Posts Tagged ‘series’

Simon Fisher Turner – Closing the Circle

Posted: 13 July 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 11th July 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

And so it is that the third season of Mortality Tables LIFEFILES series – and, indeed, LIFEFILES as a project, closes as it began just over two years ago, with its thirtieth instalment coming courtesy of Simon Fisher Turner. As such, this release is appropriately titled.

The premise of the series, which we’ve covered quite extensively here over the course of its running, is that curator and Mortality Tables label owner, Mat Smith, furnishes an artist with a field recording for them to more or less do as they please. Some of the reworkings and manipulations have been quite radical; others, less so. But what each has offered is a snapshot of a particular place at a specific time, reimagined and retold at distance by a third party. If this sounds rather absurd, it’s worth considering that this is essentially how history is formed – by the interpretation and re-presentation of primary source material to create a linear narrative. But how much can we trust the narrator? Even that primary source recording is just that – a recording. It is not the actual event. Therefore, with each revision, there is a move further away from the actual event. There evolves a certain historical layering, not so much akin to the degradation of a photocopy of a photocopy, but a drawing of a drawing, subject to ever-increasing distortions, deviations, corruptions.

As the accompanying notes inform us – quite factually – ‘The LIFEFILES series commenced in March 2023 with a piece by Simon Fisher Turner made using sounds recorded at an exhibition of works by the Memphis collective at Milton Keynes Gallery. The series concludes with a final piece from Fisher Turner, again using sounds recorded at Milton Keynes Gallery, this time at an Andy Warhol exhibition.’

This piece is only a little over eleven minutes long: a single or EP rather than an album – but Simon Fisher Turner packs a lot into that time. It begins with the slow-echoing of voices, a low mutter, the sound of voices, perhaps, chattering in a gallery – slowed and distorted, there’s a sense of discomfort, of the unheimlich, before a mid-range chimes in and hovers. So far, so ambient – but then some crushing percussion batters in and from nowhere things go a bit Test Dept. Trudging industrial beats slog away relentlessly, and they’re multi-layered and multitracked and hammer away from all angles in surround sound. There are some lulls, some drops in pitch and volume, occasional rests in tempo, even – but this is first and foremost a full-on beat assault. The speakers crunch and crackle and the beats thump and stomp.

Glitching, grinding bass enters the fray around the mid-point, albeit briefly, before swiftly vanishing, replaced instead by a subsonic sonar – and then things really get ugly. There’s a violence to this beat-driven blast, which even during the moments where it’s taken down a notch or three, there’s a sense of menace, something underlying that’s uncomfortable. The delicate chiming of a singing bowl or somesuch in the last couple of minutes, even when it yields to a quiet, low rumble, does little to dissipate the tension which has built – and built. But in the end, as is always the case, the ultimate end is silence. And so it is that the circle finally closes.

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BMH – Killigrew

Posted: 13 June 2024 in Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 7th June 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Mortality Tables have continued to release titles from their ‘Life Files’ series at a remarkable rate, with instalments 18 and 19 landing in May, and hot on their proverbial heels, this, number 20, in the first week of June.

The premise remains consistent, namely ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events [which] are shared with a range of artists working across different disciplines. Those artists are free to respond to the recordings in any way they like. And so, as ever, the field recordings, courtesy of Mortality Tables main man Mat Smith provide the foundation and inspiration.

Killiegrew Monument is a peculiar thing. Located in Falmouth, and intended as a memorial to the last surviving member of the Cornish family, the monument is a sharp obelisk constructed in 1738. It looks altogether more contemporary, and ultimately anomalous with its surroundings. And one might say that this release is similarly anomalous. I can imagine that beholding this curious construction would inspire an array or reactions. But why the fuck would you play a stone monument with a sharp stone? Is that really one of the responses you’d likely have to coming face to face with such a construction? Well, perhaps, if you’re possessed of an avant-garde mindset, whereby instead of reflecting on the origins of The Wind in the Willows, you find yourself contemplating ways of making unusual noises.

