FACTURE JANUARY / 2 0 1 2
The Humble Bee:
Henrietta (Cornwall 5-12 November 2011)
“It started with me booking a week’s holiday in Cornwall, in November staying in a lovely converted railway carriage (something I have wanted to do for ages now). The plan for the week was to spend time making and collecting things, responding to what the area had to offer. This, for me turned out to be light and sound… I suppose it was the fact that although these two things were the essence of the place, they were at the same time constantly in a state of flux, changing from one moment to the next. I found this duality intriguing, I think it was the fact that it was at once permanent and yet ephemeral that stimulated and directed the work. The week became a documentation of these things, of tides, of weather, of light, of the sounds. I made maps, plotted coast lines, developed scores from fleeting things; the rain on the window, the barbed wire against the sky, the tidal marks in the sand, things that would come and go and change with the place. I came back home with several videos, field recordings, photographs, found scores, collected colour palettes, lumen prints and rust prints from metal plates I’d le at the will of the currents and weather. This lot was all used as my starting point for the audio. The field recordings and the audio captured from the videos were the first things I worked with, arranging them chronologically and leaving space for the found scores to slot in between. Once these were in place the rest of the space in the piece was le for me to fill with my response to what I had experienced, the existing audio and what I had collected and brought home.” - Craig Tattersall (The Humble Bee)
Sounds & Textures: The Marcus Fischer Interview
In late 2010 12k released “Monocoastal”, an album by Portland, Oregon-based musician and multimedia artist Marcus Fischer. The CD edition sold out within weeks, and 2011 brought well-received collaborations with Devin Underwood and 12k boss Taylor Deupree, along with a handful of successful live performances, confirming Fischer’s reputation as one of the most innovative and talented artists to emerge on the ambient and experimental music scene for some time. With the release of a new album called “Collected Dust” arriving on Tench at the end of the month, we thought it was about time we asked the man some questions.
serious than others) and performing and recording with some really amazing people. Aer the most active band that I was in decided to call it quits, I started doing a lot more home recording again. Once my wife and I moved to Portland around 2000, I had pretty much quit playing in bands and started to focus my musical efforts towards solo experimental electronics. It seems like everything has come full circle and here I am again playing with cassette recorders again.
- How did you first get involved in making music?
By far the most significant influence on my development as a musician has to be the act of improvising with other musicians. Nothing else I have ever done has taught me more about music. It forces you to learn your instrument in a way that would be impossible to do alone. It teaches you take chances. It teaches you to embrace mistakes and use them to your advantage. Most importantly, it teaches you to listen.
I started making music when I was about 12 or 13, although I didn’t think of it as music at the time. My father always had a lot of different tape recorders laying around and I would use them for recording things off of the television and from his records. I started combining them by playing a few back at the same time using their built in speakers and recording them on another tape recorder. The combinations were really strange – like an instrumental classical record on top of a record of Halloween sound effects on top of slowed down dialogue from an episode of “I Love Lucy”. It was all pretty creepy. I actually found a few of those old mixes when I was in college and it kind of freaked me out. Around high school was when I first really got involved with actual music. I started playing in bands where we all would switch instruments so I quickly picked up some basic bass, drums and guitar skills. It was making mostly lo-fi indie pop and noise music at that time. While I was still in high school, I started a cassette label which soon grew into releasing vinyl. It was a really great learning experience and made me part of a larger community of DIY artists/musicians. That pretty much sparked my move to Olympia, Washington. In the mid-90′s, Olympia was pretty much the epicentre of DIY music culture in the US. At that time I found myself mostly playing drums in a variety of projects (some more
- What do you think were the most significant influences on your development as a musician?
- In our review of “Collected Dust” we noted some of the effects produced by your use of chance. Can you tell us more about the role of chance in your music making process? Do you have a particular method for generating chance events, or is it different for each piece? It is usually different depending on the piece because I try to not overuse the same processes. I have used all kinds of methods – everything from low-tech methods like placing contact microphones on the exposed guts of toy pianos during hail storms, to higher-tech things like a homemade granular delay plugin that would randomly reorder the sounds run through it within a certain set of parameters. I view using chance elements in performing and composing the music that I make on my own as a kind of invisible partner. Chance is kind of like a one-sided improvisation – like improvising with someone that is a very bad listener. Best of all, it forces you to give up control, which I feel is very important for my creative process.
- The use of chance within a piece of music is oen seen as a way of downplaying the conscious intentions of the artist, even though the framework within which this occurs can be highly constructed. Do you see chance as a way of opening up the creative process to other factors outside of yourself, or is it a means of expressing your own thoughts and intentions? I would have to say that for me, it is a combination of both. I do use it as a compositional tool to see what can happen but I have also chosen those elements carefully for personal or aesthetic reasons. It is a tricky thing to open yourself up to chance. Sometimes it works beautifully and other times it can be tragic. As an artist, if you are working on a recorded piece, you have the final cut so to speak of whatever it is you are creating. If you choose to incorporate chance elements, it is within your ability to edit out the chance elements that have less than desirable results. I have certainly done this and I think most artists would. Chance elements in a live setting is a whole different thing. - Are there any ‘safety buffers’ or approaches that you have developed to help you work with chance in a live environment? Not really… most of my solo live improvisations are based around creating a system for improvising which I try and change a bit for each performance. Sometimes it is focused on a certain network of pedals which I feed my signals through or other times it is all about a specific palette of sounds and textures that I have chosen to work with. Most of the preparation that I do for a live performance is just developing a system and figuring out how to navigate within that system. I don’t usually spend much time figuring out an escape plan if it fails. It has been quite a while since I have performed with the use of a laptop, but back then I typically had something like a delay/looping pedal on hand in the event that my laptop would crash. I think it kind of worked like a lucky charm because It never happened to me. Now that I’ve said that, I know that If I ever go back to using a laptop live, I will certainly be doomed.
- Are there any examples in your music of moments that took you wholly by surprise, that occurred completely outside of the framework you had set for the piece? Yes. Going back to the hail falling on toy pianos – that was an idea that I had where I imagined what it would be like but the actual recordings amazed me. I’m not sure what I thought at the time… maybe that the hail would just randomly strike the tines and there would be this beautiful music box-like melody that would emerge. But what really happened is that I got many more pieces of hail striking on the soundboard of the pianos and very little on the actual tines. The results are these strange rhythmic patterns punctuated by plinks and plunks of the tines which I found to be so much deeper and fascinating than what I had imagined. - When I listen to your music I am always struck by a strong sense of place. Is there a particular place, either specific or ideal, that you feel your music is grounded in? If so, is this intentional or did it emerge of its own accord? I’m so happy that you can feel that from the music. There isn’t always a specific place but there are a few tracks on “Monocoastal” that most certainly are. Personal geography and memories have always been the place where the music that I create comes from. I couldn’t tell you why that is the case but it has just always been that way. There is something so complete to me about a treasured place. Everything is there in your memory… maybe you couldn’t describe it if you had to, but you just know the feeling you get. I think that is what I look for in a source of inspiration. Since I do find so much inspiration in places, I feel fortunate that I have been involved in so many projects where a sense of place is front and centre. “Monocoastal” is one example, but two better examples have to be “In a Place of Such Graceful Shapes” with Taylor Deupree and the “Rivers Home” series that Kate Carr put together on Flaming Pines. My Willamette River disc for “Rivers Home” has to be my most literal interpretation of a place. Kate’s idea for the
project was for the artists that she selected to create a track based on a river that means something to them. I picked the river that bisects the city of Portland, the Willamette river. The track moves along the course of the river from its source, past towns, cities and industry until it joins another larger river which eventually leads to the Pacific Ocean. In the case of my collaboration with Taylor, I don’t think that we could have ever created that album while being on two different coasts. The place and the environment became the entire project. We have been talking a little about our next collaboration. I have an idea in mind which involves recording in a very specific spot in a small town outside of Portland. We just have to make sure that Taylor can come out here when the weather is decent, which leaves a very narrow window. - You’re also involved in a variety of other art forms, including photography, letraset printmaking and product design. Do you feel there are any correspondences between your different activities? Yes, most certainly. Maybe not in the case of the letraset work, but I think that one discipline informs another. For me the threads of photography/video and music are always strongly intertwined. I am a very visual thinker and it feels quite natural to combine visual mediums with sound. I also have a hard time focusing on just one project at a time… I’m sure that I would be much more productive if I could just work on music, or just work on art… but unfortunately I can’t. Or maybe it is fortunate that I can’t… who knows? - Finally, what are some of your thoughts and plans for the coming year? What are you looking forward to in 2012? 2012 is looking pretty busy already. At the end of this month Tench will be releasing “Collected Dust” which is a collection of tracks originally recorded for my thing-aday blog project which I revisited and reworked late last year. There are also a lot of collaborations in the works. I am hoping to wrap up a collaborative 12″ with Ted Laderas (the
Oo-Ray) in the next few weeks. It will be a very limited pressing on a small Portland label called Optic Echo. I am about to start an audio/visual collaboration with Rafael Anton Irisarri. I will be dealing primarily with the visual component. It is much more technical than anything I’ve ever done before but it sounds like it will be very cool when it is finished. I am hoping to get a bit deeper into a collaboration with Simon Scott this year. When he came out here in the Fall we had the chance to do some recording one morning in my studio, which was fantastic. It was wonderful to meet him in person and to do some shows with him in Portland and in Boston. We’ve also been trading some sound files over email, so between those two sources we should have something. Unrecognizable Now, My duo with Matt Jones, should have a new EP out soon called Two Rooms. It is all based around a recording we made last year. We made the recording at a practice space we have below an office building in downtown Portland. We performed in one room while recording in another. The microphones were placed at each end of a long concrete hallway, capturing the natural reverb of the environment. It is a dense but spacious piece in four movements. It will be released digitally on Kesh and self-released in a limited CD run in the next month or so. In April, Taylor Deupree and I have a oneoff show in Austin, Texas. Aer the series of shows we played together around the release of “In a Place of Such Graceful Shapes” we really felt we had hit our stride by the last show in Boston. It will be great to get another chance to perform together. Hopefully we get more invitations to play as a duo in the future. At some point this year I will also begin work on my next full length for 12k which is an exciting but intimidating prospect. I am hoping for another musically productive year this year and so far it looks like it should be. I feel very fortunate to have found an audience for my music and I hope that more opportunities continue to present themselves. - As indeed do we! Thank you for your time Marcus, and all the best for 2012! - Nathan Thomas
SoundFjord Session / Cafe OTO: Daniel Thomas Freeman / Attila Faravelli / Mem1
On the 16th of January, SoundFjord curated an evening of music and sonic arts at Cafe Oto where Daniel Thomas Freeman, Attila Faravelli and Mem1 shared the bill and had the small but dedicated audience both enthralled and unsettled… Daniel Thomas Freeman is by now well known from the Fluid audience for the wonderful album ‘The beauty of doubting yourself’ released last year on Home Normal. The context underpinning the release was, as discussed in an interview,
the depression he suffered from a few years ago and the way he recovered to finally get to the present state of selfacceptance and happiness. At Cafe Oto, he very humbly introduced each piece in relation to the illness, turning his short performance into a rather emotional affair. Freeman began his set striking a small gong for 10 minutes and gently processing it through his laptop. That first piece, which should appear on his next album, really impressed me by its sheer simplicity and its rather ritualistic outcome. He then
proceeded to play tracks from ‘The beauty of doubting yourself’, made of looped violin drones, emotive piano miniatures and a final piece that beautifully embodied Freeman’s new-found inner peace. When he asked his wife to join him on stage to play celestial chimes towards the very end of the set, one couldn’t help thinking about that aforementioned interview where he said: “The beauty of doubting yourself is that you have to rely on someone else”.
I first came across Attila Faravelli’s work whilst reading Gianmarco Del Re’s first ‘Postcard from Italy’ for Fluid a few months ago. I remember being intrigued by the way Faravelli described his process: “I always try and work with the space I play in, and tend to avoid the sound system of the venue. I still work with a laptop, I physically manipulate the sounds I send to my speakers through differently shaped objects. This makes sounds almost visible.” Seeing him play the second set of the evening at Cafe Oto was a unique opportunity to experience his rather unique music. The setup: a laptop diffusing sound files through an array of small
speakers distributed throughout the venue – as far as I could tell, there were cheap hifi speakers, walkman headphones, piezo speakers and maybe more. The performance: Faravelli moving around his speakers with shaped object (serving plates, metal cheese bell, a 12” record amongst others) and catching the reflections of soundwaves in order to alter their properties. At times, he would manipulate the speakers themselves as a way to localize some sound sources at very precise locations or went through more esoteric gestures that would dramatically change the nature of the diffused textures. Even if the audience couldn’t directly
translate everything Faravelli did into tangible sonic outcomes, the physicality of the performance, that could at times become quite theatrical, made for a very engaging and powerful statement about the nearly solid nature of sound, manipulated like clay by Faravelli for the matter. In a sense, it was like watching a sculptor moving about his creation, using unusual tools to further elaborate his artistic discourse. But unlike a solid and inert block of clay awaiting to be shaped, Faravelli’s material was very much alive and dependent on the acoustic reflection of the room, thus turning this performance into a fine sonic balancing act.
US-based duo Mem1 (Mark and Laura Cetilia) played the last set of the evening – a 30-minute performance using laptop, cello, electronics and radio broadcasts. The concert was an occasion to showcase their work during their Visiting Hours residency at SoundFjord, documenting their experience of London through location recordings. I found their performance surprisingly restrained but nonetheless true to the spirit of their beautiful and visceral album ‘Tetra’ released in 2010 and described by fellow reviewer Michael Vitrano as a work whose “three profound pieces move beyond the
reality of the sounds to create an ongoing expedition into the uncanny”. Mem1’s set began with sounds emitted from what looked like an AM radio receiver and manipulated with custom soware, thus reducing them to a ghostly core whose remnants of electromagnetic transmissions were gently waing into the venue. Soon, emotive and plaintive cello motifs, played and processed with pedals by Laura Cetilia, added subdued layers of melancholia that wonderfully related to the feeling of walking in the deserted streets of London just before dawn. In the second section of the set, things took a more
abrasive turn with what sounded like the processed sound of roadworks, but careful electronic manipulations once again stripped the outer layers from their rawness to reduce them to beautiful and undulating droning textures where one could decipher distant calls in the far reaches of the city, unveiled by the delicate electronic deambulation of Mark and Laura Cetilia – an “ongoing expedition into the uncanny” indeed. - Pascal Savy
Postcards From Italy: Venice - Enrico Coniglio
The next chapter in the ‘Postcards From Italy’ series sees Gianmarco travel to Venice for an in-depth interview with sound artist Enrico Coniglio… - There is a page on your website where you’ve collected a number of thoughts over the years, many of which are about Venice. In one of these notes, you write that “there are two different cities of Venice: “one ‘above’ and one below the surface.” The one above pertains to the picturesque and caters to the tourist industry, the one below is the “realm of sewers that overlook the exposed gums of the canals”. Where do you place yourself in relation to these two different cities? Also, you talk about grey areas, is there a grey area within Venice itself or is the grey area the one outside the urban centre, the one within the margins, on the outskirts? Being born and bred in Venice, I move between the two. The city above cannot be defined as a proper city anymore, not as such. It is like a theatre set, where the grotesque comedy of tourist exploitation is played out on a daily basis with colorful masks, clowns, doves and pigeons, while the residents try to get on with their lives. This whole jamboree, though, is what enables many to make a living. The same happens in all main tourist destinations the world over. The hidden Venice is the one relegated on the outskirts, one of very limited interest to tourists. Still, it is here, in the suburbs, that the few residents le have taken refuge from what once was a real city. The suburbs are also, in a way, the bastion of true romance. So, yes, the “grey area” I am talking about in my writings, is the one located on the margins, beautiful or ugly as it may be, but of undoubted charm, as opposed to the cliché version of Venice. However, this “grey area” is also a state of mind, which holds no geographical boundaries. It is the place where one takes solace from the banality of the daily “Death in Venice” experience. - You also write: “Venice is sinking, it is a city where you have to pay an entrance fee.
It is an old flooded shopping mall open 24 / 7. Venice gives the best and the worst of itself, every day, every month, and every season.” What is the best and the worst that Venice has given you? There is no doubt that Venice is a failed city in terms of its inhabitants, because it is not somewhere where one can live anymore. It has become like a courtesan you visit and you pay homage to. There are virtually no job prospects, the house prices are prohibitive and most of the groceries shops and convenience stores have turned into souvenir stalls selling useless trinkets. Unfortunately, this is the dominant Venice, a city that gives the worst of itself in its deceitful display of its falsity. It is a nonplace, a prime example of how a real city can turn into a theme park. Having said that, Venice is a truly unique place so different from any other city, it is my birthplace, and that is something that will always stay with me. Also, it has set me a part, in a way. Being born in Venice makes me feel like an alien having to endure this hanging feeling of frustration, almost as if I was sentenced to oblivion and yet, as Giacomo Leopardi put it “being shipwrecked is sweet to me in this sea”. - Considering you have been integrating locally sourced field recordings into your own music, I was wondering if your personal topography of Venice has changed over the years. In other words, has sound-mapping your own city given you different emotional and psychological points of reference? A few years ago, when I was first started to focus on the concept of “topophonia”, (the wealth of indigenous sounds that pertain to a specific time and place), what I had in mind was a more imaginary city, more musical and naive, if you like. Nowadays, however, I am more interested in faithfully recording and documenting the transformation of the landscape. If any of my current musical works, which centre around my love and hate relationship with Venice, suggests imaginary sound itineraries, these have become closer to the real soundscapes of the city, even if this sonic world has been manipulated and
rendered as something else. The theme of boundaries and borders, of the sound of the areas on the margins, is certainly prevalent in my approach to the territory, interpreted as a complex set of different areas characterized by special aural traits, which clash with each other, generating apparent “discrepancies”. The size of the areas and the size of the margins is variable. Central to this is the idea that the concept of “margin” may be used as a new model for interpreting the contemporary soundscape and this is something I am developing with the curator and music reviewer Leandro Pisano [www.leandropisano.it]. Venice is an ideal case study as it features different geographical areas that coexists with each other in the same terraqueous context. - When you write that, “There is no longer a catalog of ‘sounds of the city’, ‘sounds of the countryside’, ‘nature sounds’, or ‘human sounds’, because all sounds have gradually blurred and became ingrained in one another”, I thought of Julia Kent’s album Green and Gray, amongst others, which articulates the now outdated dichotomy between natural and urban environments. Taking into account the fact that Venice is an atypical city in itself, because it is built on water and therefore it escapes the “standardised score” of the traditional city, what are the specific sounds that characterise Venice for you? The answer may be found in your track Fondamenta Nove incl. 130 cm s.l.m., but I would like you to elaborate a bit on this. I am very fond of that track, thank you for mentioning it. It mixes field recordings and musical musings in a narrative way. For quite some time now, I have been a firm believer that we need to venture beyond the traditional juxtaposition between “land-scape” and “man-scape”. The way I see it, the borders between the natural and the human habitat have become so blurred as to be almost untraceable. One only needs to think of the Venice lagoon. It is a unique ecosystem, with plenty of wildlife, and yet, it is not, and I would like to stress this, a “natural environment”. For centuries, Venetians have controlled the flow of rivers, diverting their estuaries to
The concept of margin as a term of interpretation allows to overcome the seemingly naive idea that a soundscape can be classified by different themes. In the 20th century, with the transformation of the landscape in Italy, and in the Veneto region in particular, and especially aer the Second World War, the distinction between city and countryside has become obsolete. The richness of the soundscape of Venice is given on two different levels, the first one pertaining to the peculiarities that characterize the different areas that make up the system as a whole, and the second one relating to the complexity of the relationship between said areas. The specificity of the Venetian soundscape exists on the margins, where the different sounds come together creating dyscrasias, or even “schizophoniae “, and therefore contamination. But contamination creates a more complex and ultimately richer environment. - Continuing on from this idea of music from the outskirts, could you tell me something about your experience of Porto Marghera? Porto Marghera is one of the largest industrial areas situated on a coastal line in Europe and it is now in irreversible decline. Of all the different landscapes that make up the Venetian environment, it embodies this grey area we were talking about more than any other. I started to explore Porto Marghera from an early age in search of “urban adventures”, but also to confront and stare directly at the “face of evil”. Even though Porto Marghera has given work to many, Venetians have had to pay a very high price for the privilege in terms of work related diseases. Furthermore, the pollution of the environment is something we, and the future generations, have to contend with on a daily basis. Returning to the same area as an adult and as a soundseeker is just another way for me to perpetuate my childhood fascination with Porto Marghera. In addition to scouting the docks of large industrial canals, I was also lucky enough to visit some of the most important large industrial plants still operating. I have made recordings within factories, construction sites and warehouses. The history of Porto Marghera is very much the history of Venice in the Twentieth Century with its modern suburbs of Mestre and Marghera. Through music I try to render an alternative Venice, by creating an unusual guide to the sound of a city that is magical and mysterious, not only by virtue of its churches, museums and historical buildings, but also of its factory chimneys, cranes and large industrial plants where the picturesque takes on new forms. Alas, what prevails is still a taste for decadence, both in the old and the modern city.
