Posts Tagged ‘Thor Harris’

Aidan Baker, Simon Goff, Thor Harris – The Bit

Posted: 23 July 2020 in Albums
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Gizeh Records – August 28th 2020 – GZH98

Christopher Nosnibor

Three years on from Noplace, the unassuming supergroup known only by their actual names, comprising Aidan Baker (Nadja / Hypnodrone Ensemble), Simon Goff (Jóhann Johannsson / Hildur Gudnadottir) and Thor Harris (Swans, Shearwater, Thor & Friends) reconvene for a second instalment of improvisational work created in just a single day. On this occasion, they took advantage of a day off while on tour to record at Voxton Studios in Berlin

The Bit is an edited rendition of that session.

According to the press release, ‘The Bit finds the trio painting with a lighter touch than on its predecessor. Thor Harris’ motorik beats still underpin the music but the atmospherics take a more prominent role and there is a pure and cohesive path to be found throughout the record. Much like on Noplace, Baker’s guitar and Goff’s violin weave together beautifully, forming a deep bed of melody, ambience and reverb.’

There’s an equine theme to many of the titles, specifically ‘The Bit’, ‘Canter’ and ‘Gait’, but the loping drums and slow-moving ambient drone that defines the sound isn’t particularly evocative of the theme.

Of the six real-time compositions, the first five are quite succinct, around the three or four-minute mark, with only ‘Gait’ – a sparse, minimal piece that slowly throbs and pulsates while feathery notes drift down gently in a wide space – drawing out past seven minutes.

‘Springenden’ is a beautifully detailed piece, ostensibly a modern classical work consisting of rippling piano, quavering strings and a soft background wash of synth, which prefaces the twenty-two-minute finale, ‘Wild At Heart’. It’s essentially an expansive ambient work, which whispers, wisps and turns with an understated grace, twisting and turning as a slow beat booms into the rarefied atmosphere. It’s an expansive, exploratory piece that’s murky, ominous, and suspenseful. And the thing about suspense is that you never know what’s around the corner. There is no revelation in the rumbling low tones and wailing, dawning drones that emerge and taper down during this longform piece which descends to distortion and dissonance as the sound thickens and grows grainier. It’s a gradual dilapidation and makes for an intriguing and subtle listening experience.

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Whalesong – Gateway (EP)

Posted: 24 April 2019 in Singles and EPs
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30th April 2019

Christopher Nosnibor

The last thing you’ll get from Whalesong is any ambient relaxation sound piece or ‘blue planet’ chillout. Formed a decade ago in Poland by Michal ‘Neithan’ Kielbasa and drawing on elements of industrial, no wave and drone, the ever-shifting collective have established a reputation for extreme weight and extreme volume.

Their third album, following on from Disorder (2017) and Disorder Deconstructed, features a stellar host of musicians Thor Harris (Swans, Wrekmeiste Harmonies, Xiu Xiu), Waclaw Vogg Kieltyka (Decapitated), Aleksander Papierz (Sigihl) and award-winning vibraphonist Tomasz Herisz. But ahead of the release of the double-disc Radiance of a Thousand Suns, they’re treating us to the Gateway EP, the title of which suggests it offers the listener an avenue, an opening, through which to pass to the album proper.

The twelve-minute title track begins with a slow, torturous industrial beat, a plodding trudge that sounds like sheet metal being hit with a sledgehammer. Extraneous noise hovers around, while the vocals, detached, inhuman, echo into the bleakness. And then the drone hits. It’s a dense, distorted, agonizing drone with the volume of a jet engine. Everything screams pain and anguish. And still that constant metallic thud crashes with metronomic regularity, and hammers into your brain. And it goes on forever. The effect is purgatorial, the relentlessness punishing. Sitting obediently on a bed of nails and brandishing a club alongside Swans circa 82-86, ‘Gateway’ is music for masochists at its very best.

Promising to display difference facets of the band on this release, ‘I Am Not Here’ (which may or may not be on some vinyl pressings) is lighter, a bright conglomeration of dulcimers, hanging bells and chiming percussion ring out in unison. Flickers of rhythm emerge from the rippling jangles, although there is no distinct form to be found here. Nothing really happens: it simply jingles along pleasantly, although with endless repetition eventually comes a sense of disquiet.

They’re not kidding when they say the vinyl release is limited: the hand-numbered 10" lathe cut vinyl, which comes in folded black art paper with ‘100% hand-made screen-printed silver metallic artwork’ featuring a picture by Michal Biel, and with packaging design and layout by Mentalporn’ comes in. transparent vinyl limited to 10 copies, some of which will have hidden bonus track on side B, while black vinyl is limited to just 1 copy.

Needless to say, these were sold out before I came to review the release, but at least there’s still the digital option….

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Thor & Friends – The Subversive Nature of Kindness

Posted: 12 November 2017 in Albums
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Living Music Duplication – 17th November 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Thor Harris continues to keep himself more than vaguely occupied in the post-Swans era, and also continues to demonstrate just what a versatile percussionist he is. The collective, centred around Harris, who not only contributes diverse and eclectic percussion, but also wind instruments including some of his own devising. features at its core, Peggy Ghorbani on marimba, and Sarah ‘Goat’ Gautier on marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, organ, voice, mellotron and piano.

