Category: the crate

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.

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.

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.