Disquiet

[ 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.

[ April 11, 2003 / bookmark ]

Around the World in 54 Minutes

Big Ben, or another London clock tower quite like it, bangs at the opening of Sound Polaroids (Bip-Hop), an album credited to Scanner + Tonne. The record contains five tracks that take field recordings from specific cities and transform them into music — or, allowing for an absence of traditional melody in favor of a montage-like effect, what is referred to as “sound art.” There may not be another sample on the album as self-evident as the Big Ben gong, but verisimilitude is not the Sound Polaroids album’s apparent goal. If the point were merely to reproduce a city, we’d have documentary footage. Instead, what we get is a grab bag of sound, somewhere between the random exigencies of memory and the fluid spectrum of channel surfing, all filtered through varied signals and noises.

Sometimes, such as toward the end of the “Milano Mix,” this is akin to overlapping ham radio channels, with snatches of conversations doing battle with static. More often, the sampled real world is splayed atop the rhythms of clubland. In “Tokyo Mix,” for example, overheard Japanese chatter cements the location at the track’s opening, but that momentary comfort — that sense of orientation — is upended with a sudden downward shift in tone; we’re taken underground, or so it feels, as the beat takes on the jitters of chronic arrhythmia and the music becomes foreboding. A sixth track, simply titled “Tonne Mix,” offers no specific locale. The NYC track is credited, at least in part, to Stephen Vitiello, whose pre-9/11 recording of a creaky World Trade Center was included on the CD of the Whitney Museum’s 2002 Biennial Exhibition.

Scanner is Robin Rimbaud, who made his reputation with a series of recordings that lent atmospheric musical backdrops to conversations ripped from thin air thanks to a police scanner, hence his moniker. That agenda is alive and well in this collaboration, which projects each city as a hallucinatory sum of its suggestive aural parts. Tonne is Studio Tonne, aka Paul Farrington, who provided technological services to Springheel Jack, Monolake and others before producing his own recordings and performances. Like Brian Eno’s hour-long Thursday Afternoon CD, Scanner + Tonne’s Sound Polaroids album is merely the isolated sound of a multimedia presentation, but it easily stands on its own. The live performance from which the album is drawn involved interactivity on the part of the audience, who could influence the installation by way of “clapping, shouting, stamping their feet,” according to the album’s brief liner notes.

[ April 11, 2003 / bookmark ]

R2D2’s Idea of Dance Music

“You can’t beat radio,” says an upbeat voice at the start of the song “Radio,” the opening track of Oki-Doki’s eight-song album Vila Kula, on the Denmark-based Jenka Music label — the same folks who previously gave us the strong debut of Sofus Forsberg. What follows is R2D2’s idea of dance music: florescent baubles of synthesized pop that rush by with the effervescence of a fountain drink and the bright colors of a spring fashion show. If “Radio” is all beeps and burps, then “Jenka,” the track that follows it, vastly defies initial expectations. “Jenka” may start with a lullaby melody and rhythm, the sort of thing that accompanies battery-operated mobiles — but less than a minute in, a few gentle pauses make way for a far more ambitious composition. Not only does that synthesized beep of a melody calm down — a few key notes providing a thoughtful riff — but about two thirds of the way through the song, what sounds like an electric guitar solo quietly appears and slowly veers close to the foreground. The solo is just the sort of thing that might have spiced up a Steely Dan song way back when.

It’s downright energizing to hear what Oki-Doki manages to do with the simplest of sounds, just the sort of enjoyably saccharine pitter patter that will remind listeners of Trio (famous for the pointillist oldie, “Da Da Da”); despite the music’s playpen palette and its echo of new-wave pop, there’s nothing infantile about it. On a track titled “PW,” the tune is rendered with just enough verve to leave it up to the listener’s imagination as to whether it’s being played by hand, or if it is simply being triggered by a pre-programmed computer. Occasionally, acoustic elements make their presence heard, as with the guitar that is eventually outlined with electric beats on “Pop the Catfish.” Simply put, you can’t beat Oki-Doki’s Vila Kula.

