Posts Tagged ‘Panurus Productions’

Splat R. – Kill Spill Thrill

Posted: 8 December 2023 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 1st December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

What better way to mark the start of advent than with a new release on Newcastle’s Panurus Productions, home of noisy and weird shit on tape, eh?

This latest offering covers both bases, being noisy and weird, but predominantly weird.

Panurus releases always come with cracking explanatory notes, and they’re worth quoting for this one, too:

‘Glitching and laced with interference from its temporal transit, Splat R. intercepts nine broadcasts of lo-fi noise drenched beats from a possible future. Hooks lead you through what could be samples, generated electronica or interference noise, that at times meshes and augments the beat and others swells over and underneath it with a sense of menace. There’s a sense of retro-future to the album in its tones and the recognisability of some of the sound used, but presented as if those ideas were carried further forward before being thrown back towards us, warped and distorted; as if it was constructed from pieces of culture scavenged in the aftermath of some distant cataclysm.’

My work here is done.

Of course, I’m not being entirely serious, but whereas many press releases bring a heap of hype, much of which is a world apart from the product being presented, or otherwise fails to really explain what the release is about, Panurus always absolutely nail it in their summaries.

But of course there is more. ‘Kill Spill Thrill’ is a murky, messy mash-up which evokes The Last Poets, Dalek, and RZA’s Bobby Digital, as well as glitched-up, chewed-up, mangled elevator music. It’s chilled-out hip-hop, trip-hop, and ambient tossed together, melted down, and left to fester and ferment for a while. ‘peace to you, if you’re willing to fight for it’ adds a whole load of wrecking bass and distortion to the bubbling dingy mess, lurching into the territory of dirty experimental industrial noise in the vein of Throbbing Gristle, only with samples thrown in hither and thither. ‘reality denied comes back to haunt’ is plain fucking horrible: lurching booms of thunderous noise and trills of feedback and wailing synths pushed to their limits in a power electronics meltdown suddenly segues into a crackling mess of club-friendly dance, but distorted in a nightmarish way.

‘authentic creation is a gift to the future’ lurches so hard as to reach the pit of the stomach, before ‘there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns’ pumps a beefy beat that’s pure nightclub – but obviously, the vibe is anything but buoyant or euphoric. It’s bad trip, apocalyptic, the dance dynamics distorted to the shade of a nightmare, fizzing sparks and subsonic detonations occurring simultaneously, like a nuclear blast landing a direct hit on a night club.

I can’t decide if I need to puke or shit as the messy mass of stuttering overload stammers and rolls and lurches onwards. This is glitch of the highest order: the briefest, almost imperceptible of stammers are amplified to the most uncomfortable, blurring, bilious horrors which emulate the worst post-binge room-spin.

Kill Spill Thrill is a splurging, intestinal-churning, head-shredding sonic attach that lands thick and heavy. For all of its touchstones, it doesn’t sound quite like anything else, and it rips the ground before it to devastating effect.

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Fading Tapes – Rites Of Passage

Posted: 6 September 2023 in Albums
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1st September 2023 – Panurus Productions

Christgopher Nosnibor

A couple of years ago, Fading Tapes released Cartographer, an hour-long album divided into four near-equal segments which thoroughly confounded expectations, for it was no ordinary collage of found sounds assembled to charter fields of exploration.

On Rites Of Passage, they promise a work of greater urgency than its predecessor, where ‘sparse percussion forms the pulse of the ceremony, as whistles and less identifiable sounds weave through and over droning amplified strings and effects… The remnants of some post-apocalyptic culture so far removed from the catastrophe that the relics of their past exist only as cyclopean ruins and talismans.’

This is some evocative verbiage, and it’s fitting for such an evocative aural experience. Whether or not it’s music, well, opinions are likely to be divided.

On the subject of division, Rites Of Passage is far less equally divided than its predecessor, featuring two compositions, in the form of the ten-minute ‘Bantu’ and the twenty-seven minute title track. An album of two halves it is not. Harder and harsher than its predecessor it really is.

‘Bantu’ is a warping drift of psychedelic semi-ambient desert-rock with some twisted, twangy guitars stretching overheatedly across a lethargic beat which clatters and clumps lazily. But there’s a trilling recorder or something in the distance and the guitars build to a swirling drone and as the sound swells the drone – the buzz of a loose, downtuned string against a fret – grows. That woodwind… it sure as hell ain’t Jethro Tull.