- The region of Veneto is characterized by its urban sprawl that extends all the way from Milano, in Lombardy, right up to Venice. You also write that there is no distinction between the industrial landscape and that of the Venice lagoon and yet Porto Marghera hardly registers in the mind of the casual tourist. As we have mentioned before, Venice is atypical and quite different from any other city. The different areas are all linked by the sea. When I say that, one cannot differentiate between the industrial landscape and the lagoon, I refer to the fact that any terraqueous environment is extremely “promiscuous” by nature. The characteristic soundscape of shoals and sandbanks meets that of the industrial area along the waterfront. There is literally an overlapping of the different elements where the different sounds collide and merge. Even though, over the years, industrial archeology has become a niche market within the tourism industry, most of the tourists “delete” the existence of Porto Marghera, because clearly inconsistent with the stereotype of the old city, in all its grandeur. This is perfectly consistent with the transformation of Venice as a theme park. In order to function, all theme parks have to “erase” their surroundings, as the anthropologist Marc Augè wrote. Therefore, Porto Marghera does not appear on tourist maps, one pretends it does not exist, even if it is only just under two miles away. - This is one of the standard questions that I put to all electro-acoustic musicians: do field recordings trigger the idea of an album or of a particular track, or does the idea come first and then you go looking for the right sound that might evoke what you had in mind? A field trip is a trip, first of all! That is my motto. The so-called “sound-seekers” always travel with their own equipment. They probably have a plan of the kind of recordings they intend to capture, but it is the sound that eventually leads them. One must be able to listen, to adapt, to improvise and sometimes to take risks. The discovery of a sound oen encourages one to build a concept around it. Or it could be that one already has a clear idea of what to look for, but it is not always as clear-cut as that. I feel lucky as I have the lagoon to draw from, which is an endless source of fascination for me. Of course when I travel I always carry with me the bare essentials in terms of recording equipment, but more oen than not I return home empty handed. Last summer, for instance, I was on the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. However the wind swept with such a relentless force that it made it
impossible to hear anything else. So, getting field recordings can be a frustrating experience as well, at times. - And now onto your collaborative projects. You are part of the collective Archive of Italian Soudscapes (AIPS). What has your experience been and what do you see as a way forward for AIPS? Also, you collaborate with Giovanni Lami under the moniker Lemures, what is the specific of this experience? With regards to the project with Emanuele Errante and Elisa Marzorati, Herion, I understand this is a closed chapter, will it continue in other forms? Also, could you tell me how your recent collaboration with Katie English, aka Isnaj Dui came about for My Home Sinking… AIPS is an important initiative and a good opportunity for me to network with like minded musicians who operate within the same field. It was through AIPS, for instance, that I got to know Giovanni Lami. As Lemures we aim to work to process raw field recordings through a multi-speaker system in a live context. We have already taken this project to a couple of festivals including Flussi in Avellino, over the summer. We’ve just finished recording our first album and we’re now looking for a label. Anyone interested, just drop us a line! In terms of AIPS, I am organising with Alessio Ballerini a group field trip to northern Europe. And, finally, my friend Alessandro Doni and I have prepared a manifesto on “live electronics” open to anyone who may be interested, which will soon be uploaded to the AIPS’ website. With regards to HERION, Elisa Marzorati, Pier Gabriel Mancuso and I are currently deciding whether to continue with this project and, if so, how. I will continue to make ambient and electro-acoustic music under my own name, whereas, with My Home Sinking, I would like to address the idea of a song in all its different “forms”. I am currently working on the album, but I hope to be able to finish the mix in a couple of months. Katie English I met through Exquisite What, which we are both part of, and I was immediately captured by her sound, raw and harmonious at the same, and by her music so lovely and communicative. The project – ambient and folk-oriented – also includes the collaboration of Orla Wren from Britain, and Sean Quinn and Laura Sheeran from Ireland. - Gianmarco Del Re
Ilyas Ahmed: With Endless Fire
There’s something about the music of Ilyas Ahmed that seems to prompt reviewers to say contradictory things. One review describes it as “completely THERE”, while another insists that it is “*gone*”; some call him a “bedroom wanderer”, while others reference “wind-swept steppes” or “huge phantom continents”. Needless to say, there remains the possibility that each pronouncement could be equally right, and that Ahmed’s work manages to be both intensely intimate and immensely distant at the same time. Perhaps this accounts for the way in which his music sounds both strangely familiar and unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Familiar, in the way the beating of one’s own heart or the rush of air up the trachea is familiar. And yet, what is more alien, more unimaginable than the sight, texture, and smell of one’s own internal organs? Best, then, to concentrate on what can be imagined: intricate guitar riffs in shades of bluesy acoustic, grungy fuzz, and mellow
clean electric; droning harmonium and stomping drums; a voice sat low in the mix, faint and languid, seemingly sucking in as much as it breathes out. It is perhaps this voice that most strongly evokes those “wind-swept steppes”, as it seems to arrive from across a great expanse, carried by a gale. “With Endless Fire” is Ahmed’s third release for Immune Recordings aer a vinyl reissue of “Between Two Skies / Towards the Night” and a split 7” with Steve Gunn. It continues the experiments begun in 2009 album “Goner” with heavier, rockier sounds, though the fields of plaintively picked acoustic guitar still remain. Ahmed’s guitar playing is outstanding throughout, with the two acoustics weaving their way through a descending four-chord pattern at the end of “Every Minute of Every Hour (For JR)” and the beautifully melodic electric fingerpicking in album closer “By The Light” being personal highlights. And
special mention should be made of the cover artwork, which, as with previous Ahmed releases, uses collage to turn recognisable images into something completely uncanny, prompting a deliciously confused, humorous yet unsettling double take. While Ahmed’s music may well open up all sorts of transcendental, metaphysical puzzles, my own inclination is to take “With Endless Fire” at face value – as a superbly performed, intricately rhythmic collection of songs, melancholic at times, yet always suffused with light. The release certainly leads the listener on some kind of metaphorical journey, though whether its path crosses wide cosmic vistas or burrows deep into the heart is perhaps not as important as the simple experience of travelling. - Nathan Thomas
Nova Scotian Arms: Cult Spectrum
Going solo aer the engrossing “Crystal Anniversary” release with wife Rachel, Grant Evans, also half of Quiet Evenings, and co-curator of the Hooker Vision label, washes his musical residue upstream in a miniature epic release for the always reliable Digitalis. There’s not a single weak track here – it’s like he’s deadheading his own vociferous productivity plant, where each elemental snip ushers in a stronger return. Wilting, flowery drone to rosebud Rhodes piano on opener “Gathering/Composition” sets us off with an intense story to tell. Phasing in elements like manipulated synthesizer, which adopts a hue of birdsong put through comb filters, the mood stirs in winding ebbs and flows, and each piece seems, in retrospection of his past efforts (see “The Fire Cult To Your Dream Child” for a more Techno-inclusive palette), a structural deconstruction minus the wrecking ball.
If there’s any valuable criticism to be had of “Cult Spectrum” henceforth, it’s that second tune “Overcast Strumming (1st Delay)” kind of understates itself due to sequencing the uproarious lead-in against a placid, aquatic haziness, pursuing an anti-radical drone agenda that drips finely into the mood following. Slow, teacuphoused melody evaporates out of a compound populating the whole vinyl: one part simple melody repeated, one part multilayered textures condensed. “Citadel” stockpiles this theme with more gumption, coming off as very Brian Enoesque of the “On Land” period, mixed with the ear-bonny liquidity of Carbon Based Lifeforms. It’s great prep for the 16 minute fourth, “Emulsion”. This is where Grant really comes into his own. Le to stretch out, “deadheading” referenced earlier appropriates its place, causing sound sources to gradually pursue another place. Headphones are the sole guaranteed way
to detect and indulge in each small detail. The acoustic guitar here, and only here is the recognisable hook whatever sound spectrum you hear it, and prevents “Cult Spectrum” from stagnancy accusations. Consequently blooming frequents the next place, then leaves that place, trimmed back by the bookend “Hearse Overdub (Decomposition”). The aspect of a hook in work as psychedelic and sugary rich as this could appear lost in the murk, but hooks always worked best in Pop music, and Grant has enough integrity and brunt to perk up the rest of us. A stunning record, and possibly his best to date, “Cult Spectrum” sees Evans again composing with a fertile imagination – long may it continue. - Mick Buckingham
Windy & Carl: We Will Always Be
Listening to the new release from husband-and-wife duo Carl Hultgren and Windy Weber is like being enveloped in various kinds of cloud – sometimes driing, sometimes furious. Here are some of the clouds I met: Cirrus fibratus (25,000) – wispy, fastmoving, oen at the leading edge of a high-altitude jetstream. Cast no shadow. Like clinging on to the roof of a speeding bullet train made of candy floss. See track 5, “Looking Glass”. Altostratus translucidus (6,500) – a grey to bluish-grey sheet, the sun partially visible and casting a diffuse, shimmering light. Composed mostly of water droplets. Seeing and not seeing at the same time; wrapped in damp, brightly coloured wool. See track 3, “Spires”, and track 7, “The Smell Of Old Books”. Altocumulus floccus (13,000) – white, tuy, the stereotypical ‘little fluffy cloud’.
Fields of altocumulus floccus oen stretch for thousands of square miles, bringing a sense of vast open horizons, of weightless wisps of white repeated forever. See track 4, “The Frost In Winter”. Cumulonimbus (8,000) – huge, towering plumes of cloud. Heavy black bases form at low altitude, building up into columns several thousands of feet tall. Associated with thunderstorms, tornados, and other severe weather conditions. The feeling of immense pressure, of being held alo by an all-powerful force. See track 6, “Nature of Memory”, and track 8, “Fainting In The Presence Of The Lord”. As with all clouds, being inside “We Will Always Be” is a 360-degree experience, completely filling the sensory field. What looks ephemeral and slight from the outside is immersive and allencompassing from within. Cloud physics covers a wide range of different densities, atmospheric pressures, wind speeds,
temperatures and precipitation levels, but Windy and Carl manage to span this diversity, liing the listening weather balloon to the highest, thinnest reaches of the atmosphere before dropping it into a tailspin of melting ice crystals and blinding fog. Yet even when visibility is at its lowest, there is always still a pervasive glimmer of light. “We Will Always Be” is the first release from the duo since 2008, and sees Weber’s vocals take a backseat in favour of a more open, wide-field sound. Their lo-fi guitar-based dronescapes may well have spawned a thousand imitators, but from the hands of these masters the approach continues to enchant and delight, with a mood that is altogether brighter and more blissful than previous works. For those who enjoy spending time with their heads in the clouds, 2012 is off to an excellent start. - Nathan Thomas
Christina Vantzou: No.1 Remixes
A remix album is a little like borrowing a book from the library and finding, with each turn of the page, the marks le by previous readers: emphatic underscorings, folded corners, or barely legible notes scribbled in the margins. With these accumulated traces the book is transformed from a labyrinth, with a single path to the centre and out again, into a maze of options and available routes. You have the choice of trying to piece together the clues le by those gone before you, navigating by what their signposts seem to say, or of ignoring the footprints and trails of red thread and feeling your own way through the darkness. The book is precisely the sum of all these virtualities: the passages taken by each and every reading, along with all those that wait patiently for a reader. The book is read many times, but no two passages are the same. In “No.1 Remixes”, the notes in the margins come in many different handwritings. Many stick to a vocabulary and a writing style similar to that of the
printed text, which in this case would be majestic, sweeping, but never overstated – Koen Holtkamp’s remix of “Super Interlude Pt. 2”, for example, or Dustin O’Halloran’s “1111”. In other notes we hear a significantly different voice, whether that be the addition of a new speaking character (as in Montgomery Knott’s remix of “Prelude for Juan”), or a departure into a different style (Loscil’s pulsating “And Instantly Take Effect”, White Rainbow’s chirpy IDM). On one occasion the author herself provides a delicate, driing aerword, with assistance from a guest editor (bonus track “The Adversary of Evil Budd” by Vantzou and Stars of The Lid man Adam Wiltzie’s project The Dead Texans). The appearance of all this marginalia raises several questions, the most obvious being perhaps: how could these other readers have read something so completely different in “No.1” to what I read? Were we even reading the same text? Were all these different passages and routes already there, present in the original
material, waiting to be teased out? Or are they additions, supplements, interpretations? Are they secondary to the ‘original’ text, or does the text expand to make room for them? When two people talk about “No.1”, how can they be sure they are talking about the same thing? Part of the pleasure of the remix album is having someone take a work you thought you knew well and show you something new and unexpected about it. The other part comes from the disagreements, when another’s interpretation only shores up the perceived rightness of your own. There’s plenty of both pleasures to be had from “No.1 Remixes”. If you’re already a fan of “No.1” (and there are many of you out there), this release will widen your view and offer new perspectives on its riches. If you’ve yet to get acquainted with Vantzou’s music, the remixes offer a handy field guide for discovering your own route through her expansive, multi-layered orchestral narratives. - Nathan Thomas
AmbientFestival / Cologne - Day One: Markus Gunter & Simon Scott
When Cologne resident Dietmar Saxler first heard that the local Basilika St. Aposteln was looking for projects that would bring more young people through its doors, he thought it would make the perfect venue for an ambient music festival. Luckily the church agreed, and thanks to their continued support the Ambientfestival is now in its seventh edition. The basilica’s baroque interior, with its high ceilings and abundance of hard surfaces, would present an acoustic nightmare for many pop genres, but with smart sound engineering it made the perfect setting for the reverb-rich sounds of ambient and experimental music. The incense from the evening’s service was still heavy in the air as DJ Geo took to the decks with a set drawing from local label Kompakt’s back catalogue and other similar sources. This turned out to be a useful precursor to the festival’s first live performance from Markus Güntner, who brought an hour’s worth of entirely new
work written especially for a live setting. Güntner drew on all the right aspects of the ‘classic’ ambient sound – deep pads, sweeping synths, enchanting manipulations of the perception of time and space – in a set that was both epic and relentless. Guiding the hushed audience through constantly shiing peaks and troughs, from hazy dreamscapes to pounding bass rhythms, the performance was a textbook example of how music can take the listening mind on a journey out of itself and back. For Simon Scott this was a return visit to St. Aposteln aer his performance at last year’s festival. He chose to eschew a laptop for a set built entirely around guitar, pedals, and a small collection of handheld instruments, including what looked like a Tibetan prayer bowl, which in the basilica’s reverberate acoustics produced a gorgeous ring. Rushing water, clinking and clattering keys, and wind whistling through a very small hole were all evoked by Scott’s
performance, and although the distorted guitars of his albums “Navigare” and “Bunny” made an appearance, the sound was altogether clearer, cleaner, and more detailed than his previous material (or at least: the details were allowed to stand out more clearly). The heavenly hosts that lied Güntner’s set to the heights of the sublime also made their presence felt here, and yet the sound was markedly more ‘organic’, which led me to wonder precisely what we mean when we use such a term to describe a musical aesthetic. A topic that needs much more thought, maybe. But if Güntner led us on a journey through the ambient cosmos, then perhaps Scott’s performance was somewhat more rooted, more connected to the earth, to our bodies and to the cold Cologne rain that awaited us as we stepped reluctantly out from that cavernous sheltering church. - Nathan Thomas
AmbientFestival / Cologne - Day Two: Greg Haines & 0 (Sylvain Chaveau)
Day two of Ambientfestival “Zivilisation der Liebe”, and at this point mention must be made of the visuals supplied throughout the festival by Irish-born, Berlin-based artist Lillevan. His video projections evoked fireflies, clouds of dye diffusing in water, fractal fumes and microscopic cells, and on the high walls of the baroque Basilika St. Aposteln they looked simply stunning. Lillevan’s sensitive approach to the music, matching visual with musical intensity, greatly enhanced the overall experience. A misreading of the programme led me to miss the following performances by John Tilbury and Marcus Schmickler, which were highly praised by those who saw them. The evening concert kicked off with a DJ set from Klaus Fiehe, who mixed jazz trumpet and hypnotic metallophone and harp loops together with the croak of toads, the chirruping of birds and other animal field recordings. Greg Haines chose to begin his set at the grand piano, playing open, hanging chords to which subtle electronics were gradually introduced. Given the day’s inclement weather it was easy to associate Haines’ piano playing with rain – mists and swirls of notes building up to torrential downpours of arpeggios, before subduing and turning to the so drizzle that in films oen accompanies a character’s moments of reflection. However, it was when Haines
le the piano keyboard for laptop and Monome that things really sprang to life, with pads and loops building up in a superbly controlled crescendo before fading away into the distance as the set drew to a close. At the audience’s insistence Haines returned for a short encore, capping off his performance in spellbinding fashion with a short and simple piano lullaby. The 0 (pronounced ‘zero’) Collective is an open group of musicians whose work shrinks and expands to cover a wide range of different situations, from solo performances to quartets to chamber ensembles, from live performances and recordings to radio programming and a print zine. The core of the group consists of three French musicians, the most wellknown of whom is perhaps Sylvain Chauveau, and it was he who represented the collective at St. Aposteln. Anyone expecting a set drawn from Chauveau’s early piano works was in for a surprise, however – the music of 0 Collective leans towards more experimental and avantgarde material, oen performing works by the likes of John Cage, Morton Feldman and Philip Glass alongside their own compositions. Chauveau’s set seamlessly mixed composed works with live improvisation, and drew on vocals, electronically
generated tones and an acoustic guitar played with an e-bow. At times he used mallets on an instrument that looked like the black leather seat of a drum stool, but when struck produced a gorgeously mellow, deep-throated ring. Grainy highpitched noises buzzed like hyperactive insects recorded in 8-bit, followed by hypnotic looping bell chimes. The music was sparse on melody and traditional musical structures, suggesting that the aim was not to evoke an idea or express a feeling, but rather to allow each sound to simply be what it was, and to be heard as such. This in turn drew attention to the act of listening – of how we listen, of what we listen to and what we normally filter out, and of the tricks played by the mind to impose a sense of order and meaning on what we hear. Of all the music heard so far at the Ambientfestival Chauveau’s performance was perhaps the most decidedly non-epic, yet I still found myself completely engrossed in each and every sound, in the differences between them and the shis from one to the other. The contrast between the two live performances, and the DJ set that fell somewhere in between, made for another inspiring and rewarding evening. - Nathan Thomas
AmbientFestival / Cologne - Day Three: Nils Frahm & Peter Broderick
People were still filing into the Basilika St. Aposteln as Jörg Burger aka Triola took to his laptop for some warm ambient sounds, and by the time Nils Frahm arrived at the piano the venue was completely packed. Frahm played a range of material from recent records, switching to a Juno analogue synth for a rendition of “Peter” from the “Juno” 7-inch, and adding touches of Rhodes to supplement the warmth of the Bössendorfer grand piano. It was the latter instrument, however, that was clearly the star, and Frahm’s command of it was little short of astounding. While Greg Haines’ performance the previous night had made great use of open chords le hanging in the basilica’s rich reverberation, Frahm’s fingers hardly ever stopped moving. Rather than relying on variations in note density to provide depth and interest, Frahm instead chose to use rich manipulations of dynamics, tonalities, and tempi, as well as the balance between melody and arpeggiated chords, and between short, stabbing staccato and smooth legato playing. This was a performance of great energy and verve, anchored by impressive technical ability.
