Imperial Distortion was the album that opened a lot of people's ears to multi-dimensional sound tactician Kevin Drumm; yet the artist himself had admitted some self-doubt in regards to that 2008 release. He did eventually recognize the subtle power of Imperial Distortion's isolationist pall; and the relative popularity of Imperial Distortion led him to follow up that album with Imperial Horizon, another masterful album of bleak, shapeless dronescaping. With Tannenbaum, Drumm returns once again to the ambient strategies of those two previous albums. And while Hospital Productions situates the album within the realm of 'malign electronics,' Drumm's timbral choices are golden, warm, and nocturnally rich; and there's not much of a threat to be heard within the near two hours of glacially paced dronemuzik. The hour long "Nightside" is perfect dreamtime music, with not-quite static drone subtly undulating toward a chord change that slowly creeps into the realm of perception some 32 minutes in, only to ebb back towards a glistening shimmer of lush ambience. Much more akin to an Andrew Chalk album than anything close to what Prurient might have to say.
The second disc is comparatively more dynamic, although that's only due to the incorporation of near-silent passages at the beginning of the aptly named "Winter Ice" which adheres to an arcing composition that glides up to an elegant, melancholy plateau of fluttered electronic drone, hinting at something which may be a melody buried somewhere inside. "Taurean" follows the Phil Niblock approach to minimalism, "no melody, no rhythm, no bullshit" with its gilded set of tones that gracefully bends within a small axis of subtle variations. Another mighty fine, mighty beautiful album from Kevin Drumm.
The debut album from KD, reissued on vinyl for the first time and expanded with previously unreleased bonus material! Gorgeous cover (with embossed lettering), super heavy gatefold packaging, 180 gram vinyl, comes with digital download.
With an album title that sounds like it could be the name of the next Immortal record, this new release from Chicago guitar experimentalist Kevin Drumm takes the inspired-by-black-metal aesthetic of his recent Mego-label cd "Sheer Hellish Miasma" even further (what's he been doing, hanging out with Weasel Walter?). In fact, he teams up here with an actual Norwegian! Lasse Marhaug of noisy electronica act Jazzkammer joins Drumm for this live-in-Oslo session, his laptop computer vs. Drumm's guitar and analog synth. Their collaboration/clash results in some dark and droney sounds that are semi-appropriate to the apparent black metal concept, being generally quiet and creepy rather than massive or mayhemic. The guitar, when you can tell it's a guitar, is more Derek Bailey than Burzum. And the arctic winds evoked on here hiss rather than howl. But, there's no mistaking the simulation of the sinister crackling of burning churches, and perhaps even the twittering of malicious goblins in dark forests, via Drumm and Marhaug's electronics. So, of course, we love this. Leaving aside the black metal business, this is atmospheric ambient glitch drone improv at its best -- and most eeveeiil.
Chicago experimentalist Kevin Drumm has teamed up with Quebecois turntablist Martin Tetreault for spartan duet for delicate pings, plucks, whirs, scrapes, and other particulate matter that have all been recorded as dryly as possible with a deadening silence surrounding each and every sound. If Bernhard Gunter tried to make a record of his ultra-quietness using live instruments, it might sound like this.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Quiet and sparse guitar improvisations akin to Derek Bailey's more contemplative moments.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We imagine it's quite a rare occurrence when Kevin Drumm gets outnoised on a record. By anyone! But it looks like it's finally happened on this here split. That's not to say Mr. Drumm is not noisy here, he most certainly is, it's just that in this case, 2673 are a bit noisier. Drumm's side of this lp is a thick slab of buzzing rhythmic insectoid electronics, chopped and shuffled and assembled in such a way that it sounds almost techno-like, pounding and stuttering out an impossibly complex rhythm, before a suffocating swarm of high pitched squeals and beeps descend like some sort of seventies computer gone completely haywire. Unlike the first twenty minute blast of screech and stutter, the final few minutes are downright serene, an abstract soundscape of greys, distorted white noise smeared into blurry barely there melodies. Quite nice. 2673, who you may remember from their split with Unicorn a few lists back, definitely bring the noise here, with an opening salvo of shrieking squealing high pitched skree that had dogs down the block barking as we were listening to this. The rest of the side is less high end, but no less noisy, with massive slabs of crumbling distorted electronics and overblown loops of prickly feedback and speaker shredding crunch. Woah! In a beautiful sleeve designed by Steven O'Malley (of SUNN O))), Khanate, Burning Witch, etc.) that is even printed on the inside!
Not a collaboration but a split between Chicago's experimental guitarist Kevin Drumm and Vienna's powerbook cruncher Pita. As far as the Kevin Drumm side, this is the most accomplished piece that this Jim O'Rourke protege has released so far. Behind a muffled yet spartan clatter of metallic objects, Drumm situates a simple melancholic melody (perhaps a french horn, but more likely just a
Massive double cassette from Drunjus, a mystical magical offshoot of free noise folk outfit Davenport. Monstrous, thick, reverberating tones, like dragging a horsehair bow across the roof of the Astrodome, a dark deeply felt vibration, a subterranean string section, playing a single low low note, balanced by sections of full on chaotic skree, grinding warped guitars, blown out acid drenched psychedelic squalls, crunchy abstract clatter, a buzzy, blurry, speaker shredding sheet of corrosive trancelike urdrone. Double cassette wrapped in a hand screeened Japanese style obi.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!!!
When we first got this record in, we thought we had it totally figured out. Just take a look at the lineup: Tony Dryer, an accomplished double bassist and former touring member of the Flying Luttenbachers, Jacob Lindsay, local clarinet free-jazz virtuoso, and last but not least, Jacob Heule, a member of SF's only acoustic free/death/grind duo Ettrick! So naturally we figured this record would be a chaotic frenzy of fierce free jazzy madness. And while it is definitely loosely composed and rather abstract, the trio delve into some unexpected territory here. We checked out Heule's website and he describes the Idea of West as an album of "quiet and static acoustic musical territories explored through the pragmatic application of compositional and improvisational structures". Damn, and we thought we had this one figured out!
"In Order to Reroute the Wind" starts things off on a rather minimal note. Rickety scratching and scraping that sound like creaking boats swaying in a harbor of sizzling electric waste. Quiet industrial, barely there type of sound meanderings, a reserved and delicate sound for these ferocious free jazz contemporaries. On first listen, the jazz aesthetic of Idea of West is a bit hidden underneath a more ambient guise. Don't get us wrong, this sounds more like a jazz collaboration than a drone/ambient record, but it defiantly lacks the smack you in the face ferocity of other releases put out by these dudes. But that doesn't mean Idea of the West isn't an awesome piece of work in its own right. On the contrary, the trio confidently evolve Idea of West into a beautifully arranged aural invitation into a strange world of alchemic precision and skilled musicianship. Like a sorcerer who meticulously adds ingredients to a potion, paying careful attention to every detail in hopes of casting the perfect spell, these dudes play with close attention to detail. The record builds up and dissipates as the trio feed off each other's playing, letting chance determination sculpt their meditations into a hauntingly beautiful sonic narrative. Perfect for those of you aQ-addicts open to the weirder, more mystical side of free jazz!! And most certainly recommended by us!