Once again, when it comes to the ‘Life Files’ series on Mortality Tables, we don’t know what the source materials actually sound like.

‘Killigrew Monument Played With A Sharp Stone (Part One)’ is an odd sound work: there’s chatter and ambient drift and scratches and shuffles and scrapes, but what on earth is going on? Seagulls wheeling and cawing – and on those squawks the sound echoes and reverberates, and the collage of sound collides with a strange rendition of ‘One, two, three four five, once I caught a fish alive’.

There’s lots of processed echo and cawing gulls at the start of ‘Killigrew Monument Played With A Sharp Stone (Part Two)’, as well, and it does, in some respects, sound like someone crooning abstractly into a child’s echo mic just to see how it sounds. The longer of the two pieces, at almost thirteen minutes in duration, it creates a deeply strange and disorientating atmosphere, which is likely evocative of this curious monument, which stands out of time and out of keeping with its surroundings as a testament to human folly, and, ultimately to vanity.

Too abstract to be ‘songs’, too much happening to be ‘ambient’, the result is a haunting and somewhat disorientating soundwork of a rare quality.

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Gudrun Gut – GUT Soundtrack

Posted: 7 March 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Moabit Musik – 8th March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Gudrun Gut has forged a career on the fringes, participating in numerous collective and collaborative activities as well as solo projects. Often creating artistic work which sits well outside the boundaries of genre categorisation, her output has never been dull, or predictable. And so it is that GUT Soundtrack is precisely what the title suggests – her own soundtrack, to – wait for it – a mini-series about Gudrun Gut.

It’s a difficult call to make in assessing whether this is indulgence or an essential artistic profile, especially without actually viewing the series, but reading the synopses of the three episodes, it does seem that GUT is a bizarre hybrid of documentary and reality TV, particularly on the arrival of episode three:

Episode 1 The Blank Page. In the first episode of “GUT,” everything revolves around the mysterious blank page that means so much to artists. A Boat trip at moonlight with Thomas Fehlmann, a foto session with Mara von Kummer, and the surprise guest Ben Becker.

Episode 2 MMM. In the second episode the letter M takes center stage: Music, Mother, Malaria, and the mysterious Monotron. Gudrun composes the soundtrack for her series, everything turns into a pink dream. In the studio with her bandmates Manon Pepita and Bettina Köster.

Episode 3 The Sourdough. In the final episode, Gudrun turns her attention to the everyday, the routines, the laundry, and the bread. Here, an artistic ode to the freedom hidden in the seemingly ordinary unfolds. The visit of musicians Pilocka Krach and Midori Hirano culminates in a garden performance with Monika Werkstatt. A delicate symphony of the everyday, the essence of art and community resides.

Ah, that delicate symphony of the everyday. On a personal level I find pieces where people recount their routine not only vaguely dull, but, worse, depressing, as they invariably seem to have time – time to eat a nutritious breakfast, do some yoga or go to the gym or got for a run, before their morning session of creativity or money-making from a comfortable environment, be it a studio, or spacious office, or a coffee shop or somesuch. I feel myself shrivelling inside as curling with envy as I compare these routines to my own, which involves a daily to-do list an arm long whereby I squeeze in endless laundry and changing cat litter around my dayjob, runs to the shops and making sure everything is ready for my daughter to go to school in the morning, including making a packed lunch, before finally sitting down to knock out a review around 9:30pm and waking up at my desk, review-half-written around 11:30 and panicking about being back at the dayjob for 6:30 the next morning.

But I’m not here to berate the former Neubauten member’s breadmaking, but to critique the audio accompaniment, and, as ever, to reflect on how well a soundtrack stands when standing apart from the visuals to which it is intended to augment.

