Disquiet

[ October 20, 2003 / bookmark ]

Through a Microphone, Darkly

C. Reider is a one-man game of telephone. The voices that enter his recording devices exit entirely transformed. Almost invariably, what was said in the first place is altered beyond any sort of verbal comprehension. There are instances on the opening track of his recent Aughtet album (Vuzh Music) where, amid the sub-bass rumblings, a distant human utterance might be identifiable, but it’s a voice on the far end of an extremely bad extension. You can sense the anxiety, but you cannot discern the cause. Of course, Reider has such control over his source material that he could probably make the most erudite politician sound like a patient at an Asperger Syndrome clinic. For all we know, the voice on this track is reading saccharine poetry from a Hallmark card.

Since the advent of the mobile phone, it’s become abundantly apparent that proximity and clarity are no longer directly proportional. For that reason, even the most alien sounds on Aughtet may ring more true than the false promises of Sprint and Verizon spokespeople. Reider’s sound art revels in the everyday dissonance of the overheard and the misheard. Aughtet’s second track begins with a tantalizingly false promise. The word “siblings” sounds loud and clear, but what is subsequently spoken is chopped, cut, garbled and mix-matched into a mosaic of broken syllables, even the vowels fractured into harsh, otherworldly consonants. Reider plays many games with his chosen sounds. On “Lumchumble,” a giggle and a “huh” flit in and out, repeated like a stuttered mumble. He embraces the almost purely rhythmic on “Narh Narh.” Several tracks bring to mind the gender-bending games of early Laurie Anderson multimedia performance art, others the nonsense mouth-play of Charles Schulz cartoon adults and Jerry Lewis comic antics, but they’re just as likely untouched surveillance tapes of Wookie psychoanalysis sessions. “Organic Machinery C 3,” looped like a deep, beat-less techno track, pushes voices beyond any identifiable human tone, but the best work here may be where a voice, however remotely, makes itself heard, as on “Vian II-V,” which reproduces something close to the cumulative rush of crowd-speak. These are the half-remembered narratives from nightmares, warped like the faces in Francis Bacon paintings.

[ October 18, 2003 / bookmark ]

Laptop Concert in Tokyo Nest

At a club called Shibuya Nest in Tokyo, Japan, on February 9 of 2003, Christian Fennesz, who records under his last name, took the stage with his laptop and let loose three quarters of an hour of sublimation and noise. The event is now available as full-length CD, Live in Japan, from the Tokyo-based label Headz. Aside from one fadeout half an hour in, it’s a single continuous piece of music — continuous, but not homogenous by any means. What is beautiful in a familiar way about the recording (the occasional spurts of guitar, the squawking of birdsong, various lyrical samples) is often muffled by layers of static and fuzz. And that static and fuzz, in turn, is often shaped into its own musical material — repeated, for example, until what sounds like interference becomes a riff; the experience is a bit like seeing enormous and threatening clouds overhead come to resemble faces and forms. (Throughout the record, various segments might be recognized by anyone who has heard Fennesz’s previous Endless Summer and Field Recordings albums.) His music thrives on its proximity to chaos, which is what makes it sublime. In contrast with cathartic work that openly embraces chaos, his has the detailed beauty of a carefully produced song, though that song may take several listens to hear, and the production several listens more to appreciate.

Almost seven minutes into Live in Japan (the disc contains one single track, 43 minutes in length), after a flurry of fuzz has settled down, an acoustic guitar surfaces tentatively to provide a distinct signal. The digital hubbub subsides, soothed like a pack of digital beasts, rabid robot scouts lured to the campfire by the promise of a lullaby. The hisses and crunches that had previously defined the recording seem to coalesce around the guitar, echoing or otherwise complementing the melody that’s being plucked and strummed. There’s an extent to which these fluctuations and irritants are welcome, since some of the guitar playing sounds like second-rate singer-songwriter mush. Twenty minutes or so in, as an electric guitar emerges, again it’s downright enticing how peculiar particulate sounds — bleeps like terse foghorns, scintillate like amplified fireflies — mesh with the guitar. On first listening, the noise can be little more than a distraction. But Fennesz has the unique ability to suggest an interplay between what is foreground and what is background, and how those two merge into one thick moment is what makes Live in Japan worth sitting through repeatedly. So heat up some sake, dim the lights, and sink in.