One of a whole bunch of releases on our pal Jason's Oromolycka label on the list this week, everything from Middle Eastern booty bass, to Southern hip hop, minimal synth pop to witchy electro, and then there's this, a tape from a Brooklyn outfit called DubKnowDub, whose sound is a thick, noise drenched blown out downtempo avant dub, sort of. The beats are there, and they are definitely dubbed out, but they're buried beneath a roiling sea of super distorted loops, of layered drones, fractured samples, all blurred and smeared into woozy streaks of soft noise shimmer, and crunchy buzz, the noisiness peeling back now and again to reveal a loping groove underneath, the beats crumbling and chaotic, the sound constantly shifting from noisy and groovy, to lumbering and dense, to spaced out and skittery, it's the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from Kevin Martin's The Bug, or on one of those old Pathological comps, a twisted industrial dub, or warped minimal avant hip hop, but doused in some serious noise. Sweet shit for sure...
Another strange and mysterious collection of lost and forgotten musicks, perhaps the last volume (of four) in this series of archival recordings, collecting the very few existing performances and recordings that fall under the umbrella of a mysterious movement of musicians and composers known as�The Guild Of Funerary Violinists.�
Pierre Dubuisson was France's foremost Funerary Violinist, having made his name in the great funerary duels that became a bit of a fashion for a brief spell, where the deceased would leave a bit of melody to be performed after his death, two violinists would then improvise on the theme doing their best to wring more tragedy from the notes than their opponent, the winner of course was the one who drew the most tears from onlookers. Dubuisson eventually became president of the French branch of the Guild Of Funerary Violinists, and helped to integrate Funerary Violin into the Catholic ritual before disappearing under dubious circumstances during the infamous Funerary purges.�
These recordings were made by Pierre's grandson Jacques, who after running away from an abusive home and an overbearing father, was discovered playing some of his grandfather's pieces at a concert in 1913, by an archivist from the Biblioteque Nationale De France, who convinced Jacques to make wax cylinder recordings of some of his grandfather's recordings. Jacques is of course not the player his father was, or his grandfather before him, but the pieces carry their own powerful emotion which easily overcomes any sort of deficiencies in the performances.�
Oh, right, we always seem to forget the most important part, none of the above is true? Not a bit. Or is it? Hard to say. Or so a few of us think. Some here choose to believe (Mulder?) since the mythology is almost as fascinating and nuanced as the recordings, and imagining this lost art is so much more fun, while others are just happy to listen to this amazing music. And amazing it is. Perfectly and beautifully rendered to sound as old and antique as it most likely is not. Wailing, plaintive funereal laments on solo violin, sad and morose, lilting and so completely lovely, bathed in all manner of grit and hiss, fuzz and antique distortion, sounding like the old wax cylinders these recordings purport to be. Imagine some old timey violin music treated by Tim Hecker, and spun� in some ultra morose DJ set by Philip Jeck...
The music is so evocative, of dark clouds at dusk, rain swept fields, huge brooding stone houses, lush gardens beneath grey skies, and of course, funerals, and the slow stately trudge of the funeral procession to the grave site. We've gushed about pretty much every volume so far, and by now are probably just repeating ourselves, but we just love these discs, read the other Funerary Violinist reviews for more on the music and the mythology, and you'll realize just why it seems impossible to us to not fall totally in love with such a well executed piece of what ultimately amounts to performance art. The music, dark and delicate, creepy and so beautiful, even removed from the mythology is totally amazing, the story and the text is as well (there's even a book you can track down, detailing the entire recorded history of the Guild) but the two together, are simply magical....
This absolute classic is finally back in print!
Predating the inclusion of chance operations into modern composition by almost fifty years, these compositions by Marcel Duchamp (written in 1913) were recorded in 1976 by the S.E.M. Ensemble of New York.
Duchamp was a household word in art circles, and music seemed the least important of his various interests, yet he managed to create a small, but highly innovative body of work. Included here are two interpretations of Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even". One utilizes a chance system in which notes are represented by numbers written on balls which are selected as they pass through a funnel into the open cars of a toy train. The other is based on a a random selection of numbers, transcribed into notes and performed by player piano.
That's all well and good, but what does it sound like? Pretty amazing actually. This disc is worth buying for the first track alone, a gorgeous 25 minute piece, spacious and elegant, a dreamy sleepy swirl of chimes and their shimmering overtones. Absolutely gorgeous.
Predating the inclusion of chance operations into modern composition by almost fifty years, these compositions by Marcel Duchamp (written in 1913) were recorded in 1976 by the S.E.M. Ensemble of New York.
Duchamp was a household word in art circles, and music seemed the least important of his various interests, yet he managed to create a small, but highly innovative body of work. Included here are two interpretations of Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even". One utilizes a chance system in which notes are represented by numbers written on balls which are selected as they pass through a funnel into the open cars of a toy train. The other is based on a a random selection of numbers, transcribed into notes and performed by player piano.
That's all well and good, but what does it sound like? Pretty amazing actually. This disc is worth buying for the first track alone, a gorgeous 25 minute piece, spacious and elegant, a dreamy sleepy swirl of chimes and their shimmering overtones. Absolutely gorgeous.
Another missive of gloriously murky tropical lo-fi garage surf pop from Ducktails, aka Matt Mondanile, this cd collecting tons of older out of print material from cassettes: the '1992' demo, recorded in 2007, a split tape from a little later on and the way out of print Ducktails II.
Even more warped and warbly than the Not Not Fun full length, these tracks drift and float through a hazy sonic dreamworld, slipping from looped cassette tape psychedelic calypso, to moody, sludgey bedroom balladry, to fuzzy proto garage rock, to dizzying super distorted sonic collages, to far out glistening new wave sparkle, to disembodied otherworldly Appalachia, to lonely sun dappled country twang, to lush lo-fi drum machine driven power pop, to dark brooding minimal indie jangle, to cinematic, almost Morricone sounding soundscapery, to super distorted GBV sounding fractured fragmented ADD pop, to hushed spaced out new age shimmer, all held together by that weird warped production, which wreathes everything in a washed out muted glow, like someone turned down the treble, or cut up the tweeters in your speakers with an exacto knife, the result is muddy and blurry and smeary and so gorgeous.
And be sure to stick around for the 12+ minute closing track, merely an excerpt of a much longer track, but it could be our favorite, an extended slow burning space drone, layered and textured, super distorted and effected, growing more so as it unfurls, eventually the sound begins to blow out, the notes begin to crumble, revealing a warm glowing center, surrounded by slowly decaying buzz and crunch!
