Posts Tagged ‘Unsounds’

Christine Abdelnour & Andy Moor – Unprotected Sleep

Posted: 27 October 2022 in Albums
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Unsounds Records – 1st November 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Andy Moor has been nothing if not prolific over the course of his career, which is now well into its fourth decade, and his collaborations are truly multitudinous. He’s one of those musicians who clearly thrives on this approach to working – as comfortable contributing as steering his own path.

I’ve covered a fair few of his efforts over the last decade and a bit, both here and elsewhere – with my belated introduction in 2011 arriving via his appearance on Anne-James Chaton’s ‘Transfer /2: Princess in a Car’ single release.

Moor’s style is by no means accessible or easy, and is as distant from mainstream as is possible, but it’s highly distinctive, and this is unquestionably a significant part of his appeal, both to listeners and fellow musicians.

For this work, the accompanying notes explain how ‘Christine Abdnelnour and Andy Moor have explored the notion of hypnagogia or ‘unprotected sleep’ to drive their process for this improvised album, delving in their own experience and memories. Unprotected sleep is commonly defined as an altered state of consciousness that occurs beyond the proper or intended time of waking up, not sleeping in your own safe bed, or even sleeping without a blanket. Being slightly out of phase, one is vulnerable, fragile, but the mind is at the same time very fluid, ultra-associative with an extraordinary memory. In their music making Abdelnour (saxophone) and Moor (guitar) explore the possibilities of real and hallucination sounds and ranges that might come with deep dreaming.’

I had never known that this was a term before, but that it exists speaks on multiple levels, and on a personal level. Sleep is one of the most vital of human functions, but also the most neglected. I’m writing this at 11:30 at night after starting work at 6:30 this morning; five hours of sleep disturbed by lengthy anxiety dreams and broken by the occasional nocturnal anxiety attack is standard. I’m by no means alone in my difficult and often antagonistic and troubled relationship with sleep.

On Unprotected Sleep, Christine Abdelnour and Andy Moor soundtrack the traumas of troubled sleep magnificently. Moor’s scratchy guitar is both metronomic and agitatingly atonal, forging an aural representation of the head-nodding fatigue that so often sweeps over while challenged by needling thoughts that prick a way to wakefulness, or otherwise nag at the psyche

The heavy, grating drone of ‘80db is Loud if You’re Snoring’ ret with scraping guitars and squawks and scrapes if feedback before surging amongst the clattering of cans and escalating to a peak that will inevitably collapse. It drones and groans, and ultimately fades out.

On ‘Compartment 5’, the drone reaches an oppressive level, and it’s enriched by a blank, drony thrum. The density grows, as does the intensity, and it reminds me of the hours spent turning over and over, unable to find that right position, unable to get comfortable, and unable to that headspace conducive to settle to rest: instead, everything is an awkward, uncomfortable churn, accompanied by an unsettling sense off impending doom. The ‘Exchanging Oversize Chrome Objects’ brings a head-pounding crashing beat and uncomfortable churn that’s deeply unsettling, and there’s an uneasiness that permeates the album as a whole.

For many, the experience, if not necessarily the specific sounds, will resonate. Unprotected Sleep is a far from relaxing or soothing sonic experience, built on drones and dissonance, lurching atonal wandering guitar parts and inconsistent tempos that butt against low-key but uncomfortable saxophone drones and honks. Enjoyable is not the word, but compelling most certainly is.

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Yannis Kyriakides & Andy Moor – Pavilion

Posted: 15 June 2020 in Albums
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Unsounds 65U – 15th June 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

While Andy Moor’s distinctive guitar playing is central to this collaborative work, it’s worth stating from the outset that this is a challenging listen. Spacious and eerie, above all it’s atonal and discordant, as if the two musicians are playing against one another, rather than with, and, moreover, against themselves, particularly in Moor’s case as he digs deep to pick notes in counter-time and counter-melody.