[ September 30, 2003 / bookmark ]

Improvising Trio Blends in Laptop

For the three free-improvising women of Mephista everything is in play, from instrumentation to the listener’s perceptions. An illusion persists throughout Black Narcissus (Tzadik) that more than three people are performing, thanks to the members’s broad range of techniques. Pianist Sylvie Courvoisier is as likely to pluck strings prepared with tape as she is to sound downright romantic, in the classical sense of the word. Susie Ibarra can lay on the drums with out-jazz soul, coming down hard with cantilevered rhythms, but she’s also prone to lose herself in her bag of percussive tricks, which is full of resounding bells and other rudimentary music-making objects. And then there’s Ikue Mori, whose choice of instrument — a laptop computer, with electronic accessories — firmly distinguishes the group amid free-improv’s largely analog international community. Technology also lends Mephista’s music a digital-age patina. Despite an earlier career as a drummer, Mori expresses more interest here in textural than propulsive elements; she employs synthesized haze and microscopic sonic particles, as well as the occasional goofy sci-fi effect. Her influence is often, for lack of a less clinical term, “contextual”: when her contribution resembles a misfiring hard drive, it’s dizzyingly uncertain to the audience what is being performed live, and what was ripped from a pre-existing recording. This is especially so with the traditional aspects of Courvoisier’s playing; when Mori cues the static, the piano can easily be mistaken for a sample. Overall, Mephista’s music will be familiar to fans of free improv and, therefore, disorienting to newcomers: the trio’s notes and noises forge associations that may make sense only on the third, or tenth, listen. Song form, furthermore, is summarily passed over for dream-state logic — the album’s cover art, tellingly, is a classic image from an earlier surrealist, the painter Salvador Dali.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the spring 2003 issue of e/i magazine.

[ September 30, 2003 / bookmark ]

Full-Length Debut for Electronica’s Arranger

In the liner notes for Memoryhouse (Late Junction), composer Max Richter explains the name of one piece, “Last Days,” as follows: “The title refers to the concept that our culture is living beyond the end of history.” It’s evident from the record’s outset that when Richter says “culture” he means “Western classical music,” for which Memoryhouse is a requiem — or, better yet, a much-needed kick in the pants disguised as a requiem. Richter is no throwback. His orchestrations graced the drum’n'bass of Roni Size’s In the MØde, and he handled various old-world musical duties for Future Sound of London’s psychedelic album, The Isness. His brand of composed music is “post-rock” in the purely chronological sense. John Cage is dead, his wizened recorded voice heard here in a scintillating setting, on “Garden (1973).” The minimalism of Philip Glass is not an idiosyncratic style but a rich form ripe for adoption, whether in a piano duet (”The Twins [Prague]”), or full orchestral grandeur (”Last Days”). And baroque music, as Richter notes, will more likely remind listeners of the Beatles’s Abbey Road than of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He seems obsessed, to our benefit, with how the past is a matter of perception. On one track, “Quartet (1908),” he plays his music through a valve amp to simulate a 78-rpm record; on another, “Untitled (figures),” he pumps out modern digital pulses to accompany a celesta, thus making that antique sound utterly contemporary. Richter has the ability to reconcile a conservatory-trained composer’s attention to melody and counterpoint with a sound designer’s attention to timbre and production, a rare combination of pursuits and skills. He challenges us to listen through raindrops on “November” in order to focus on his light, sustained string arrangements, and we follow him through the haze, in a splendid trance.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the spring 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

[ September 30, 2003 / bookmark ]

Music for 8 Blessedly Servile Guitarists

On 8 Guitars (Quecksilber), the music chugs along like a minimalist locomotive. It builds steam within minutes, and then maintains its pace intently. Fans of the monastic repetitions of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, not to mention of Philip Glass and Gavin Bryars, are sure to recognize here a pop-music analog to those composers’ late-period classical inventions. As in their work, 8 Guitars functions as a Western gloss on Eastern conceptions of space and sound — a realm in which melodies and tunes and linear development are given over entirely to timelessness. But instead of Glass’ opera orchestrations and Bryars’ chamber arrangements, we have the iconic tool of rock’n'roll: the electric guitar. And we have it in large amounts. The name on the album sleeve is that of Scott Horscroft, though he doesn’t play any of the guitars. (Horscroft is probably the guy pictured on the record cover seated at a mixing board.) The eight guitarists — among them Oren Ambarchi and Brendan Walls — play with such selfless devotion to the mantra rhythms assigned them by Horscroft, that their interlaced patterns often suggest as many as a dozen more guitars. The sounds chime and shimmer, they huff and whir, so many strings working individually and collectively — not according to the organized flight pattern of an orchestra’s string section, but with the tightly controlled mayhem of a hive mind in action.