Here's some seriously warm, wobbly, surfy, tropical sounding lo-fi gems that have totally captured our attention! Dripping with such melty, melodic yet slightly tripped out perfection. Ducktails had a lot going for it before we even heard the music, the name obviously (!), the great cover art by Jan Anderzen (Kemialliset Ystavat) and the fact that it was mastered by Graham Lambkin of The Shadow Ring already lead us to believe there might be some kind of magic being brewed under the colorful, inviting cover, so we threw this on the stereo right away and it's been beyond the perfect soundtrack for the bright and sizzling sunshine days we've been baking in for the last couple weeks. Ducktails is the work of one person, Matt Mondanile who has found such a unique sound, melding elements of the lo-fi pop movement that came out of New Zealand in the '80s with a tropical undertone and wandering spirit that sounds like bits and pieces from some gem of a find on a Sublime Frequencies compilation, the kind of rare multidimensional sound that Pumice is able to achieve, or the more pastoral side of prog that folks like Bo Hannson explored, or a sun-soaked instrumental passage from an Ariel Pink record (actually this actually reminds us a lot of the great Holy Shit record Ariel Pink made with Matt Fishbeck a while back), or maybe White Rainbow shining their hypnotic rays through the bodies of a band on Woodsist. The album's closer "Surf's Up" is almost like a new generation's version of Terry Riley's A Rainbow In Curved Air!
This record is like a soft edged maze that leads in a million different directions and takes you around on a sonic adventure that isn't as concerned with destination as it is in creating a totally and wholly encapsulating journey. While many in the new wave of one-man-band lo-fi noise pop combos have been focusing their sonic scope more on the fuzz, and burn, and rocked out side of things, Ducktails have a much more languid, dreamy and enchanting approach to finding lo-fi bliss through conjuring up so much warm sun soaked color in their hypnotizing sounds. Highly Recommended!
We had never heard of Xander Duell before, but we were definitely intrigued by a record on Mexican Summer titled Experimental Tape No. 2 Vol. 1, but it's not necessarily what you might expect. Or what we were expecting. Based on the title, we had imagined some actual musique concrete tape experiments, all academic and avant, but then that didn't really jibe with Mexican Summer. And then you hear the first track, the ultra brief fifteen second lone "-", with its dramatic piano and crooned pop, and sampled strings, and the whole tape experiment makes more sense, and the second track just drives that home, acoustic guitar, lush multi tracked vocals, murky percussion, sounding a bit like the Frogs, although the label describes this record as a tribute of sorts to Scott Walker's Scott 1-4, which also makes sense. At its core, the music of Duell is a sort of old fashioned baroque pop, but in its presentation and execution, it's anything but old fashioned. Slathered in noise, warped production, slipping from piano ballad, to dark gloom pop, to a sort of new wave-y RnB, to shuffling groovy jangle, and pretty much every stop in between.
The vocals deep and dreamy one track, wavery and falsetto the next, and then a weird sped up and processed warble the next, making Duell sound almost like Ween, which is in no way a bad thing. In fact, Duell is sort of like a strange fractured mix of Scott Walker, The Frogs, Ween, and you could probably mix in some Ariel Pink, and Emitt Rhodes, and any of a number of idiosyncratic pop geniuses.
It's not an easy listen, some of the songs are dark and dolorous, moody and haunting, others are goofy and bizarre, still others are completely bizarre, and then others practically perfect pop. But the magic of Duell's experiments, is that rarely do they stick to just one of those. A perfect pop song, will have some bafflingly bizarre vox, some twisted avalanche of lo-fi clatter, will be shot through with a gorgeous timeless melody, or some lush vocal harmonies will be doused in effects and wrapped in a collage of twisted samples. But it works, and to these ears this is some seriously amazing stuff. It really makes us wonder what Duell could come up with in a real studio, but at the same time, why mess with what ain't broke, or in Duell's case is exactly as broke as it should be.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Each one hand numbered. Comes with a download coupon as well.
One of two new blasts of "True Sheffield Black Psychedelia" from one of our favorite labels, UK weirdo sound stronghold Frequency 13, the True Sheffield Black Psychedelia descriptor covering a whole lot of sonic territory, from groups as varied as Black Vomit (whose new record is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), Ice Bound Majesty, Rape Rack, Skultroll, not to mention these guys right here, Dukkha, whose latest, the awesomely titled Grim Disco, is a single, 70 minute sprawl, that merges Butthole Surfers like atonal guitar melodies, with thick swaths of churning low-end, and looped propulsive programmed rhythms, into something heavy, hypnotic and WAY tripped out.
A dirgey, murky, krauty groove, submerged in a sea of chug and buzz and crunch, wound up with all manner of spidery melodies, the 'riff's a sort of blurred black metal, tangled up with something much dirgier and noise rockier, the sound slipping from caustic distorted buzz to weirdly tranced out cyclical churn, but that's only the first 6 or so minutes, the rhythmic pound and chug fading out into a cloud of glitched out digital shimmer, a bit like Oval, hazy and hypnotic, before splintering into something much more ominous, a whirling cinematic stretch of buzzing epic synthscapery, all soaring low end buzz and haunting majestic melody, thick and lush and layered, seriously dark and creepy, before it too fades out, this time into a field of glitch and glimmer, which gives way to some Melvins-y detuned dirge-y pound, the guitars gradually growing more and more chaotic, streaks of feedback, shards of fragmented riffage, moaning melodies, jagged atonal crunch, swirling low end murk, all wound around some tribal rhythmic pound, a doomy, downtuned final sludgey, weirdly groovy coda.
Killer stuff, as always. CRAZY LIMITED too, ONLY 40 COPIES!! we got 20 of those, which are bound to go fast...
The return of TRUE SHEFFIELD BLACK PSYCHEDELIA!!!
A few lists back we listed two discs of mysterious blackened post rock ambient epic weirdness, one from a band called Skultroll, the other from a group called Ice Bound Majesty, both offering up tangled sounds not easily to pin down. The hypno krautrock of Circle, the dirgey black doom of Bunkur, mixed with epic space prog, damaged drones, and whatever the fuck else those weirdos could cram in.
So as we continue to fly through copies of both, it seemed like maybe it was time to dig deeper into this bizarre black scene of freaky fucked up musical madness, dubbed by these outfits True Sheffield Black Psychedelia, and needless to say, it is indeed black, most definitely psychedelic and oddly enough, also from Sheffield!
So this time around we picked up a split, two more mysterious Sheffield combos, Dukkha, and the appetizingly named Black Vomit.
The odd tracks are Black Vomit, three long ones, culminating with a nearly 20 minute closer. But what the heck does Black Vomit sound like? Not as black as you might think. The opening track is a gorgeous drum heavy krautjam, the drums plugging along, with little double kick drum flourishes, relentless and motorik, as a huge warm washed out black cloud of swirling fuzz and hissy shimmer drifts in, a bit like Tim Hecker, dense and layered and constantly shifting, thickening as the song progresses, shot through with streaks of feedback and speaker rattling low end pulses, little flurries of effects and grinding industrial whir, sounds like a dronemetal Necks or a way more blessed out and dreamy Pharaoh Overlord. The second Black Vomit track, clocking in at nearly eleven minutes, is a much blacker beats, the middle portion a chaotic psychedronemetal freakout, the drums a blurry blast, the guitars tangled and angular, all wrapped up in a throbbing low end buzz, eventually mellowing out and stretching out into a hissy buzz drenched static drone, beneath which the sounds of frogs and crickets, bits of TV or radio broadcasts, a drifting barely there bit of simple guitar strum, super intense and creepy and cinematic. The final track, The Black Vomit's closer, a bruising 19 minute jam is a long form ambient sprawl, beginning with some epic tribal drumming, some industrial clatter, and thick corrosive drones, before the drums drop out leaving just the low end to drift and throb, swell and shift, a gorgeous dreamy thrum, until the drums kick back in near the end, finishing off with a flurry of mathy chaos, the drones and buzz building in tandem, a corrosive final moments prog psych blowout.
