Although sounding more like the name of a character Shakespeare struck from the script of "A Midsummer Night´s Dream" in his final revision, "Peasgood Nonsuch" is actually a variety of apple grown in England (best harvested in October).
Robin Saville´s album is so very evocative of rural England, so much and so pleasantly so that it is almost the magically anthropomorphized England of classic children´s tales. Imagine if a character in "The Wind in the Willows" had been a composer - this is what he would have written.
It is good-natured and dry-witted, which is evident both in track titles and the light touch brought to the compositions and the playing. Swaying and bubbling electronics are delicately combined with acoustic instruments, usually a guitar. Saville stays low to the ground and conveys the essense of a shift in the breeze or the fragrance of a flower, the smallest and therefore most important elements of the bucolic life.
In 2006 Hey-o-Hansen released a series of twelve-inch singles, from which they have now culled six original tracks and five remixes. This two-man circus takes us on a seventy-five minute "Journey into Berlin´s Afro-Alpin-Dubstep-Killersound". I´m not really sure what that means other than they value the beats and bass of Africa and the West Indies as much as they enjoy the native sounds of their Alpine homeland, represented primarily by some wonderfully swingin´ accordian right off the bat on track one, "Moon". But it also tips you off to the fact that these fellows have a wicked and silly sense of humour. Which is nice in dance music, a genre that takes itself all too seriously.
If I understand the genesis properly, originally Hey was a solo act, teaming up occasionally with Hansen. Now they have taken on board the barely-under-control dancehall singer Sir Lord Gordon Odametey and have also been lent a hand by members of Múm from Iceland. As they take on collaborators they take on influences and expand their sound palette.
Further evidence of the breadth of their odd tastes are samples from such unlikely candidates as the leader of the conservative Popular Party in Spain and the regional chief economist and director of social and economic development for the World Bank's Middle East and North Africa office.
Musically, the trio range so far all over the map that you´ll be finding everything from steel drums to brass bands somewhere in among the heady, steady rhythms. The only real miss is the preachy, plodding "Abraxas" - as a jeremiad against slavery one must of course admire its convictions, but it just doesn´t fit in such happy, colourful surroundings.
And just when you think you´ve had too much fun, the remixers take over, all of them working out of Berlin and most of whose reputations have unfortuntely not reached much further. Yet. As with any remix, the art is in doing something with someone else´s ideas as a point of departure. And everybody does, but to be honest none really stand out as work which will break them internationally. If I had to choose a favourite, I´d take Thaddeus Herrmann´s "Jack is a Simple Fellow..." for the great sense of space it creates.
Still and all, I can hardly think of an album you can have more innocent fun with.
One of the hardiest stalwarts of the new dub scene since the nineties has been Nick Perch, the man behind the band Zion Train, operator of the Universal Egg label and coordinator of the Abassi All Stars. As is traditional in the genre, a studio album (called "Showcase") was first assembled from various sides recorded by this studio-only band, highlighting singers including stars like Tippa Irae and Luciano, and newcomers drawn into the studio from across a vast expanse - Junior Kigwa (Rwanda), Sis Sanae (Japan) and Daddy Roots (Anguilla). In the future the band has plans to record with an ever-expanding roster of exciting new and familiar names.
All songs were written by Perch, posed with agile fingers stabbing deftly at the keyboards and twiddling the knobs on his electronic playthings, and trumpeter David Fullwood, whose seductively swaying, muted trumpet has always been a hallmark.
Now as is the custom comes its dub companion, showcasing Perch´s considerable studio skills. Irresistable, positive energy has always been a hallmark of Perch´s productions through the years and the vibe remains the same here. The instrumentalists are all top British and Jamaican players, the melodies have a kind of Ethiopian lope about them and the horns a Trenchtown jump. As with most classical dub, the singers are rendered mere bit players, mere ghosts, fragments and after-echoes remaining from the original.
Still, their spectral presence is one more colour on the palette of the producer giving his dubscapes more depth, more breadth, more life. This is one vastly entertaining seventy minutes, jam-packed with just what you expected and a few surprises, like the somberly beautiful dirge "Cities" showcasing and fiddling with some lovely violin by someone only identified as "Anne".