Now, the guitar symphony, for that is what this is, is nothing new. Glen Branca organized them as early as 1979, and groups as distinct as the Allman Brothers, with their Southern-rock jams, Judas Priest, with its hard-rock twin leads, and Sonic Youth, which inherited Branca’s New York art-world torch, have done much to promote the sound of guitars working in unison. Horscroft owes these folks a debt of gratitude, and not just for their having suggested such an experiment; there’s a naturalness to the sound on 8 Guitars that has to do with it simply having come long after these other musicians had broken new ground, and then let the ground settle. It goes without saying that the electric guitar served rock well, but it can be refreshing to hear it in a different context. And the difference between Horscroft’s intent and that of, say, AC/DC guitarist Angus Young is clear. In the traditional classic-rock song, the peak moment is a uniform and consensual resolution, a single instance primed by a standardized sequence of alternating verses and choruses, shared by all listeners at the height of a given riff. On 8 Guitars, an epiphany may occur at any moment — and, if the listener’s ear and mood are so attuned, for an extended moment.

[ August 19, 2003 / bookmark ]

Three Tracks Beat as One

Over six years passed between an evening in late January 1997, when Colin Bradley slow-burned the air during a Manchester, England, concert performance, and early 2003, when he made recordings from that show available on CD for the first time. It’s a lovely EP, even before you pop it in your CD player — a modest 3″ CD, slipped into a full-size, bleach-white, corrugated-cardboard CD sleeve, looped by a glossy-paper band displaying Bradley’s prolific moniker, Dual; the set’s title, Pace (CEE); and the terse titles of its three tracks, “auxpin,” “chpstk” and “pyrrhic.” (All three were performed with the assistance of Sean Reynard, and the third is co-credited to Julian Coope.) Pace is three tracks of industrial ambience for which the guitar serves as the primary sound source, that being Dual’s code of honor, its modus operandi. On other recordings, more recent ones, Dual has milked the guitar for its soft curves, for the way both the guitar strings and the instrument’s feedback have an inherently natural sound to them — the cycles of the sine waves, the hazy edges and ambiguous shapes that evade all but the most patient and craft-minded of digital synthesists. Bradley finds so many sounds in his guitar, the tender pizzicato as “pyrrhic” fades out, the scratches that irritate the opening track’s dub-like zone. Pace is three tracks in name only. Track one, “auxpin,” doesn’t fade into “chpstk” so much as bleed into it, its thought-level buzz continuing on as a somewhat lifelike beep and a distant, coastal hum become prominent. And “chpstk” doesn’t fade into track three so much as it sounds, at the end of track two, as if the performers were cleaning up after themselves in preparation for their “pyrrhic” close. There’s a smattering of loose noises, of objects moved around, of small occurrences that cannot all have been pre-planned. Fans of Han Bennink’s brand of “European free improvisation” will hear resemblances to his favor for wild chance clutter, the everyday percussion of dropped objects and nervous activity. Fans of typical electronic ambient music may be confused by the theatricality of these recordings, especially the way “chpstk” sounds like footsteps, like tentative movement. If so, “pyrrhic” offers some respite in its gently layered long tones, its high-pitched gossamer. But the three tracks should be heard together, because their various elements complement each other. Pace is reportedly the first in a series of three, and the next two are eagerly awaited.

[ July 7, 2003 / bookmark ]

Different Kinda Vocal Album

Though the vast majority of electronic music is instrumental (that is, vocal-less), some of the best compositions take as their base a snippet of something spoken — be it the loops of Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” the hobo’s hymn in Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus’s Blood Never Failed Me Yet,” the “overheard” dialog of Scanner (ripped from the airwaves), the cut-up speech of Scott Johnson (John Somebody, Patty Hearst) or even the random, canned hip-hop shout-out from the Chemical Brothers. Rapoon is the pseudonym behind which Robin Storey works his studio magic. On I Am a Foreigner (Soleilmoon), various squelched voices, rarely more than a moan, surface amid a variety of textures. On “Via,” the title word is taken, reportedly, from a “Teach Yourself Italian” tape, and what we get is a heavenly choir of disembodied voices above the scratching of a locked-groove vinyl album. On “Horizons Endless,” what seems to be a muted choir, as if heard through a thick church wall, reveals itself to be but a few seconds of sampled vocal sound. As the sample loops, its edge, the point at which the splice is evident, takes on a rhythmic purpose, as if like one of Michael Jackson’s hiccups. And then, bizarrely, the sound is overlaid with what seems to be a Jew’s harp, all bouncy fun, albeit minor-key. Inevitably the voices fade back in, just in time for the whole piece to fade out. Many of the pieces on I Am a Foreigner make similarly peculiar transitions; “Dusk Moon” starts out with reverberating piano, only to be transformed into a Tangerine Dream-style staccato movement. Even on repeated listenings, I Am a Foreigner challenges you to find your place in its mass of found voices and sounds. A background sample from one track becomes the core material of another; tracks change mood at midway points. The result is disorienting, but no one promised it would be easy. If only a “Teach Yourself Rapoon” companion volume were available.