Frahm was joined onstage by both Haines and Peter Broderick for a short 3-way jam, with Haines on Rhodes and Frahm and Broderick on piano. The latter pair, whose work together as Oliveray has already produced the beautiful short album “Wonders”, continued with an atmospheric improvisation built around a Juno loop and layers of violin. Broderick then took to the mic for a spot of beatboxing, with Frahm supplying percussion with the Bössendorfer case, his knees, and anything else he could find to hit – a fun piece of showmanship that had the audience completely charmed. Aer the break Broderick began his solo set singing ‘a cappella’, before taking to the piano with a lyrical and flowing playing style. While in Frahm’s performance the piano was the centre of focus, Broderick switched freely between piano, guitar, violin and vocals. At one point the man from Oregon unplugged his violin, stood on a piano stool and sang and played Oliveray song “The Book She Wrote And In The Time” completely unamplified – a risky gamble, but one that paid off handsomely, with the basilica’s cavernous architecture
stepping in to provide natural volume and a haunting touch of echo. While much of the music heard so far during the festival worked its magic through textures or tonalities rather than hummable tunes, Broderick brought simple, gorgeous melodies to go away singing – and judging by the audience’s response, they’ll be floating round more than a few heads for weeks to come. Frahm returned for the end of the set, and the ecstatic crowd brought the pair back for an encore based on a handsaw played by a violin bow (to surprisingly great effect). As much as their respective solo work impresses me, I have to say that watching Frahm and Broderick play together has convinced me that in their case the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Broderick’s daring approach to live performance and ear for a sweet melody reacts alchemically with Frahm’s technical virtuosity and flair, and the result is pure gold. Another rapturous night of music at the Ambientfestival “Zivilisation der Liebe”. - Nathan Thomas
AmbientFestival / Cologne - Day Four: Lubomyr Melnyk, Ensemble-Son-Et-Lumiere & Hauschka
Great piano music has been a recurring theme of this year’s Ambientfestival “Zivilisation der Liebe” at St. Aposteln in Cologne, and the closing concert was no exception to this trend. Canadian musician Lubomyr Melnyk was the first to take a seat at the ivories with a compositional technique he refers to as ‘continuous music’. His approach was based around a constant flurry of notes covering the whole of the keyboard, from the very lowest rumbles to the highest twinkling pitches. At times Melnyk’s playing produced a hazy minimalist shimmer, but while the emotive force of minimalist music oen relies on an absolute ascetic purity, Melnyk brought rich Romantic colours to his immersive and expressive sound. Particularly effective was second piece “The Fountain”, which used a second piano pre-recorded during the soundcheck to enlarge the wall of sound still further. The gradual climb into the higher registers evoked a flock of birds liing off into startled slow-motion flight, and the machine-gun clack of keys against keyboard only added to the breathtaking power and intensity of the work. Melnyk has developed and refined
his approach to reach a level of sublime perfection, and the reverence reserved for him by those in the know deserves to be shared by a much wider audience. Ensemble-Son-et-Lumière aims to bring together original contemporary music with video projection. Their performance at St. Aposteln made use of the basilica’s large pipe organ, as well as trumpet and percussion. At times the energy and grandiosity of the group’s single long-form piece resembled Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” arranged as an organ concerto; given that “Rite” is my least favourite work in the classical canon, this resemblance was somewhat unfortunate. However, nice percussion playing and great visuals saved the performance from being completely lost on me. The final performance of the festival came courtesy of Düsseldorf-based musician Hauschka, whose extensively prepared piano and ra of electronics made for a pulsating, highly rhythmic sound. The influence of his background in dance music was clear, yet the transposition of techno beats and melodic riffs onto the
piano seemed to bring out wider and more subtle variations in expressive detail, and the more driving pieces were interspersed with moments of haunting melancholy. Joining him for several numbers was Kai Angermann, whose prepared vibraphone and percussion brought depth, warmth, and a hint of groove-inflected syncopation to Hauschka’s oen piercing and metronomically precise playing. For the encore Melnyk returned to the stage for an improvised trio that began somewhat hesitantly, but soon found its feet to bring the evening, and the festival, to a spellbinding close. Inspired curation, a fantastic venue and well-engineered sound all helped to make this year’s Ambientfestival “Zivilisation der Liebe” a resounding success, and audiences were treated to some truly stunning performances. In making it possible to see so many great artists over a single weekend, the festival makes a vital contribution to the ambient and experimental music scene in Germany and beyond. - Nathan Thomas
A Rare Occurrence, Woven In Sound: From The Mouth Of The Sun
It’s late 2008, and Dag Rosenqvist asks Aaron Martin for a cello part for his then work-in-progress, ‘The Black Sun Transmissions’… That initial request grows into a gradual exchange of musical DNA, part being a recording of an electric guitar from Martin. Rosenqvist, suffering an enforced layover in The Netherlands due to Icelandic ash in the 2010 eruption of the volcano Eyjaallajökull, starts working on that guitar part, which becomes music, which eventually becomes From The Mouth Of The Sun, which leads to the creation of ‘Woven Tide’, which is to be released by Experimedia on January 31st. So, amongst the lost opportunities and missed deadlines that the grounding of air travel had in 2010, an amazing record emerges from the volcanic ash; literally from the mouth of the sun. The album has seemingly been on the horizon for several months (if not longer), with Rosenqvist having mentioned it here on Fluid as early as November 2010 in an interview with Alex Gibson, discussing his collaboration with Simon Scott, ‘Conformists’ “I’m also working on a collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Aaron Martin. We’ve completed five tracks and four more are in the works. In my mind this is the perfect combination of the two of us: lush orchestrated parts, some noisier parts paired with drones and lots of acoustical instruments like cello, pump organ, banjo and piano. This should be out … sometime closer to summer 2011.” So, given that this work had been crawling over the horizon for quite a while, we all felt pretty keen to know the story behind the epic album. Martin and Rosenqvist kindly discussed the project by email over the last few months, during which time at least one interesting development occurred…
Rosenqvist posted on his blog in late December that he is retiring Jasper TX with one last release, ‘An Index Of Failure’, his comment being “Eleven years is enough I think.” Luckily for listeners of both, Martin and himself plan to continue on with From The Mouth Of The Sun, but the year that produced the record seems to have been eventful one for all concerned… - Did you two know one another from prior to 2008? AM: No. The first time we came into direct contact with one another was when Dag asked me to do the arrangement for “Weight of Days”. I had been aware of and enjoyed his work as Jasper TX since his album on Lampse, and always felt a connection with what he was doing, though. At that point, I hadn’t had any of my music released, so I never anticipated working together with him on an album. I was pleasantly surprised that we worked together well, and had similar ideas about how to make things work nearly every step of the way. - How did you first cross paths? DR: The first time I heard of Aaron was when Rutger sent me the ‘Cello Recycling’ 3”. And I immediately liked the approach. There was something raw in it that I really liked so when I started planning for “Weight of Days” I knew that I wanted Aaron to play the cello on it. .......... For those not familiar with it, the Cello Recycling project was originally commissioned for use in an art gallery, presumably as an installation piece; Rutger Zuydervelt, better known as the somewhat prolific Machinefabriek, took cello improvisations from Martin and built them into a slow-burning post-ambient monster. The project was later released on Type
with Martin’s take on Rutger’s work, “Cello Drowning”, two sides of the same tarnished coin. .......... - Where did From The Mouth Of The Sun come from? DR: Well, I had asked Aaron do record some cello parts that I had written for the track “Weight Of Days” off of ‘The Black Sun Transmissions’. This was back in 2008, I think. So he recorded them and also added some excellent ideas of his own to the recordings. Then he used some of those recordings for the track “Water Tongue” off his ‘Worried About The Fire’ album on Experimedia. And when he asked me to contribute a remix for an upcoming tape featuring remixes of the entire album I knew I just had to work on “Water Tongue” that in turn contained parts of recordings he had done for me earlier… So there’s actually a connections between those three albums. - How long did the record take, from where it started as an idea to the finished product? DR: I think we started talking about doing something together in the beginning of 2010 but I know I was very busy at the time and couldn’t really commit to anything right then. Then when Eyjaallajökull forced the world to a standstill in April I got stuck in den Haag, The Netherlands for an additional three or four days during which I started playing around with some recordings of Trombone and French Horn I had done a couple of months earlier to another project. And during the course of those very insecure, chaotic and strange days I made the foundation to what was to become “Like Shadows In An Empty Cathedral”.
And I actually think that Aaron had sent me a recording of an electric guitar (which is the foundation of “My Skin Drinks Light That Has Passed Through Leaves”) a while before this that I also started playing around with during time. But the collaboration didn’t take off for real (at least for me, as I remember it) until I had le school in the beginning of June and was basically unemployed for almost two months. Then I can’t really remember but I think the album was done like midDecember or something like that. So it was a pretty quick one. So from initial discussions to finished album in about a year. - How did the creative process work between the two of you? DR: I think I made the basic foundations in terms of chords and stuff like that for most of the tracks. And Aaron would send me sounds and recordings that I built even more foundations of. Some things emanated from previous recordings but transformed into something completely new. And once we had a foundation we would bounce that back and fourth a couple of times. Add stuff, mix and re-mix, add more, take away and mix some more. The whole process went quite easily actually and I think that we wanted to keep it quite rough, at least that was one of my ambitions with this one. I know that most of what I recorded was first-takes. Everything was very well recorded but I really wanted to keep a spontaneity about the whole thing and not over-work it too much. And that goes for the mixing and processing as well. Thinking about it now I don’t think we ever talked about what we wanted to do in terms of music, we kind of just let it happen and see where it would take us. And it seemed to work fine.
- Do you feel like you captured the rough spontaneity you wanted in the recording? Is it a goal for both of you to keep the life in the music, to not over-work it? AM: I feel like the album is nice combination of spontaneity and refinement. I tend to record in long takes, rather than piecing together multiple takes. I think that gives the music a more intimate feel. ‘Woven Tide’ has a lot of string arrangements, though, which requires quite a bit of preparation beforehand, and a lot of focus to capture in long takes. I think a lot about what I want to with each individual track as I’m preparing a part, but once I hit record, I allow some room to feel the music out and try something new in the moment. With all of the music I’m involved with, it’s important for me that the listener sense the life behind the music. If the music sounds too pristine or you can no longer penetrate the human element involved in the recording process, I feel like that creates too much distance between the artist and the listener. DR: I think that I generally tend to over think things a lot when I make music. I am always very critical to what I do and I tend to obsess over minor details. And to some extent I tried to let a bit of that go when we made this album. I always try to record things with good quality audio chains, from the microphone to the preamp and so on. And I think I focused even more on that for these recordings and rather than processing the sounds I tried to just leave them as they were. Of course I used effects, both while recording and while mixing, but not to the extent I normally do. I wanted to keep the natural sound of things, including all it’s flaws. If the music is too perfect then it loses something. There has to be some grittiness and some dirt in it in order to
appeal to me. And that’s where analogue equipment makes all the difference. Using a real piano rather than samples, running things through outboard compressors, tape echoes, reverbs etc. When you use analogue effect chains you allow for the element of chance that oen surprises you in unexpected and lovely ways. - Is there a “theme” for the record? AM: ‘Woven Tide’ has some subconscious themes and layers of meaning that appear throughout, but we didn’t set out with any themes in mind. It would be difficult to pinpoint exactly how to express these meanings, or even if Dag and I would be in agreement on what they are. I think the album coheres quite well as a whole and the listener is free to simply listen or to think about what themes are holding the music together. DR: I don’t thing there’s a “theme” for it but for me it’s about nature, the ebb and flow of the seasons and the beauty and fury of nature, the shis and changes. But it’s not a theme that we both agreed on, it’s just a feeling I had while recording and that I get when listening to it now. - Aaron, can you also hear the ebb and flow that Dag talks about? AM: Yes, I definitely hear that. I think a lot of the music has to do with observing elements in nature or in one’s life that are too substantial for an individual to impact. In that way, ‘Woven Tide’ has a wider scope with more abstract meaning than my solo work, where the music oen concerns specific memories and events in my life.
- Dag, you mentioned a love of grit and imperfection; can either of you point to where that influence came?
- Has the project spawned any other material that will come out at another point? What’s next for both of you?
DR: To me the grittiness comes as a very natural thing. I don’t like recordings that are too perfect. There’s just nothing that kind of get me going when I hear something that is too perfect. I like to have good recording equipment in terms of microphones and outboard effects so that I can capture the frequencies I want in a recording, but I don’t want things to sound too clean and crisp. You have to include and embrace the element of chance when recording. All of a sudden something that you could never plan for seeps into a recording and that minor little thing might just be the thing that makes or breaks the whole recording, if you get what I mean?
DR: At the moment we aren’t working on anything but we definitely plan to do more. That was one of the things when choosing a band name for this, we wanted it to be more than just a one-off thing. The thing is that this collaboration worked so well between us, it was kind of intuitive so it would be a shame not to do more really.
I also think it’s a combination of me growing up listening to old jazz records and stuff like The Rolling Stones, Ramones and The Sex Pistols where you can hear that it’s someone actually playing an instrument. I also grew up listening to death and black metal and there’s tons of dirt in those recordings. Or at least it used to be. I think it all comes down to what you want to achieve in a recording. Sometimes there’s a point in lining stuff straight into the pre-amp too. It’s all about esthetics and choices. AM: The impetus for me came from both the instruments I use and how I learned to record music. I use a lot of acoustic instruments that are oen unprocessed, and when I first started recording, I used a 4-track recorder. A lot of my habits from that beginning period have carried over (many have also been refined). Both of those elements lend themselves to imperfections that give the music a different kind of depth than recordings that are created in a more sophisticated environment.
I have a collection of odd bits and pieces that were collected over the last 5-6 years coming out this spring on the American label Handmade Birds. It’s a vinyl entitled ‘An Index of Failure’. The album was mastered by James Plotkin and right now my fellow studio colleague, musician and friend Thomas Ekelund is hard at work with the cover for it. Which will look absolutely stunning by the way. It’s a collection of tracks that, for various reasons, didn’t get a proper release. Some of them are collaborations that didn’t pan out and some are from compilations that never got done. It’s not a B-side kind of thing but rather a “best of” unreleased tracks. It actually features on track that I started working on and sent to Aaron for our collaboration. But we discarded it because it didn’t sit right with the rest of the tracks off of “Woven Tide”. So I decided to finish it on my own instead and it turned into something completely different… .......... It’s worth mentioning at this point that this dialogue comes from early November last year and may sound somewhat dated, given Dag’s decision to retire Jasper TX. While we were in the process of finalizing this interview, Dag agreed to go through a retrospective of his releases for a future article, so there is an adjunct to this
dialogue to follow, likely in the next few months… .......... DR: I also have an album with another duo project called The Silence Set coming out sometime during spring 2012. The duo consists of myself and Johan G. Winther, who’s released tons of excellent music under the Tsukimono moniker. The album is called ‘Teeth Out’ and will be released on Swedish label Fang Bomb. It’s kind of broken lo-fi mixed with some noise elements, proper songs with vocals and everything. But don’t worry, I’m not singing on it. But we got the wonderful Heather Woods Broderick to write lyrics and sing on one of the tracks, which might just be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever been a part of. We got Nils Frahm to record and produce Heathers vocals and he also added some modular synthesizer. Believe me when I say it’s magical. AM: Not yet, but I’m looking forward to working with Dag again as soon as we both have time to do more. Next up for me will be a release with a musician from New Mexico who records under the name Luperci. He plays sitar and heavily processes it. He did a remix for the recent “Worried about the Fire” remix tape ‘Stitched in Fire’. I’ve also been contributing cello parts to the new project of Maurice De Jong (Gnaw Their Tongues) called Seirom. That album should be out soon and there are already some unreleased tracks available. A new Irish documentary short called “Remember Me, My Ghost” features eight pieces of my music and one ‘Woven Tide’ piece, as well, which is pretty exciting.
And the album itself? As you would expect from these two, it is a very accomplished piece of work. There are a number of elements that distinguish it from other similar collaborative releases, primary amongst them a scope of sound used and a sense of mature restraint that reins in some of the more potentially direct pieces. The tracks vary in length from oneminute intros to ten-minute epics, and there’s a broad range of sounds and instruments; piano, guitar, sparse vocals, cello (obviously) and number of unidentifiable tonal elements that weave in and out. Tracks like “Colour Loss” are good examples of this, with a simple melody directed through many iterations and guises, starting simply and quietly and eventually developing into a layered stringed hiss. One striking feature of the pieces is their well resolved nature; rather than being just random splashed paint on the canvas, all the ideas are developed out fully, given their due and then resolved neatly within the confines of the song. The clearly identifiable starts and ends of each track mean that the album has a sense of
depth to it – at no stage do you feel as a listener that you’ve come in midway through something, and as a result the eight tracks have a resolved nature to them that make the album, as a listen, feel much longer time-wise than it is. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, but still feels substantial. Given how long the album was in development for, the temptation must surely have been to rework it constantly, but both parties have achieved their stated aim of keeping a loose energy to it whilst it still sounds considered and detailed. Walking that fine line, tonally, is the triumph of the project. The grit and spontaneity that both mention could very well be the “woven tide” of the title; mic noise, tape hiss, hums and rumbles fade in and out in a remarkably subtle fashion, almost to the point the their presence is almost indistinguishable from the music (“Pools Of Rust”), only really able to be focused on in context when their sudden removal highlights their absence. The mastering is grand as usual from Taylor Duepree, and the artwork by Chris
Koelle is both detailed and sparse. ‘Woven Tide’ is to be released worldwide on January 31 2012 on CD, 12” vinyl LP, and digitally. Direct pre-orders for an exclusive bundle with poster are available NOW from Experimedia. A digital pre-release copy will be included for download with all formats immediately upon ordering in choice of Flac, Apple Lossless, and Mp3. Woven Tide will be available from independent retailers beginning January 31 2012. Also worth mentioning is a very fine free remix of the track “Pools Of Rust” by Danny Saul available at Soundcloud – Our thanks again to both the artists (also photographers Laura Steele & Andy Glaser for the use of their work) for their time and involvement, and also a strong recommendation to all reading to not miss this rare occurrence, woven in sound. - Charles Sage
Jacaszek: Hidden Treasures
On December 6, Michal Jacaszek released Glimmer, an unexpected siege of contrasts: frailty and force. Stillness and momentum. Ancient baroque instrumentation, and up-to-the-second processing methods. Expectations had been high, and Jacaszek did not disappoint. By all means Glimmer earned near-unanimous praise from the more familiar outlets, but the NPR review was unexpected, and rousing: “It pulls back the curtain so you can step into music that is at once of its own time and, seemingly, timeless.” BBC concluded that Glimmer was “an immediately immersive work” with a “twilit core.”
music in the house – kids knocked at the doors, shouted, cried. Headphones were my rescue.
Very few reviews failed to notice the binary quality of the work. Indeed, the artist’s statement was clear on the point: “All my artistic activity is based on the intuition that there is a hidden reality existing behind or beside the material world.” So it should surprise no one that a dialogue with the composer shows a much different side to Michal Jacaszek and his creative process.
Besides poetry, I could also point to visual arts (painting, architecture), nature, and a few other things as factors influencing my work. These sources can impact my music directly or be just a kind of stimulator driving me to work. Pentral (2009, Gusstaff Records) is an example of direct inspiration – I wanted to create a musical equivalent for a Gothic church interior.
- Hopefully you’ll take this as the highest compliment, but it sounds like your psyche is a pretty noisy place. Are we on to something? My head is full of musical ideas, possible sound combinations, art challenges. I’m also extremely busy with things connected to everyday life: family – three kids! – earning money, house and car maintenance, et cetera. So in this sense I feel really full of noise. But also in deeper areas there is a realm of quietness and silence. It is not emptiness, rather a delicate slow melody going on. - How did you manage composing when you had three young kids in the house? It is not that hard as I have my own isolated place to work. A while ago I worked on
- You also mention earnings: what is it you do for a living?
Headphone Commute review. For people who pray this description sounds familiar I guess. Listing to all those characteristics I noticed some aesthetic associations. I do pray, but it does not mean that my goal is making sacral music, being a prayer itself.
In my studio I work on different aspects of music and sound: I compose scores for films, theaters, installations, cartoons, and commercials. I also play gigs.
- Glimmer nods in many ways to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Would you describe how you came to choose his verses as inspiration for Glimmer?
- You seem to draw great inspiration from non-musical sources, particularly poetry. Could you explain why, and how you channel these sources into your music?
Glimmer does not have very deep association with Manley’s poetry. When I finished the music, I was simply looking for proper titles, that could somehow reflect the associations I had in my mind whilst listening to the finished tracks. Glimmer generates some “visions” in my head: some tracks remind me of golden patterns, some sound like the wind in trees, some were like flashing sun rays … Manley’s sensual expressions were really close to what I imagined
Another example would be my current project: I am recording the sound of trees and plan to make music out of it. But very oen just simple contact with a landscape, great painting or moving piece of poetry causes some kind of excitement, a state ecstasy which drives me to do something with sound. - You’ve mentioned that your music should balance the narrative with the cinematic, “but still atmospheric, a bit like with a prayer.” Would you expand on that conclusion? “Like with a prayer” seems even more pertinent now, given the subject matter of Glimmer. “So but hardly touching, monotonous but keeping you awake, filled with emotions but controlled, … repetitive and trancy … a little bit like a prayer” That was the full text of my little aesthetic manifesto from the
- You were familiar with Hopkins’ work already? He drew my attention when I saw an excerpt from his “Wreck of the Deutschland” poem on Philip Jeck’s last CD cover. The fragment sounded really interesting, so I found Polish translations, and started reading his works. The opposition of sensuality and spirituality is something that I like about his poems. - But the poetry did not directly govern the compositions in any way? Not in this case. But I am working on another project with singers, and will be using poetry as lyrics. The poems’ mood and structure of verses determine the composition.
- While the contrasts between instruments is clear, they all seem cut from the same sound fabric. The electronic processing is also perfectly cohesive with the acoustic instrumentation. How did you achieve this cohesiveness? Hard to say, really. Maybe because most of the sounds are immersed with deep reverb? I have been working on proper, satisfying sound for many years, searching for the right balance, studying sound relations, making lots of experiments and trials. So this is just the result. - So you have added more effects to your arsenal, at least since the Morpheus interview in 2008? I guess I rather tend to limit effects usage. Distorted lo-pass filters and reverb are the only effects I use at the moment. - Would you share your thoughts on noise and music? Something tells us you’re quite philosophical on this point. An interesting thing happened to noise in 20th century music: It was rehabilitated by composers, and included in their creative process as ordinary musical elements. I like this idea. Noise is for me a sound with no precise tone, but it can still have rhythm and timbre, and therefore could be a wonderful means of musical expression. I use different aspects of noise, for different reasons: sometimes to increase an emotional aspect of my music, sometimes to build a kind of contrast or opposition to clear, traditional instrumentation. It is a process based on intuition rather than any philosophic strategy. I work a lot to shape it, manipulate, edit and process it in many ways. - You have said before that you don’t perform any instrument, although the Glimmer liner notes credit you with the guitar performance. How have your technical abilities progressed since then, as well as your collaborative efforts?