How this album came to be is worth recounting, so I shall quote directly: ‘In 2017 Andy Moor and Yannis Kyriakides were invited to participate in Xavier Veilhan’s ‘Studio Venezia’ at the French pavilion for the 57th Venice Art Biennale. This was a space where a series of musicians were in residence throughout the six month duration of the festival, recording and performing there in an open environment. The two musicians had access to a variety of instruments and machines including Moog, Buchla and Vermona synths which were used for some of the recordings. The unusual situation here was that they were working in a studio, experimenting, trying out ideas while at the same time being a part of an ongoing art installation. So they were part of the space, yet not really knowing whether they should play for the crowds who were constantly passing through the pavilion or just ignore them.’

‘The result was nine hours of recorded material mostly improvised or based on a few basic rhythmic patterns that Kyriakides had prepared as starting blocks. For this album they selected 45 minutes of what they considered to be the strongest material after several listenings and editing sessions.’

That’s a lot of material, and a lot of whittling and editing, but the end result is well-assembled and flows together nicely – while at the same time mining a seam of arrhythmia and clanging dissonance. Moreover, each piece is distinct and distinctive, with different textures, tones, and moods, and as such, Pavilion represents a disorientating, difficult journey.

The layers on ‘Camera’ build at different rates, crossing over one another and interfering with one another’s time signatures so as to become bent out of shape, colliding against one another in a clutter of discoordination. The synth bass on ‘Dedalo’ warps and scratches and scrapes away as low grooves that trip and curl, wow and flutter. There’s a playful side to it, with the rhythmic swing and metallic clattering that sounds like pots and pans, which contrasts with the more ponderous atmospherics of ‘Concha’, a nine-and-a-half minute exercise in detuning and retuning, as notes bend and bow with a slow, resonant decay.

‘Diluvio’ is unpleasantly tense and prickly, and the album ultimately drifts towards an uneasy conclusion with the last couple of pieces, which are simultaneously dolorous and soporific, albeit in a dark, horror-movie dreamscape sort of a way.

Pavilion leaves you feeling… not quite bewildered, but spaced, separated, as if standing half a step behind your own body or your own shadow. It’s less about if this is a good thing in itself, as much as the fact that this is a work which has a degree of psychological resonance, which marks it as a creative success.

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Yannis Kyriakides Andy Moor – Pavilion

Anne-James Chaton & Andy Moor – Tout ce que je sais

Posted: 29 May 2018 in Albums
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Unsounds – 60U – 1st June 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Tout ce que je sais is the second part of Chaton and Moor’s ‘Heretics’ series, which, according to the blurb, sees the duo ‘revive the most obscure, violent, erotic passions, summoning the great gures of their personal mythologies. In the company of Caravaggio, Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs and gures such as Jose Mujica, the duo immerses the listener in another world history peopled by radical thinkers’. ‘Heretics’ pays homage to those heroes who have used transgression and excess as a necessary means for creation. In this new album, recorded live at the Carreau du Temple in Paris on the occasion of Périphérie du 35e Marché de la Poésie (2017), Anne-James Chaton and Andy Moor deliver a radical work at the confines of literary and musical creation.’ The first release came in a giant matchbox, complete with textured side and a huge matchstick. No, I haven’t burned my copy. Yet.

The fact it is a live recording creates a certain degree of difficulty in terms of how to weigh its realisation. Granted, there’s an immediacy to the stuttering, fractured ruptures of dissonance what scratch through at forty-five degree angles to the rhythms and overall shapes of the compositions. But to doesn’t feel like a definitive document: something is missing.

‘Casino rabelaisien’ is a stark, minimalist grind, throbbing and churning away at a short, repetitious sonic loop of bass and extraneous discord reminiscent of Suicide and with cluttering, scratchy guitars that call to mind The Fall pre-1980. The murky sound accentuates the claustrophobic atmosphere, and Moor’s monotone delivery. The words being spoken in French mean I’m excluded from their meaning and from their sense. Oftentimes, the language of sound is enough to transcend linguistic barriers. But with the musical aspect so minimal and the vocal aspect so much to the fore on this work, I fear that much of the significance – and quite simply much of the content – is lost. Burroughs et al – this is my field, so to speak. But I simply don’t recognise it, let alone connect on a level where I can engage critically in terms of its conceptual content. Nothing about Tout ce que je sais conveys the brutal perversion of de Sade on a sonic level, for example, and there’s nothing that brings the bewildering explosion of ideas or the narrative fragmentation of Burroughs’ writing here.