Then there's Dukkha, who sound like Black Vomit's kissing cousins. Their opener is nearly 23 minutes long, and is a loping post rock dirge, the drums a simple pound, the bass looping and loping in the background, the guitar in thick sheets buzzing dronelike, and occasionally locking into weirdly groovy stoner jams and then unwinding again into static sheets, the vocals a demonic distant wail, the riffs surfacing and locking into endless loops and super hypnotic hypno metal jams, like a crusty black metal Gore. The second track sounds like the first one, with the drums pulled out, the whole thing dipped in a bucket of busted effects pedals, and dumped over a wall of feeding back amplifiers. Maybe the 'dub' version of the first track, a Dense cloud of fucked up electronics, jagged melodic fragments, freaked out FX, and massive groaning walls of crumbling ultra distorted slow motion riffing.
Fucking awesome. Black enough for the true grim kvlt, but rhythmic enough to appeal to folks who dig Circle, This Heat, Aluk Todolo and the like and who aren't averse to something equally rhythmic, but way more blackened and brutal.
In our experience a lot of the best (and, of course, worst) cds released end up languishing in a forgotten corner of some distributor's warehouse, or under the label owner's bed... It's quite possible for something great but obscure to get released in an edition of 1,000 and then ten years later there's still 700+ copies gathering dust in a closet somewhere. We suspect that this Dumb And The Ugly cd is an example of this (though that's just a guess, maybe it sold well and has been re-pressed). What we do know is that this came out in 1992 in Australia and we liked it then and it's still great and we somehow just got a hold of a few copies. Despite the title, this isn't a "metal" album per se. It IS quite atmospheric, its eight tracks almost alternating between sheer sinister ambience (shortwave sounds, distorted operatic singing, underwatery drones) and heavy-duty guitar riffage a la Helmet or Circle. It's lumbering thud-rock with definite weird arty dark psychedelic pretensions, successfully so. We've only got a few but presumably there's more where these came from...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Dumb Type is a performance / conceptual art group comprised of Ryoji Ikeda and Toru Yamanaka and has been active since 1984, producing a number of multi-media spectacles. "Memorandum" combines their audiovisual architechtronics to explore memory as the semiotic sum of the elliptical orbits of emotion, instinct, and intellect, utilising dance, translucent scrims, and rapid fire video collages. Dumb Type saw fit to release just the audio from "Memorandum", and it's certainly strong enough to stand on its own, even without all of the visuals. In working with Yamanaka, Ikeda's clinical pulses of pure sinewave tones are flushed out with extended drones, making this simultaneously sound like early Klaus Schulze or Pan Sonic. Dumb Type breaks up the piece with snippets of spoken texts that are accompanied by delicate synth patterns, emulating the sappiness of daytime soap operas. While the intent of these musical interludes is unclear, it is the only flaw in an otherwise fantastic post-techno score.
The always intriguing and aesthetically striking Utech label is on a rumbling roll! Of their three newest releases, we made Aluk Todolo's Finsternis a Record Of The Week last week. Gog's Mist From The Random More is one of this week's Records Of The Week too. And then there's this, which is pretty awesome too, if you're into the more extreme end of textural abstract electric drone-groan. Three-for-three for Utech as far as we're concerned!
You might expect "holes and disused shafts" to be quiet places. Not so, if the ominously noisy soundscapes of French experimentalist Olivier Dumont are any indication. The holes where he goes are alive with chaotic crackling electric intensity, densely detailed distortion. Utterly satisfying stuff for those of us into this sort of sonic grit.
Dumont's Utech debut consists of five tracks, about 44 minutes total, all varied in approach and relative levels of "noisiness". It starts off with perhaps the most menacing cut, "Room 237", recorded solely with "buzz cable" (probably a patch cord connected to an amplifier, though we also could imagine something more massive and industrial, like some sort of repurposed undersea telecommunications cable). Switching to tape recorder and then feedback guitar for his sound sourcing, Dumont conjures sounds like buzzing airplane motors and swarming mechanical bees as this disc progresses. The final two lengthy tracks, the 16 minute "R-Grey" and the especially atmospheric album ending title track (9:30), are on the more subdued side, being mysterious organic improvs that draw the listener in rather than grind them underfoot. More beautiful than brutal in the end, this disc is quite recommended for noiseniks.
Nicely packaged in a slender, slightly oversized sleeve typical of Utech releases, with the usual black & white (mostly black) graphics, this is limited to just 500 copies.
2003 has been a very busy year for John Duncan, having released 5 full albums along with creating two rather impressive sound installations in Sweden and his current base of operations Italy. Many of these projects have simply been the culmination of projects that began quite some time ago; and fortunately, Mr. Duncan has steered clear of many of the failings of hyper-prolific artists who simply fall back upon signature styles. As always, Duncan seeks out new challenges for himself and nakedly asserts them upon his audience, whether they want it or not.
Da Sich Die Machtgier... began as a collaborative project between Duncan and Asmus Tietchens. To begin, Tietchens sent Duncan recordings of Tietchens reading texts from E.M. Cioran, the early 20th century skeptic whose quotes are featured on almost all of the Tietchens back catalogue releases. In turn, Duncan processed those recordings, sent them back to Tietchens, and awaited further instructions. Instead of receiving another round of recordings to work with, Duncan received a note from Tietchens that his initial recordings were sufficiently complete and that Tietchens would refuse any credit for his contribution. To this day, Duncan still disagrees with Tietchens about the credit issue, but went ahead and released the results as is.
An unnervingly digital construction, Da Sich Die Machtgier... relies heavily on the maniacal hammering of the DSP / timestretching filters. For the first half of the album, these agitated, rapid-fire noises approximate Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and strongly reference the process of a thoroughly disembodied voice as the content to the work. However, the caustic abstraction completely dissolves in the album's epic, 30 minute finale. Much closer to the subtle power of Phantom Broadcast and Infrasound - Tidal, this track smears Tietchens voice into an electronic windstorm, sweeping with an elegant majesty.
As with Duncan's entire body of work, Da Sich Die Machtgier... is a very strong release.
Sonic provocateur John Duncan has said he prefers the use of shortwave radio signals over any musical instrument in his pursuit into the pure physicality of noise. "Fresh," however, finds Duncan stepping back from that proclamation, as this album documents his collaboration with Zeitkratzer, a German avant-garde ensemble that specializes in the translation of electronic and noise compositions into scores for classical instrumentation. Under the guidance of Reinhold Friedl, Zeitkratzer's refreshing attitude is that "the opening to multi-disciplinarity isn't new any more, but artistic normality." In addition to this disc with Duncan, they've also worked with Merzbow, Zbigniew Karkowski, Phill Niblock, Christina Kubisch, and most recently Lou Reed in reworking his pioneering '70s noise opus "Metal Machine Music", if you can believe that!