And then… ‘Rites of Passage’. Epic doesn’t cut it. If Earth 2 was ground zero for heavyweight drone, the last thirty years have seen a large number of acts follow suite. It’s fitting that Earth 2 was released thirty years ago, really, as it provided some useful context. While Sunn 0))) have taken the template of Earth 2 and pushed it to the absolute limit in terms of crushing doom-laden drone, others have expanded on this premise. Sleep’s Dopesmoker may be a landmark release in this timeline but the fact s that there have been so many influential offshoots that it’s not easy to keep track.

But ‘Rites of Passage’ is hypnotic, mesmerising. You find yourself zoning out. Of course you do. You’re supposed to. ‘Rites of Passage’ is a remarkable track which plugs away at a relentless motoric beat for its entire duration. There’s a wall of noise building. Sensurround, now, and an enveloping shell of abstract noise around it, a squall of sound.

Glorious and tense and painful in equal measure Rites Of Passage is one hell of an album: All the guts, all the grit, and all of the weight.

AA

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Fashion Tips – Fucking Hell

Posted: 25 April 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Panurus Productions – 28th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

There are many things to love about Panurus Productions releases, the main one being the music, which probably goes without saying. But for me, the notes which accompany their releases are always quality – dense slabs of prose that convey the releases in the most physical of terms. And it’s fitting, seeing as said releases, which showcase the vibrant noise scene in the North-East, do tend to be the kind which evoke a certain physical reaction.

The one thing that is apparent is that the scene does involve a lot of bands sharing personnel, and four-piece Fashion Tips are no exception, featuring Esmé Louise Newman of black metal muthas Petrine Cross on vocals and microkorg. She’s joined by Butch Lexington (drums, drum machine), Liam Slack (bass, bass VI) and Jorden Sayer (guitar), and the four tracks were recorded t Liam’s house in County Durham, and was mastered by Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe of Thank and Beige Palace (because there’s a fair amount of cross-sharing in the Leeds scene too, and the northern DIY scene in general. In fact, it’s less of a scene and more of a community, and it’s nice, and I mean that sincerely: in an industry that’s pretty harsh, cutthroat, backstabby and all that shit, it’s a source of joy that there’s a sense of collectivism where artists are mates and help one another out: it should be a model for society in general).

And so it is that Fashion Tips’ debut EP is described as ‘A dance but one of mania, possessed by a need to expunge, switching between mournful and self effacing to raining down scorn. A quivering musculature of strings erupts in spasms of screeches and squawls, held to arched backbone of drums by straining bass tendons. Run through with varicose electronic veins bursting near the surface of skin, a fraught body emits its secrets through a variegated range of croons, shrieks and bellows.’

It sounds a terrifying prospect. The result is, in fact, altogether less scary, although those accustomed to Esmé’s chthonic guttural growls may be surprised by the helium-filled hollers ad yelps here.

Fucking Hell is pitched as ‘Sitting at the uncomfortable mid point between the upbeat and deeply visceral; Fashion Tips drag you in with virulently infectious riffage while simultaneously drenching you with noise and battering you with wild eyed and frantic vocal delivery’.

‘Lunched Out’ is scuzzed out, bass-driven and noisy, but also lively and hooky, and comes on more like X-Ray Spex than anything from the noise-rock scene. The guitars are fizzy fuzz, and the definition comes from the throbbing bass that’s melded to a crisp drum and then there’s the warping space-rock synth lines that really lift it.

Things get heavier with ‘Waltzing’, with hints of Cranes and Daisy Chainsaw bouncing around between the Stranglers-esqe synth, before it melts into a swirling sonic stew on ‘Cinema Vérité’.

‘Standing O’ brings crisp, cutty guitars and a certain (post-)punk minimalism against a swirling mess of feedback and noise, and synths tones that gyrate and grate against one another as everything surges to a rabid climax of barking vocals and a swirling soup of nasty noise.

Fucking Hell stands apart from other Panuras releases on a number of levels, its brevity being one of them. With the longest song clocking in at under four and a half minutes the whole EP’s duration is less than fourteen minutes. But that’s all it needs: Fucking Hell is about instant high impact. And it delivers. It also – unexpectedly, in context – delivers some decent, catchy tunes.