In one glaring lapse of judgement, however, snippets of a tirade by British nutcase, racist and conspiracy theorist David Icke are included on three tracks. Reggae, hip hop and illbient all have a predilection for conspiracy theories, sometimes ironically, sometimes dead serious. But while these artists usually sample their kooks off the radio or TV, Icke appears among "vocalists" in the liner notes. In fact, two other individuals also share their conspiracy theories with us on the record, but they remain unidentified and probably sampled. If Icke indeed was specifically invited to participate, then I´d say this all-star team let a fox into the henhouse of otherwise honourable and peaceful individuals. For it is always far more refreshing to hear a singer humbly admit that he doesn´t "have the answer to all the questions", as we do a little late in the disc.
This is the ambient music that ambient music puts on the stereo when it wants to unwind and get reaquainted with its roots.
Toronto´s Sleep Research Facility perversely approach the "comfort of encroaching hypothermia" with this sweeping, textbook example of true soundscaping craftsmanship. The playful title puns of course on the temperatures to be encountered in the Arctic, the region inspiring the five works presented here, but there is also a deeper poetry here. A frieze is of course a mural, an oversized, panoramic view of something - in this case, the top of the world and the deeper, hidden delights of what most dismiss as a monochrome wasteland.
Sleep Research Facility allows each piece to evolve at its own pace. Our location is clearly set at the outset as SRF effortlessly conjures up the sound and feel of icy wastes across which the winds roam unimpeded. He progresses by smearing great swaths of thick greys and off-whites on this canvas as he raises monoliths of unimaginably large exterior space, the kind of space only nature can provide. Although one drone does indeed recall being indoors - imagine the most tremendous hall housing the most monstrous giant turbines you could ever conceive.
It´s inspiring to hear someone with such an ear for nothingness.
The present reviewer must confess to having no idea of this duo´s track record, but artistically at least it looks like a case of the old ketchup-effect: nothing, nothing for a long time and then suddenly, splat! Five releases on three different labels, including their own, in a matter of a few short months.
Vryashn is presented as an "avant-garde sound experience" intended for deep listening. A tad generic as a description, but then the two extended pieces on this album really need no further introduction or setting of the scene. What Bible and Henry have created speaks for itself, and it does so softly and with great authority.
I fell for the first piece directly. In its slow, organic growth it displays compositional maturity and dexterity. Vast grainy spaces shift as viola and cello sway back and forth, the elements become integrated and build a perfect whole. I am almost sad to have it come to an end. It is a space for quiet contemplation and reflection, as sparse and sacral as a Zen garden.
Initially I found myself indifferently disposed toward the second, half-hour long piece, which would seem to be an altogether different animal than its predecessor. Instead of floating in glorious stasis, it is more of an off-kilter collage; this must be the "avant-garde" bit promised by the press release. I´m still not really enjoying myself - until around the seventeenth minute when what sounds like an orchestra schooled in nothing but holy mininalism begins to swell and we are back in territory much more familiar and, to be honest, much more worthwhile your time.
Having also recently heard Bible and Henry´s "Marker" on Gruenrekorder, I know they are dedicated field recordists, but I prefer their talent at creating mood, sustaining techniques, sounds bleeding into one another, shifting colour. And the first seventeen minutes of that second track simply seem out of place on Vryashn. Excise them and you have what in my opinion is one of the most polished musical moments of a year quickly approaching its end.
As Rapoon, Robin Storey can assume a number of guises. His audio work can be so dark as to be toxic, oily dark, nightmares of industry, fresh hells. He can also toss varied-coloured tiles at the wall and create wonderful and byzantine mosaics which range in mood from giddy to threatening. Good examples of such work include his double CD "Cold War", or his recent release on Vivo, "Obscure Objects of Desire".
However, his name is associated almost as much with the cold, desolate regions the label Glacial Movements has staked out as its own. And Time Frost is a kind of opus in celebration of the Arctic, its serpentines of loose snow dancing across the tundra. If the landscape is monochrome and featureless to many of us, Storey finds this inspirational rather than tedious and uses looping and repetition as his guiding aesthetic.
In his liner notes, Storey posits a textural theme as well, based on scientific speculation that global warming may weirdly enough bring down a new Ice Age on Europe. In order to imagine a Danube that has finally, really turned blue because it has frozen over, he uses "tiny fragments of music from an iconic European composition, Johann Strauss's Blue Danube". In fact, trumping one meta-fiction with another, he exclusively used locked grooves from the soundtrack to the equally-iconic movie, Stanley Kubrick´s "2001". (Interestingly, it has been done equally well before. Several years back, Andrew Deutsch released "Loops Over Land" on his tiny label Magic If, in which all the samples were created from locked grooves looping the music of Gustav Mahler.)