Nothing has changed in that area I am afraid. I have always had trouble with instruments, but thanks to samplers, sequencers, loopers I can always improve parts that I record live. I mentioned this on the cover credits just to provide info about instrumentation. I find it important to draw people’s attention to the acoustic aspect of Glimmer.
selection of colours and rhythms. Working this way, very oen some accidental sounds or texture combinations can surprisingly build very interesting musical phrases. This “accident” can sometimes become a foundation for the complete arrangement, which as a whole is controlled, but is founded on a kind of coincidence.
- You’ve disclaimed region having much impact on your work, but there nevertheless seems like an eastern European je ne sais quois to your composing. Do you notice the same, and is this unintentional?
- Your frequent mention of color makes us wonder if you experience any form of synesthesia, however mild. Care to comment?
If you suggest that there is some eastern spirit, unintentionally present in my music, I agree. It is possible, as my favourite composers are Polish, Ukrainian or Estonian; my favourite painters were born here in Poland, and my favorite place for holidays is Eastern Poland. Some consequences of these fascinations may be present in my music. - I don’t recall any Ukrainian composers you may have recommended. Would you care to do so here? I was talking about Valentin Silvestrov. His “Silent Songs” cycle, or “Sacred Works” are fascinating. - And when you mention Estonian composers, do we assume Arvo Pärt is your first example? Yes, Arvo Part – my old love. A lot of air and silence in his music. Very modern, contemporary, minimal music with religious and spiritual content. - How about compositional control? Do your pieces develop on their own, or adhere to a strict blueprint? I do not work on partitas; my method looks more like building collages out of sounds, like composing a picture through the
A mild form of synesthesia was for example an attribute of French composer Olivier Messiaen – he could easily translate any kind of tone into colour and vice versa. He did it in a very precise way, and his “observations” were objective – meaning anybody with this kind of “ability” had the same colour experiences. My “visions” are rather subjective impressions. - What are your plans for 2012, including any live performances? I plan to work on an EP for Ghostly, and in the meantime together with my band we are going to play several gigs all over Europe and the U.S. So far, our plans include New York (Unsound Festival 2012), Boulder, Colorado (Communikey Festival of Electronic Arts), Uppsala in Sweden (Volt Festival), and some gigs in Portugal (Porto and Lisboa). - Fred Nolan
Simon Scott: How Many h’s In Keshhhhhh?
Simon Scott’s latest record “Bunny” turned quite a few ears when it was released on Miasmah late last year, adding a darkly cinematic vibe to the dense layers of acoustic instruments and heavy processing that characterised previous work. We caught up with the Cambridge, UK-based musician and label owner prior to his performance at the Ambientfestival “Zivilisation der Liebe” in Cologne. - You’ve made music in quite a few different genres throughout your career. When did you decide that a more experimental and field recording based approach was a route you wanted to follow? It wasn’t a conscious decision – I didn’t sit at home for ten or fieen years trying to find a scene to join. There’s a whole thread of experimental music and people trying to find their own sounds, like Debussy, Varese, Cage, and so on and so forth, that I really like. I had influences in the ambient, post-rave, mellow, maybe slightly melancholy kind of vibe that comes from the music I still listen to – to bands like the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, A.R. Kane – but also Debussy, Satie, and all these different things that I think are still in my music somewhere. I didn’t think one day, “right, that’s it, I’m going to be on Miasmah one day” – I just made some music, and a few friends said, “You should send this to Miasmah”. The next record is all field recording based. I’m from Cambridge, and I live on the edge of the fens in East Anglia. It was drained to basically turn it into arable land, and because peat shrinks, when they took out the water it all fell below sea level. So the land dried, and then re-flooded. I’ve done two years’ worth of field recordings in
those areas that are below sea level and that’s the next record. I was trying to pick up something that’s very temporary, something that changes. I don’t want to keep on doing the same thing. So the next record is an evolution, which I think “Bunny” was from “Navigare”. - A lot of artists either use digital processing to turn acoustic instruments into something unrecognisable, or use electronics as ornaments to brighten up vanilla guitar, piano, drums. The relationship between ‘real’ instruments and electronics on “Bunny” seems much more interesting and multifaceted than that. Was there a particular sound you were aiming for, or was it a case of simply using whatever was to hand? I very deliberately went out and recorded real instruments. For example, the first track I wrote for the album was “Gamma”. I had access to a gamelan, and played it and recorded it for a couple of days at a university. Which was ironic, because just aer I did it Taylor Deupree released “Shoals”, so I thought “Damn, I can’t do a gamelan project!”. But I made one track, which was “Gamma”. I spent a good few years making my dream laptop looper in Max MSP – I learned how to program it, and put together, arduously, a loop system where I could do everything that I did with my guitar pedals. So what I would do is use a really nicely recorded, say, gamelan sample, and work that as the core of the piece, and then around it use the processed sounds. The whole idea is that you’ve got this core real instrument that people think, “oh, it’s a piano, it’s a drum kit”, but then around it you’ve got these kind of sounds that are fragments, that are micro-sounds of that particular
instrument. And they sometimes ended up kind of flipping the track on its head. On one track I used a hacked FM3 Buddha machine, and thought that it would be a kind of nice grainy outro that kind of decays into nothing – and it ended up being the main focus of the track! So it was kind of, “start off with this, let’s use this”, and then build up the track. - So for each track most of the sounds come from the real instruments you hear in the track? All of the sounds you hear come from real instruments. So you’ve got a kind of organic, acoustic thing that’s juxtaposed by digitally processed sounds – hopefully there’s some warmth in there but also some cold digital starkness. That was the idea. - There’s some great drumming on your latest record ‘Bunny’. Any plans to incorporate live drums into your shows? I tried it last summer at Node Festival, supporting Ryoji Ikeda, and I felt like a kangaroo or something on stage. I was with the laptop, so I’d play some guitar, feed it into the laptop, get something nice going on, run over, pick up a bass, get the bassline going, run over to the drumkit, then back to the laptop – it was the most stressful forty minutes of my life. And… it was a mess. I couldn’t concentrate on the kind of slow evolution of a live set. I see these younger experimental musicians play, and they panic, they’re jumping about, and it’s like “no no, let that just flow a while, just relax”. And the drum kit did the opposite. I was with Ryoji Ikeda, who was a gent, and said “oh yeah, I kinda liked it”, you know… It was the worst show of my life, so no!
- Let’s talk about your label, Keshhhhhh. How many ‘h’s are there meant to be? Six. - There are so many great labels out there at the moment, and the numbers are growing all the time. Do you think it’s getting harder these days for labels to really stand out and differentiate themselves? Yes and no. I think there’s too much music out there, because everything is easily accessible – buying a laptop and buying music soware, or getting a cracked copy. So everything is flooded, and it’s very, very hard to actually see the good stuff through the noise. I think some record labels release too much. My whole ethos with what I’m doing now is to try to do a few things, and do them quite simply. My Max patch isn’t complicated, it’s just loopers – it took a while to learn the language and then you put it together. And it’s the same with releasing records – don’t confuse people, don’t do too much. People bang out releases, two or three a month, and then you get a whole other load, and it’s like “woah, I’m still digesting that big pile that you sent two or three months ago!”. But there are some great labels out there – I think what Taylor’s doing at 12k is fantastic, how the label’s slowly evolving. Type is another really good record label. I think it’s difficult for smaller labels to actually have a voice at the moment because there’s lots of small labels releasing too much. So I plan to release three new records this year, and that’s a lot. Two of them are going to be quite soon – one of them is Marcus Fischer and his project Unrecognizable Now, it’s great, another is Kane [Ikin] and David from Library Tapes, that’s brilliant. And maybe I do another one at the end of the year. You know, you kind of leave it a while, leave it three or four months and then maybe drop something else. There’s too much music, there’s too much stuff to get through.
I also have to mention Raster-Noton as a beautiful record label, they release quite a lot of stuff but the artefact and the whole aesthetic of the label is wonderful, so hats off to those guys as well. - It seems like the emphasis on the “artefact” or physical object has been one way in which labels have tried to set themselves apart and say, “hey, this is something special”. I think so, yeah. Those [Raster-Noton] guys must not make a lot of money per release. I think their costs must be really extortionate because the packaging’s so gorgeous. But I love that, you know. I think this year is going to be the year of people releasing vinyl, for sure, because people are sick of CDs. I don’t do the label to make any money out of it, because profits are eaten up by sending out promos, and manufacturing costs are stupid. And it’s actually really hard work, because it’s the sort of thing you have to do outside of everything else. It’s kind of like, “right, I’ve got a Sunday aernoon, I’m going to have to spend six hours hand-stamping this release”. If you don’t love what you do, you don’t do that – you’d quickly get bored running a record label. There’s loads of people out there who’ve put a couple of albums out or whatever, and then thought, “err, this is really hard work and I thought it would be really glamorous and it’s not”. And especially when you’re doing things like duplicating your own cassettes or cutting your own CDs. So really, hats off to people like John Chantler, who I know gets his knife out and hand-cuts the cassette sleeves for Room 40 releases. - And when you see the amount of effort that’s gone into it, it makes it seem that much more valuable. I think so, yeah. There’s a specific age group that are a lot, lot younger than me who don’t buy music, and that really
disturbs me, that they just download music and expect to get it for free. And I think they don’t digest music in the same way. It’s a really long subject that I could talk for hours about, but in a nutshell, I think the people that want the artefact and really love music and the packaging and the aesthetic behind it, etc., they will go and buy it. So they’ll buy the vinyl, they’ll buy even the CD – if the CD’s good quality and there’s a beautiful photograph, there’s something special about it. You know, if it’s mastered well. That’s an artefact. I mean, people are sick of CDs but if it’s RasterNoton, for example, you go and buy the CD. And I think what it will probably do is make your Saturday night karaoke crew that download music and don’t really appreciate it, it will push them out, eventually. And the people le will be those that really do appreciate the music and the artefact and like the actual physical process of turning the record over and putting the needle in the groove, etc. . Actually swapping a CD – a lot of people download music so much that the process of actually opening a CD tray or flipping a CD in your Mac and ejecting it, that’s eventually going to become the artefact. People will say, “I love putting the CD in and ejecting it!”. Strange! - Finally, are there any artists on your wish list for a Keshhhhhh release? Not really to be honest with you. There’s no kind of career plan or anything with it. I admire and respect and listen to an awful lot of people, and if someone sends me something and I think it’s really brilliant, then that’s only when I go for it. I could reel off a list of names… but I think I’ll just wait and see who sends me stuff. - Nathan Thomas
Birchall / Cheetham Duo: Tipping Point
Bob Dylan’s almost annual nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature receives predictable resistance. Popular music is the result of months of craing and rehearsal, weeks of recording, countless hours of production and mastering. The process is invisible to the listener, and there are many rewards to be found, even in a brief, three-minute song: a catchy, repeating hook. A potent, repeating chorus and rhyme structure. Literature is nearly the opposite, wearing its process as skin. There is no way to rehearse a book without simply writing it, so the novelist discovers the story in essentially the same way that the reader does, by turning its pages. Rewards are much fewer, and subjective. Patterns are difficult to discern. The opposition insists that Dylan should not be considered for the Nobel Prize for literature simply because songwriting is not literature. Can we say, then, that improvised music is much more literary than other music? That the creative process is laid bare, measure for measure, and the rewards are fewer, unconventional? That its patterns are fleeting, although purer in form, perhaps elemental? If so, Tipping Point by David Birchall and Andrew Cheetham is no exception. Birchall and Cheetham (guitar and drums, respectively) met early last year, when performing for Rhys Chatham’s G3 ensemble. From the one-sheet, “Tipping Point is the culmination of endless
jamming and working deep into each others psyche, delving into the dark corridors of their deconstructed improv drone-rock.” This is not just empty promotional copy. The text here is raw, chaotic, as if the guitars have been fashioned with tendons in place of strings, and the drums skinned with actual skin. The opening, title track sets a curryscented guitar drone against a cymbaland-tom concoction. It’s somehow both kinetic and completely still, and easily plays as the most scripted track on the CDr. With two minutes le, radio-static guitar raises the temperature even more: the actual moment of tipping? The fading siren of the last minute confirms it. Opposite the spectrum from the opening cut is track three, “Hold On To Your Lamp Post,” a bewildering jazz study that will leave the more rock-minded listeners exhausted. (The artists have uploaded these two bookends for streaming at their Soundcloud page. Know that the rest of the material falls mostly in the relatively restrained middle.) The first minute is especially off-kilter, with a four-hand freestyle drum lick and a loose-stringed guitar seizure. Aer the manic introduction, “Lamp Post” settles into something remotely psychedelic. The guitar tones favors those of Jimi Hendrix, and the singing distortion, the jazz chord progression are reassuring features. Track five (“Incompatible Principles”) nicely illustrates the push-and-pull
between the composed and the turbulent. It begins with guitar scratching and muted, jazzy percussion. Not a sound check as much as a couple of guys who do not know the PA is on. Aer the disorderly warm-up, Birchall opts for a alternate-tuning drone and some chiming, high register harmonies. Aer a minute or two of false security, Birchall/Cheetham allow the pendulum to swing back again, incorporating headstock tricks, pulsing feedback, and now machinelike distortion and glimpses of slide guitar. “All the Reds, Yellows and Browns” closes the album with ten minutes of gypsy bell percussion and Cheetham’s knuckles-on-officefurniture ethic. Michael Ondaatje would prefer to describe the guitar as thinkering instead of tinkering, while Cormac McCarthy might refer to the sum of the parts as riprap. It would be a disservice to the readers and the artists not to state clearly that Tipping Point is a difficult album. By all means do not think of the Birchall/Cheetham debut as a polished pop, where we learn of former lovers and future ones, of princes keeping the view. Instead, think of it as literary fiction, in which we learn as much about ourselves as anyone else. - Fred Nolan
Muhr: Dream Dictionary
The third release from Montreal’s Les Enregistrements Variables comes courtesy of label co-founder Vincent Fugere under his Muhr guise. With its evocative track titles, Dream Dictionary lives up to its name, providing a series of differing yet complimentary pieces that reflect their subjects. ‘The Flood’ provides a slightly hesitant opening, as if gently easing the listener into a somnambulant state. Fragments of guitar chords swell and recede, overlapping to create a melodic, driing soundscape. Despite heavy distortion and a jittery piano line, the insistent guitar pattern of ‘The Calm’ produces a hypnotic effect, lulling the listener into a peaceful state, albeit a slightly unhinged one.
