Category: the crate

It’s hard to know what some deep-pocketed audiophiles might make of freq_out, a compilation on Ash International Records of art music seemingly crafted for effete dogs — high-pitched experimental music that was commissioned for, in the immortal phrase of songwriter Gus Kahn, high-tone places. The set’s 12 original tracks feature upper-register sound sculptures by a broad range of contributors (there’s also a 13th ensemble track), including J.G. Thirwell (aka Foetus), taking a break from the more pedestrian sounds of industrial rock, and Brandon LaBelle, among others. The album is an artifact of an installation at a gallery in Copenhagen from June of last year, in which artists were given frequency ranges in which to play around. The results are much more varying than one might imagine, though judging from the cacophony of Jana Winderen‘s track, it seems like someone didn’t read the instructions carefully. PerMagnus Lindborg turns in bent tones like thick wind, while LaBelle makes fun, stereophonic, pixilated funk, bouncing little beats back and forth. Thirwell, like Winderen, doesn’t seem to adhere to a particularly narrow frequency range, but the his multi-faceted track, highlighted by chugging ritual music on a miniscule scale, is worth the price of admission on its own. The remainders range from Star Trek special effects to pure immersive sound design. As for those audiophiles in question? Faced with sounds more likely dismissed as errors than readily identified as music, they’d probably freak out.

The compilation Active Suspension vs. Clapping Music, featuring acts from both those two Parisian record labels, is an album to get lost in repeatedly. From futuristic campfire music to robotic hip-hop, from sad and damaged pop songs to self-described “interstellar folk,” its two CDs are just packed with epiphanies, piled high with them, like so many angels doing mass tai chi on the head of a pin. For fans of ambient/electronic music, a wealth of soprano drones are among the richest surprises. My Jazzy Child‘s “Barcelona, Something in Mind” is like the lightest, most enchanting Low song recorded, endlessly chanty, with a running hum of tight harmony — like something the Roaches, that wonderful minimalist folk trio, might have recorded had they been mentored by Aphex Twin rather than Robert Fripp. Noak Katoi‘s “Aérienne des rêve infinis” likewise takes its steps daintily and solemnly at the same time. It seems impossible to overstate the beauty of those two tracks.

In addition to this music for music’s sake are things more readily identifiable as songs that, nonetheless, fit in well with the refined surroundings — such as the Konki Duet‘s “In the Trees,” which has My Jazzy Child’s Roaches feel, with those tangy close harmonies and Renaissance Faire aura; but for all its coy verve, it has this sense of stasis that remains with you long after the track ends. Colleen‘s “Good Morning Sunshine” inserts jumbled, reverberating riffs, and its format tantalizes as it veers repeatedly away from song-ness. Domotic‘s “Pimmi” goes wide and deep, with a stunningly vibrant field of long tones, unidentifiable sound fragment stretched until they’re translucent. Still, it’s the songless tracks that make the strongest impression, like Shinsei‘s “Store bonheur, nue,” which plays light and slow with glitchy elegance, a swath of scintillates like light refracting in mist. Sogar‘s “Shinsei amateur remix” puts Shinsei through a blender, revving it up, but never tarnishing its grace. “Pour une flaque” by Davide Balula seems to start where Shinsei ends, making the segue to whispers, backward masking and a simple guitar figure. There’s more here than space allows for praise, but suffice to say that though the album is over a year old at this point, it deserves to be discovered anew.

Balula’s Pellicule is among Active Suspension’s most recent releases, and it is almost as varied as the label’s compilation, Active Suspension vs. Clapping Music, despite being the work of one man and a small handful of friends. Balula’s record has the sound of a folk singer camped out in a bomb shelter, strumming his guitar while the world gently weeps and the computer equipment around him fritzes in and out of working order — his Active Suspension vs. Clapping Music track “Pour une flaque” is heard here, followed by “Lorsqu’il n’est plus,” a track of unspeakable tentativeness, false start after false start; there’s even a montage of lightly treated field recordings, “Viens va-t-en.” The acts of outright Francophone pop, like “Eburn (9V),” the opening track, and “Iris em arco,” start plainly enough, only to have the electonica folded in as time passes, both prime evidence of the artful potential at that intersection of singer-songwriter indie rock and gadgety electronica.

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.

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.