Imagining further into the future, post-Ice Age, when the glaciars recede and future archeologists sift through what we left behind, "Time Frost is an imaginary recording of the mutational process of sound locked into ice and transformed over millenia. Like ghosts of music trapped in an evershifting permafrost."
It´s an unspeakably beautiful five-part suite, in which maybe more purely than ever before over the course of an entire hour-long album, Rapoon succeeds in evoking not only the deceitful barrenness of the far north, its white-on-white textures, but also the bite of its cold air, the sting of snow moving horizontally on the cheek, the smell of the place - for it does indeed have its own special smell.
Among his most beautiful listening experiences.
Cameron Wood is a true do-it-yourselfer, from the playing and recording to the cover insert and typewritten liner notes, which state that he recorded this mini-album on his day off and edited it the following weekend.
After being lulled into believing we´re in for a half hour of lazy, lo-fi blues meanderings by the first two untitled tracks on Three Thoughts on C Tuning, Wood unleashes twenty-five minutes of blistering deconstructive guitar torture, feedback shrill on top and dense muck on the bottom, utterly unimpregnable, passionately obnoxious and ultimately out to destroy any semblence of tuning regardless of key.
Like the proverbial car wreck on the highway, you just can´t tear your ears away from it, even though you know listening to it will give you nightmares. As it slowly subsides and resolves itself, an actual, albeit jagged two-note melody can be discerned trying to make itself heard over the buzz - a last desperate attempt at "music" to assert itself amid the apparent nihilism?
winwinwinwin.blogspot.com
We are so fascinated by the way sound makes its way through water, its physics so familiar yet so foreign, so alien but close by. And of course aside from the vastness of outer space, the element is the primary metaphor for the entire genre of ambient music.
"Underwater" has of course been done before in many ways. Gavin Bryars famously sank the orchestra of the Titanic, whilethe wonderful Mystery Sea CDR label is all about water. This piece by Mathieu Ruhlmann and the duo Celer (consisting of husband and wife Danielle Baquet-Long and Will Long) is high concept and triumphant.
In 1969, Swiss physicist Jacques Piccard completed construction of his "mesoscaphe", a submarine with room for six and capable of sustaining life for weeks at a time. In contrast to previous submarines and bathyspheres, the mesoscaphe was built to drift, not to be be powered by thrust engines, and to drift specifically along the Gulf Stream. Its initial mission took it from the Gulf of Mexico to the coast of Maine and was an enormous, if uncelebrated scientific success; you see, at the same time, the Apollo 11 mission to the moon was conducted. The mesoscaphe now rests in dry dock in a museum in Vancouver.
The three movements are each given numerous, detailed, and poetic subtitles detailing the mission, like "The Melodies of Our Heartbeats Slowing" and "Family Photos Speckled with Ocean Dust". And although the inspirational technology is modern, one gets the feeling more of being contemporaneous with Jules Verne and the contraptions of the early machine age - all steam and clanking rods and pistons - than the first moon landing. Jacques Piccard or Captain Nemo, this combination of man-made machinery and the briney depths is utterly beguiling. And the minds and manipulations behind this project, playing pianos, looping tape, turning knobs, seem to have been in complete harmony. Rarely do temporary collaborations come off so seamlessly.
Marissa Nadler sings like a girl Bob Dylan might have created and longingly described on an album like "Blood on the Tracks". She´s fascinating, she´s intelligent, she´s attractive, she´s utterly unique, but words will never really succeed in capturing her true essence. Instead you should just listen and listen closely.
A very special voice, a very spectral voice, which somehow conveys something completely sui generis and never-before-heard and yet seems as timeless as the act of singing songs itself. An effect the late Canadian singer Stan Rogers was adept at achieving.
From the very first strophe of "Diamond Heart" you´re hopelessly entangled, possessed by the voice and determined to delve deep into the text, sometimes so straight-forward, sometimes so impenetrable. And truly pretty, then exhiliratingly sad in turn.
Nadler has almost simultaneously released a collection of "b-sides and other lost songs", or "compilation tracks and miscellaneous oddities", depending on what side of the cover you read. Now, Marissa has recorded three wonderful albums, nary a flubbed note or forced rhyme. So the question is, has she ever recorded a bad song at all? Since "Ivy and the Clovers" (Eclipse) contains one-offs for magazines, compilations and flip-sides, this would be the place to look for slip-up, right?
(Thirty minutes and ten seconds later...)