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Lo Egin – Volumancer

Posted: 8 April 2023 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 5th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

What is this? Sludge-jazz? Avant-doom? It’s certainly not quite like anything else you’ve ever heard.

The Leeds act – who despite several years of hard-gigging to refine and hone their sound, I’ve not previously encountered – describe their debit long-player as ‘a modern doom tome in which thrashings of drums, bass and guitar find kindred spirits in larynx-shredding vocals and lamenting horn arrangements, delivered on trombone and saxophone.’

It’s the lamenting horn (I often find myself lamenting my horn, too) and grainy guitars that greet the listener at the opening of the album, the first crushing bars of ‘Accursed Land’ offering a strange sonic experience – strange because it’s neither one thing nor the other. And when it drops down to just bass, the rasping vocals are the sound of purgatorial torture. The bone-dry vocal chords sound like sandpaper in a desert, before the instruments return to conjure some sort of doom rendition of a Hovis advertisement. It’s circa 2004 post-rock with the most pungent metal overdrive, the track’s explosive finale a punishing experience, like a Satanic I Like Trains or Her Name is Calla as dragged through the flaming bowels of hell.

The riffery steps up several notches on the heavy grind of ‘Arise’, but it’s the manic brass that really messes with your ears and your head. Brass isn’t a new feature in metal: These Monsters, another Leeds act from back in the day who pitched noise and psychedelia with mental sax are obvious precursors and possible influences, but Lo Egin scribble all over the template and make everything louder, gnarlier, messier. And yes, Volumancer is seriously fucking messy, mangling everything together all at once ins a genre-crunching morass of disparate elements which coalesce to create something utterly mind-warping.

Half the time, you find you’re utterly revved and raving, marvelling at the ingenuity and the enormous weight of Volumancer; the other half you’re baffled and bewildered , wondering how much you’re actually enjoying this while feeling dazed after the relentless punches the album lands. The album’s centrepiece is the ten-minute ‘The Things His Highness Overlooked’ and it’s a magnificently mellow slow-drone jazz piece which borders on a chamber-orchestra arrangement, where layers of brass overlap one another, until about three minutes in when the guitars and drums crash in and it scales the heights of epic while bringing crushing weight.

This album may only contain five tracks (six if you get the cassette version with a bonus cut), but it has a running time of nearly forty minutes, and it’s a beast.

Brutal, ugly, yet beautiful and glorious, Volumancer is something else. What that something is, I have no idea.

AA

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Distant Animals – Everything Is Fucked And We Are All Going To Die

Posted: 27 December 2022 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 2nd December 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Panurus Productions are renowned for their favouring of pop and jaunty indie on their catalogue, but as the title suggests, they’ve really excelled with the saccharine-sweet, shimmery Christmas bauble stylings on this December release by Distant Animals, the vehicle for Daniel Alexander Hignell.

The accompanying blurb sets the pitch for ‘A scuzzed out synth/noise/punk affair… straddling a range of genres but never settling on any one of them for long, shifting around with an angry, anxious energy directed at our bleak status quo.’

Granted, this does mean it’s nowhere near as abrasive as recent releases from Trauma Bond or as dark as Carnivorous Plants, this is a hybrid form that coalesces to convey the sound of post-industrial nihilism.

The synths drive and dominate the sound, and they’re layered into thick, foggy swirls pitched against grinding, fuzzy-as-fuck sequenced bass and a drum machine that’s largely submerged beneath the swelling squall. The opener, the eight-and-a-half-minute ‘Greetings from the MET Office’ builds and builds into an immense wall of sound, the guitar adding layers off noise and feedback rather than melody. There is a tune in there, somewhere, and vocals, too, buried in a blitzkrieg that sounds like Depeche Mode covered by My Bloody Valentine and then remixed by Jesu or Dr Mix and the Remix.

‘Phase Down and Sweat to Death’ gets dubby, with samples and snippets cut in and out of the mix, and actually finds a murky, echo-drenched groove in places, before veering off on myriad detours.

As titles such as the title track and ‘Panning For Shit In The Shallow End’ intone, this is far from a celebratory collection, with the delicate and brittle-feeling ‘Hegel’s Violin’ sounding like it could have been penned by The Cure circa Seventeen Seconds, and yes, it’s fair to say that there are what some may refer to as ‘gothic’ elements to the brooding sound.