‘Conquins coquettes at cocus’ jolts and jars, the crunching guitars choppy over a haltering, stuttering rhythm worthy of Shellac. It’s sparse in instrumentation, but it’s intense, and Moor’s dry, almost inflection-free delivery provides a counterpoint and contrast.

There’s something deep and haunting in the very notes of ‘Clair Obscur’, but the limited instrumentation means it feels somehow incomplete, unfinished. And then here’s the applause and the shouting from the audience immediately after; while being there would have almost doubtless have been a quite remarkable experience, the material would equally doubtless benefit from a proper studio realisation in order to capture the nuance and the detail of the compositions and their arrangements.

‘The Things That Belong to William’ closes the set; a slowed-down, opium-slurred Burroughs drawl creaks through the jolting, jarring spasmic guitar chords. It’s interesting and uncomfortable, but doesn’t go any real distance to create the same kind of temporal dislocation of Naked Lunch or any of Burroughs’ cut-up works. Is this a failing? Probably not in real terms. We land, then, at a place where we’re faced with the disunion between expectation and actuality.

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Anne-James Chaton & Andy Moor – Tout ce que je sais

Yannis Kyriakides – Subvoice

Posted: 29 July 2017 in Albums
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Unsounds – 57u – 10th February 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Unsounds have a history of releasing magnificently-packaged albums, and Subvoice by Yannis Kyriakides is up there with the best of them. The double CD is housed in a chunky hardcover book binding, which contains an actual book, some forty pages in span.

My introduction to the concept of the subvoice came via William Burroughs, who, around the time he was exploring the myriad potentials of the cut-up technique, made innumerable audio experiments. While most of these involved tape splicing, dropping in and cutting out, some investigated the subvoice in a most literal fashion. Some of these barely audible and even more barely listenable recordings appeared on Nothing Here Now But the Recrdings on Industrial records, with the liner notes describing ‘Throat Microphone Experiment’ – if memory serves – as a not entirely successful attempt to capture subvocal speech.

The definition of ‘subvocal’ is ‘relating to or denoting an unarticulated level of speech comparable to thought’. Kyriakides describes the works in the collection as ‘an investigation into ideas of voice and language [which] range from works in which text is directly encoded into music… to ones in which the voice is examined, dissected and pulled apart’. He explains that ‘in both approaches the underlying idea is to explore what happens when material has a clear semantic form, whether communicated in text or speech, is translated into musical structure’.

While thematically and theoretically linked, the nine pieces – which have a combined running time of almost two and a half hours – are from quite distinct and separate collaborative projects Kyriakides was involved in between 2010 and 2015.

The first piece on disc one, ‘Words and Song Without Words’ is the shortest work, being a couple of seconds under ten minutes, but appropriately introduces the kind of sonic palette Kyriakides and his collaborators – in this instance, Francesco Dillon, who contributes cello – work from. ‘Paramyth’ is eerie, disconsolate, the cracked ramblings splayed in all directions over tense piano and uncomfortable strings, but ultimately peters out into something softer. Skittering strings scurry busily in brief and disjointed flurries, hectically flying here and there, on ‘Toponymy’. Muffed voices bring a discomforting sense of the unheimlich, a sense of the intangible and of something just out of the reach of understanding.

Ominous notes hover and ring on the last piece on the first disc, ‘Circadian Surveillance,’ a twenty-five minute exercise in haunting atmospherics, where distant voices are barely audible under a rumble of turning static and hovering notes which resonate into dead air.