We are taken to darker realms with ‘The Fox Witch’, its densely layered guitar building up to breaking point before revealing a delicate piano melody. ‘The Dead’ seems like a fragment from a lost Jim Jarmusch soundtrack, the solo delayed guitar cutting a lonely figure and providing a contrast to the otherwise highly textural work. This is followed by the similarly sparse ‘The Fox’, where a melancholic piano plays on through a desolate landscape of distant whistles and reverb laden guitar. ‘The Attack’ demonstrates a more contrasting soundscape with fragile tinkling sounds placed in amongst guitar chords that dri heavily throughout the texture before an echo of the insistent
rhythmical guitar of ‘The Calm’ jolts us out of any feeling of serenity. Taking on a more delicate approach are ‘The Woman’ and ‘The War’, both bringing a sense of fragility to proceedings. We end with the highly unsettling ‘The Adultery’. A menacing drum pattern and jittery electronics introduce the piece before giving way to a brief, gentle piano motif. Not the average floaty ambient album, Dream Dictionary manages to provide a hazy, immersive atmosphere whilst maintaining a real depth of sound and melody. Recommended! - Katie English
Marcus Fischer: Collected Dust
I enjoy listening to a wide range of music, but it’s rare that I come across something that completely changes my understanding of how music can be made and listened to. One such occasion was the first time I heard Marcus Fischer’s album “Monocoastal”, back in 2010, so to say that I was looking forward to his new release for Tench would be somewhat of an understatement. “Collected Dust” brings together several pieces made by Fischer for his blog project, “Dust Breeding”, where every day for a year he posted something he had created that day. The album is far from a collection of quick sketches, however: aer being selected by label owner M. Ostermeier, each piece was extensively worked on, and the results show all the careful attention to detail that characterises Fischer’s music. Fischer makes use of a wide range of acoustic and electronic instruments, some of which he craed himself, along with a variety of field recordings. What struck me m o s t s t r o n g l y w h e n I fi r s t h e a r d “Monocoastal”, however, was the way in which systems of chance are allowed to partly determine the distribution of sounds within a given piece. (‘System of chance’ sounds suspiciously like an oxymoron, but I intend it to mean chance occurring within a field constrained by certain rules or
choices. For example, the roll of dice is constrained by the number of sides on each die, the mechanics governing how far they can roll, etc.) The result is that everything that is heard happens as a surprise – there is no listening on autopilot here. The listener becomes more aware than usual of his or her own act of listening, of how the listening mind still works to recognise patterns, establish series, and gauge depth and height and width. This is listening as a kind of making sense – not passive consumption, but an active, creative enjoyment, a form of play. If this sounds a little too dry and intellectual, then it must be noted that intellectual activity can in no way be segregated from emotional response – to experience a feeling and to work through a problem are two aspects of the same movement. My own emotional response to Fischer’s music is perhaps related to the way in which the use of chance gives it a sense of precariousness and liminality, of balancing on the edge of existing – as if it could have easily happened otherwise, or not happened at all. This brings it into the same domain as the flash of remembered image and the snatch of dream. Fischer’s music is a sky for sudden, quiet fireworks: aer the choice is made to light the touchpaper, there is the straining to see,
the uncertain watching and waiting for chemicals to react. This combination of deliberate design and unpredictability, of attention to detail and openness to contingency, is beautiful because it is mimesis – it is like the experience of being alive. To my ears the guitar and synth ambiences used in “Collected Dust” are thicker and warmer than those of “Monocoastal”, bringing it closer to the lush sounds of previous release “Arctic/Antarctic”. Though all is serene and restrained on the surface, all manner of clicks, chimes and scratches flicker and glimmer underneath. Rhythmic loops and fragments of melody rise to the top of the mix before slowly sinking down again, while the tight surges of “Wires on Carpet” – a field of midnight orchids blooming one aer the other in rapid succession – may well be one of the most sublime sounds you’ll hear all year. This album easily matches the standards set by its predecessors, and confirms Fischer’s reputation as one of the most innovative and thought-provoking artists on the experimental ambient scene. Another excellent release from Tench! - Nathan Thomas
The Boats: Ballads Of The Research Department
It’s 2k12 and here we go with The Boats 2.0 on 12k. Actually, for Craig Tatersall and Andrew Hargreaves this is more like incarnation 3.5. Luckily, with these two, evolution is never a bad thing. Ten minutes into Ballads of the Research Department, the newest album from The Boats, and their first for the celebrated 12k label, it’s clear that this is a different record for them. The first five minutes of the opening song offer a sampling of some familiar elements: grainy tape loop work, precocious folktronic elements, dub, modern classical and drone. These sounds don’t come at the listener all at once mind you, instead each element is given its own moment to build up then rescind. It feels like an introduction, an assemblage of the different sounds that have come to define The Boats across the years, all coming at you in a series of vignettes. And then the acoustic drums enter, pretty high up in the mix too, telling you this is new terrain for The Boats. The other dead give away you’re in for a very different record for the duo? At ten minutes in, you’re still listening to the opening song of the album. Ballads of the Research Department is a new sound for The Boats in many ways, but one that still captures the charm of all their other works, even as they mine new musical territory. In a way those first five minutes of the album could be titled ‘a career retrospective – catching up with The Boats’. And a lot of catching up there is to do too, by now The Boats have evolved enough for four bands. From their early works for Moteer which felt like an evolution of folktronica; to the even more minimal ideas they explored on the first
two releases for their own Our Small Ideas imprint and their Faulty Toned Radio release for flau; to the inclusion of a modern classical bent via Danny Norbury’s contributions, first appearing on the tour EP with Pan Am Scan; to the bigger sounding dub-inflected pop-electronic sounds that appeared on their Home Normal release Words are Something Else and the stunning Verbs are not Enough companion remix EP; to the tape loop experiments that defined their work in 2011; one thing The Boats could never be accused of is stagnation. And if The Boats ever felt like two guys in a room craing tiny sounds for tiny songs, well, this is something bigger. And bigger it is in every sense of the word; many moments sound as though they are coming from a full band, the songs are longer, the production sounds bigger, and it is the most conceptual record they’ve released to date. As for the use of acoustic drums, they don’t just make an appearance on this record; they are all over it. Yep, if ever there were a ‘rock band’ incarnation of The Boats, this is as close as they’ve come. This is a record that is going to surprise a lot of people. “Ballads of the Research Department” is a title that reads in many ways like a contradiction in terms and that contradiction is precisely what has made and continues to make The Boats great. On the one hand you have the word ‘ballad’, and to read Andrew and Craig’s words on the matter they really do see these songs as explorations of/ challenges to what constitutes a ballad. On the other hand, there is that word ‘research’, which
runs as far in the opposite direction as possible: if ballads are calculated plays at sentimentalism, research implies the potential for failure. Something about The Boats music has always felt uncalculated, like we the audience we’re being invited to witness their experiments; the best of their experiments mind you, but the music has always felt personal and fragile. And that’s what “Ballads …” is too; it’s an experiment to see how big they could make their sound while still retaining that smallness, that intimacy that defines so much of their work (so much so that Boomkat has oen used the word ‘bijou’ to describe their work). In the past, if you’d followed the respective solo works from Andrew Hargreaves and Craig Tattersall, there were hints as to how this duo might evolve. Danny Norbury’s heavy inclusion on Andrew’s wonderful Fragments/Defragments work hinted at Norbury’s growing presence within The Boats family. Similarly, Andrew’s work as Beppu hinted at the infusion of dub into their sonic palette for the Words Are Something Else album and the stunning Verbs are not Enough EP (Did I say that already? Good.) Craig’s and Andrew’s work in recent years with tape loops as The Humble Bee and Tape Loop Orchestra respectively certainly setup the arrival of that addition to their palette. However, to find a precursor to this now shoegazey/ space-rock element of their sound, you’d be hard pressed to find recent clues. There was however hints at longer compositions via the much longer songs in The Humble Bee’s, E and I’s and Tape Loop Orchestra’s most recent opuses. And opuses are what we get with “Ballads…”
Four of them to be precise. The shortest of which is over ten minutes. Had The Boats ever written a ten minute song in their career up until 2011? I don’t recall. “The Ballad for Achievement” opens up the album with a combination of sounds that feel like a cold wind coming at you. Danny Norbury’s string work is subtly at play in the background, lending the piece warmth to counterpoint all that cold. And then? It all fades away to a barely there percolating dub beat. Tape loop hiss enters the composition and is the new source of light and warmth. And then what sound like angelic voices start to rise in the mix. Or do they? Instead it turns into a loop. Norbury’s strings keep slowly working their way into the mix and then giving way. It almost feels like the piece refuses to settle down. These vignettes are almost small songs into themselves. Again, everything fades away: piano and strings take over. Then abruptly the tone of the whole piece completely changes to something more mysterious, almost sinister. But, of course, those gentle traces of warmth, those moments of melodies that ooze an effortless, yet soulstirring charm start to fight their way through again. And then? … And then? Acoustic drums. The whole song settles down as a hip-hop beat weaves underneath all the elements. Now we’re in it, this is The Boats you know and then some. “The Ballad for Failure” begins with some arpeggiated, clean-sounding electric guitar. Again, is this new for The Boats? I’m trying to think of a time they used cleansounding electric guitar in a song. Not only that, there’s a second guitar in the background. Acoustic drums enter and the song rolls along gently. Chris Stewart comes into to do his thing, and really you don’t get much better than a song that features Norbury and Stewart. If “… Achievement” refused to settle down, “… Failure” is the opposite, content to just move along at a languid peace. For the first four minutes that is. By minute four though, again it all fades away, and a dub beat and some tape loops come into replace the groove. Each song on the album seems to invite two interpretations: 1) the songs are indeed extended songs 2) each composition is the blending of three or four smaller songs stitched together. The interesting thing, and again this is unique to a group like The Boats, is that this second half of the song would be for most artists heard as some sort of denouement; in the case of The Boats this
is the aspect of their sound we are most familiar with: the gentle blend of percolating rhythms, electronic minimalism and classical elements. Either way you interpret it, these are songs that demand your full attention. “The Ballad for the Girl on The Moon” opens with a melancholy piano introduction. This whole composition feels like Danny Norbury’s moment. It feels like a number of songs pastiched together, as the other compositions do, but Norbury’s work seems to be at the heart of this entire composition. That’s another thing that should be said for this album: it feels like Norbury has finally become an integral part of the very makeup of the The Boats’ sound. Before it felt like Norbury enhanced the sound of the group, whereas now he feels engrained in that sound. I have a (half) joke I like to tell involving Danny Norbury, it goes like this: Q: Is there such a thing as cheating when it comes to making music? A: Yeah, put Danny Norbury on your song. Needless to say: Norbury’s track record for elevating every piece of music he participates in continues. “The Ballad of Indecision” begins with an almost dark feel as coarse electronic sounds come at the listener in sparse, spiky rhythms. Then, yet another new element to the Boats sound: Japanese lyrics and vocals from Cuushe. This feels like the most experimental and darkest composition of the four. Again, as the piece gets really dark, it all fades away and Norbury comes up in the mix. This seems to be a strategy for the album: create dark, terse moments that seem to swell; let them rescind to the nothing from whence they came; then let a gentle melody, usually via piano, strings or tape loop, enter to lighten things up or at least provide some sense of warmth to the songs. Then, the final few minutes of the song, some of those dubby rhythms come in again, but to gently wind down the song. Cuushe’s vocals take on a breathy quality and are manipulated then layered until they disappear completely, as both the song and the album come to a close. Is this use of vocals at the end meant to mirror those angelic voices at album’s open? As it all ends, there is no way to not feel that at the very least the album has taken you on a journey. Shoegazey/space-rock-jam vibes, extended songs, an album length ode to the art of the ballad, a new vocalist singing in a new language: this is The Boats for
2012. If one thing makes Ballads standout in the trajectory of The Boats musical evolution thus far, it’s that oen they’ve tended to do a hard le, making a new record that prominently features that ‘new’ musical element from their palette (i.e. the dubby-ness of Words are Something Else), and then re-calibrate their sound to more seamlessly integrate that new component into their overall sound. With Ballads, it feels like there is some missing link to how they arrived at this moment; meaning it feels like we are bearing witness to the recalibration, not the preliminary hard le that notes what it is to come. That is not meant to be derisive of the album, simply to give context as to why I believe it will surprise some people. To sum Ballads up in another way, think of it like this: up until now The Boats have been making headphone music, this is their stereo record. There is an interview on the topic of Stanley Kubrick where filmmaker Alex Cox highlights the fact that in Clockwork Orange there is a visibly placed LP of the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack. Cox says of this moment that it was Kubrick’s way of saying that he was from that point on only influenced by one filmmaker: himself. The thing I’ve always taken away from Cox’s point is that artists, especially the truly great ones, have their own language. How that applies to music is that oen the works of art that affect us the most take time for us to appreciate because they take time to learn. Think of how many records you love deeply that le you baffled or bored the first time you heard them, then think of how what you were hearing and the way you were hearing it changed over time. It’s because in part, you, as the listener, were in the process of learning this entirely new language. The Boats not only keep expanding their vocabulary, they keep switching up their language. I imagine most readers of Fluid are anticipating the release of this record and in the chronological order of highlight-albums you’re looking forward to for the year, this one comes first, simply based on its early release date for 2012. The good news is that for most listeners they will still be listening to this record come March, growing ever fonder of it, all whilst learning the latest in language via The Boats in the process. - Brendan Moore
Andre Vida: Brud: Volumes I-III
The once seemingly empty road came to a sudden halt, cars that were flashing by you at 70+ miles an hour have all lined up, parking lights on, inching their way past an unknown incident. As you get closer you begin to make out what happened, shards of glass on the floor, sirens ringing in the distance coming closer every second. Then a pattern begins to appear, almost all that pass by stop for a little less than a minute to catch a glimpse of the wreckage, a very tiny part of them hoping to see something gruesome, a few drops of blood, something that will trigger their minds to delve into the dark alleys of whatifs and spring onto extrapolating various sequences of events that ended up with this gruesome event. It is these rare acquaintances with the raw, the profoundly real, the sensory overload that one faces scarcely in the course of day to day life that people unknowingly yearn for to add flavor to life’s routine that makes almost everyone look. It might be out of genuine worry or compassion, but there’s always that part of us that wants to look and quickly look away only to keep recalling these events for weeks and maybe months on end. Something so overwhelmingly strong and out of the ordinary that leaves one in shock, that weakens resistance and turns minor acceptance into embrace with that sensory overload eventually causing it to seep into daily life and in a way enrich. In many ways, this juggernaut of a release by avant-garde jazz saxophonist and composer Andre Vida is exactly that; a three hour long challenge to any appreciator of experimental music. Brud Volumes I-III, an anthology of Vida’s most notable works in the 16 years between 1995 and 2011, is a testament to the man’s virtuosity and passion for the true essence of free jazz, which he refers to as “energy breaking through the details of refinement: a repositioning of the language of bebop and post bop improvisation to accommodate the destruction of ‘elegance’”. It is a multitude of emotions and atmospheres which nods towards everything from blues to electronic music and field recordings and is laid out so intuitively and intelligently in these discs
that at times it feels that these pieces must have been created for the same album only to find that two perfectly aligned pieces were actually conceived years apart, if not decades, and that is what makes this compilation work so magnificently. Virtuosity is something that is oen disregarded in the field of ambient and experimental music, something that some musicians may even perceive as disruptive to the organic flow of emotions and ideas from the artist. Vida, however, challenges all these concepts and it is his ability and shear comfort with his instrument that carry this compilation through, whether it is the wondrous fashion in which he articulates his notes or even his utilization of silence and voice to interrupt the flow and weave in and out between the other instruments. The first disc tells it all really, formed of eighteen shorter tracks that introduce the listener to all the facets of the man’s musical persona, and serves as a more than adequate introduction to the other two discs. Here he showcases his affinity for blues and his compositions, even if at first they might sound wrong in the conventional sense, convey the man’s genius. Harsh noises with unidentifiable notes filter into finger snapping bebop, poetry and stream of consciousness ramblings shine against a backdrop of improvised rhythms. It is free and it sucks the listener in a second at a time with its rough edged sounds that turn beautiful with time and add a very human and unembellished characteristic to the music that helps create a bridge between the musician and the listener and endears them to the audience. It is this appreciation of the futility of man and the hardships of life, the knowledge that perfection is never attainable that Vida seems to be able to channel quite confidently on his compositions that make tracks like “AxelRaDre” and “Broken Tape” with their off the wall progressions and spiraling sax solos so meaningful to the listener. They are a manifestation of everything reality is but magnified to include the enthralling and sometimes shocking that strike a chord with the
receiver of the music. They lock one in a state of bewilderment, entranced by everything that’s going on, waiting for relief and rather receiving the horrific and with each turn a new surprise is uncovered and a new element is introduced until the point at which surrendering to the sound becomes the only feasible option. The first real relief comes at the very end of the second disc with “Woodwing”, an eleven minute etude in silence and subtlety that segues brilliantly from the chaos to the more upbeat and more conventionally arranged (conventional here is used very loosely and in very relative terms of course) third disc, the Kreuzberg suite. The third disc alone would warrant another 1000 words, as it is a culmination of the work of Vida and his quartet over three years, performing every Tuesday in a project he referred to as ‘Every Tuesday night, for the rest of your life’ collecting hundred of recordings until finally refining them to be committed to tape. Here we are met with swing influences, lively jazz musings and the ghosts of earlier tracks like “Blues Shuffler” and “Put it in Your Pocket” which are in a sense the happiest tracks on the compilation are summoned back to life. The beautiful “39 Flowers” could be considered the point at which everything comes back full circle and we reach the ending of one of the strongest musical propositions that has ever crossed my path. It is a work of art that stuns and defies all convention, which pushes one to walk away at first only to keep coming back for a glimpse every now and then until a weird, borderline sick, bond is formed with the recordings. What’s more interesting is that Vida has amassed this humongous amount of fantastic compositions and is still only almost 37 years old, a feat that probably a tiny percentage of people can accomplish and a sign for all of us who have enjoyed his works that we are still to expect heaps more of brilliance from this man. - Mohammed Ashraf
Aspidistrafly: A Little Fable
The purpose of a fable is to illustrate a lesson, oen moral in character, with concision and a kind of dreamlike colour. Fairies exist, animals take on human characteristics, rocks and plants speak; the whole universe comes alive with possibilities for story-telling and is channelled, through authorial intent, into a small, easily-digested nugget of ethical guidance. When I think of fables, I think of magic, disbelief, and the impossible made possible. It’s probably telling that I also think of childhood. Fables hack into the child’s mind, exploiting the natural tendency towards fantasy and wonder in order to plant the seeds of society’s ideals of “right living”. I think that, in many ways, the o-noble and morally certain lessons of fables can have a perverse and unsettling effect on young minds as they mature. The black and white certitudes of the fantastical and idealised neverland conjured up by these tales provide a backdrop against which reality casts confusing and confused light – moral choices become relative, means and ends become interchangeable, and situations never have clear resolutions. In uncertain times, we look back on the lessons of youth and how do we interpret them? Do we see them as our moral bedrock, our core principals? Or do we view them as society’s convenient lies; duplicitous in our inability to gain traction in the shiing sands of life? With “A Little Fable”, Aspidistrafly have created an album which thankfully does
not attempt to moralise or deliver life coaching in the manner of a folk-tinged Anthony Robbins lecturette. Instead , the album attempts to take the listener back to that child-like state of open-mindedness and preparedness for magic – that internal space in which the story of the fable unfolds, before the clumsy ‘lesson’ hits home. The dreamworld of Aspidistrafly is characterised by whispered lullabies, delicate guitars, gently rippling textures, cascading pianos, and dancing string arrangements (that are a far cry from the ‘mournful cellos’ adorning the majority of music I surround myself with). There is not a disjointed mood or hint of a melancholic shadow falling across these tracks. Like the warm sun on your face, or the play of light across closed eyelids, there’s a delicate ephemerality at play here that allows the tracks to elude gravity and sprightfully shimmer around the listener. Tracks exist between two worlds – whilst self-evidently rooted in the folk music traditions of yore, bridges are built to contemporary and more experimental modalities, evinced by the unobtrusive (but structurally integral) use of electronic textures, techniques, effects, samples and field recordings. This is, by no means, Tunng mark II though. The electronic flavours here are altogether more subtle – rarely “front and centre”, their role is primarily augmentative but simultaneously essential to the overall character, tone, and structure of the music. The interplay between traditional and modern
techniques creates a beautiful and evocative mood which pervades the whole album. I don’t know that there any standout tracks here – to this listener’s ears the quality of each track is consistent and to single out individual tracks for special mention is close to impossible. If anything, this might be some (very) mild criticism of the album; the mood is a little too consistently dreamlike or lullabilic. There’s an unremitting lightness to the tracks that I personally find a touch wearing. On repeat listens I end up not noticing the transition from one track to the next – a kind of auditory ‘snow-blindness’ wherein track differentiation becomes increasingly difficult. I put this down to my personal taste rather than any fault of the album – it’s not you, it’s me – my crushing internal descent into a pit of stomach-gnawing cynicism is not appropriately soundtracked by music this pretty. “A Little Fable” is a beautiful nymph-like album, full of sweet and evocative tracks that transport the listener back to a primordially experiential state akin to the tabula rasa of a child’s framework for reality – a state open to possibilities, magic, and fantasy; a state wherein fables can assume the mantle of reality; a state that precedes the soul crushing disillusion and tedium that arises from having to deal with bills, work, people and politics on a daily basis. It’s a little pocket of escape, and if you need some, you should hear it. - John McCaffrey
Plinth: Collected Machine Music
The philosopher, social critic and journalist Walter Benjamin once suggested that the assorted detritus of the 19th Century bourgeoisie – the knick-knacks, toys, trinkets, mechanical amusements, photographs - could, when “blasted” out of their original historical context as kitsch distractions by means of critical analysis, reveal something significant about both their own age and also that of the present. This notion developed into The Arcades Project, an extensive, wide-ranging exploration of bourgeois social history centred around the Parisian arcades. Social history and its political implications may not have been foremost in the mind of Michael Tanner, here releasing under the name Plinth, when he decided to make a collection of pieces using old Victorian music boxes, calliopes, wheezing mechanisms, and other antiquated contraptions. However, there nonetheless remains a sense in which the twinkling, huffing and whirring of these mechanical instruments is “blasted” out of historical dust and takes on new meaning. It is clear
from the outset that the album is no mere stroll through the sepia streets of mistyeyed nostalgia, but instead sets out to investigate what can be created with these instruments now, using the techniques that modern composition and recording technology has made available. For Tanner, this means looping the sounds, combining them across different musical keys, varying the speed at which the music box handles are rotated, and applying subtle effects such as reverb and volume mixing. The results sound both old and new at the same time - familiar without being clichéd, inventive without breaking the spell cast by the instruments’ historicity. To coax something fresh and imaginative from these instruments without turning them into dead museum exhibits is no mean feat, but Tanner manages to surprise and delight across the album’s fieen tracks. However, the album’s crowning glory (and perhaps what lis it into the realm of the truly uncanny) is the packaging. The
limited edition “deluxe version” comes tied to a heavy duty, hinge-lidded chocolate box, hand-worked inside and out with “150 year old English engravings, original Victorian calling cards, clock hands, brass nuts and bolts, hand printed insert and other ephemera”. Each box comes with a miniature music box and a unique song strip composed on a harp and then hand punched by Tanner. While the digipak CD comes in a run of 200, the deluxe version is limited to just 70. Time Released Sound are well-known for their extensive and beautifully handcraed packaging, but they have really outdone themselves this time! Thankfully, Tanner’s music is certainly worthy of the fuss - a must-listen for any fan of beautiful experimental music, regardless of their feelings towards the quaint and bizarre world of Victorian mechanical memorabilia. - Nathan Thomas
Gultskra Artikler: Abtu Anet
In the middle of the sixteenth century in the south of England a group of Orford fishermen caught a strange creature. Its form reminded them of a man – completely bald, but with a long dense beard. They put it in the governer’s castle in the dirtiest and most suffocative dungeon, and fed it with a crude fish, which it kneaded in hands before eating. The women have started to have strange dreams, as if the newcomer comes to their bedrooms at night, and looks at them in the moonlight with his empty eye-sockets, filled with cold, demonic laughter. The next morning they found their beds wet, shrouded in sea water and seaweed, and aer a while it appeared that all women in the castle had become pregnant. In the throes of agony, they gave birth to ugly, scaly babies. In one day the creature escaped from the people, back to the sea, and nobody saw the babies. But sometimes, when the ocean rages, its hoarse, spiteful breath is again audible in the dungeon, and the women have those same dreams. This is a brief, piercing story, and its singular flavor will linger for days. Surprisingly it is a track title, from the second cut on the forthcoming Gultskra Artikler reissue Abtu/Anet. Gultskra Artikler is the alias of Moscow-based Alexey Devyanin (Pixelord, Stud). Miasmah offered Abtu as a limited edition 3″ CDr in 2007. The companion EP Anet – every bit the work of art as Abtu – was unreleased until now. “In the middle…” is unrepresentative of the whole, although in fairness, none of these 12 tracks can be said to represent the others. It begins this way: a record player broadcasts vinyl noise, quietly at first, then
surging in volume. Now the sound is clipped again and the effect is looped irregularly. Devyanin adds crowded beats of pitch-bent bells, warped percussion strikes, and source-forgotten samples: a busy, Dadaist touch that he will not revisit anywhere else on the tracklist. No quarter, save possibly for a barroom piano that takes center stage for a few restful beats, and steps back aside for more playhouse clamor. Three minutes in, and the composition returns gradually, tactfully, to vinyl noise. If you feel winded aer reading that, just wait until you listen. Even where the compositions defy easy explanation and categorization, Devyanin pursues a thematic cohesiveness that might better illustrate the point (the onesheet refers to this as “a deeply Eastern European, near-theatrical focus”). On paper the off-kilter, yodeling, almost mocking guitar-and-harmonica anthem “Intensivnost otrajenia” belongs nowhere near the distant church bells and creepy, beyond-tempo wind chimes of “Bojestvo.” The inching, dark ambient machinery of “Glaznoe dno moskogo chudisha” seems a poor companion for the chaotic industrial update “Daesh uglya.” By point of fact, both of these pairings are adjacent tracks, with songs, even instruments stitched into the same quilt and cut from it at the same time. Devyanin’s restless disarrangements ensure that nothing is out of place: horn, flute, bells, harmonica, samples, guitar. He has likened the Gultskra Artikler project to a mosaic, but we disagree on technical grounds. It is the substrate. The last six tracks succeed more than first six do, although it is difficult to imagine
one of these EPs released without the other at all: the carnivalesque Abtu, the stalking Anet. Both of these brief collections are slow and low key, oen explorations of single instruments, but obscured by audio trinkets, processing, and the odd squeal of machinery. Album highlights are “Vsegda krasni cvetok” and “Izginanie demona.” The former is a crowded costume ball of nearly random flute notes, the occasional snare drum and rim shot, a smattering of dulcimer strikes, unidentified machinery, and another thick serving of the pops and crackle we associate with vinyl. The last minute of the composition shis completely, opting now for a mournful, cinematic piano-and-synth arrangement, tempered only slightly by the chilly production and occasional, unrecognizable percussion. The latter of the two sets a remote and cosmic synthesizer against a spooky pileup of whispered voice samples, metallic rattles and general mischief. Abtu/Anet is an elusive beast. Elements you hear today, you’ll miss tomorrow, and might pick back up the day aer that. In this way, reviewing it is about as hamfisted as drawing a straight line through two data points and calling the result a graph. So here is all the data you’ll need: the release is set for mid-February 2012, on vinyl plus immediate download. - Fred Nolan
Stephan Mathieu / Taylor Deupree: The Semibreve Interview
Last November, Stephan Mathieu and Taylor Deupree were invited to play together at the Semibreve festival in Braga. As I was covering the festival for Fluid, I had originally planned to interview them separately but, upon meeting them a few hours before the concert, we decided to have a joint conversation instead… - What are you going to play tonight? SM: I’m playing my Phonoharp Zither, no computer processing this time, just the E-bows and strings, all mic’d up. TD: I’ll have various noises and percussion devices through my pedals and loopers. But we’re not exactly sure what we’re going to do yet because I haven’t done anything yet. We discussed it in the hotel room but without me being able to hook up my equipment, we couldn’t get very far. SM: I think we know what we want to do but still have to find the shape of it. TD: I think that Stephan will probably do more of the harmonies and I’ll do more noise and textures to make a nice combination. I don’t think I’ll do any melody but we’ll see. I’ve got a little OP-1 synthesiser so that could do lots of different things. And I have to say that to me the OP-1 replaces the computer and because of that I don’t need to bring the laptop on stage. With the OP-1, I can have some synthesised sine waves, some tones that I like to use without having to bring the whole computer. - Both of you have moved away from using laptops for live performance. Why? TD: I’ve wanted to move away for some times now but it’s only this year that I’ve come up with a system that allows me to not bring the laptop on stage. To me it was a bit boring, because when I performed, even though everything was improvised and it was different every time, it was not like I just hit play and it was there, but looking at the screen and moving some midi controllers, it’s just that for me it wasn’t that interesting anymore. And in general I’ve been trying to move away from digital things a lot, not totally so but I prefer the hands-on approach. I can do the same
kind of music that I was doing before but with guitar pedals, loopers etc and for me it’s just a lot more interesting and maybe for the audience too. I think I can thank Steve Roden for what I do now. I was touring with him in Brazil maybe 10 years ago and I had my laptop and Steve brought only some microphones, delay pedals and nothing else. And I was like: “Well, what are you gonna play?” and he said: “I don’t know!”. And everywhere we went, he would collect small objects he found locally and he would make his music with those. And it was unbelievable music, music I saw him creating from nothing at all. And it’s been stuck in my mind ever since and in a way no live performance has had so much impact on me. For the past ten years I’ve been trying to do that without just going out and doing just the exact same thing. But I’ve been trying to come up with my own way of making something from nothing. The laptop to me is this box that has my emails on it, 12k’s accounting on it and all this stuff. It feels just bloated and heavy and in a way this box represents just so much of my life and it’s perhaps too much of my life. Because I know that behind the screen of Ableton Live, there is all this other stuff, all these other programs etc and it’s just mental garbage. So when I can play with my pedals, my microphones and instruments, it’s very pure: it’s all I’m using to create. So maybe that makes sense. But also I don’t want to go down as being anti-computer. SM: What you’re saying is very interesting, I never thought of it like this but it’s exactly that for me, like having my life standing in front of me while playing a concert. TD: You just know that behind that screen of Max/MSP or whatever, you’re a button click-away from the internet and everything else and it’s just about getting away from it. You want to get away from all that stuff and just make music. SM: On the other hand I think I’m notorious for having problems with computers. During the last few years I had bought several lemons, machines that had arrived dead. To say the least, It’s hard to build a good relation with them. Luckily I’ve never had any notable issues while playing
live but I still feel terrified with computers on stage and that was another reason why I wanted to get away from them. I didn’t feel happy working with computers, even in the studio, to me a computer was more a problem than anything else. I have to say I’ve always been happy with what I do with them, a healthy workflow assumed, but at the same time I became interested in acoustic sources like the gramophone, the zither or the virginals and I saw there were quite some similarities to what I do with digital processes. Performing live with ‘real’ instrument feels different, and it gives the audience something visual to relate to. While playing, I receive a different feedback from the people. - That’s interesting because when I saw you playing at Cafe Oto in May you were using the laptop for live convolution but in a way it didn’t matter because it could have been just a pedal… TD: Did you touch the laptop or was it just processing? SM: In this setup, the computer is at the center of an autopoietic system, something that evolves by itself. The acoustic input of the ebowed strings is fed into it, I’m only adjusting some parameters every now and then. In the end it is like fishing in the dark, I can’t really control the process, rather shape it roughly, while I will only hear the adjustments I do through the PA with a delay of 3 to 5 minutes. It’s a slow beast, good to surprise yourself with. The UK shows last May with Robert Curgenven, Jörg Zeger and Simon Scott where the first time in years that I used a computer in a live context again. I fell in love with it again so now it’s a tool that I sometimes use, sometimes not. I’m sure that we will see the computer becoming really unwelcome on stage, something rather uncool. I can clearly see that coming. This is most likely because during the last decade the machine became so common and more and more people think it’s all too easy to come up with acceptable results. Actually I don’t think so at all and I like soware processes for the things you won’t be able to do with analog means. The spectral and convolution stuff, I can’t do this without computers.