If songs titles like ‘Fondly Remembering When Primark was a Woolworths’ and ‘They Didn’t Have Snowflakes In 76’ might suggest that Hignell’s been gorging on the Memberberries, but on the evidence there is, buried away in trudging industrial sub-zero trudges and stark, oppressive abstraction, this couldn’t be further from the truth, and we can appreciate these compositions as critiques of the multi-billion-pound nostalgia industry and Brexit Britain, where narrow-minded twats get dewy-eyed all over social media reminiscing over false memories of a golden age that never was. ‘They don’t make ‘em like they used to…’ It’s patent bullshit of course, but so many subscribe to this that, well, it must be true that The BBC haven’t screened Monty Python in decades because they’re woke lefties (and nothing to do that after airing it in 2019 for the fiftieth anniversary, the rights were purchased by NetFlix), and Stranger Things is only good because, well, it’s like The Goonies, isn’t it?

‘Panning for Shit’ is sparse, minimal electro that borders on Krautrock, and is the sound of drowning, not waving from our turd-encircled island, and there are many elements of this album which seem to align with the bleak perspectives and sounds of early industrial acts like Throbbing Gristle. But, to be clear, these are simply touchstones, rather than direct comparisons. Everything Is Fucked And We Are All Going To Die may evoke a sense of familiarity and a strange sense of déjà-vu, but ultimately presents a unique view and amalgamation of influences and stylistic references, and herein lies its true strength.

AA

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Trauma Bond – The Violence Of Spring

Posted: 5 July 2022 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 15th July 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

In a world where there’s so little that you can rely on, knowing that there are some labels that can be taken as a measure of quality provides a much-needed reassurance that not absolutely everything is shit. Panurus is one of those labels, along with Cruel Nature, Bearsuit, and Human Worth, that provides an unwritten guarantee that if they’re releasing it, it’s worth hearing. And what’s particularly pleasing with all of these labels is that they’re not genre-specific. Human Worth may lean toward guitar-driven noise, while Bearsuit favour genre-straddling avant-gardism, but ultimately, these little labels put out stuff that they like and find interesting, and this is healthy, in that it provides a platform for a diverse range or acts and fans to connect.

Trauma Bond’s The Violence Of Spring is in fact a reissue, having been originally released by Digital Destruction in the US just over a year ago, in a limited run of twenty-five hand-stamped pink neon tapes. Panurus have retained the original design, but rotated the image to replicate the band’s own digital release, which makes more sense when you study the flows off blood down the face. It’s not a pretty over, but it does very much provide a fair visual representation of the ‘raging grindcore/powerviolence/noise onslaught’ it houses.

As their biography summarises, ‘Trauma Bond is the conception of Eloise Chong-Gargette & Tom Mitchell – blending a shared love of violence, noise and metal to concoct a visceral exploration of aggression’. I mean, who doesn’t love violence, right? I am being sarcastic and, indeed facetious, and should perhaps reiterate here that both makers and fans of the most brutal music tend to be among the gentlest, most docile people I’ve encountered. The music is the outlet for everything they aren’t in the every day. With the exception of Marilyn Manson and Genesis P. Orridge, it’s the bland indie types who are more likely to be the real scumbags, and likewise their fans. This is the long way of saying that there’s violence, and there’s violence.

The original notes pitch ‘a furious onslaught of razor-sharp, disorienting grind; that darts between blasting intensity, to dirge, to industrial noise, and back again before you’ve realised what you’ve been hit by.’ And that’s exactly what The Violence Of Spring delivers, packing nine brutal sonic assaults into twenty minutes.

It all begins with an ominous roll of thunderous rumbling, the fifty-seven-second ‘O.C.B.’ building a tension and suspense that’s devastated with the explosive treblefest of ‘the title track, where everything piledrives in at a hundred miles an hour, from the flurry of guitars, the machine-gun drumming and screamy vocals, and from hereon in there’s not much let-up. There are samples galore – seemingly of panic-stricken crowds and people in streets where accidents, explosions, and shootings have just taken place. And The Violence Of Spring is simultaneously a drive-by and a hit-and-run that concludes with a suicide bombing.