"Fresh" features two Duncan compositions, "Nav-Flex" and "Trinity", as performed by Zeitratzer. Initially released as a collaboration with Francisco Lopez, "Nav-Flex" -- which happens to be one of my (Jim's) favorite Duncan pieces -- translates very nicely from original composition for shortwave, datastreams, and voice. Opening with a very loud, discordant blast of horns, strings, piano, percussion and electronics, Zeitkratzer vigilantly maintains Duncan's course of action by quickly fading the notes to a near silence that nervously persists for several minutes. The rumblings of those interwoven orchestral tones re-appear as a resurgent mirror reflection of that first incarnation of sound on the record and maintain a plateau-level of sustained, droning tones which accurately mimic the sounds that Duncan originally recorded. Zeitkratzer's version of "Trinity," on the other hand, sounds remarkably different than the original Duncan piece, a caustic composition that investigated the electric buzzings of shortwave radio static. It does follow Duncan's pattern of varying shortwave-like fluctuations, but the tonal colors of the two "Trinities" exhibit a much greater distance between the original and the orchestrated version than with "Nav-Flex." It's interesting to wonder how Duncan/Zeitkratzer scored these pieces (perhaps as a graphical score a la Cornelius Cardew?), but whatever the method, the results are nonetheless amazing.
In 1998, the American expatriot sound artist John Duncan made contact with Australian sound archivist Densil Cabrera, in hopes of arranging a project based on oceanic, seismic, and atmospheric measurements. While his resume points towards an academic background in electroacoustics and sound installation, Cabera presented these recordings to Duncan as raw scientific data, having translated three centuries (yes, centuries!) of the tidal spectra published by the Australian National Tide Tables into a far more digestible recording that compressed one year of data down to one second. Further recordings transposed barometric pressure recordings from two Australian air force bases and others used seismometers to produce images from a number of earthquakes and nuclear tests. In researching how he wanted to proceed with these recordings, Duncan was also hoping to form an impression of Densil's personality. However, during the five years it took for this collaboration to be completed, Duncan came to the realisation that he knew nothing more about Densil then when he started. Thus, he applied this detachment of scientific rigor to the production of Densil's recordings. "Infrasound - Tidal" emerges as a stark album of subtle tonal shifts, mostly low rattling frequencies that transition into gray static flutterings, resulting in an album not unlike the best of Francisco Lopez' "Belle Confusion" series. Like all of Duncan's recordings, "Infrasound - Tidal" seeks wisdom and knowledge through the process of sound construction and metaphoric conceptualization. While he may not have found what he wanted, Duncan wonderfully took what was given to him and realized a fantastic atmosphere of stark desolation.
MPEG Download: "Infrasound - Tidal (excerpt 1)" [/audio/duncaninfrasound1.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Infrasound - Tidal (excerpt 1)" [/audio/duncaninfrasound1.m3u]
MPEG Download: "Infrasound - Tidal (excerpt 2)" [/audio/duncaninfrasound2.mp3]
BACK IN STOCK, AT A LOWER PRICE!!! In the early '80s, John Duncan moved from Los Angeles to Tokyo where he began a number of very interesting works with grandiose agendas of destabilization and transgression. One facet of his Toyko period was his pirate radio station using the frequency of NHK 1 after that station signed off at night. But perhaps the most infamous work was the pornography that Duncan produced under the pseudonym John See. Part of the intention of the John See series was for this work to be used by the viewer as source material for any video collage work; of course, Duncan was also going for sexual titillation as well. During that time Duncan shot five films for the adult film company Kuki - Doll, Fallen Angel, Inka, Aidayuki Passion, and Power Love. There are some distinctly unconventional aspects to these films, as Duncan often layered multiple images and early video effects during the build up to the money shot. But most of the sex and the "scripting" around those sex scenes tended to be pretty standard fare. What's most bizarre about Duncan's porn is the soundtrack that he uses. Instead of the funk grooves and wah-wah guitar workouts, he recontextualizes the ecstatic gasps and moans from his own footage alongside sterile drones culled from shortwave. If anything his use of sound is the most provocative element to the John See films.
In 1994, Duncan returned to the John See series, remastering several of the scores as well as remixing others in new compositions (which fit into his original idea that this work should be recycled for the viewer's use). The John See Soundtracks is a quintessential document of Duncan's early styles which ruptured violently with shortwave static and sexual outbursts in direct contrast to the cauldron of somatic fluctuations and electrical drones.
While attending Cal Arts in the mid '70s, John Duncan discovered the transient frequencies of shortwave, and made it his tool of choice in transferring his knowledge about the psychological implications for specific colors to the realm of sound construction. Instead of merely rehasing the Marshall McLuhan's 'medium is the message' tropes, Duncan's use of the shortwave is marked by his ability to transform the sound device into an externalization of profound (and sometimes disturbing) psychological states. Throughout his impressive back catalogue of recordings, the textural grit and grim electrical tonality of shortwave has repeatedly surfaced in any number of contexts, whether that be the poisonous aggression of "River Of Flames" or the architectural hauntings of "Palace of Mind." The same can be said for this album, as Duncan used nothing but a single shortwave transmission augmented by minimal amount of processing in composing the 47 minutes found within "Phantom Broadcast." Instead of the darkened references mentioned earlier, Duncan has extracted a sublimely powerful and uniquely transcendent series of sounds from what is just a utility signal containing something banal like air traffic controller data but could be something sort of shadowy like a RTTY radioteletype (a fairly sophisticated form of encryption; although not impossible to crack like Numbers Stations). These electrical sounds -- originally noxious striations of aural code -- have been smeared into quasi-harmonic, gaseous states and articulated as gasping reverberating drones. Right from the beginning of the album, these sounds do appear as from shortwave but as an epic piece of '60s Minimalism or Ligeti choral and caralon composition. Such references do not disappear over the "Phantom Broadcast" composition as organic cycles and fluctuations move throughout. It's simply breathtaking and beautiful.
While there were a number of great albums in 2002, Duncan's "Phantom Broadcast" is firmly planted at the top of my (Jim's) list for record of the year.
A recent document from the outstanding Mort Aux Vaches series of commissions for the Dutch radio station VRPO is as with all from the series quite limited. Here Duncan's deep bellowing gasps of shortwave radio noise and distant furnaces are delicately processed into tense soundscapes.
In the Jan 1999 issue of the Wire, Jim O'Rourke was the Invisible Jukebox victim who successfully identified all of the records which were played for him without any prior indication of what was to be heard. All of his answers were coupled with "fuck, yeah!" or "that fuckin' rules" - odd explications for Fennesz, Luc Ferrari, and John Duncan, whom Jim O'Rourke talks about further:
"John's awesome, insanely underrated. He did this one piece called 'Scare', where he basically got a gun filled with blanks and wore a mask, went up to friends' house, knocked on the door, and shot them. And then ran. Getting to know him, I understood that he has an absolute sincerity to learn about his existence. He's actually very influential on me... When I was playing a lot in Europe, I was doing these shows where I was getting to the point of annihilating myself. Playing one note or whatever - I would not allow myself to do the same thing again at all. Just going on stage and trying to find the thing that would make me the most incredibly uncomfortable, and forcing myself to do it."