Anyone on the market for Swans-style brutal percussive bludgeoning should leave now. Thor and Friends are pitched as an ‘avant-chamber ensemble’, drawing on ‘the classic Minimalist composers including Terry Riley and Steve Reich, but also amalgamate such diverse influences as Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Moondog and The Necks around a polyrhythmic core of mallet-struck instruments, primarily marimba, xylophone and vibraphone’.

There’s a lighthearted, skipping melodic heart beating beneath the eddying synths and weirdy whistles and subtle strings which are all interwoven into one another on the hypnotic and ever-shifting ’90 Metres’. Ominous and eerie tones and echo-heavy chimes dominate both ‘Creepy Carpets’ and ‘Dead Man’s Hand’, while elsewhere, ‘Mouse Mouse’ explores a more playful side, manifesting as a sing-sing tune that has an almost nursery rhyme / lullaby feel to it.

In the fucked-up, brutal world in which we find ourselves, where it’s everyone for themselves while each and every citizen is shafted by governments and multinationals and consumerism, kindness does feel subversive. And in their own quiet way, Thor and Friends offer their own subversive resistance. It’s a gentle, mellifluous collection of compositions which are neither overtly contemporary nor steeped in traditionalism. It’s this sense that the music exists out of any place in time, and that it doesn’t obviously connote any concrete physical space that makes it so very appealing.

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Aidan Baker / Simon Goff / Thor Harris – Noplace

Posted: 28 October 2017 in Albums
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Gizeh Records – 10th November 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

This is certainly quite the collaborative lineup, featuring as it does Aidan Baker (Nadja / Caudal / B/B/S/), Simon Goff (Molecular, Bee & Flower), and Thor Harris (Swans, Shearwater, Thor & Friends). What renders Noplace all the more impressive is that it’s an improvised work, recorded in a single day.

As the press release recounts, ‘having known each other for a number of years and previously contributed to one another’s recordings this trio finally came together as a whole on May 7th 2017 at Redrum Studios in Berlin. In a short, improvised session of just a few hours they set about laying down as much material as possible which was then subsequently edited and re-worked (without overdubs) to form this album.’ And the results are quite something, and I very quickly manage to put aside the thought that the cover art reminds me of the film Up, minus the balloons.

Rippling strings quaver over softly swelling undercurrents while rolling percussion provides a subtle, unobtrusive rhythm as ‘Noplace I’ introduces the album before creeping into the darkness f counterpart piece ‘Noplace II’. And yet it’s very much only the beginning: having been moulded post-recording, the album’s seven individual pieces are structured and sequenced so as to lead the listener on an immersive journey which gradually and subtly moves from one place to entirely another.

‘Red Robin’ builds a pulsating, looping groove overlaid with creeping stealth. Its repetitious motif may owe something to the hypnotic cyclical forms of Swans, but its trance-inducing sonic sprawl also alludes to a hypnogogic reimagining of dance music – and this filters into the spacious ‘Noplace III’, which draws together expansive ambience and, in the distance, shuffling, tranced-out beats, to create something that stands in strange, murky Krautrock / dance territory. Yes, it sounds electronic. Yes, it sounds unique, but at the same time, yes, it sounds familiar in terms of the individual genre tropes. It’s ‘place’ is precisely ‘noplace,’ in that it belongs nowhere specific, yet appeals on many different levels and in many different ways.

Interweaving motifs continue to feature in ‘Tin Chapel,’, but the rhythm here is much more prominent, a weighty four-four bass/snare beat driving a linear road through the sweeping, strings that glide from mournful to tense. The locked-in psyche-hued desert rock bass groove pushes the piece forwards, while at the same time holding it firmly in one place. In turn, it tapers into the bleak, murky expanse that is ‘Northplace’.

The final composition, ‘Nighplace’, brings things down and almost full circle as the percussion retreats into the background amidst a wash of elongated drones which ebb and flow softly.

Noplace certainly doesn’t feel improvised, and while it’s remarkably cohesive, as well as possessing a strong sense of structure, it also reveals a remarkable range, both sonically and compositionally. And irrespective of any context, it’s an engaging and immersive aural experience.

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Lawrence English – Cruel Optimism

Posted: 6 February 2017 in Albums
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Room40 – 17th February 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

The title carries an implicit connotation of juxtaposition. It’s also a direct reference to the 2011 text by Lauren Berlant, which explores power and the ‘cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted’ and the collapse of the liberal-capitalist dream.

English explains the album’s context as follows: ‘Over the course of creating the record, we collectively bore witness to a new wave of humanitarian and refugee crisis (captured so succinctly in the photograph of Alan Kurdi’s tiny body motionless on the shore), the black lives matter movement, the widespread use of sonic weapons on civilians, increased drone strikes in Waziristan, Syria and elsewhere, and record low numbers of voting around Brexit and the US election cycle, suggesting a wider sense of disillusionment and powerlessness. Acutely for me and other Australians, we’ve faced dire intolerance concerning race and continued inequalities related to gender and sexuality. The storm has broken and feels utterly visceral. Cruel Optimism is a meditation on these challenges and an encouragement to press forward towards more profound futures.’