Onto disc two, ‘Der Komponist’ – a composition for orchestra and computer – begins quietly, ominously, with protracted near-silences between delicate, low, slow builds, before horns begin to add cinematic drama. It’s very filmic, very – for wont of a better word – soundtracky, and is reminiscent of some of JG Thirlwell’s more recent orchestral works. The climax is a slow, swelling succession of surging brass, underscored by a rippling digital churn.

‘Politicus (Dawn in the Giardini’ is perhaps the lightest and most playful composition of the nine, and utilises the variability and versatility of the prepared disklavier. The original work was a twelve-hour sound installation. The booklet explains the technical aspects in great detail, and Kyriakides outlines the way in which algorithms based on speech drive the formulation of the piece, here in an abridged fourteen-minute segment. The immense complexities behind the composition are completely hidden from the listener, with the surface completely masking the mechanical depths.

The final piece, ‘Oneiricon’ is a work for ensemble and computers. It’s an exploration of dreams, and is often subtle to the point of subliminality. And because Subvoice is very much a ‘background’ work, while it often drifts for significant stretches without really pulling particularly hard on the attention, it does mean that its immense duration is not an issue. Equally, because Subvoice is a collection rather than a work conceived as a single continuous whole, it’s possible to listen and appreciate in segments, without absolute commitment. And it is an album to listen to and appreciate: Kyriakides’ compositions are varied and textured and demonstrate an attention to form and sonic detail which extends far beyond the basic premise of ‘the voice.’

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Yannis Kyriakides with Slagwerk Den Haag & Silbersee – Lunch Music: Music Inspired by William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch

Posted: 24 July 2016 in Albums
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Unsounds – 55U

Edward S. Robinson

William Burroughs may have become a figure toward whom many hip musicians gravitated towards in the seventies and eighties, but it remains a rather perverse fact that his enduring influence appears to be stronger in the world of music than in literature. It’s true that many ‘alternative’ musicians and counterculturalists latched onto his lifestyle and biographical details more than his actual output, romanticising the idea of the ‘literary outlaw’ but it would equally be a mistake to underplay the effect his innovations in audio, with his tape recorder experiments extending the concepts surrounding the cut-ups proving hugely influential acts like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. It’s a shame, then, that so many of the albums which cite Burroughs as an influence are simply dismal. Burroughs may have referenced various ‘poplar tunes’ in his works and resided in Tangiers in the late 1950s but I haven’t yet established any textual basis to connect Burroughs with bad avant jazz or half-arsed hip-hop.

Yannis Kyriakidies and his collaborators are clearly immense fans of Burroughs, and the CD booklet records that the text for the album is not derived from Naked Lunch, but ‘a Burroughsian cut-up of sorts’. Now, this is problematic in that the cut-up technique came later: there are no cut-ups in Naked Lunch, but I would rather be charitable and embrace the spirit of the album: the words were in fact derived from ‘word frequency analyses’ of the book’s segments, and as such, it’s fair to say that the lyrical content very much captures the essence of the book. I can’t help but be impressed by their referencing of Ian MacFadyn’s essay ‘The Mouth Inside: The Voices of Naked Lunch’, and am equally intrigued by the implication that the album was set to be called simply Naked Lunch: Kyriakideas records in his notes that Robert Ashley, to whom the album is dedicated, implored him to use the title and deal with any copyright issues later, but finds the artist conclude ‘somehow I did get scared by the difficulties.’ But what about the music, and what about the delivery?

The heavy, heavy crackle of vinyl. Scratched as scratched. From the glitching fuzz or white noise croaks the voice of William Burroughs. Slowed, as if drugged. The sound warps and slows, as if the tape is stretches or the turntable drive belt is slipping. As a barbershop quartet croon Gregorian chants to provide an incongruously jaunty backing, his voice is dragged to an unintelligible drone, slower and slower. Finally, all that remains is a faint whistle, clattering and a thumping beat like a heart’s pulse, which eventually, finally slows… and silence. ‘Boy…. Boys…’ sings an operatic tenor voice against a backdrop of springy instrumentation and whistling analogue on ‘Boy’. The vocal harmonies build in layers, skyward. It might not sound like my impression of Naked Lunch, but that’s a reflection of the book’s multifaceted nature.