Nope. Nothing is less than glistening, nothing is just phoned in. Just as meekly profound, beautiful and even sexy as anything else in her growing, stellar catalogue. "Conjuring Spirit Worlds" reads like a lament written by Ophelia to Hamlet before taking her final dip. More proof that Marissa Nadler is probably the most interesting female vocalist currently evolving on the North American continent.
The Japanese artist Murakami has a theory about the current state of his own culture, which can easily be extended to cover any Western society. He calls it "superflat" and means that his fellow citizens are refusing to grow up and deal with reality, instead drifting along in a state of empty happiness, indulging in childlike play through their obsession with manga cartoons, Hello Kitty and ridiculous TV game shows.
I wonder if fellow countrywoman Naoki Ishida is thinking along the same lines (Is it ironic that her own label is called "Kitten Recordz"? Or totally not?). On the one hand, Tone Redust is "common" enough folktronic field recording music. It is very competently done and makes for an undemanding, enjoyable listen. But if we view it in the context of the superflat, then the cover art (beautifully executed by Mai Seike) may hint that we are sniffing in the right direction. Child-like pencil sketches of happy faces and sad faces share the canvas with horsies and flowers and cars. But also cigarettes and what looks like a straight razor. And something else that looks like a sperm. Inside the envelope, the CD itself is a blast of fresh, primary colours.
The music of Tone Redust is one great, circuitous playpen filled with bright and shiny distractions and the absent-minded strumming of an acoustic guitar, keeping us gently occupied until, with irregularity, the flick of a Bic reminds us that this is an adult world after all. Or an adult dream. Throughout the piece - given six titles despite the fact that there is hardly a pause between any of the tracks and the entire album is of a whole - an electronic mural rolls by in the background, like the kind of repetitive backgrounds used by lazy animators in cheap cartoons. And throughout, Tone Redust has an outdoor ambience - but where exactly? Wooden wind chimes are regularly disturbed, so I end up imagining a balcony in an apartment building not in the middle of the city, but not far outside it either. There are simply no aural cues to help identify which way is up and which way is down, if we are in an urban space or somewhere else altogether.
I believe that this ambivalence is part of what makes Ishida´s album so successful.
Only rarely so far in his extremely promising career has Rutger Zuydervelt released full-length solo CDs. Mainly, he has made a process and an aesthetic out of regularly sending out three-inch bulletins on his own, eponymous label. These can be apprehended as works-in-process or as just enough music for the time being. I am often of the latter opinion; I think a lot of these twenty-minute missives from the factory are little gems in no more need of polish.
Would that that were the case here, when he goes for a full fifty minutes. Dauw is certainly no failure, in fact fans will probably welcome it into their collections, but then again, it is not the record you´d choose to show a novice how good Machinefabriek can be.
Assembling a typical assortment of instruments like acoustic and electric guitar, turntable, sampler, dictaphone, piano, tone generator and laptop, the album opens with the first of four shorter tracks, beginning with simple acoustic guitar and piano patterns into which are introduced jagged fragments of noise-mongering. When concrete effects are extracted out of the sonic debris to make musical logic - like the loop he constructs out of a stylus riding grooves in an almost physically pleasureable manner - I´m on board and loving the ride. However, the random, jarring sounds of what might be a tangle of wire coat hangers being dragged across a stainless steel countertop seem arbitrary and aestheically impoverished.
The fifth and final track, "Singel", takes up a full twenty-five minutes of the album - here is the little three-inch release that wants to be free - even the name says so. It´s a beautiful grey dreamscape, stretching out over an arid plain before suddenly swelling briefly, almost romantically, before returning to its monochrome glory.
Unlike the four sketches which precede it, "Singel" is built with the care and craftsmanship most typical of his work.
Delightful packaging - a kind of flat origami with creme and grey folds and inserts seeming to promise treasure within but actually refusing to relent and unfold. Only a card jutting out from one side bearing the name of the artists can be removed: on its one side, the bare essential facts about this recording made on a single day in Leiden early last fall.
Credits go to the prolific Rutger Zuyderveldt for guitar, banjo, effect and something identified as "povrtoric"; with Leo Fabriek at the piano. I hardly believe this is his real name, but I also have no evidence to prove otherwise nor any information about his musical context.
Considering Machinefabriek´s highly abstract canon, this album is actually a relatively conventional, and very musical, collaboration. Leo´s piano is always front and centre, his chords played with determined restraint, accompanied most often by Machinefabriek´s guitar or banjo. Unlike most of Zuyderveldt´s collaborative and group efforts, Fabriek + Fabriek is not so much about processing (often acoustic) sound sources, but rather working with them - a duet can just as much be between a piano and a guitar as between a piano and a hailstorm of digital noise, as on "Karrewiel", the final of the five tracks.
