces it in a different bracket. And as Gintas K continues to pursue a most singular journey, it’s most educational to be able to tag along.

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