Month: November 2015

There is little to no annotation associated with the audio that Brigid Feral posts at soundcloud.com/fferal. The closest she generally comes is a hashtag, such as the “#augmented lute” that appears on the page for her “Violet.” The source audio for her thoroughly transformed sounds can provide the distinguishing factoid, as in “Sound of Friend Peeing,” which, in case the title isn’t clear, has “#pee.” Much of the work she’s posted to SoundCloud starts with some specific sonic basis, and then goes somewhere else entirely. Recent live recordings by Feral, such as one from September 11, and another “Residuum,” posted in the past couple of weeks, use a female voice — presumably her own — as their point of origin.

In the first of these syllables give way to a stuttery beat. In the second there is a delightfully flowery, fluttering affect that is half human, half synthesized.

As for “Violet,” it has a dampened-industrial quality. What is being done to the lute is unclear, but the result is a battery of soft poundings: sawtooth waveforms with their edges rubbed off, beats like a mallet hitting a bag of wet feathers. The rhythm is insistent, but it’s enacted with purposefully unstable resources.

Now, there’s no lute pictured in Feral’s Instagram feed (instagram.com/fferal), but there is some excellent footage of her destroying a piano from the inside:

A video posted by bridget feral (@fferal) on Aug 19, 2015 at 3:27pm PDT

“Violet” originally posted at soundcloud.com/fferal. (Update November 28, 2015: The one recorded on September 11, “Body Chaos,” has been renamed simply “Body Chaos,” and as a result the track link changed. It’s been fixed here.)

Daniel W J Mackenzie’s Four Places for Piano will likely be misread as Four Pieces for Piano. There’s a blurry glimpse of one of the title instruments on the album’s cover. As for whether the piano actually played an active role in the recording of the album, that’s a far more blurry topic. Four Places for Piano is four pieces of long-form, slowly modulating drones. It opens with the highlight, “Diocleia,” which has several pulses set against each other, most noticeably a bell-like ringing that arrives every eight seconds or so. Other elements run through more quickly or more slowly, but that bell tone is the heart of it. At almost 11 minutes in length, “Diocleia” lets the ears fall prey to various cross-pollinations of meter and tone.

Each track on Mackenzie’s Four Pieces for Piano is noticeably distinct from the others, and yet any one of them, once you get three or four minutes in, can, as with much drone music, sound like the background noise of an electrical substation. The similarities are an illusion. Part of the pleasure of Four Pieces for Piano is listening not just within a track, but between them. “Duklja” has more of a sense of urgency than the others; it grows as time passes, occasionally pushing the waveforms into something rough-edged. “Zeta” has an even more pronounced bell than “Diocleia,” here like a carillon caught in a loop. And “Podgorica” distinguishes itself with a slow, crunchy beat amid its already noisy churn.

Album posted at urbanartsberlin.bandcamp.com. More from Mackenzie, who also goes by Ekca Liena, at danielwjmackenzie.com.

Machinefabriek turned the tables on his own production technique. As described in an advance notice, his forthcoming release with saxophonist Neil Welch began as a one-way affair. He was to provide a foundation (a “backing track,” in the official release language) for Welch to improvise upon. However, upon receiving Welch’s responsive work, Machinefabriek proceeded to work upon it some more. The result, as heard in this four-minute advance listen of an eventual 38-minute release, to be titled Tides, makes any discernment between background and foreground imprecise at best. There is a dense blur between the original work and what Welch provided. In part this is because Welch’s work is often heard with several parts layered in a manner that an individual player couldn’t achieve live, except with looping equipment. In part it’s because the horn often dissolves into the greater noise, leading to something akin to John Zorn fronting a Ligeti concerto. But the real beauty of the resulting piece is how segments of Welch’s work were themselves improvised upon by Machinefabriek, who took the nuances and used them as source audio for his own efforts. Welch’s work was, in turn, as much a foundation for Machinefabriek’s efforts as was Machinefabriek’s for Welch’s. It would be interesting, down the road, to be able to listen to what it was that Machinefabriek sent to Welch in the first place.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/machinefabriek. More from Welch at neilwelch.com, and from Machinefabriek, aka Rutger Zuydervelt, at machinefabriek.nu. The full album is due apparently from Confront, though it isn’t yet showing on the label’s website (confrontrecordings.com).