- Taylor, you’re not classically trained and that’s a decision you made very early one in your career. Why was it so important for you? TD: When I was fieen I sold my drum kit and my collection of comic books and that’s when I got my first synthesiser. I knew from that age that I wanted to be a musician, and over the next few years I learnt and read Keyboard Magazine and just soaked up everything I could. I had taken some piano lessons for two or three years, as my parents told me I had to take some piano lessons, but I had no interest in that. And I guess from fieen to eighteen years old, a friend of mine and I did nothing but write music all year together and record on cassette tapes, and I had progressed to a point where, when the time came to go to University, I thought I didn’t anyone to teach me music, and I didn’t want to go to a music school and learn Jazz music or classical or give recitals, or any of that stuff. At the time, I don’t think there were any electronic music courses and if you went there, it was to learn piano or trumpet. Maybe there were an electronic music courses but none I had known about. I didn’t want to go to University to study music, so I studied photography which was something I was also interested in but needed a technical background that I didn’t have at the time with a dark room and all this stuff. So during the University as I was studying photography what I was really doing was making music in my apartment, and school was really secondary. I loved photography but I knew that I didn’t want anybody to teach me music because I was learning enough on my own. If you’re obsessed with something, no matter what it is, you can do it by yourself, at least in the arts. But right now I wish I knew how to play guitar because I don’t. To me a guitar is a tone box. I can play a few chords, I can play some notes and with a multi-track recorder I can ‘fool’ people. But I wish I knew how to really play. Looking back it would have been nice to learn an instrument or two but at the time I didn’t think it was important.
- And what about you Stephan? SM: Actually I can tell you almost the same story. I started playing drums when I was ten and I had three lessons with the organ teacher of my brother, an eldery lady. She said of course she could teach me how to play the drums, so I ended up sitting in front of a big, drum-shaped washing powder bin with a pair of sticks and had some initial lessons in rudiments. Aer three meetings I was disappointed and bored. By that time, I used to go to concerts quite oen since my family lived at the University campus where my father was a house-keeper. There were many concerts organised by the Students’ Committee and he always took me there, a lot of Reggae, ECM related jazz, punk and rock shows. At some point a local band opened for Carla Bley, I was fascinated by the drummer and I asked him whether he would teach me. The week aer I was sitting behind his massive kit playing beats, a great thing for a rock socialised kid. I saw him for a year, at home I would play along my records on my own drum kit. I also played in funny little school bands, which were total crap but certainly fun! When I was around fieen I sold my drum kit, when I was eighteen, I discovered a series of improvised music in my home town with fantastic musicians in a venue called Stadtgalerie. This was one of the best sound art galleries in Europe, right in Saarbrücken, where I lived! So I received a nice extra education there. I met people like Steven Roden there and there were some really great exhibitions there and those series of improv music. In the late 80s I heard Alexander von Schlippenbach’s legendary improv trio there with Paul Lovens, who plays a prepared drum kit, small chinese drums and super odd cymbals, like a totally trashy set. The first image I got was that he sounded like someone shaking a huge tool box. No beats, just sound. So I saved some money and bought a cheap drum kit again and started playing, trying to digest what I heard there. A year later, I moved to Berlin as a drummer and three weeks aer I arrived I found myself playing with various
wonderful musicians, all the young guys who stranded in Berlin the way I did. Again a while later I played with some of my heroes, people like Butch Morris, whose records I had collected as a teen. Everything came quite quickly. There were some really great drummers in the scene, proper technicians, something I never considered myself at all but then I knew I had my own qualities and think I was quite good at what I did by doing it my very own way. Sometimes I wondered whether I should take lessons, study with someone, but I chose not to as I feared classes might spoil what I have, let’s say, my own language. I remember asking Paul Lovens for advice who told me: “Always watch the drummer, especially the bad ones.” It was a great time actually. Every now and then, I thought it would be great if I could play etudes for snare drum off the sheet, but then – why? I was able to do other things well. Nowadays it’s actually the piano that I would love to be able to play. I can’t read music, scores. Ironically, in the meantime my daughter and even my youngest son is able to teach me how to read music. I’ll play the piano or whatever you give me anyway, like Taylor said, as a tone generator. I enjoy approaching things in an innocent way. TD: With the music and the technology that I grew up with, I didn’t have to be a trained musician. Nowadays, I don’t have to be able to play Mozart to be a musician and it was the same when I started in the 80s’ with sequencers etc. Being able to play a little bit is nice, but with multitracking and different kinds of sounds, you didn’t need to go to school for it. The technical stuff you did but I learnt that myself anyway. But you didn’t have to learn how to play a fancy score to make the kind of music that we wanted to make. When I started I wanted to be an industrial musician, I made industrial music, alternative new-wave music, I wanted to be New-Order.
- You document in details the creative process behind your music in press releases and CD booklets. Why is it important for you? TD: I really like talking about that stuff, so to me it just comes naturally to share that process. And I think that a lot of listeners out there are also musicians themselves so they can appreciate it. And then from a more dry point of view, it’s something to talk about on a press release. Because the hardest part of running 12k is writing those press releases because it’s so hard to talk about music so it’s just gives you something to say, and it fills up a paragraph of material. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter how it’s done and it shouldn’t matter how it’s done. But it gives to the listeners something to learn about you as a person, to follow your career and how you’re evolving. It’s just more information that people may be interested in or may be not interested in. It’s just about creating a history of yourself and how you work, how you change. SM: While I agree with Taylor when he says the process behind a work shouldn’t matter, I like to share what I do to a certain degree. In the end it’s the music that matters, no matter how fascinating the process may be, if the music is boring the methods won’t help. At the same time, I’m interested in other people’s processes, for instance when William Basinski started releasing his music I wanted to know more about it, how his music came to be, what were his motivations. Basically whenever I fall in love with some music, I’ll find myself researching. With my own stuff, I’m mainly concerned to tell that it is a process-based music, opposed to processing-based. I don’t edit, multitrack, arrange, MIDIfy, I don’t use special effects. If I make an
album, I record tons of material and discard most of it then. The rest stays as is and will only be polished with mastering tools then. Otherwise I will end up with a product where I will always hear decisions I made at a certain point. I’m not interested in that, I like to keep the sounds integrity, a quality that evolved by itself. - Both of your processes share this level of abstraction from the sound sources... SM: My own stuff has always been about the essence of a material and processing. Whether it’s the zither, the gramophone, a piece recorded 100 years ago onto record, I always try to squeeze my personal essence from it, to find out what is in there that makes me love the sound. TD: It’s the same with me. It’s also just interesting to listen the sound all around us or how I can use a guitar to create the kind of music that I make, besides playing it like a pop song. Take the work I did in York with all the gamelan instruments for example. I had a brief training for one aernoon and I quickly realised that I wasn’t interested in playing it the way it was supposed to be played. Again I looked at all those instruments as tone boxes and how I could use them to make the music that I make. So it was about playing all parts of the instruments, just using the all thing as an instrument. I don’t know where that comes from, it’s like asking why we do what we do or why we make the music we want to make. It’s a big question. But in order to make the kind of music that I want to make, the sounds do have to be abstracted somewhat, but not totally though. And they get smooched into a bed of sound, however that needs to happen or whatever processes need to go on for it to happen.
SM: I worked on ‘The Sad Mac’ around 2003 while having a grant from the City of Berlin, which put me in the position to buy a good pair of microphones and also to pay some recording fees to musicians. I got in touch with a couple of early music players to record the basic material for this project, asking them to perform little sketches I had made up based on their repertoire, as a starting point for my processing work. Once the album was finished, I thought it was a pity that I went so far away from the initial acoustic material I had recorded, that I chose to process the recordings so heavily. I’d definitely like to go there again, giving certain chamber music concepts another try. The Virginals project deals with that, my approach to the duo with Taylor as well. Actually early next year an acoustic duo recording with David Maranha on violin and me on the virginals will be released. - And you Taylor, what new directions would you like to explore in the future? TD: It would be a guitar and voice record as a solo project, some sort of abstract folk music. My 7” release ‘Journal/Attic’ was a step towards that but I don’t want any processed voice or processed guitar, just a really simple lo-fi guitar, voice, maybe some little sounds. That’s what I’m working towards or hoping one day to be able to do. But I can’t play guitar so I really have to do what I can do and still make it work. And I can’t sing very well. This project is one thing but there are so many other things and they’re not enough hours in a day to make everything that I would like to do. - Pascal Savy
Qluster: The Low Down
It would probably take a full book to write about legendary ambient/avant-garde collective Kluster formed by HansJoachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius and Conrad Schnitzler in 1969. Kluster became Cluster in 1971, when Schnitzler le to pursue a solo career, and through its 30 year-long history, Cluster have collaborated with a plethora of artists such as Brian Eno and Asmus Tietchens to name but a few, releasing 13 albums of varied artistic directions, whilst always staying anchored to a strong experimental ethos. In December 2010, Cluster split-up aer their performance at the ATP festival in Minehead, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius asked long-time friend Onnen Bock to join him to continue the journey, renaming the band Qluster. In 2011, Qluster announced the release of a trilogy named “Fragen/Rufen/ Antworten” (Questioning/Calling/ Responding) on German label Bureau B and started performing their music live with Austrian visual artists Luma.Launisch. On 11/11/11, Qluster opened the Semibreve festival in Braga and gave a beautiful performance that le me completely enthralled. The next day, I met Onnen Bock at his hotel and we talked about the genesis of Qluster, their recent trilogy and the way they approach live improvisation… - How did you meet Hans-Joachim Roedelius? I had a copy of “Selbstportrait I” on cassette tape that my brother had given me. I was 12 or 13 years old and I heard it the first time when I was on holiday, lying in bed, reading comic books. For me, it was really about the pure emotion of timelessness. I found it really relaxing because it had only these little figures of repetitive melodies that struck me emotionally. At the time, I didn’t know
anything about Hans-Joachim Roedelius. A few years later, in summer 1991, as I was 18, I went hitch-hiking in Corsica. I was staying on a camping site where one day, I saw a hand-made poster saying that Hans-Joachim Roedelius would play on a certain date. Unfortunately it was an old poster and the gig had already happened. I thought it was bad luck and then moved on. But then, a week later, I saw another poster saying that he would play and this time it was a few days later. I thought that surely he was living nearby because an artist like him wouldn’t come to Corsica every two weeks to play concerts. So I asked people around and I was told he was actually living nearby and somebody showed me his bungalow. The next morning I went around that place and I saw him sitting outside, having breakfast with his wife and his three children. I remember feeling starstruck because I’d never had any contact with any great musician before. - Were you making music yourself at the time? Yes, but in very small local bands with my brothers and friends. And for me HansJoachim Roedelius was a musical hero so it was on a completely different level. - Did you meet them then? Yes, I went to say hello and he was really kind and welcoming. He invited me to have breakfast with him and his family. The children were around my age and younger and we all had a nice conversation. But I had to leave Corsica the same day to go back to Germany to attend school, so we exchanged addresses and I le. A few months later, I sent him a postcard and he invited me around Easter to have a look at his studio in Blumau, not far away from Vienna. During that time, we actually made
“Harmonisieren”, one of our first four songs together that were released later on the cassette tape album “To Cover The Dark” for our Aquarello project in 1993 on the Deep Wave label. “Harmonisieren” was re-released under the name “Glass From Jasper” on the “Pink, Blue And Amber” album in 1996. During those holidays, we took some very nice walks together, through the fields and the vineyards nearby, and I felt very quickly like a close friend of the family. - How did you work in the studio? He let run his 8-track tape machine and we just enjoyed playing music together. He allocated me a few tracks to work with and we just recorded the sessions. As he was manipulating various effects like delays and reverbs, I played instruments like contrabass, flute and synthesisers etc. - Did you continue playing together aerwards? Soon aer this, we played at some events, like the Osnabrück festival Klang-Art which was an electronic art festival, and we did a small tour in Spain in little venues. In the mid-nineties, Hans-Joachim concentrated on touring and I focused on my studies. Also back then, he lived in Vienna and I lived in Berlin so we didn’t see each other very oen. But we kept a close relationship and would call each other and made sure we saw each other whenever it was possible. For instance whenever he played with Dieter Moebius nearby, I would support them setting up equipment, being like a roadie or something like that. When Cluster split up last year, Hans-Joachim asked me if I could imagine making music like Cluster and soon aer it we became Qluster .