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"Tap Internal" firmly addresses a question that has been tangential to a number of John Duncan's previous releases: "What is the sound of energy?" Starting with the basic scientific method of breaking down a substance to reveal its structure, the character of its parts, and the taxonomic position it holds in relation to other elements like it, Duncan researches sound by crumbling it into its subatomic particles. "Tap Internal" is an ambitious project that mirrors the raw energy of white-hot VLF cracklings, shortwave radio buzz, and tectonic-plate rumbles. While Duncan's experiments have a willful cruelty to them, his static laden pulsations and incendiary ambient environments aren't merely theatrics of aural confrontation. The metaphoric hammer that Duncan takes to his sound sources softens in the presence of sublime yet beautiful moments of mesmerizing drones. In the process of obliteration, Duncan may have stumbled onto bigger more metaphysical questions that he may not be willing to answer quite yet, like "What is the sound of Duncan's soul?"
The sound constructs of John Duncan almost exist as a residue of his own personal research into esoteric realms of knowledge, existential bouts of continuous questioning, and transgressive acts against himself and society at large. Here was a man who claimed to have sex with a corpse as a performance piece entitled Blind Date, whereby he planted his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. That event presumably took place nearly 30 years ago, when Duncan was emerging as an artist in Los Angeles alongside Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, and Mike Kelley. Blind Date has become a piece of infamy that blossomed beyond his already highly transgressive context, but he's always been an artist who is very deft at framing particular works through the process and through the context of said piece. The Nazca Transmissions is one such piece.
A few years back, Duncan received an email from a German archaeologist working at the site of the Nazca Lines in Peru. These are the massive drawings carved into an arid plateau some 2000 years ago by the ancient Nazca people. Some of these figures are representation, some are not, and some get as large of 200 yards in size, all posing the question: who was supposed to be seeing these figures, and to what end? Now, this archaeologist claimed to have been able to record sounds from those line drawings; and he presented the raw material to Duncan, having been familiar with his transmutational pieces of digital data and shortwave. Duncan was suitably perplexed and intrigued by the sounds that were presented to him, proceeding to work on a series of compositions through that material. Unfortunately, this archaeologist ceased all communications, leading Duncan to wonder if it was all a big hoax.
Eerie ringings pocked with scrabbled textures almost like clipped VLF recordings open the album set against a gaping chasm of quietness. While Duncan's penchant for abrasive noise and jarring juxtaposition is well documented, you won't find that here. By the end of the side, the textures take on an unsettled rhythm that almost resembles human speech garbled through the process. Very compelling, very unsettled. The second side begins with an interlocking series of modulated and muffled Shepherd Tones, these are the audio equivalent of a barber's pole with the tones giving the appearance of being in constant ascension or descension. It's a common artifact found throughout the shortwave bands, harkening back to one of his preferred sound sources; and Duncan puts them to excellent use amidst a sea of low end rumblings. Soon after, pierced tones push to the foreground as those low end rumblings mutate into grotesquely deformed growlings only to fade against a hushed coda of grey noise. This is limited to less than 300 copies, and it remains to be seen if we'll be able to get more than the handful we have now. Recommended no matter how you look at it.
Before we get into the amazing sounds that John Duncan and C.M. von Hausswolff have created for this album (which we have to say is pretty fucking incredible), we have to drool over the artwork. Sure, it's always nice to get one of those hand-made packages, loving assembled by the musician from scraps of wallpaper or gesso smeared across heavy card stock; where the investment is paid through blood and sweat. But at the same time, it can sometimes be pretty fascinating to go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, to see what happens when money is no object, and thus nearly any vision can be realised. The recent Tool record is one example (reviewed elsewhere on this list) with its incredible built in lenses and stereoscopic booklet. And then there's Our Telluric Conversation, which employs a seriously and gloriously reckless design sensibility. Unfotunately, jpeg reproductions of this cd's cover will never translate how amazingly cool the packaging is. The white O-card / slipcover which wraps around the CD and the accompanying 40-page booklet is printed on a rubberized paper dotted with braille, making it strangely tactile, and thus not a little unsettling just to touch the album! Which is appropriate considering the musical content...
John Duncan and Carl Michael von Hausswolff have made an dark and unsettling album in Our Telluric Conversation, the second collaboration between these two AQ-favorite sound artists, opening with ominous bleeping, sort of sounding like sonar or a life support system barely keeping someone alive. An electronic turbulance gradually swarms around these mechanized pulses and explodes in a torrent of furious magneto noise, sounding very similar to the recent Duncan collaboration with Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisainen. Abruptly, the track comes to a halt as the whispering voice of Hausswolff begins reciting a presumably fictional tale in which the protagonist has been infected with maggots and tries to rid his body of the parasites by communing with lizards and snakes through a combination of occult rituals. Hausswolff's whisper is all that one hears, with his lips closely pressed up to the microphone making saliva, lips smacking, and teeth gnashing all audible. Upon the conclusion of Hausswolff's spoken excerpt, the two proceed with a long-form construction for brilliantly shimmered drones and flickering sinewaves that's as good as anything by Phill Niblock, Mirror, or The Hafler Trio. Our Telluric Conversation concludes with another extended composition that bridges the signature aesthetics of the two artists, with a deadened monotone of processed 60-cycle hums (that's Hausswolff) and a seductive processing of shortwave static (that's Duncan). By themselves, Duncan and Hausswolff have crafted amazing records; but together, these two have really tapped into something eerie, psychologically instable, and sublimely beautiful. Highly recommended!
The bulk of John Duncan's exceptional catalogue of sonic provocation and sublime post-minimalism has been collaborations. CM Von Hausswolff, Francisco Lopez, Bernhard Gunter, Asmus Tietchens, Peter Fleur, Max Springer, Giuliana Stefani, and Elliott Sharp have all worked with Duncan in recent years; yet at the same time, each of those collaborations exhibits the inescapable gravitational pull of Duncan's conceptual and aesthetic agendas. This collaboration with Edvard Graham Lewis is no exception. Lewis, of course, is the legendary bassist / vocalist from Wire and has often ventured into the netherworlds of the avant-garde with fellow Wireman Bruce Gilbert in various guises. Like Duncan, Lewis is quite comfortable with the role of collaborator.
The human voice has been the springboard for a number of Duncan's records including the recent collaborations with Tietchens and Sharp. Not surprising, the most obvious contributions that Lewis makes on Presence are a few choice spoken word bits highlighting his elegantly sinister baritone voice (which in my opinion is more interesting than Colin Newman's). Broken into variable streams of timestretched anxiety during the album's introduction, Lewis' voice slips away beyond recognizablility, falling into an abyss of shortwave hum and crackle that have long been the divining rod for Duncan's epistomological inquistions. The centerpiece of the album is a 30 minute piece fusing those same gray timbers of shortwave with monochromatic vocal compositions, presumably birthed from Lewis' lips and later manipulated by Duncan. Even if Lewis did have a greater hand in the mix, Presence sounds much like Duncan's masterpieces Phantom Broadcast and Palace of Mind, which is not a bad thing at all. The album ends with Lewis' unmistakable voice offering a naked piece of advice:"Take a step forward and tell the truth." As narcotizing as the album becomes, this whispered text booms out of the speakers as a startling conclusion to this excellent album.