The series may contain three episodes, but the soundtrack comprises some twenty-four short, incidental snippets, which are nothing if not wide-ranging in style and form. One minute it’s like an episode of The Clangers; the next, it’s like listening to percussion made from the banging of bin lids. Spoken word and space-rock, swirling synths and fizzing electronics are tossed around all over the shop. There are moments of glacial synthpop glory – ‘Gutscore’ is atmospheric, dynamic, a bit Kraftwerk, a bit Tangerine Dream, a bit Mike Oldfield, while ‘Garten (Edit)’ is reminiscent of Yello. Yes, it does sound, often, overtly German, but then, Gudrun Gut was there from the early days of electronic exploration and as such, she isn’t following the lineage, but has been instrumental in its evolution.

‘Biste Schon Weg (23 Mix)’, one of the set’s few longer songs – that is to say, over three minutes – is a reworking of the song which appeared on Guts’ last album, the 2018 release Moment, while ‘How Can I Move (24 Mix) revisits a song which originally featured on Wildlife in 2012.

Tossing bumping electronica and some weird excursions make for an interesting journey, and a collection which encapsulates Gudrun Gut’s varied output during the course of a lengthy career. Quirky, odd, idiosyncratic, these are all highly appealing features which define a unique artist, and render GUT Soundtrack a fascinating listen.

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Ergo Phizmiz –The Tin Drummer Has Collapsed

Posted: 18 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 16th February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

For myriad reasons, my head’s a shed of late, and I’ve been doing this for coming up for sixteen years now, cranking out reviews on a more or less daily basis, sometimes during certain spells up to five or six in a day and taking in three or four live shows in a week, on top of dayjob and, since 2011, parenting. So I can be forgiven for not remembering every artist I’ve covered, let alone the details. But somewhere along the way, on seeing this arrive in my inbox, I recall that I have written about Ergo Phizmiz. I have no idea what I wrote, or when, whether I dug it or not, what kind of music it was, but I did write. Ergo Phizmiz isn’t a name one forgets easily, after all.

And so it is that ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is the sixth release in the second season of Mortality Tables’ ‘LIFEFILES’ series, a series of singles whereby ‘Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events are shared with a range of artists working with sound. Those artists are then free to respond to the recordings in any way they like, either through manipulation or composition.’

Seems I’ve got some catching up to so, since, ‘Season 01 of the LIFEFILES series commenced in March 2023 with contributions from Simon Fisher Turner, Veryan, Xqui, Rupert Lally, Andrew Spackman and Dave Clarkson,’ and ‘Season 02 commenced in September 2023 with contributions so far from Audio Obscura, Todeskino, boycalledcrow, Simon Fisher Turner, Maps and Ergo Phizmiz.’

The one thing about arriving at a late point in a series and not even in the first season of singles, over a TV series is that there’s no cause for consternation over the plot arc or who the characters are or their back-stories. A single is a single, and it should, by its nature, stand alone, free of the context of series or album, and ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ does.

As the accompanying notes inform us, ‘The following three source sounds were chosen at random:

1. Loud bass music played from a car at the Akeman Inn, Bucks (21.06.2021)

2. A rubber lid stretched across a ramekin (07.07.2022)

3. Seren playing an old acoustic guitar (01.11.2023)’

Phizmiz’s response is to hurl them all together at random, too. ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ begins with a roaring barrage of noise, the roaring thrum of an engine and what I understand to be ‘loud bass music’. On ‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’, Phizmiz doesn’t collage or overlap the source materials – which would likely have produced an utterly head-smashing cacophony – instead favouring a different kind of cut-up method, akin to the ‘drop-in’ method devised by Burroughs and Gysin, whereby the different segments are dropped in, ‘randomly’. The sources follow one another, and it’s a haphazard-sounding patchwork of unrelated sounds, although the rubber lid and acoustic guitar aren’t as different as one might anticipate.

‘The Tin Drummer has Collapsed’ is strange, and interesting, and as an experimental assemblage, it isn’t designed to be accessible or musical, or conform to any conventional expectations of a ‘single’. This is nothing more and nothing less than an artistic response to a set of parameters set as part of an experiment – and one that’s novel in its directness and simplicity.

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