- Why is the name Cluster so important? For him Cluster is more than a band name, it’s a philosophical idea and an approach to making music (as I understand him) through improvisation and unforeseen moments, feeling musical ideas and producing them in the very moment, not to construct something and reproduce it live. It’s always been about embracing chance and the possibility of failure to make music. It’s an interesting process for the musician and for the audience too. And even though Hans-Joachim is a very religious person, for him it’s about transporting a metaphysical idea to the public. He oen admits that he is surprised by what happens on stage. Improvisation is a different way to approach music, melody and rhythm. It’s very pattern like, reacting to what s happening. - How did the recent trilogy “Fragen/ Rufen/Antworten” come to existence? It really started a few years ago when I was a sound engineer for the Berliner Philharmonie. During one of HansJoachim’s trip to Berlin in January 2007, he visited me where I was working and we did a recording in the basement of the concert hall using singing bowls and two Steinway grand-pianos. It happened late at night aer the concerts were finished. We played and recorded everything that night until 3am and that’s why it’s called “Nachts in Berlin” (At Night in Berlin). We improvised for two hours and then we extracted the good parts for the release that would later become “Antworten”. But in a way, the record had always been laying around. We were good friends but at the same time bad in business, so it took time! It was like a treasure which hadn’t been discovered before. But then we got asked by Gunther Buskies from the Bureau B label to make a CD using analogue gear only. It’s really en vogue these days to work
with analog synths. And it’s nice because the unexpected always happens with those modular and open systems. For instance you press a button and something completely unexpected pushes you explore new ideas and that fits very well with the concept of Cluster. - Did you have analogue equipment already? Yes, I had bought a small collection of analogues synthesisers in the mid-nineties which were not too expensive at the time, so I had a Jupiter-4, a Korg MS-20, and a Yamaha CS-70m and some analogue delays. I have to say that I use those delays like real instruments and not necessarily as effects only, because you can use feedback to shape sounds or add a rhythmical structure, something that my synths alone can’t do. So the whole analogue equipment made a nice great operating system or meta-instrument that we used to make the first CD in the series “Fragen”. - And “Rufen”? The second album “Rufen” (which means: “Call Someone”) is all made from improvisations in a live context. It was either real concerts or recordings made in a live situation but without a public. And as I said before, to all that we added the material from the piano pieces as a third album in line, so we asked Gunther Buskies about it and he was happy to release the whole lot as a trilogy with a unified artwork. - You said that improvisation is at the very core of your working methods. Can you talk a bit more about your approach? I have my modular system (a lot of effects and synths patched together) that I have developed a bit like a handcra over the years so i know which button makes what
etc. I have some production patterns, not that I know the output each time, like the direct sound that will appear, but I know how to approach some details in the music and how to channel them into the modular chain, so I m sure they will be interesting sound-wise, but paradoxically I don’t know what will really happen. I only know how to use such and such chain of modules to make something compelling. For instance playing with an external signal fed into the envelope of a MS-20 produces such a wide range of possibilities that it fascinates me enough to approach improvisation from a new angle. - You never prepare anything then? I have some pre-organised patterns, like chords or short melodies, that I use and loop for a few minutes usually, but when Hans-Joachim plays on top of them it gives new structures and new outcomes. We have also some pre-prepared soundscapes that we use like musical material but without structures. It’s completely different than using a computer with pre-recorded song structures. We use those soundscapes like a common ground on which we build the rest. But even if I do nothing and just concentrate on those sounds, it give me time to relax in such a way that the musical output is not a stressed output. And to give something interesting to the audience during our improvised performance, we need to not be in a hurry. There is also the visual content that plays a big part in a concert like at Semibreve and as a musician I feel I belong to a larger social network on stage and am not responsible for any failure because you can only win in this context. Even if you do nothing, you win. Silence is also winning in improvised music. As musicians, we shouldn’t try to make too much. - Pascal Savy
Echo Park: The Willamette Interview
An Interview with Davin Chong and Joseph Edward from Willamette whose recent LP “Echo Park” is one of the standout ambient albums of 2011… - ‘Echo Park’ is a very well considered release, and shows the kind of restraint that seasoned musicians/composers are able to display, yet this is the first Willamette release that I know of… Can you say a little about the group; how long have you been making music and how long as Willamette? Davin Chong: We all met around the spring of 2006; as our music is ambiguous, so are the details of this initial acquaintance. I studied musical theory for much of my formative years, which bored the hell out of me and ultimately resulted in my current uneasy relationship with classical music. As a result, I find we rarely talk about composing music or music at all, but instead about cold weather, chronic pain and lost love. ‘Echo Park’ is indeed our first proper release in any format; we began conceptualizing and composing the record in the summer of 2006 and completed it in the winter of 2009. I recall it was hot and sticky when we started, bitter cold when we finished. I think music of this nature cannot be rushed. I think the pace at which some artists release music has become somewhat of a sticking point for me in terms of my persistent frustration with current music in general. Joseph Edward: I got a little four track tascam for my birthday when I was about fourteen and have been recording on it ever since. Willamette came together out of time, some years back now, where there was a nice community of people who were making sounds and sharing them with
each other. We got connected during that time and started sending things back and forth. Making ‘Echo Park’ did take some time. I lived in at least three different cities while we were working on it. It is a strange thing to have people hear this only now, aer we have lived with it for such a long time, but it is a wonderful thing as well. - You refer to your music as ‘ambiguous’… Is this a planned ambiguity, or more related to the fact that all music is necessarily experienced subjectively and is therefore always heard by an audience differently than it is heard by the artist? On a related note; as a music maker myself I’m always interested in the way other people interact with and interpret my music. Are you shying away from imposing a dominant or ‘intended’ interpretation of your music, or is there an actual thematic undercurrent to the album? DC: Well, I think there is a certain ambiguity and timelessness to this kind of music. Classical music, to me anyway, has always possessed a “bad memory”, if you will. References to Wagner or Chopin, for example, invariably cite works from the early to mid/late 1800s; this aspect of timelessness and chronologic haziness is something I find extremely fascinating. There is a distinct quality of history to the music. From a strictly compositional standpoint, however, I think our music is quite academic and decidedly meticulous. I suppose that this is a paradox that has always confused me a bit about our work. I don’t think we ever have any intended interpretations of our music. I get uncomfortable when people say they love the record or they think a certain song is beautiful. I think I have a problem with the
idea that our work somehow affects other people. Sure, I can appreciate it, but I would never approach George Delerue and say “Wow, ‘Camille’ changed my life”. JE: We have sat with this album for some time now. Personally, my interpretations of the work have evolved over the years, so I am interested to hear how listeners perceive the album now, having only heard it for the first time. I think the music is deeply personal to us, so I do hope people connect with it on a personal level to some degree. - Can you explain the album title and group name? DC: Echo Park is a neighbourhood in North Los Angeles. I have vague memories of visiting this place as a young child. For some reason, memories of this one and only trip remained firmly in my mind. I recall my brother and I fooling around with my dad’s polaroid, taking pictures of the sky. Because taking pictures of the sky was indie at that time. Maybe it still is. The Willamette Valley is a semi-famous place of attraction in Oregon. While I’ve actually never been, I’ve had ideas of what it might be like. I have a friend from the area and he assures me it is beautiful. JE: I was actually living in the Willamette Valley during a time when a large majority of the work for this album was being completed. I spent quite a bit of time getting lost in the woods by my home. The isolation and solitude found within this area seemed fitting for what we were creating.
- Can you tell me a little about the instrumentation on “Echo Park”? The textures and sounds are stunning; beautiful washed out chords…how do you go about creating the sounds? DC: It’s fairly straight forward how we create the sounds. We like the sound of old tape loops; sometimes voice, guitar and other stringed instruments are used as well. I think the tone of a record is one of the most important things. When you hear a Morricone piece, you know it’s a Morricone piece. The same can be said of that famous Delerue Melancholy. JE: There are numerous sound sources that we use, but it always depends on the piece and what feels necessary or unnecessary. Sometimes things work out well, sometimes they do not. - I recently reviewed ‘Echo Park’ and mention in the review that I hear a strong Stars of the Lid influence across the album…is this true? Are there any likeminded artists with whom you feel a strong affinity, or do you see your sound as not really ‘scene’ related? DC: We were just actually discussing influences the other day. I think I have become progressively less informed by certain artists, and instead by certain albums. I think “Tired Sounds” and “Avec Laudanum” are records that work incredibly well within their context, but I wouldn’t say everything Stars of the Lid released have been relevant for me. That said, I’ve always quite enjoyed the aforementioned Delerue’s “Les Mepris OST” and Basinski’s “El Camino Real” as well. I am uncomfortable with comparing our work with that of others, but I can certainly understand the need for these comparisons sometimes.
JE: I think their influence is undeniable within the genre, “The Ballasted Orchestra” and “Per Aspera Ad Astra” being two of my favorites, but I would like to think we approach our music in a way which is entirely honest and our own. I listen to artists like This Heat and Joy Division more oen than I do SOTL, but I understand it is much harder to draw a line between our music and those artists, much to my chagrin. Haha. - What’s with the decision to go vinyl only? JE: Aside from sound quality, I think there is a level of care that is associated with vinyl that is lost with other formats. Artwork and packaging are important aspects of the decision as well. The hope is that this all translates to the listener spending more time with the album and investing in it a bit more as a whole. DC: I think this kind of music sounds better on vinyl than on any other medium. It’s as simple as that, really. - Can you say a little about your next release…a soundtrack I believe? DC: Our next release is entitled “Always in Postscript” and it’s a score for the film “All the Lines Flow Out” by Charles Lim Yi Yong which made its debut at this year’s Venice Film Festival as part of the Orizzonti Competition. It received special mention which made us all quite happy. It will be screening at the Dubai Film Festival shortly. We composed the score between 2009-2011. It actually was a very painful time for all of us for various reasons and I think some of that definitely comes through on the record. I’m not sure Charles expected such a melancholy piece, but I think it works fine.
- And what projects aer the next release? Given that Echo Park was a long time in gestation, when can we expect a new full length? DC: I’m not sure that Echo Park was given enough time, to be honest. Composing and recording the music is one thing, but allowing time for the pieces to ferment and evolve over time is tricky. I was a little uneasy releasing two records so close together, but I was assured that 60 minutes of music over a span of five years is not excessive. We are always working on music, each at our own slow pace. I just don’t know how other musicians are able to release a release or more each year. It seems a half hour of music put to tape takes so much out of me emotionally. But that’s a whole other frustration I have with this particular genre: There is just so much music put out. At the end of the day, who really cares? I don’t take myself that seriously… I think for newer work, we will focus on slowing down and stripping away. Simplifying things. Even the quietest music is too hectic and too busy for these ears. JE: Nothing planned at the moment, though I would like to do some more work with film. I think with the abundance of material that is being released within the genre, or even in general, it is difficult for me to know where my place is or even if I should have a place within it. I am always working on things, and will continue to do so, I am just not sure about widely releasing those projects or releasing them at all. - John McCaffrey
Message To Bears: Folding Leaves
Picture a scene in time lapse. From a breaking dawn follows parting clouds. Trees blow, their branches swaying from a wind unseen but felt by many. Birds trace the sky, ants march from their nests, the world awakes. A light powers on and in tandem a car exhaust bellows its fumes. Life asserts itself onto this earth, all of which is captured in this one, prolonged moment. Now imagine something altogether different. First, witness the crack of an eggshell and then visualise the merging of textures. The thick, clear innards of the egg are blended with a coarse sugar, powdery flour and a solid, sticky butter. It’s an effort but they join together, forming into a blonde coloured slime, with a drooping consistency. A simple act of heat will transform this messy substance into an entirely edible creation. A cake will arise and its sweetness will be a taste to behold. From here we’ll diverge slightly. Let’s internalise. How did we reach our present? What were the conflicts and the pleasures which brought us here? We met crossroads, suffered loss, felt love and experienced hope. This was what drove us
forward, these merged emotions. Yet here we stand, unaware of the future. The road that lies ahead is an unpredictable one, but the only certainty is that our destinies will be formed by conflict and the convergence of elements both human and of the world itself. So what of sound? Not everything is comprised of something visual. Those heart strings can be pulled by reverberations too! Let’s consider what influenced the above and how its wholeness is also dictated by the meeting of varied notes. Our subject is a musician, Jerome Alexander. He has an alias, Message to Bears, and an accomplice in Laura Ashby who plays stringed instruments. For this exercise we’ve been invited to explore “Folding Leaves” which marks the second long player from his musical canon. His formula is precise; subtle narratives woven together from varied influences, but his impact is vast. Small worlds of sound will form as we enjoy this record. As with our thoughts on captured moments, baked goods and the journey of life itself, the nine fragments at work here are built from the brilliance of
joining. Whether guitars, violins, chanted voices, field sounds or minimalist thuds of percussion we witness the beauty of noise in unison. Each song is guided by a strange juxtaposition. An undoubted melancholy rests at the base of the tracks and as the ingredients of each number dance around, connecting with one another to form these creations; they are supported with a piercing light of encouragement. It is to this effect that these songs take on the presence of something more than just music. The sounds feel like some sort of digestible air whose nutrients and vitamins will tug at the inner workings of one’s emotional foundations. To move away from the conceptual and diverge into the literal, let us conclude by encouraging others to enjoy this musical experience. “Folding Leaves” truly is an excellent work; a winter composition to savour and one that should be embraced by a listener willing to let their emotions amalgamate through the binding of multifarious sounds. - Josh Atkin
Dustin Wong: Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads
In winter, weather-beaten nip ‘n’ tuck releases predominate the experimental scene. Sonance ushers in a minimalist accompaniment to the elements, unwishing to separate itself from what surrounds it. This means Dustin Wong’s “Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads” shines like a beacon. First: it’s jolly, with an eccentric smile that traces for miles. Second: that’s additionally strange, when realising Wong’s guitar loop project can only stretch vocabulary inside a minimal sonic scattergraph. But lo and behold, with an uneven structure to connect title apothesis together with the music, “Dreams Say” is an hour of oneman quasi Improv mettle, to test the enthusiasm of those serious about much more than improvised music. On “Infinite Love”, Wong’s preceding album, there was in the seventh piece, similarity to a worn out tape being reversed – well so it sounded. With “Dreams Say” there’s a contrasting lynchpin with “Evening Curves Straight”, which is a summery blowing-into-a-balloon bassline affair, stretching itself to optimum helium; entwining a twee, maddeningly catchy chorus. The overall arrangement of “Dreams Say” differs, too, being less wallflower, more bombast, as is linkworthy
with Dustin’s approach, explained further when Thrill Jockey asked him. “In ‘Infinite Love’ I recorded every layer as a separate track dividing them up throughout the stereo-field, but in ‘Dreams Say’ it was all mostly recorded live with a few overdubs moving around in the stereo-field.”
composition methods and taking a more central, live-to-computerised outlook on each track sequenced. Being a succinct r e fl e c t i o n o f h i s l i v e s h o w s , t h i s ornamentation is as tasteful as cheese and wine, but without pretentious hangups to obstruct.
Through “Ice Sheets On Feet Prints”, Wong starts his newly adapted process juxtaposing bruntish drive with melodious unusualness. Flamboyant; a happier Tortoise dropped on a bass drum, le to kick the edges as a bid to slide off. He writes that the delay pedal determines the tempo and pattern, and as a singular project, quickfire white lie harmonies aren’t dominant. Each track combines metamorphosis with metabolism, in parallel timing to a fluctuating rate, shoehorning paradoxical somnambulism. During it we hear and walk to the interpretative crossroads, yet we’re sleepwalking because sentience is not fully developed. Complimentarily, there are periods of decompression in the instrumental loops that give an impression of winding down. Like dogs worn out from catching ball on a walk, the timbral fabric continually gets chewed and screwed. This dynamic concurrently speaks for Dustin’s humanism: not replying on artificial
Lengthy crescendo-spheric fourth “Tea Tree Leaves Retreat” masticates what precedes. Dustin sees the guitar loops, delays and dyes as “a kind of textile factory”, whereby on soon-following “Toe Tore Oh” he breaks the layers down into accessible nourishment, fastening pithy notations to sweetly grandiose posturing. There’s a steadfast theme picked up at this album third: he’s continually dangling in an incomplete joie de vivre, doodling routes that never idealistically end. Where, in other cases, nip ‘n’ tuck reductionism placates as a persuasive “cool” trend, Wong has his eyes set on an oblique tangentiality, one that’s a blazing white light. Dreams may say view or create, shadow leads confuse what’s innate, but Wong always connects these contrasts wonderfully. - Mick Buckingham
Radere: I’ll Make You Quiet
Futuresequence is a name well known among fans of ambient and experimental music for their online magazine, mixes and colossal “SEQUENCE” free download compilations (not to mention some stunning accompanying artwork). 2012 sees them shi focus onto a more traditional label project, with their first single-artist release coming courtesy of musician Carl Ritger, otherwise known as Radere. Upon moving from his native Philadelphia to Colorado, Ritger was struck by the intimidating grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, and this sense of awe is clearly discernible across the five tracks of “I’ll Make You Quiet”. The opening fades in gradually, as if approaching the mountains from some distance away, but the listener is soon lost among an enormously vast soundscape, dwarfed by towering everests of distorted noise. The effect is certainly a
(dis)quietening one – harsh, cold, yet brutally beautiful, like the Rockies themselves. Second track “Sometimes, I Can’t Make Full Sentences” makes apparent that Ritger’s approach is capable of supplying not only a sense of scale, but also of an ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’. Whereas the opening title track clearly gave the impression of an open, endless mountain expanse, “Sometimes” introduces a cavernous, densely reverberate space, the limits of which could be traced with the eye if not with the hand. “Good Evening, Ghosts” takes the listener up in a creaking old cable car towards a summit wrapped in swirling fog, visibility reduced to an impenetrable cloud of white. Album closer “Stay Away” introduces a more ambiguous space, however: a brittle, jangly sound (apparently house keys) is heard above a deep whistling drone, skittering
somewhere between outside and inside, close and distant – a trick that the echorich acoustic environments of mountain ranges can oen play. It’s clear that Ritger has spent some considerable time thinking about how different physical environments can affect the qualities and perception of sound, efforts that make his sonic landscape narrations all the more convincing. Though extensive use is made of harsh distortion, the sounds produced by guitars, cassette recordings and electronics are carefully sculpted to create a listening experience that is absorbing and compelling rather than tiresomely ear-splitting. This is a fine first release from a promising new label, and a new career high for a talented musician. - Nathan Thomas
Secret Pyramid: The Silent March
There is some strange symbiosis between Lars Von Trier’s latest film ‘Melancholia’ and Secret Pyramid’s “The Silent March”. Or maybe it’s just that both of these excellent works of art entered my periphery around the same time. Have you seen the trailer for ‘Melancholia’? One of the most striking images from the trailer is of Charlotte Gainsbourg running across a golf course with a look of terror on her face. Two things about the image stand out in the viewers mind: 1) she is running in such slow motion and it is one step removed from being stillness 2) her feet are actually sinking ever deeper into the fake greenery of the golf course with each step forward, almost as though she is running on quicksand. “The Silent March”, the second album for Vancouver’s Secret Pyramids, opens with an auditory equivalent to this image: a fade-in on a sustained chord. This is an interesting tactic to open an album; on the one hand a fade-in suggests movement in that the sound is rising, if only via the mixing; on the other hand a sustained chord suggests something in stasis or suspended animation. It’s like being thrown in the middle of the story. However, this strategy perfectly sets up the way the album works in that across all seven songs, each feels like a meditation on a still life but there is some unseen movement that keeps furthering the narrative of the album.
introverted, almost like it is the internal, emotional interpretation to the image the first song gave us. There is a feeling of descent, a slowing as the song gets murkier. Then in the background there is a sharp, almost Penderecki-style phrase that again foreshadows something threatening around the corner. “Still Return” opens with more fuzzy guitars, this time accompanied by acoustic guitar, the sounds of the pick scraping as it strums the strings is almost more audible than the actual chords being created. Human voice (real this time) enters too. There is an optimism to this piece though, and a very outward optimism at that. Of all the pieces thus far into the album it has the least movement in terms of structure but relies on mixing to allow the elements to pull in and out of focus. It’s almost serene, content not to change. And then… “Silent March I” takes us into someplace new altogether. It has an overtly mournful quality and is much quieter than the dense layers of guitar that framed the previous songs. What happened between then and now? Are these the final moments before the storm? Or has the worst already come and gone?
“Outside” is the title of the album opener and it does feel like we are outside. Glacial drones built out of a combination of fuzzed out guitars and some electronically created choir-like vocals give the effect of waking to find yourself standing in the middle of a blizzard, snow falling so hard it’s moving horizontally rather than vertically. There’s an almost palpable tension to the song based on the way those faux-human voices occasionally rise above the guitar to pronounce themselves; it almost feels like an alarm warning of some unknown terror. But we do feeling like we are watching this lone figure from the outside.
“Her Spirits” opens with acoustic guitar and human voice. It evokes images of some folk-troubadour singing his heart out to a group of lone survivors huddled in some nuclear fallout shelter. The lyrics are inaudible but the quivering vocals say more than words could anyway. Slowly, a new sound enters, first organically, then violently; Crushing guitars enter so thick and heavy they almost do violence to the piece. It’s a violent merging between the album’s thicker-fuzzier drone tendencies and its quieter more introverted elements. The song ends with a droning hum and a chiming sound. One of the album’s great strengths is its ability to keep the level of tension present even through its quietest moments, suggesting safety is improbable.
“Come Down Gently” continues with that icy-feeling but feels much more
“Eternal” is the album’s longest piece and takes it’s time to develop. There is gentle
guitar melody working away while other elements occasionally enter the mix and obscure it. There’s a sense of calm to it and while it utilizes the fuzzed-out distortion techniques to give it that arctic feeling, it is much more minimal and breathes a lot more. It feels as though there is some sense of peace, the thick waves of distortion have been quiet in the mix – they are still present, just less forceful. And in the end? Album closer “Silent March II” has a funereal feel. A combination of choir-like vocals and a simple piano-refrain end the album. Those voices hearken back to the album’s opening song. But where has this journey taken us; has anything objectively changed? Is this the moment of finality? Has our lone figure taken its stand, made its march, against that looming presence? Or has it come to some sort of internal view that renders any ‘real’ ending meaningless in the face of its new found sense of peace with whatever may be? Von Trier said of ‘Melancholia’ (and I’m not ruining the movie for you here) that he was interested in the way depressed people are better equipped to handle cataclysmic events in that their introversion makes any potential finality seem bearable. “The Silent March” feels in many ways like a disaster story but it also feels like its ending invites two opposite interpretations: 1) that disaster has come and gone, and in its wake there is peace now that the worst is over with, or 2) that threat of disaster is still looming, but our lone stranger has made peace with whatever is to come. But really the success of the album is that it invites either interpretation. A clearer statement might be: “The Silent March” is an album about how a mystery can grow in your mind and how regardless of that fact, the mystery is still made no less solvable. “The Silent March” is a wonderful listen and a great companion for long walks during those winter storms that border on apocalyptic. - Brendan Moore
Good Weather For An Airstrike: Underneath The Stars
Following on from last year’s A Winter on Rural Colours, Tom Honey, aka Good Weather For An Airstrike, turns his hand to a full length for Rural Colours’ big brother Hibernate. Underneath the Stars brings Honey’s most accomplished work to date, combining processed guitars, strings and numerous field recordings. We open with the sparkling tones of ‘Theta Waves’, which sets in place the somnambulant quality that runs throughout the album. The chords gently subside into the field recordings of ‘Another Way Out’. Featuring Rob Honey and Jamie Brett on guitar and vocals respectively, the piece slowly builds to a melodic climax before dissipating into the ether. ‘You’re Rendering Again’, perhaps appropriately, brings to mind a restless night, working because you can’t sleep.
The driing, almost painful sparseness of the piece is very evocative of that otherworldly feeling associated with insomnia. Allowing a brief pause in the otherwise static soundscape, ‘Aurora’ brings with it slightly more movement. Hypnotically repetitive processed guitars flicker across the space while gentle bowed strings build in the background before fading away to reveal a fragment of piano. From the minimal organ melody of ‘Cast Aside (The Briefest of Pauses)’ to the flickering tones interspersed amongst the static chords of ‘Delta Waves’, the listener is invited to reflect or simply allow themselves to be immersed in the texture. It is interesting to note that the initial starting point for Good Weather For An
Airstrike was Honey’s own experience of tinnitus. As a persistent, unchanging ringing in the ear it seems somewhat perverse that he should choose to employ highly static, oen high-mid pitch tones as the basis of his work. However, the soporific quality, aimed to soothe sleepless nights caused by the condition, is certainly effective. All in all, although not breaking any new ground, Underneath The Stars is a very pleasant collection of minimal drones and textures and is sure to appeal to fans. - Katie English
Convex Mancave: A Closer Study...