Once in a while, Aquarius has definitely put forth opinions that some folks didn't like. It goes without saying that those negative reactions seem to always be in response to a negative review of some band someone loves and is very sensitive about. Fair enough. We've gotten crap for a Butthole surfers review as well as our continuing indifference to house music. Well, brace yourself for another one, maybe no surprise: we have no desire to suffer through another Elliott Sharp album. Even though the Downtown New York veteran wanker has teamed up with one of our favorite sound reseachers John Duncan, we were skeptical to say the least, simply because the presence of Mr. Sharp could potentially ruin this album.
Yeah, this album could have been a total disaster. But it's not... not at all. In fact, Tongue is a fantastic document of mulched shortwave and vocalizations, and will probably be one of the better sound art recordings to come out in 2004. Either we've always only heard the really terrible Elliott Sharp records or John Duncan is wholly responsible for the album's success. Either way, Tongue is really a superb piece of work. Duncan has long praised the human voice as the most powerful instrument that he's encountered, even above his beloved shortwave which has been central to almost all of his compositions. Here, Duncan and Sharp manipulate sustained vocalizations from both artists as well as quiet gurglings of saliva coagulating within the cavities of their respective mouths. While these sounds acquire a delicate tactility that recalls the likes of Steve Roden and Toshiya Tsunoda, Duncan's shortwave interrupts and ruptures the quiet passages of this record with caustic static, twin blade flutterings, and electrocuted drones. Much could be said about the dislocation of the voice by a transmitter / receiver machine, but we'll leave that for the post-structuralist, academic types. That said, Duncan's recent work has shifted toward monumental compositions of minimalism (e.g. Phantom Broadcast, Stun Shelter, Keening Towers, etc.); but with Tongue, his work privleges the fragment (perhaps in deference to Sharp), making this an album closer to his previous masterpieces Tap Internal and River In Flames. Another recommended John Duncan record, and perhaps the first and only Elliott Sharp album we'll endorse wholeheartedly.
Hmm. These experimental ambient drone electronics guys sure keep themselves -- and each other -- busy. Elsewhere on this list you'll find another double cd that sees Lopez teaming up with Zbignew Karkowski. And there's also a Karkowski/Xopher Davidson disc too. Etc. But if they can't get enough of the drones, well, that's 'cause neither can you, right? So check this out... Both
- RealAudio clip: Flex
- RealAudio clip: Gate
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Palace Of Mind is the 2000 recording collaboration between John Duncan and Giuliana Stefani. Mr. Duncan has long been one of AQ's favorite experimentalists, having started things out back in the '70s LA performance art community only to quit the US to pursue his own intense psychological research into sound, projection, installation, photography, and the like. Stefani is a mathematician by training and became acquainted with Duncan through a collaborative project they began in Amsterdam in 1996. For this album, the two sifted through digital treatments of shortwave transmissions, wire-tapped data streams, and voice. In turn, they work the album into labyrinthine composition that can hold any number of potent metaphors: the neural synapses of the human brain, the schematics of a computer, or simply an architectural set of overlapping resonant spaces. Rareified tones set with motoric vibrations transition through the fluttering of (or rather the lack there of, as this sounds like the empty spaces between the bands marked by a mechanoid oily hiss) and onto slashing digital drone. Here, one can think to Duncan's exceptional field recordings made at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in the early '90s. Within the movement from an irritable data-stream purity to the gossamer haze of shortwave distortion to gaping drones of treated vocal vibrato, Duncan and Stefani have set a trajectory deep into the heart of their sonic architecture, with each 'room' saturated with an anxiousness for what may be on the other side of the door. You won't find Duncan firing a gun at your head (seriously, he did that as performance piece called Scare back in the late '70s, using blanks mind you), but Palace Of Mind revels in an interlocking network of chambers that resonate and breathe with a profound beauty. Highly recommended!
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Making full use of the unintentionally dynamic acoustic phenomenon occurring within the Stanford Linear Accelerator, John Duncan and Max Springer have collaborated on this haunting collage of semi-processed field recordings made within the monolithic structure 2 miles long and several stories high. For those unfamiliar with Duncan's extraordinary shortwave experiments, this is a excellent introduction to one of the best dronologists / sound artists of the past two decades! From the liner notes: "The accelerator is full of contradictions: structures built to dwarf and outlast their creators, designed to generate subatomic events that take place in a time scale that is impossible to imagine, using forces that are hostile or lethal to human life, yet are entirely human-created. A 'city of the dead' that seems to have an existence of its own with or without its operators. For this work, the electon is understood as a metaphor for the process of life: isolated, compelled by a system that uses the electron's own energy to force it into a path that leads at a constantly increasing pace to certain destruction -- to a point of certain change, of complete resolution and the beginning of a new process."
The work of John Duncan should need no introduction, as he has long been one of Aquarius' favorite sound artists; however, Paolo Parisi is something of a mystery to us. An Italian sculptor, painter, and installation artist, Parisi commissioned Duncan to compose a sound component for one of Parisi's installation. The themes behind Parisi's installation for plastic tubes and eviscerated cardboard sentry houses are far too convoluted to recount within this review; but in a shocking display of Aquarian restraint, we'll merely mention that the Panopticon, Hitchcock, Deleuze, and Duchamp all get name checked throughout the book's text celebrating Parisi's installation. The CD is all Duncan; and it's well worth the price of admission. Duncan has long been known for his use of shortwave radio sounds as the springboard for his psychologically intense compositions; but slowly, he has been introducing the human voice into his pantheon of sound sources. For Conservatory, voice is the only source he is using, in particular he's amplifying and stretching the gasps, wheezes, and hisses that occur during the act of breathing. Through his manipulation of these sounds, Duncan cultivates a vast network of gaping blasts of air that collectively build into a ghastly, frigid drone emanating from a unscrupulous cryrogenics laboratory. Another epochal release from Mr. Duncan!
Earlier in 2003, long time colleagues John Duncan and C.M. von Hausswolff collaborated on an installation at the Nicola Fornello Gallery in Prato, Italy. Judging from the massive 50 page, full color book that accompanies the cd of "Stun Shelter," the two artists presented individual installations whose sound elements bled together within the space to form the collaborative aspect of their work. Duncan revisted the pornographic "John See" films he produced in Japan during the mid-80s. That series accurately followed the strict Japanese rules about the visual representation of sexuality, in which no penetration or pubic hair can be shown. As for the soundtrack to those films, Duncan combined distant shrill orgasms from the actresses and his own claustrophobic, breathy vocalizations, slowly uttering optimistic phrases in Japanese. Despite their content, Duncan's renderings of language take on an aura of mechanical monstrosity. Hausswolff's installation was equally disturbing, having designed a haute couture bar and lounge for the sole purpose of huffing glue and paint thinner. The Hausswolff soundtrack featured several tone generators droning toward infinity. The amalgamation between the Duncan and Hausswolff soundtracks works incredibly well, offering a backbone to Duncan's vocalizations and contextually specific details to Hausswolff's numbing minimalism.
