Posts Tagged ‘musique concrete’

The Music Liberation Front Sweden – Even Though It Was The Blink Of An Eye, I’m Sorry For What We Have Become

Posted: 23 November 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 17th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Among their ever-expanding catalogue, Mortality Tables have put out a number of releases which are essentially singles or EPs, with this being one of them: with a running time of just over eleven and a half minutes, this single longform composition is only marginally longer than its title, but its creator, Michael Evill, has condensed a considerable amount of material and experience into this space.

As he writes, ‘I have created a movement which includes the last breaths of my beloved dog Watson. It also includes the last time I recorded with my most talented and wonderful best friend Gustaf in 2001, which I have slowed down so I (and you) can spend more time with him. There are the sounds of new stars being born – my own interpretation and ones ripped off from NASA through this modern internet connection we all have. Surely we own the stars still?

‘We have Aztecs having fun with drums. These were recorded live in Mexico, sadly not from the 14th century before we invaded. We have the hourglass from our kitchen, which Mat inspired me to sample. This was the first idea of this piece and everything else fell in to place very quickly as it’s been swimming in the back of my mind for a while.’

Clearly, some of these elements have deep emotional significance for Michael, but this isn’t conveyed – at least not overtly or explicitly – in the work itself. It’s a collage-type sonic stew, where all of the myriad elements bubble and roil together to form a dense soup, in which none of the flavours are distinct, but in combination, what he serves up is unique, and provided much to chew on. That this protracted food-orientated metaphor may not be entirely coherent is apposite, but should by no means be considered a criticism.

As Evill goes on to write, ‘this was the beginning, and I didn’t spend much time thinking about it and just coalesced those ideas.’ Sometimes, when seeking to articulate life experience, it doesn’t serve to overthink it. Life rarely happens that way: life is what happens when you’re busy thinking and planning. And just as our experiences aren’t strictly linear, neither are our thoughts and recollections. Indeed, our thoughts and memories trip over one another in an endless jumble of perpetual confusion, and the more life we live, the more time we spend accumulating experience – and absorbing books, films, TV, online media, overheard conversations and dreams, the more everything becomes intertwined, overlayed, building to a constant mental babble.

William Burrroughs utilised the cut-up technique specifically to bring writing closer to real life, contending that ‘life is a cut-up… every time you walk down the street, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors… take a walk down a city street… you have seen half a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments.’

This encapsulates the artist’s quest: to create something which conveys the thoughts in one’s head, to recreate in some tangible form the intangible nebulous inner life, if only to help to make sense of it for oneself.

‘Even Though It Was The Blink Of An Eye’ is a woozy, disorientating churn of noise, which is, at times, dizzying, unsettling, nausea-inducing. But then again, at other times, it’s gentle, even melodic, reflective, contemplative. There are some passages where it’s all of these things all at once. It very much does feel like a scan of the artist’s memory banks, the human brain equivalent of skipping through the RAM files and pulling items seemingly at random. It does feel somewhat strange, even awkward, being granted access in such a way, but at the same time, it feels like ‘Even Though It Was The Blink Of An Eye’ is more than an insight into the mind of one individual, but an exploration of the human psyche.

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Diminished Men – Damage Mécanique

Posted: 15 November 2022 in Albums
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2182 Recording Company – 2nd December 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

While books have blurbs that likely indicate whether or not you want to read them, records are altogether less pitch-orientated in their physicality, which, back in the day, used to make sifting through vinyl in shops and at record fairs an exercise which was a measure of one’s attitude to risk. Sometimes you’d take a punt on a record because you’d heard of the band and they sounded interesting, others, you’d go by the label or the cover or something.

Some traders – and this is something Jumbo records in Leeds still do – is put a short summary on a sticker on the PVC sleeve the record is stored in.

The virtual equivalent, for me, is scanning press releases. No way can I listen to everything I receive, let alone write about it, and some nights my inbox feels like flicking through boxes of records, unsure of what I actually want to hear until I find it. And lo, as I wander, aimless and befuddled, fatigued from another day of corporate chairpounding to keep the roof over my head and the bills paid, I stumble upon Damage Mécanique by Diminished Men. I’ve never heard of them, but on reading the pitch, I felt as if this was the thing I needed but didn’t know I needed until I found it.

Drawing from elements of film noir, psychedelic exotica, experimental rock, deviant surf and musique concrète, Diminished Men refocus their influences into something entirely unique. Collaged with menacing electricity, the raw materials are broken up and reassembled in their crude private facility. The group has spent more than a decade crafting their style and have established themselves as an integral part of Seattle’s underground music scene.

Their latest record, Damage Mécanique, thrusts the listener into a malfunctioning industrial sci-fi soundscape. Trance inducing guitars beckon with haunting wails, high-tension wires spin and spit with a crackling hiss. Circular kosmische rhythms and anxiety-drenched beats destroy and rebuild around fractured melodies and noise. The band oxidizes and melts into experimental post-punk and acousmatic environments as hypnotic groove and vertigo copulate in cinematic assemblage.

And there’s no question that they’ve got pedigree: drummer Dave Abramson is also a member of Master Musicians of Bukkake, Spider Trio, and has collaborated with Eyvind Kang and Secret Chiefs 3 among many others.