The Bandcamp page is about it. So what first catches the eye is the name and the album art, a sly recovering of Monte Steele’s quick novel Atomic Blonde. (Representative book review: “tough guy, murder, and lots of sex.”) Back to the band name: the mancave, a place for drinking flat beer, watching golf, hiding from the kids. And the “convex” part: a curved surface, but only as differentiated from concave. Red meat for math geeks. Convex Mancave is Matthew Collings, Ally Winford, and Chris Tenz. Collings also records under the alias Sketches For Albinos, a careful, touching inquiry shot through a magnifying lens and sepia light. Winford (Greyhound Out Of Mainline, also An Insection) states flatly, “I’m just a shoegaze kid,” describing the former project as “a bedroom lo-fi thing,” and the latter as “a lot more considered, a lot more electronic.” Chris Tenz composes lowvolume, high-regard storytelling with guitar, voice, and a dash of processing that we oen don’t hear. If it all sounds nice, hushed, craed, it is. And Convex Mancave is the antithesis. Collings explains in a brief interview, “I started out just as someone documenting Ally and Chris playing, and getting creative with the recording process as it was happening in real-time, fucking things up, feeding everything back into itself while it was recording.” The first of two releases is Atomic Blonde in E (November 1), a single, 20-minute track, and it launches exactly as described: a long fade-in, a dreamy, onehanded piano lick, and a crushed-tone guitar (atomized is a better word, but that is surely coincidental). Winford reminds us
that is it “a completely spontaneous thing and everything is improvised,” and for the first four minutes it is leashed only by the relative silence. Now solar-flare volume surges and steady, electronic pulses leave us pawing at our ears, while a barge foghorn crowds out an otherwise beautiful six-minute reprise of quiet echoes. Collings explains, “I oen feel that there’s nothing more expressive than raw, raging, directionless noise.” The prolonged coda begins impulsively, weighing large, oscillating clamor against off-lying guitar and nearly forgotten piano. December 16 saw the release of Big In Mogadishu! (A Splendid Sonic Adventure in Four Thrilling Parts!). Mogadishu? Winford writes that the artwork and track titles are “done completely on the spur of the moment, so I’m not sure anyone should read too much into them.” Technically, Mogadishu is nearly identical to Atomic Blonde In E: a digital-only release, free to download at Bandcamp, and one track, some 20 minutes in length. Winford performs on guitar and Collings handles processing and piano, oen at the same time. (The “one-handed” keyboard technique noted above is both a composing preference and a necessity.) The extremes are a bit less jarring here, trading in high-register pulses and surges of feedback for a slightly steadier hand. But only slightly. Mogadishu begins with brittle, remote piano and punctuating guitar strums. The squall starts brewing at about two minutes in, again a domino fall of accumulated feedback, albeit more user-friendly than Atomic Blonde. The low-end, echo-fordays overcoat only hints at melody, until
the smog lis at about 3:30 and a guitar comes back into view, however fleeting. The sidewinder rattle of the second act is, as promised, thrilling. The calm returns, with its sparse, ringing tones: just at the 10-minute mark, too, as before. If the project ever gives off true improv emissions, it is here: the clean-tone, lowregister canyon guitar and the furious piano tapping, the kinetic waves of effects and samples rushing by. It is not quite clear where the third act is supposed to lend way to the fourth — the subtitle’s promise of “Four Thrilling Parts” could always be misleading — but the barking, short-stepped final 90 seconds is probably it. It’s an eyebrow-raising finish, for sure. Before it is anything, music is the transmission of a signal. A spectrum comes into view, with no signal on one end, and random, rhythmless bits of indecipherable signal on the other. Dead silence and harsh, white noise. John Cage has already determined our limits in respect to the silence: four minutes, 33 seconds. The jury is still out on the other end of the spectrum, and you have to admire those who are doing the research, putting in the hours. Atomic Blonde In E is not exactly “raw, raging, directionless noise,” although it certainly has its moments. And where Big In Mogadishu is decidedly more melodic, it tests our boundaries all the same. We can only guess what comes next. Until then, download both tracks for the price of a mouse click, and join the study. - Fred Nolan
0 (Sylvain Chauveau) The Interview
0 is a collective based around a core of three French musicians, though it expands and shrinks to accommodate different projects. Representing the band at the Ambientfestival “Zivilisation der Liebe” was Sylvain Chauveau, whose solo performance was one of the most innovative and absorbing of the whole festival. We sat him down aer the concert to talk about openness, the seduction of melody, and Justin Bieber. Can you tell us a little about how the Collective was formed? Sure. I was invited in 2003 to play solo in a festival in the south-west of France, in the region where I was born, near Bayonne, near Spain. The guys who had invited me at this time were almost the same age as me and from the same school, and we got along very well. And they were musicians also. We talked a lot, and I felt, “wow, those guys will become friends”. Immediately we decided to play together, and so we started this band. We found the name maybe one year aer we started rehearsing together, although we were not living in the same city: I was living in Paris, those guys in Bayonne. We were four people in the beginning: there was Stéphane Garin, who plays percussion, there was Joël Merah, who’s mainly a guitar player, and there was the cello player, a girl, whose name is Maitane Sebastian, she’s from Spain. And so that was the four of us. We wanted to do something together, but we didn’t know what – there was no real musical direction in the beginning. Some stuff was very melodic, some was very abstract. It was mostly [original] compositions but we also wanted to play compositions by other people. And finally the band went on like this – there is still no musical direction, and we still haven’t… we have decided not to decide. Maitane decided to leave the band a few years ago, but we are still, the three of us, playing together and we have decided to open the band, not to work like a traditional band with the same people in the same city rehearsing every two days or
every week. It was impossible to do that and we didn’t want to play just over the internet or something. So one of the solutions was to decide that the band could live with just one of us, or it could be much more than the three of us. - Since then your activities expanded to cover many different bases, including a percussion ensemble, chamber orchestra, radio show and even a print zine. Is there any kind of overarching project or aim that brings all these different things together, something that is always recognisably 0? Or is it very much a case of being free to act on opportunities as and when they appear? I don’t think you could recognise 0 across all the projects. It can be so different. So it’s just the guys who play, I think. Because it can be a whole concert of, I don’t know, John Cage music, or it can be what you saw tonight, just me alone, or it can be an acoustic trio with two acoustic guitars and percussion. So actually that really is a question, even with the name, because we have this idea to expand the name with the projects that we do. If it’s just a percussion ensemble, then it’s called 0 (for percussion), if it’s chamber music it can be 0 (for large ensemble), or even 0 (for radio), if it’s a radio playlist. So what is the common point? Just that we want to do it. It’s just our will, and our culture, what we like. That’s all there is. And sometimes things that are done by the band are not something that all the members of the band like. For example if the percussion ensemble plays some George Crumb music – I don’t really like this guy, you know! But they play it, and I’m ok with it. And that’s also something we have decided to agree on. We agree, even if we don’t like everything. - You’ve invited a wide range of musicians to take part in 0 projects, and had works created specifically for you by people such as Steven Hess, Niko Veliotis, and Florencia Di Concilio. Can you give us some examples of how working with these
people has brought the collective forward, or perhaps changed your approach? It’s a special experience. Honestly I would say that I would like that the band has a musical direction, a very simple way of living. But it’s not the case. So we have to deal with it. So for example at one point we had this idea to ask some musicians for some scores that we would play. And we especially wanted to ask people who are never asked this – improvisers, electronic musicians, not contemporary composers. So we just said, “these are the instruments we can play, and three of us can read music, one of us cannot (that’s me!)”, and instructions like this. But it was very free. And the results that we received were so varied. We then performed those pieces – some were just graphic scores, some had verbal instructions. So that was one thing. And the other is when we invite people to perform with us. In this case I would say that we are like the Soviet Union – it’s like there is the Politburo, you know, a group of people who make the laws, and we are those people. But we are democratic people, we are really open. We take good care of who we invite, and we take good care of what they want to play. If they really don’t want something we won’t do it. We are not dictators at all. And inside the Politburo, let’s say, it’s a total democracy. - It seems like if there was any one thing at all that would define 0 or that would tie everything together, it’s the idea that everything the Collective does is a way of working through this problem of dealing with having no direction, and with this openness. The group is self-inventing. The group is always inventing itself. Aer four years maybe we could have said “ok, now I could say that 0 is this, and the music could be defined like this”. But two years aer, I could not say the same. It’s always changing. So it’s a bit disturbing, and at the same time, I got used to it! And we got used to it. And we kind of like it now.
- I want to talk a little bit about tonight’s performance. We’re used to thinking of music as something that evokes or expresses, but it seemed to me that the music tonight wasn’t going for that at all – that each sound was just there for itself, it wasn’t trying to express some kind of grand idea. I was wondering, if not to express or evoke, then what might the role of this music be? And how does that then affect the role of the listener? I think it’s a very good remark. I didn’t think of it in this way but I think it’s very true. It’s not a music of expression, there’s almost no emotion in it… maybe a little. But I’ve been listening a lot to very emotional music, very Romantic you could say, I’m very attracted to that, but it’s something I want to escape from. And that’s why I arrived at the point that you heard tonight, where I’m trying to avoid melody. I never liked rhythms but melodies were always my thing. I came to a point where I wanted to avoid this, because – there is one reason that I can explain – it’s because the most powerful music that I’ve heard in the last ten years was music where there was absolutely no melody or what I call emotion or romanticism in the traditional way. It was music that was very dry, very abstract, and despite that it was extremely powerful to me. And I still don’t understand exactly why. For example, today John Tillbury, the pianist, was playing on this piano here, and he has a band called AMM, a trio of English musicians. Those guys are masters of improvisation, they started in the mid-Sixties. I saw them three times, and it kind of blew my mind. It was incredible – how could this music be so powerful? Because there is no vocal, there is no melody, there is no beat, there is nothing to make people get easily into the music. And still it’s so powerful. I felt that with these kind of bands. I felt that with some paintings – sometimes you see a yellow monochrome, and you don’t know why, but you feel something very powerful in this painting, you don’t know what it is, but you know that you know what’s inside. And what happened when I saw that… I still don’t know. What happens when I see a Japanese Zen garden with just white gravel and lines in the gravel and rocks? Why do I feel something? That’s a mystery that I want to go towards. That’s why I’m searching in this musical direction. I don’t know if that answers your question but it’s all I can say. - I think that also says something about why this music has oen provoked quite a lot of, quite a negative reaction from a lot of people. Because it challenge sus to question our own responses – we’re put in a position where we don’t understand our own reactions any more. And I think that can be quite disconcerting for a lot of people sometimes. I don’t know, but the reason why this music makes some people stay out of it is simple.
It’s because the most attractive things in music are voice and melodies and beats. And we bet that we can do something without those things. That’s the reason. And I think we don’t have to worry about whether they will get into it or not. When people leave during some of my shows, like tonight – it happens to me almost all the time now when I play this kind of music – I’m not really worried any more. I think you have the right to try to get into it or not, to leave or do whatever you want. There’s no explanation to this music. I don’t think you need to hear someone explaining to you for thirty minutes, “this is where this music comes from”. I could say it comes from the Fiies in the USA, and the New York School of John Cage and Morton Feldman, and those people come from another background, blah blah blah. We could have talked about this, but the sounds are just the sounds – “you like the sounds?” That’s the only question. “Do you like this sound?” If you don’t like it, it’s no problem; if you like it, then listen. - You’ve covered a wide range of repertoire from people like Philip Glass, John Cage, Steve Reich, Morton Feldman. Is there anyone whose work you haven’t covered yet that you’d really like to take on? With 0 we’ve covered quite a lot of musicians. But a lot of American musicians, I notice. Not only, but we also wanted to ask some living composers and some unknown composers and musicians to write pieces that we would perform. What would we like to do? It’s a democracy, so I cannot speak for the others. Personally I would be very excited to perform some Morton Feldman music. The other guys have done some, well we have done some together, but he’s maybe one of my favourite composers of all time, and Joël from the band is also a huge, huge fan. But I don’t think it’s very interesting to do. There are two things – there are our tastes, and there is the question, is it interesting to do it? Because Feldman is quite well played all around the world. There are recordings of all his music. Same for John Cage – I’m very very interested in John Cage, and so is Stéphane and Joël, but there are some pieces by Cage that – you don’t need to do them. Because even if it changes all the time – - Like “4”33”, for example… Actually the first recording of 0 was dedicated to this piece. It was several recordings of this piece. Even just this piece, we could talk about it for hours – it was the hardest thing to play for us when we played it in concert. It was the longest time in rehearsals, because we had to document and talk about how do we perform it. And it was so interesting. I could drop you names, but… I’m not the
only one to decide, so it is hard to answer this question. In the future we’ll see. - One more question, regarding your solo work. You mention on your website that you’re working on quite a long piece… Oh yes! Actually it’s a good time to talk about it, because I think the piece is finished right now. And it took me eight years to know how to finish it. I had the idea in 2004, and I just finished it, I would say, a few days ago. So the concept of the piece was to make something extremely long – seven years – something you cannot listen to in one go, you cannot listen to the whole thing. And it’s mainly silence. There is almost no sound for almost seven years, but there are a few moments where there are sounds. I had this idea, a moment of my life when I was obsessed by silence in music, and with pushing the boundaries of the structures of music. So that’s why seven years, that’s why it’s almost silent. But to make no sound for seven years would be too easy, so I wanted to have some moments of sound. There are eighteen moments of sound. The first sound arrives aer three months or something. So there were a lot of questions about how to do that. Can you perform that somewhere? Can we have a room somewhere in the world for seven years? Can musicians come this day, February 17th, and play for one hour and then leave? How would the instruments be tuned, where would they be tuned? The final decision I made was to make a recorded piece. It’s not performed by musicians live, it’s a recording. And one of the answers for the diffusion of it was to make it through the Internet. So maybe within a few weeks I’ll be able to put this piece online, so you will be able to listen to it, if you find the website, it’s streaming, and you can see where you are in the piece. And the eighteen moments of sounds are sometimes very slowly coming, so you will have to listen very carefully to check, is there some sound or is there not? That will be the main question during seven years! - It reminds me a little of a piece by an artist called Katie Paterson, who modified a record player to play Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” at the speed of the Earth’s rotation. Then there’s a John Cage piece somewhere, being played on a modified organ… Yes, it’s in Germany. It’s a piece called “As Slow As Possible”, and the version that they started to do a few years ago is to last for 639 years. That’s quite a long composition! I just recently heard a timestretched version of a song by Justin Bieber, like a three-hour version, and it’s… really ambient! Very beautiful, and the voice sounds like a choir… - Nathan Thomas
Peter Broderick & Nils Frahm: Soly Spoken Words From The Nave
The so-called ‘modern classical’ scene has furnished the world with a number of interesting and highly praised artists in recent years, but few have garnered a wider or more devoted following than Peter Broderick and Nils Frahm. Their respective solo work has charmed and delighted listeners of many different stripes, as has their recent collaborative release under the name Oliveray. It is perhaps only when seen in live performance, however, that the depth of their talent – and the strength and vivacity of their friendship – becomes apparent. We talked to the pair before their rapturously received concert at the Ambientfestival “Zivilisation der Liebe” in the old basilica of St. Aposteln, Cologne. Mass was being celebrated in the nave next door, so we had to keep our voices down… 2011 was a very productive year for both artists, with solo releases, their first album together as Oliveray, and a number of collaborations and live performances – a heavy schedule that suggests many nights spent working into the wee small hours. “We both could use a little more sleep than we’ve been getting…” remarks Broderick, prompting laughter. “Your weekends are always kind of erased from the schedule,” Frahm agrees. “You never know when you’re working and when you have time off. Even when you travel on a beautiful ferry ride from Copenhagen to
Berlin, you’re actually working but on the other hand it’s travelling. I visited Ólafur Arnalds for a couple of days in Iceland, and I was like, “….WOW! It’s amazing!” People say, “oh, you’re so busy!”, and it’s like, “yeah, but it’s also been pretty mellow”. “It is like ‘holiday/work’,” Broderick explains with a smile. Did any particular moments stand out from last year? “For me a highlight was definitely that we put out the Oliveray record,” Frahm says. “And also Peter invited me to come to Japan with him – that started the whole Oliveray idea, really. The contact [in Japan] asked if we were interested in bringing a tour CD or something like that.” The pair are certainly not alone in facing an increasingly busy schedule of record releases, performances, and collaborative work, causing some to suggest that maybe there is too much pressure being placed on artists to produce new work. “I think there’s definitely something to be said about how quickly things move these days and how quickly things are forgotten,” Broderick asserts, “just because of the pace that keeps speeding up. But I don’t feel any kind of pressure. I feel more pressure to slow down, actually – that people are saying, “whoa, this is too much!”, you know, and that’s really got to my head at some point. And I thought “yeah, maybe it is a little too much”. And so
I started to try to make an effort to slow things down in the future. I mean there is just so much music out there that a lot of things get forgotten about really quickly.” With artists from all around the world making music with each other via the internet, it may appear that location is no longer such a restraint when it comes to finding a community of like-minded musicians. However, both Broderick and Frahm have consciously chosen to base themselves in Berlin. What does the city offer them that makes it such an attractive place to be a musician? “It’s cheap!” they immediately declare in chorus, to more laughter. Broderick expands: “It’s great for travelling around Western Europe. If you want to fly somewhere for a one-off show, you can get cheap flights pretty much anywhere, for short distances.” “A lot of people in Berlin seem to be looking for something,” Frahm muses. “They just live there from their midtwenties to their mid-thirties, and just have the drive to do stuff. And they might go, and new people come, and other people just stay for a couple of months… You can just stay there and wait for people to visit you. It’s pretty comfortable. And I think we also like to collaborate in one room. I’ve just totally stopped this, “can you play piano on this track for me?” business…”
Broderick quickly agrees. “Email collaboration was really fun when you first start to do it. But then I would have this thing where I’d be collaborating with someone over the Internet, working on a bunch of music, and then you meet them in person and they don’t have anything to say to you, you know. And it’s like, if you can’t even have a conversation in person then… I very much prefer to make music with someone when we have a good vibe together.” One suspects that it was the experience of working together that led them both to such a decision. Despite having only known each other for a relatively short time, it’s clear that a strong professional and personal bond has developed between the two, although they are by no means identical in terms of personality or musical background. Frahm’s dynamic approach to the piano is underpinned by many years of rigorous classical training, which prompts the question of what he has had to unlearn or re-imagine in order to keep on innovating. He sees things differently, however. “I think I never have to unlearn things,” he declares. “A lot of my playing is probably because I never finished learning. If you have the perfect classical style, you can change your style in many different ways – I only have mine. You can play Mozart like that [mimes playing soly] or like that [mimes playing heavy-handedly]. And so when you’re only a classical player you spend your whole life learning different costumes to wear, and different masks, so that you can play different roles – like any good actor. I realised it’s too much to deal with, and way too hard at school. And so I
stopped, and figured that I have enough intuition to just know what I like and not. So I just use that instead.” Broderick’s own musical journey is in many ways very different. Inspired by a musical family, he picked up skills on a whole range of instruments, and this diverse approach has slowly come to characterise both his recorded and live output. Without a clear focus on a single instrument, as is the case with Frahm and the piano, this arguably makes the question of instrumentation much more pertinent. “Well, I think the first real solo record I made, called “Float”, at that time I knew that I wanted to make this music that was based around piano and strings,” Broderick recalls. “Even though I played these other instruments I just wanted to use those. And at that time I thought maybe that’s the type of music I want to make, and the sound I want to have for a long time. But aer I made “Float” I started to play live shows, and when I was onstage I realised I also like to sing and play guitar. So on the next record I said, ok, let’s see if I can make one without piano and strings, and then one thing kind of led to another. Most of the time there aren’t really any rules. If I’m working on a score project, sometimes they tell me, “ok, we want a score with piano and strings” or something. Otherwise I just kind of use whatever feels right. With the latest record I just finished, I made a conscious decision not to make any rules, and to just use whatever instrument feels right for the song.” At this point Frahm interjects: “But also when you were travelling a lot you were
writing songs on whatever instrument you were finding in places… ” “That’s the thing, yeah, whatever was there,” Broderick agrees. “If I don’t have a piano available then I’m going to write songs on the guitar instead.” With “Wonders”, the pair’s debut album as Oliveray, Broderick and Frahm have managed to capture some of the intimacy and directness experienced when two musicians with complimentary approaches work together in the same room. However, it is in live performance that their shared creative spark really ignites. “That was also the purpose, to write some songs which we could recreate live,” Frahm states. Broderick agrees. “Some of them were definitely just improvisation,” he explains. “What we do onstage is also improvisation, but it’s not really going to be the same thing. But some of the more ‘singy’ songs we do for sure.” Judging by their performance in the cavernous, reverberate hall of St. Aposteln, it is to be hoped that this partnership will continue to inspire both artists for many years to come. - Nathan Thomas