They swing into black metal on ‘Total Fermentation’, and this is a dank brew, unfiltered and thick with sediment, and headcrackingly potent, while on ‘Daddy Do’, it’s more barking, guttural grindcore than anything else, and fuck me, it’s savage. One of the album’s two longer tracks, ‘Double Denim Dissociative Disorder’ which runs past the four minute mark against the usual minute and a half, is a grating wall of distortion, a churning landslide of sludge that slowly sinks into a spent crackle. Sandwiched between this and the finale, the overloaded tempo-shifting blast of demonic fury that is ‘Syndrome Imposter’ is ‘Little One’, a pained blast of metal anguish that’s delivered with remarkable and unexpected clarify, particularly in the vocals.

Nothing about The Violence Of Spring is gentle, but it hits all the harder on account of its comparative range. Yes, it’s all metal, but The Violence Of Spring is all the metal.

AA

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Sozna and Young Tribe – Ephemeral

Posted: 21 November 2021 in Albums
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Panarus Productions – 3rd December 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a challenge faced by many artists, and many try but fail to capture the fleeting moments that pass before we even see them. They’re sometimes visual, sometimes auditory, sometimes emotional, and sometimes a combination of all three, like an instant where the lighting is so rare or perfect and you feel a fleeting pang of something inside that you can’t even pinpoint… there is a soundtrack to that somewhere, but it’s so fleeting, intangible, there is simply no way you can grasp it, no way to capture it.

This is where we convene with Sozna and Young Tribe, whose biographical details are sparse but likely irrelevant. Because as the title intimates, nothing is fixed, and details are not important; what matters is chasing the mood of the moment, which is like catching air in a fishing net. It’s a common notion within the spheres of ambience, and more often than not manifests as gentle, ethereal works, with mellifluous trails of vapour drifting softly in attempts to convey the wistfulness of fleeting intangibility.

Where Ephemeral stands out is not only in its heavy use of field recordings and material lifted from various sources – snippets of voices, building work, street sounds – to create a layered collage that quite literally captures and combines fleeting moments and assembles them in a kind of patchwork, bit its darkness and weight. Everything overlaps to crowd the mind, as construction work and idle chatter overlap.

‘Subincision’ is a swampy murk of swirling dark ambient electronica withy rumbling, thunderous grumbles and ominous overtones. Following that, ‘Gods From Saturn’ is particularly dense; part space-age abstraction with hints of Krautrock, [art dark ambient, it’s not a sigh of reminiscence about that brief moment of ecstasy, but the gut-pulling nag of anguish that comes from recalling that social wrong step, that embarrassing misspeak, the sinking feeling of that wrong choice or bad decision. These emotions too are fleeting and ephemeral, and in many ways a more common kind of ephemera. The title track is dark and punishing, a gloomy chant and thud from the depths of a cavernous cave; it’s oppressive and somewhat scary, with monasterial moans and elongated shadows droning and rising. It’s eerie, creepy, and other-worldly. You may feel a pang of fear, but it, like everything else, passes in no time. There is no permanence; everything happens, and exists, in but a moment.

Every moment is just that; a moment, and it’s gone before you realise it. The highs may often prove more memorable and feel more protracted in comparison to the highs and the alrights, but in terms of the period of their existence, all is equal. Sozna and Young Tribe explore this space, and delve courageously into the lows, the throughs, the darker spaces, the moments of discomfort, shame, and embarrassment which are but fleeting which often haunt us forever. Ephemeral grips the corners of fleeting discomfort, the lower reaches of the intestine, and pokes the points of nagging discomfort from fleeting moments which linger there. In doing so, they inch closer to creating art that reflects life.

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Petrine Cross and Tower Of Filargyria – Split

Posted: 1 October 2021 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 1st October 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a cliché to say ‘I don’t know where the time goes’, and it’s often, if not an outright lie, then at least somewhat disingenuous. Between dayjob work, school runs, cooking, other domestic chores, gigs, occasional TV, and writing reviews, it’s pretty obvious to me and most people who know me where my time goes. I know where my time goes. This doesn’t make it less of an issue. The fact I’ve been chipping away at this particular review for days, even weeks, adding a few words here and there, is testament to the time-deficient lifestyle. I can’t even quote remember where I was going at the start of this by the time of the finishing point, but ultimately, I suppose the point is that time is something that is ephemeral, fleeting, something of which we’re all too often acutely aware and are in thrall to and yet at the same time, it is simply a construct by which to structure our existences.

This split release on Newcastle cassette label Panurus Productions promises ‘two sides of bleak catharsis on this transatlantic split from Petrine Cross and Tower of Filargyria.’ And that is precisely what it delivers, with three tracks from each artist, both of whom scour the depths of darkness in contrasting and complimentary ways.