[ July 7, 2003 / bookmark ]

Schematic Records Sampler

The latest various-artists collection from Schematic Records, the label’s fourth, is a kind of anti-compilation. Other than its self-effacingly — and self-consciously — bland title, Well-suited for General-purpose Audio Work, the volume provides little else in the way of explanation for itself. For example, though the CD booklet is a gatefold, the interior spread is blank. What little text there is lists the titles of the collection’s 13 tracks, the names of contributing artists and the details of publishing rights. The only other bit of text serves as a kind of subtitle, “Adorable survival music by Phoenicia, Richard Devine, Otto Von Schirach and Dino Felipe of the Schematic Music Company.” Inexplicably, that list excludes several other contributors to the project, including Kiyo, Tipper (remixed by Phoenicia), Canibal A:fraux (remixed by Devine) and Monica De Miguel (assisting Shirach). And furthermore, the track listing for the LP and CD editions diverge; not only is the sequence different, but both the LP and the CD contain exclusive tracks. In the world of electronic music, Ezra Pound’s modernist mantra “Make it new” has long since given way to “Make it difficult” — but as demanding as the Schematic crew’s shenanigans can be, they regularly reward listeners’ patience. Phoenecia’s “Homosote” layers just enough doomy haze above the burbling rhythm track to make for an interesting tangle of elastic syncopation. Dino Felipe’s “Dead Wild Horses” makes the most of its five minutes, moving from a stuttering opening through an ever-altering mix of industrial sounds and flippy sound effects before settling back down again, as if the track itself has been worn out by its effort. Kiyo’s “Philiter,” the album’s seemingly final entry, is perhaps its strongest, first building a cautious beat and then dispensing with it, and leaving only the overlay to last for the track’s nearly five minutes — and if you hold on long enough, about 10 minutes after the song ends there’s a “bonus” cut with synthesized strings and a rap that reads like an avant-electronic answer to Eminem’s brand of drama.

[ April 25, 2003 / bookmark ]

Widescreen Ambient Music

Over the course of four full-length CDs, Steve Roach’s Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces (Projekt, 2003) extends itself beyond the traditional realm of music. The sheer mass of sound — in terms of length as well as depth — is a challenge for listeners hung up on such arcane concerns as “song” or, for that matter, “melody.” Roach refutes such preconceptions with a ritual hum that will resonate in the body cavity and the imagination as much as it will in the ear.

These four CDs are the result of Roach’s long-running communion with his computer, which is no less a tool in his ambient toolbox than are his deeply echoing electric guitar or his pulsing, aboriginal didgeridoo. For more than 20 years, Roach has probed sounds for their essence, recording over 50 solo and collaborative albums in the process. Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces was made on a computer, but it is not computer music, per se. It is indifferent to the metronomic synchronization inherent in most digital media. Instead, Roach pulls pure cloudstuff from his sonic source material, sounds that never quite begin or end, but just float and flow.

The album alternates between existential epiphanies and industrial dread, and it’s a triumph of widescreen ambient music that defies the listener’s sense of proportion and scale. At a low volume, it’s an aural scent, a background flavor; played loud, though, it’s a whole other world, reproduced with detail and precision. Despite this otherworldly aura, at times figments from our world surface, as with the birdsong that enlivens the track “Wren and Raven.”

[ April 25, 2003 / bookmark ]

Mille Plateaux Debut from Canadian Glitch-meister

Glitch is the word, have you heard? The term “glitch” is shorthand for the use, by electronic musicians, of bits of sonic material that mimic the sounds associated with everyday technology that has ceased functioning effortlessly. The most common example of glitch in pop music is what sounds like the repetitive skipping of scratched CDs. This tenacious electronica technique — found in music by Oval, Autechre, Matmos and many others — is less a genre than it is a flavor. And in the hands of Tim Hecker, glitch is more than just an Information Age trope — it’s got move, it’s got meaning. Hecker can turn what sounds like a broken record into a background groove, and he can make those repetitions sound less like echoes and more like premonitions — less like a reflexive mechanical effect and more like a compositional salvo. On the opening track of Presents Radio Amor (Mille Plateaux, 2003), “Song of the Highwire Shrimper,” the glitchy repetition comes in the form of single notes that ping slowly in a kind of decay, or quite suddenly as if something has short-circuited and a switch is being flicked on and off with great anxiety. Hecker has managed to find in this repetition a common ground with solo piano music — not only the minimalism of Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, but the romantic etudes of a century or two earlier. His repetitions almost always have an arc, and when that arc is slow it has the elegance of a rolling object coming gently to rest. In terms of sheer hyperactivity, the album’s eighth track, “The Stair Compass,” is its most glitch-intensive — with all that quiet buzzing, it could easily accompany a documentary about termite infestation. Hecker’s trick is that his sounds, for all their furious friction, meld into something as soft as wool. The track that follows, “Azure Azure,” has the same sort of textural, almost visceral, richness, but it achieves this with a more monotonic haze.