As ‘Double Vision’ crashes in amidst clattering, explosive percussion and dingy bass, I’m hauled by the collar into the realms of early industrial in the vein of Test Dept and Perennial Divide, and instantly, I’m home, knowing that this was indeed what I needed. It’s sparse in terms of arrangement, but dense in terms of sound, and it’s abrasive, rhythm-orientated, loud, heavy, and batters away at the brain.

It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that when your thoughts are in a mangled disarray and your focus is no-existent that the answer lies in music that bashes you round the bonce from all directions at once, but for me, at least, it’s infinitely more beneficial than any kind of chillout shit or ambient – although amidst loping, rolling rhythms, ‘Wet Moon’ conjures a shimmering ambience of sorts, while pointing towards esoteric oddity.

‘The Maze’ confuses and confounds with its daze-inducing cyclical riff and motoric beats which are pure Krautrock, evaporating into a mist around the mid-section of its six-and-a-half minute duration that sees it build through a jazzy post-rock segment before tumbling back into that nagging, dislocated groove – and it’s a nagging dislocated groove that dominates the wig-out weirdness of ‘Panopticon’. It’s likely of help to no-one to comment that it sounds like Murder the Disturbed but with the wild sax of These Monsters, but there it is: obscure post-punk collides with obscure jazz-infused noise rock, and it’s a corking way to end the first side of the album.

If ‘Axiel Tremors’ suggests rock excess played at a crawl, then it’s equally dragged out via some expansive jazz expressions into the realms of darkness. ‘Silver Halides’ brings a bold, brawling swagger to a cautious and subdued party of picked guitar introversion, and the final piece in this mismatched musical jigsaw, the six-minute ‘Spy’ hits the groove and drives it out of the door – while the door is still closed. Just as they clearly know how to make an entrance, they obviously understand the importance of a memorable exit.

There’s no particular or overt theme which unifies Damage Mécanique, and nor is there really anything that’s obvious stylistically speaking, as the album tosses a whole load into the mix and feels, in many respects, quite introspective in its influences and inspirations. There are, however, strong and unusual contrasts in evidence, with doomy bass and twanging desert rock working in tandem to forge a unique sonic experience., alongside, well, you name it. Quirky, atmospheric, Damage Mécanique is odd, but also compelling. It could be just the album you need, too.

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Ghédalia Tazartès & Rhys Chatham – Two Men In A Boat

Posted: 5 January 2022 in Albums
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Sub Rosa – 26th November 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

In the scheme of Ghédalia Tazartès singular career, which saw him featured more prominently in dance, theatre, and cinema than on record – a career spanning back to the mid-late 70s yielded just thirteen albums – this release is significant in several ways, not least of all in that it contains probably his final recordings prior to his death in February 2021 at the age of 73. It follows his last album release, Superdisque, which was released a full decade ago, in 2021. It also documents a collaboration that almost never happened.

As the story goes, ‘Tazartès and Chatham had met once in 1977 at CBGC’s and had not seen each other since then when they were asked by their mutual agent to play a private show in Paris. This happened in September 2018 in a house with a garden where sax player Steve Lacy had lived back in the 1990s. This album presents the recording of this show plus another show at La semaine du bizarre festival in Montreuil, France a year later, mixed with a couple of studio sessions.’

Their coming together yields something – and I’ve struggled to find a word that comes anywhere near describing what others have simply classed as ‘indescribable’ and ‘unclassifiable’ – most otherly. Tazartès singing is, in itself not only unique as a style, but also as an experience. It’s less about what it conveys as such, and more about how it touches you. It’s certainly not singing in the conventional sense; and yet, it is very much musical, rather than mere vocalisation. Tazartès sings from different parts of the body, and his voice tremors and quivers, trills, gargles, and ululates.

On the four parts (or ‘actes’) of the ‘Jardin de Simone’ performance, Chatham’s sparse, minimal backings provide a shimmering backdrop that ripples and glimmers softly. On ‘Acte 1’, it’s chiming notes, picked, on a clean electric guitar, while on ‘Acte 2’, it’s wavering woodwind which accompanies Ghédalia’s soft croon. Scraping strings create a dolorous discord alongside a wailing, weeping, skittish vocal performance on ‘Acte 3’ while the fourth and final piece floats into the atmosphere in amorphous waves if sound.

The three parts which make up the ‘Semaine du bizarre’ set are quite different, with Chatham’s backing on the ten-minute ‘Acte 1’ being denser, the electric guitar rattling and with strains of feedback filtering through the stuttering notes. The stutters are not of hesitation, but of tightly-reined tension, and over time the form evolves into an elongated tapering drone. The vocal adopts an almost falsetto-range droning quality, at times shifting to a guttural throb, at others, an open-throated note sustained on, and on. Woodwind drapes and twists around like fingers of mist. In combination, it feels mystical, in an impenetrable, occult way. Overall, this set is more drone-orientated, Tazartès’ vocals venturing more toward the lower register, the growlier, the more atonal. And yet, in places, he soars almost operatically, albeit descending like a punctured bellows after, while the instrumentation wheezes out, fatigued.

The vinyl finds a performance on each side, while the digital version features a bonus cut, appropriately entitled ‘Encore’. This, too, is quite drone-orientated, with the addition of a certain hint of an Eastern twang.

As a whole, Two Men In A Boat feels like a meditative work, and one which exists out of any kind of context, real or imposed. Without any constraints in terms of structure, culture, time, place, or even meaning – explicit or implied – the performers can be found revelling in the freedom of musical explorations. These are songs of the soul, and Two Men In A Boat is a unique document.

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