Black metal may have relatively modern origins in musical term, but its murky invocations speak of something altogether more ancient, and Petrine Cross has a way of transcending time and genre, taking the standard tropes and merging them with atmospherics so dark and dank as to blur to near-ambience. The muffled production values which are core to the genre are something not only embraced here, but utilised to create a distancing and a sense of ‘otherness’: this isn’t drums, guitars, vocals, it’s a dense wall of sound that envelops your entire being, and smothers the senses, stifling, suffocating, like a cloud of mustard gas.

There’s a point near the end of ‘Sobriquet’ where everything simply erupts into an explosive crescendo that hits like a bomb, and the sound is like mud, dirt, rocks and splintered body parts – being splattered in all directions from an immense crater. You’ve no idea of the song’s lyrics or real meaning, only the impact of this devastating moment. But there’s light. The third and final PC cut, ‘The Grecian Bend’ seems to offer glimmers from amidst the murk, with some delicate wisps and washes of sound. There’s a rare subtlety and delicacy about this that resonates on a subconscious level.

Tower of Filargyria, apparently referencing ‘the medieval term meaning love of money or silver, rail against their monumental namesake, produce three tracks of sample laden anti-capitalist black metal’. We have to take this on trust, of course, as what this manifests as is a blistering assault of guitars so trebly they hurt and snarling vocals with so much reverb everything clangs into a mesh of noise, the drums thumping away somewhere low in the mix like a pillow thwocking around in a washing machine.

Samples of lectures and speeches dissecting the beast of capitalism abound, and the semi-ambient opening to the third and final ToF track, the eleven-and-a-half-minute ‘Capitalfascist State Apparatus’ (no question about the sentiment / agenda there) works particularly well in the way it draws the listener in – which makes the ‘metal’ section all the more disappointing, being quieter, and of a very different sound quality. It feels more like a demo than a finished take – but for that, it’s true to black metal production values, and it’s one of those songs that gets better as it goes on, and builds and builds to a roaring crescendo of howled, raw-throated vocals and thundering percussion amidst a squall of guitars and feedback. It’s a real whorl of noise and comes on full-throttle, and this – THIS – is the release. It’s been a long time in coming.

Catharsis is hard to beat, but the downside is that it’s often hard to know how to manage the drop, the slump which follows – and it inevitably does. This split release is all the catharsis, and it’s one the listener can project onto and draw inwards from. It has immense (dark) force: the only slump is for the listener on the realisation that after forty-five minutes of immersion in the gnarliest, most painful depths of anguish, it’s over.

AA

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Fading Tapes – Cartographer

Posted: 4 July 2021 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 4th August 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Fading Tapes: a moniker that casts allusions to degradation, the wear and fade through the passage of time, the notion of impermanence and the significance of medium – because the medium isn’t only the message, it’s the determining factor in the lifespan of a record, whereby digital is supposedly forever, but analogue corrodes, deteriorates, and ultimately becomes unusable.

A Cartographer is one who draws or makes maps, and Fading Tapes’ latest work is, ins ways, both map and territory. The titles of the four tracks sketch out the features of the locations in the most minimal of forms – and these aren’t necessarily natural geographical landforms or biomes, but remains of human activity left marking the landscape.

The sequencing of the four compositions, each of which span around fifteen minutes apiece, very much create the sensation that the listener is being guided on a journey, and there is a clear linearity to Cartographer.

Opener ‘East Valley’ calls us to the ritual with an insistent tribal drumming and wailing pipe before… actually, before what the fuck? It’s not so much a building of layers of sound as it is a jet plane flying overhead, devastating the image of a hidden tribe enacting an ancient, esoteric ritual. And this is the dynamic of the piece – ancient collides with modern, and as immense gongs and cymbals crash, ringing out into an expansive desert, unchanged for centuries, hidden from the march of technology and evoking a deep-seated spirituality, the disruptions are deep incisions that disrupt without care for the existing habitat. But over time it’s the soft, supple droning ambience and wordless vocal tones that ring out into a spacious echo that come to dominate. For once, nature, and the old world, wins out as so-called progress falls by the wayside: the valley remains unconquered.