Nice show, boys.
Frank Rothkamm has been an avant-garde pianist since his childhood in Germany. Now he is a bicoastal American with repetitive strain injury who also accepts commissions for commercials, video games and movie trailers.
I am unfamiliar with any of his previous work but am informed that it always has a conceptual framework. This is obvious here where, without cracking a smile, Rothkamm pays tribute to a Saturday morning cartoon favourite of the latest generation of toddlers, Spongebob Squarepants.
With all the seriousness in the world and making all kinds of gestures hinting at both classical styles from romanticism to modernism and great pianists from Horowitz to Richter, Rothkamm is playing for laffs. Playing very well indeed, for the joke would not work unless the teller knew what he was doing. Rothkamm´s "40 variations of the secret formula" behind the character are explicated further in the dense liner notes, yet another nod to the code of "serious" music - all that´s missing is that the notes appear in French and German as well as English, as is the custom.
There is of course a serious side, too - Rothkamm is toying with the idea of homo ludens, or "playful man". Grown-ups are directed and do work, children are blissfully aimless and just want to have fun - which is of greater value, and what kind of value? And to repeat, first and last Rothkamm is an excellent pianist who takes his comedy seriously. There are no squeals or bicycle wheels, just strong, intense and emotive playing.
Presenting the first collaboration between well-known German field recordist Frank Rowenta and relative newcomer C.J. Larsgården from Sweden.
This piece smears Swedish and English in its titles to indicate its beginning, middle and end, book-ended between which are two parts of "Alisons Garden" (sic). A plodding beat sets the pace for a simple acoustic guitar being strummed over a quiet wash of noise, before breaking off to reveal a more pastoral vista, an audio guided tour of a garden I can only assume is Alison´s. Her voice is played with electronically and blends into the birdsong and other ambient sounds of the garden until it in turn becomes replaced with a sythesizer interlude, itself sort of miming the chirping of birds over the drone of the everyday.
Alison´s voice returns after a while and she and her birds are given a pretty, lazy electronic guitar accompaniment as the piece comes to a close. A "middle" section features a far distant female voice singing wordlessly to the strummings of a guitar much closer to the mic, as static disturbances lurk in the middle ground. Again, Alison returns, leading us through a gate to the steps and deeper into what is sounding increasingly like a tropical garden, before a new electronic interlude overtakes the tour, this one ever more spacey, before landing back in the garden again. In contrast, the coda track features what sounds like a female talking head nattering in German on a television set in the other room and after a little musical flourish, the proceedings close. A lovely record of shifting character; I´d probably also enjoy listening to a whole hour of stuff like this while walking through an actual green and humid garden.
Larsgården also pursues a passion for darker ambient under the monicker Ondo, also released on his label Tuguska. "Slow" is a, well, slow-burning outing of darkly, excruciating tormented electric guitar, while "Waiting for Shields" is much more varied and circular with a narrative in three distinct movements, not unlike the three-inch CDR messages Machinefabriek likes to send out monthly from his Netherlands studio.
A single thirty-seven minute track in three distinct movements, recorded live (and possibly improvised?) in Wouter van Veldhoven´s digs on a summer day in 2007. Rutger Zuydervelt has worked with Mariska Baars and van Veldhoven before, but never to my knowledge on the same album. Their combined talents have produced a suggestive piece as sparse and sketchy as Baars´ cover art. The guitars of Baars and Zuydervelt are absolutely angelic and van Veldhoven´s deft tape recorder manipulations almost organic.
Over a discreet electronic mat, four distinct guitar notes repeat like the call letters of an off-the-air radio station as crackles and clinkings of sonic debris (courtesy of van Veldhoven´s "metallophone" I presume) inhabit the middle field. Out of this trash, a odd, pure innocent music box twinkle becomes increasingly prevalent, like random drops of water dripping on a xylophone left out in a summer shower.
In the meantime, the sweet notes of the guitar (or is it Baars´ heavily treated voice?) have a turned-inside-out,
running tape-backwards "Tomorrow Never Knows"-style. At twenty-one minutes, everything dissolves into a near silence which grows into a broad, engulfing drone, out of which in turn emerges avian cries reminiscent of Robert Fripp´s distant electric guitar before the five-minute-long shivering denouement.