‘Shakin’’ takes Johnny Kid and the Pirates’ hit and jars and stutters it, one more scratched CD, bowed LP, cassette tape chewed in the machine heads. From the sonic swamp into which the song rapidly descends emerge crawing pterodactyl-like sounds. Like Burroughs’ fragmented, fevered narratives, so the pieces of music are twisted and contorted out of shape, linearity dispensed with in favour of atmosphere and heightened sensation.

Kyriakides returns to the barrelling scrape of badly worn vinyl on ‘Junk World’, while industrial scraping and a babble of voices in multiple languages combine to disorientating effect on ‘Like replicas’, before ‘Speed Days’ moves into the kind of musical territory more commonly associated with Burroughs-related recordings and tributes, with scratching and rattling industrial percussion.

In all, it’s something of a mixed bag, and while I personally don’t love all of the music, I have to admire its spirit.

 

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Maja Osojnik – Let Them Grow

Posted: 23 February 2016 in Albums
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Rock is Hell / UNrecords – RIP 66 / unrec11 – February 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

 

Maja Osojnik is an angry woman. A woman on the edge. A woman with inner strength. After 14 band albums, her first solo outing is a highly charged work, heavy with stark emotions and raw catharsis.

‘Tell me, what do you want me to be?’ she asks in an opium monotone on ‘Tell Me’. Slowly, her offers become more desperate and pained, her multiple voices speaking simultaneously before she slams it all down on the table, unable to maintain her decorum any further: ‘Ill become… all the images you want / so you can walk on me / sleep in me / so you can throw all your shit on me / Tell me, what the fuck do you want me to be?’ It’s chilling in its directness, its apparent lack of artistic distance.

‘Let Them Grow’ is one of those albums that hits like a punch to the solar plexus. It’s impossible not to laud the artist for her openness, her ability to convey so many painful emotions – but at the same time, it’s deeply uncomfortable. Listen, people who use terms like ‘TMI’ are, in the main, uncomfortable because they don’t like to face brutal truths, particularly those belonging to other people. On ‘Let Them Grow’, Osojnick pays no regard to these emotionally closed or stunted types and simply lays it all out there, telling it like it is, spilling her guts because she has no other choice. This isn’t simply music, this is pure art and the very definition of catharsis. Let Them Grow is a work of exorcism, of expulsion.

If you hadn’t already figured, this is a challenging work. ‘Condition’ is a full-tilt rant against a backdrop which amalgamates industrial noise and tribal beats. ‘Stick it up your ass… Come out, you rotten cocksucker, here’s your fucking POP SONG’ she hollers bitterly. And she fucking means it: this isn’t mere petulance, but a middle finger to an establishment and a wider world that’s failed and ultimately fucked up- and which doesn’t value the arts and doesn’t recognise the value of art. It’s a shame, because this is art.

It’s not just the music: I received the CD in its gatefold card sleeve enveloped within a four-leaf pamphlet type wrapper, accompanied by a sticker and five postcards of the artist beautifully shot by Rania Moslam in a range of striking poses. The whole package was in turn wrapped in a parchment paper bag. It’s about the artefact, the attention to detail, the building of suspense and expectation while gaining access to the disc itself, which, in turn, does not disappoint. This is not merely an album. It’s a grand gesture.

From the most subtle, delicate pieces, led by softly-fingered piano, she slowly drags out every sinew of anguish, draws on every drop of pain and presents real emotion. Emotion that can’t be faked.

Brooding instrumental passages offer moments of respite, but then there are sections of growling industrial noise, dark and sinister, grinding and crushing, which are nothing short of devastating. Taut, tense and from the heart, Let Them Grow sees Maja Osojnick present an album that is unparalleled in its sincerity and astounding in its emotional and musical power.

Maja Osojnik

Maja Osojnik Online