‘Bones’ is a more contemporary-sounding drone work, with conventional western percussion propelling a deep, dark surge of slow-burning desert rock that’s slowed to a the pace of drifting dunes, and the sound is dense. The snare rings out into a cavern of reverb – it’s almost dubby, but it’s accompanied by wailing feedback, that does on, and on, and endless mid-range drones. We learn little, if anything, of the bones themselves, or their origins, but there is a sense that there is little interest in the real detail of the past, and that a sketched narrative is all that there is an appetite for. Instead, to the present, and the future.

The cymbals grow in dominance on the tempestuous ‘Boats’, but again, echoes and shadows dominate, and this very much feels like a window on an historical event, the soundtrack to a battle or other catastrophe at sea where boats were lost beneath the waves. To all intents and purposes, this is a spacious post-rock piece, but it possesses a richness, a level of detail, and a degree of ambience, that is so much more.

The final track, ‘Red Dry Land’ is a hypnotic piece that drifts without real movement, a nagging motif backed by a thrum that simply thumps on unchanging for what feels like an eternity. There’s a scratchy guitar that’s reminiscent of Andy Moor, and mines a more avant-jazz seam, but retains that expansive post-rock vibe, too.

The map charts a route, and as it progresses, it leads the listener back to themselves. This all feels highly evocative, and conjures images in the mind’s eye – but every perception is different. Perhaps that difference ultimately does come down to the map, and one’s experience of the territory – for while the former is fixed, factual, the latter is not, and will always be coloured by individual realities, the eye of the explorer. You may know exactly where you are, and still be lost. With Cartographer, Fading Tapes point the way but provide no real answers. But perhaps that’s ok: the enjoyment is in the journey rather than the destination.

AA

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Left Hand Cuts Off The Right – Only Then

Posted: 14 March 2021 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 2nd April 2021

Sometimes, an understanding of process helps in shaping the appreciation of a musical work. Sometimes, it doesn’t. When presented with Only Then by Left Hand Cuts Off The Right, I can’t decide either way. The album contains two longform tracks – the twenty-five minute ‘2 – 6 – 17’ and the thirty-five minute ’23 – 6 -19’. Both were recorded live, and showcase a blend of improvisation and composition. The track titles do, unsurprisingly, mark the dates of the performances, both f which took place at the legendary Café Oto in 2017 and 2019.

On the former piece, a scraping drone hovers somewhere in the distance, relentless, nagging, always in the background but always within the reals of awareness: you simply cannot tune it out. Atop of this, there are crackles, scrapes, flickers, scratches and microcosmic, microtonal glitches, and gently tinkling picked notes casting sparse scales and oriental motifs, with the zither providing a unique, and, to western ears, exotic flavour. Over time, the details dissolve and blur into a metallic scrape that gnaws at the senses as allow, slow, undulation persists long after any trace of melody had dissipated, swallowed by currents of dissonant sound.

Slow-hammered xylophone notes emerge and steer toward the end of the first piece, and then stop: cue a cascade of applause which reminds us that this isn’t a studio work and that this happened. Not just that live performances used to be a thing, but, quite simply, that the audio contained here is not a studio-controlled contrivance, but an event that happened in real-time. Something about that realisation is strangely affecting.

Coughs and splutters and a general clamour of voices preface the fall to silence and the first echoing sounds on side two. Audience behaviour is so telling: the respect (or lack of) given to a artists whose performances are on the quiet aside can make or decimate the enjoyment for may of those present. Here, Left Hand Cuts Off The Right command over half an hour of hush. From clattering drips and clangs, the track builds from sparse sound echoing into emptiness, slow-dropping notes decaying into a soft ambience.

As to the technique and the technical aspects, the press release informs that ‘both sets were created with zither, melodica, synthesizer, bent electronics, field recordings, mbira, tape loops, percussion and effects. Side A comprises of 6 improvised sections each with specific performance, composition and sonic parameters. Side B is centred on 2 pre-recorded compositions which are mixed and performed live and interspersed with improvised sections for set sound sources.’

It’s actually quite difficult to unravel precisely what this means, beyond the fact that often the composing, improvising and performing processes overlap – informing one another as new works are created. And while the live performance of prerecorded pieces interspersed with improvisation and improvisation within predetermined parameters are clearly different disciplines, ultimately both methods combine a certain element of random with planning. Moreover, while delivered as works in the ,ids of an eternal evolution due to the nature of their form, these pieces as performed and as recorded are not works in progress, but works in their own right.

Only Then captures a moment – one I suspect many of us wish we could return to right now.

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