For Cruel Optimism, English has enlisted, amongst others, Swans contributors Norman Westberg and Thor Harris. As their recent excursions outside Swans demonstrate, they are both musicians capable of magnificently nuanced sound – a stark contrast to the shuddering power of Swans in full force. They bring subtle, understated performances to the pieces on which they feature here. Tony Buck and Chris Abrahams of The Necks are also featured, although again, their input is suitably muted and the line-up is far from overplayed in the promotional materials which accompany the album.

A sense of contrast and contradiction is woven into the fabric of the soundscapes which combine to form Cruel Optimism, as soft layers drift down over coarser, grainer sonic terrains beneath. There are moments of darkness, shadowy, vaguely unsettling but not overtly eeriy or horrific, tempered equally by moments of tranquillity and light ‘Hammering a Screw’, as its title suggests, is an awkward, jarring piece. Sinister chords jam and jolt abrasively, rupturing the soft tissue of sound which hangs almost invisibly in the air while fluttering heartbeats pulse erratically way down in the mix. ‘Negative Drone’ rumbles ominously, a formless, amorphous cloud of sound which bleeds into the must-like atmospherics of ‘The Somnambulist’. The album ends with the entwined drones of ‘Moribund Territories’, which offers a tone of bleakness which intimates the dissipation of optimism in the face of a chilling future.

Writing in October 2016, English described the album as an album of ‘protest against the immediate threat of abhorrent possible futures’. Depressingly, those futures have arrived, and we are now living in dark, dark times. But for all of the turbulence which motivated the compositions and the underlying anxiety poured into their realisation, Cruel Optimism is a beautifully calm album, in the main – or at least, it maintains a calm exterior. As such it’s a work of peaceful protest, which succeeds in making itself heard in a loud, violent, and ugly world.

 

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Watch: ‘Medieval’ by Thor & Friends

Posted: 22 October 2016 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Thor & Friends’ eponymous debut recently received the Aural Aggravation seal of approval, and now the mighty percusionist Thor Harris and his cohorts have unveiled their first video. You can watch it here:

Thor & Friends – Thor & Friends

Posted: 6 September 2016 in Albums
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LM Dupli-cation – 26th September 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Thor & Friends is the eponymous full length debut from the avant-chamber ensemble formed by its namesake, polymath percussionist Thor Harris. Anyone who has heard – or, more so, seen – Swans in their current incarnation will be aware of Thor Harris’ remarkable percussion skills, and likely know that he is a man worthy of his name: a burly, bearded, hirsute figure who appears to have been transported from the mists of Norse mythology and onto the stage, surrounded by chimes and gongs, he’s something of a drumming deity and a figure far more fearsome than Chris Hemsworth.

Swans fans may, then, be somewhat surprised by this album. Surprised, but not disappointed. Despite it being Thor’s project, the percussion is not a dominant factor: it’s very much about the contributions of his ‘friends’, namely Peggy Ghorbani on marimba and Sarah ‘Goat’ Gautier on marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, organ, voice, mellotron and piano. Harris also plays, alongside myriad percussion instruments, wind instruments including some of his own devising. The core trio are joined by Jeremy Barnes on accordion, drum, and mellotron, Heather Trost on violin, voice and marimba, John Dieterich on guitar, bass, castanets and special effects and Raven on bone flute, and electronic sounds.

The choice of instruments may provide an indication of what to expect, but to be clear, there are no thunderous crescendos to be found during the nine tracks on offer here, and Thor and Friends is a remarkably graceful, elegant and understated work. In place of volume, there is atmosphere.

Soft chimes ebb and flow and soft, supple droning tones rise and fall before soft, soothing strings layer down over them on the album’s first track, ‘White Sands’. It’s a multifaceted, mood-shifting piece which sets the album’s gentle, hypnotic tone. Airy rhythms bounce from softly struck xylophone bars, and the general leaning toward instruments fashioned from natural materials lends the pieces a soft, organic feel. Supple woodwind melodies drift and trill effortlessly through semi-ambient passages, and there’s almost a sense of playfulness about the light, skipping, rippling motifs of ’12 Ate’. Elsewhere, ‘Lullabye for Klaus’ presents a darker, more brooding outlook, but nevertheless manages to lift the listener with its cyclical motifs.

Many of the pieces would work well incorporated within film or series soundracks, and while the compositions in themselves aren’t overtly evocative of anything specific, they possess a malleability allows their context to be ascribed by the listener. If ‘pleasant’ strikes as being a wet, nondescript word, in reference to Thor and Friends it most certainly is not: we live in a world befouled by unpleasantness, we’re jaded, cynical and mean. Thor and Friends offers a rapturously pleasant listening experience, in many ways simple, natural, and honest. It’s a magnificent antidote to modern times.

 

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