[ January 31, 2003 / bookmark ]

Wide-Ranging Denmark Debut

There is a moment on NO/1, the solo debut album by Sofus Forsberg on the Denmark-based Jenka Music label, as fine as anything released this year. Well into track three, which is titled “Autotune Track,” a little buzz shuffles its way from background into the foreground. Up until that moment the track has consisted of squiggly noises and playful beats, very much like something Aphex Twin might put his name on. That little buzz is just static, additional texture, noise. It may raise the tension a little, but it’s not so much in tune or out of tune as it is apart from the tune, like something passing by, like a fleck of dust in the eye. As soon as your ear accepts it as such, though, that noise turns into a melody very much like the melody with which the tune opened; that strange little noise warps into a strange little riff, bringing to mind nothing so much as the magical anthropomorphizing utensils in Walt Disney animated films. NO/1 is rich with such detail. There’s the deep hum on “So Alone” that can feel like a scalp massage if you’re listening on a proper pair of headphones. There’s the bouncy stereoscopic play at the start of “Venice Beach,” in which reverberating tones bound from left ear to right in a delightful syncopation. Forsberg has produced 11 fine tracks, which share an attention to memorable moments but otherwise vary widely, from heavy percussive polyrhythm to spacious drone to quiet song. When he uses acoustic instruments, like the piano at the end of “Convertible Love” or what sounds like guitar at the start of “Det Ser Vi Pa,” the sounds are lightly treated — clipped or looped — in a way that blends them perfectly into his electro-acoustic palette. He recorded most of the music himself, but there are a few guests — there’s the occasional vocal by Henriette Sennenvaldt, who has Bjork’s majestic remoteness, and there’s the occasional saxophone part by Niels Bottcher, the rare untreated analog instrument in this sea of digital sounds, and just about the only thing to suggest the record was recorded on Earth.

[ January 31, 2003 / bookmark ]

Two Guitars, One Thick Tone

Keith Rowe and Oren Ambarchi play a mix of guitar and electronics on Flypaper (Staubgold), an exhilaratingly stark album, if such a thing is possible. Their tandem playing has the randomness of field recordings, the spaciousness of great soundscapes and the give-and-take of substantive free improvisation. Flypaper is a pan-generational affair, teaming old-school avant-guitarist Rowe (b. 1952) with a guitarist of a younger generation, Ambarchi (b. 1969), who besides a rich resume of free/noise music has experience in today’s experimental pop-electronic realm, largely as a result of his association with the Touch label (which is home to, among others, Fennesz, who has done his part to make the electric guitar at home in the modern realm of the laptop-computer studio). Over the course of four tracks, “Flypaper I” through “Flypaper IV,” Rowe and Ambarchi tread rarified territory, eking out granular layers of dread and texture, and keeping to stoic rhythms that tend toward the ritual. Rowe can be a tough guitarist to love, because the sounds he himself loves are generally abrasive, and he seems bored by playing the same thing twice. That said, he’s more than happy to play the same thing — a shuddering low tone, a buzzy rasp — for minutes at a time, and to let that thing resolve on its own accord. Only a diehard fan could begin to imagine where he lets off and where Ambarchi comes in, so intimate is their deeply sensitive sense of ensemble and their weighty patience.

[ January 31, 2003 / bookmark ]

Nortec Collective Sequel

The soundtrack to Frontier Life (Accretions Records), a documentary about Tijuana directed by Hans Fjellestad, is an unofficial sequel to the Nortec Collective’s 2001 album, Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 1. The Sessions collection made many folk’s top-10 lists that year with its assortment of the city’s digital-dance acts, including Fussible, Terrestre and Hiperboreal. Frontier Life crosses the border by mixing Nortec acts with those of San Diego’s Trummerflora Collective. In many ways, it’s a better record than Tijuana Sessions: darker, deeper, never remotely frivolous. The act Panoptica, which was downright house-y on Sessions, is decisively downbeat — make that downtrodden — here, on a song titled “Aguasnegras en Dub.” To say the track is stripped down understates how much was left behind. The track is hard and slow, a heavy downbeat that leaves behind an opening trill in favor of concerted, sullen, punch-in-the-gut beats. By the end the music has splintered into a lonely echo chamber. And the Panoptica track’s length, at close to seven minutes, gives the act (a pseudonym for Roberto Mendoza) a lot of space in which to make those musical transitions.

Discar’s “Iofobia,” the album’s opening song, fulfills the desire for spaghetti-Western drama. And “Com Com,” by Las Cajas del Ritmo, brings a border-party feel to the kind of ascetic pointillism we’ve come to expect from Japanese aesthetes like Ryoji Ikeda and minimal-house stars like Plastikman. Director Fjellestad provides some beautiful ambient background music with his “Phone Damage,” a tenuously held together array of found sounds and held tones. The same could be said of “Ensemble Circuits,” a slightly more invasive bit of minimalism credited to Point Loma. Not that you can’t dance to all of Frontier Life, but even the most rhythmically straightforward tracks, like Clorofila’s “El Animal,” have a sense of purpose that keeps them from becoming lounge fodder.