With Duncan having a whole slew of releases that have just come out at the end of 2003, "Stun Shelter" is easily the best of the lot, and certainly ranks as one of his best records alongside "Phantom Broadcast." At the same time, this album (especially with its highly informative book) encapsulates many of the ideas and themes (i.e. the transgressions of cultural norms, the never-ending inquisitions of power structures, the experiential realizations as existential proofs, etc.) that makes Duncan and Hausswolff such amazing artists. One of the best experimental records of 2003, though pricey.
This is an ultra limited split seven inch on Die Stadt, featuring stalwart sound researcher John Duncan, conceptual artist C.M. von Hausswolff, and Ditterich Von Euler-Donnersperg, who is often described as a cranky writer. Duncan offers 6 locked grooves of
Three excellent pieces from three excellent sound artists that Die Stadt lumped onto one CD, with no real thematic connection to speak of. John Duncan's piece is a recording of the jawdropping live set he did at The Compound here in San Francisco in 2006. The hissing shortwave and noxious datastreams which have been signature source materials for Duncan continue here, with Duncan displaying a considerable amount of restraint in the slippery juxtaposition of softened white noise, periodic accelerations and crescendos, and subharmonic rumblings. This climaxes with a tempestuous 8 second blast of hurricane-shock noise. Kontakt Der Junglinge (aka Thomas Koner & Asmus Tietchens) also present a live piece, but then again haven't all of their recordings been live presentations? This one from the Mutek Festival in 2003 is an isolationist gem of shadowy ambience and deep deep drones (the Koner half of the equation) with electronically treated recordings of clanking machines (the Tietchens half of the equation). Hausswolff seems to have revisited the source material from his There Are No Crows Flying Around The Hancock Building installation / cd document, with a loop of an electronically treated screeching birds (not a crow, mind you... there's a red-tail hawk and the chirp of what could just be a blackbird), monotonously sitting on top of gradient build of amassed gray noise.
When John Duncan sent us this collaboration with the members of Pan Sonic, he warned us that the first two tracks would be a little hard to take on headphones. Oh yes, that warning should be heeded by all, headphones or not; especially if you're expecting the electric seduction of Duncan's Phantom Broadcast. But don't let the warning scare you off; as this is an incredible fusion of caustic electronics, shortwave radio signal manipulation, and the hammering arpeggiations which have become a trademark of the Finnish techno minimalists. So Nine Suggestions begins with some 15 minutes of white-knuckle noise tightly composed from siren squall electronics, volatile data streams from shortwave utility signals, and plenty of sawtoothed abrasiveness. In this introduction, Nine Suggestions harkens to the Pan Sonic masterpiece 4CD box set Kesto, which expressed plenty of noxious intensity in its rhythmic overload. Even as the album calms considerably in the expanse of the album, Kesto still stands the most accurate comparison as that album shifts from aggression and explosion to contemplation and eerieness. In the shadowy half-melodies, tectonic rumblings, nocturnal drones, dental drill vibrations, submariner sonar pings, and delicate modulation of electronic tones found within the latter two-thirds of Nine Suggestions, Duncan, Vainio, and Vaisanen have created something that really is as one would expect from these high-calliber artists. Highly recommended!
The Scattering is a collaborative release from the exemplary John Duncan and the little known sound artist Peter Fleur, who had a few minor league successes as L.O.S.D. with Radboud Mens. Here, the two artists collaborate on one long track and offer solo works to round out the album, always using data files and shortwave as the source material. Each of the tracks have been severely manipulated with loads of DSP effects, feedback accumulation, and resampling techniques to form plastic drones rippling with a dramatic psychic tension. As on Duncan's previous album Da Sich Die Machtgier..., the dominant sounds are the dissonant fillibration from densely packed samples that have all been timestretched towards oblivion. The collabortive piece builds dramatically through those cracked drones with a mechnized bass pulse ominously crawling below. Fleur's solo work splits itself between a Francisco Lopez-esque low end rumble and a cascade of digitized textures amassing into frigid wall of noise. The final track is a signature John Duncan piece, where he amplifies the unsettling nature of shortwave's liminal spaces between the active broadcast frequencies. Shortwave has long been a favorite medium for Duncan, not only for its aesthetic qualities but its allegorical properties of psychological unrest, hidden communications, information wars, etc. In this piece for The Scattering, Duncan contextualizes shortwave static as a parallel to somatic fluctuations, where the sounds breathe, ebb, and contract in response to a subconscious intellect. Very very nice.
Really fucking spooky! Of course, we wouldn't expect much less from John Duncan, whose sound research specifically seeks out the most intense of psychological states. As the most infamous case, Duncan's Blind Date performance piece tells of his presumed experience with necrophilia as a masochistic ritual for depositing his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. While the audio documentation of Blind Date is cold and precise in what it says, Duncan neither confirms nor denies any of the details beyond what is told in that recording. It could have been a fabrication; but he plants the idea that he *might* have broken the most significant taboo of human civilization. Since then, Duncan's psychological research through sound, visual art, and performance has become far more sophisticated in approach and content. For example, there's his convoluted Pynchonesque album Our Telluric Conversation with CM von Hausswolff, and there's the masterful recapitulation of the sounds from the Stanford Linear Accelerator into The Crackling - a cavernous, sublime electric chorale which magnify the smallest of particles into massive discordant drones.
There Must Be A Way Across This River was a performance / installation that Duncan presented inside a refrigerated basement at a performance hall in Bologna, where he presented a slow-developing soundtrack of arctic drones layered with darkly vibrating shortwave patterns, whispered declarations from Duncan himself, and these strange violent bursts of electronic noise. While he never stated this to be the case, we wonder if he demanded that the audience be naked, as he has done for a handful of his other claustrophobic, black-box performances. That might have been even too cruel for Duncan! The sounds of There Must Be A Way Across This River are relatively subtle for Duncan's catalogue of work, but they are darkly evocative, eerie, bleak, and ominously threatening. Another very strong piece in his ever impressive body of work.
The flip side of the record is a strange collaboration between Duncan, Z'ev, and the EVP hunter Michael Esposito. Originally, Esposito, Duncan, and the medium Heidi Harman set out to make recordings in Duncan's childhood home outside of Chicago. Despite making arrangements with one of the occupants at the house, they were refused access, all the while Esposito was recording their conversations. During those recordings, 18 EVP invocations occurred, one of which addresses Duncan by name - an allegation that Harman confirmed through her own psychic contact. These 18 invocations were then given over to Z'ev who manipulated them into a suitably frightening set of interwoven drones and spectral undulations. If that particular EVP citation of Duncan's name is on these recordings, Z'ev has thoroughly eradicated the syntax into a slippery, ectoplasmic sound. It's one of the best things we've heard from Z'ev outside his kinetic percussive assaults, and rounds out a terrifyingly great piece of wax!
We could easily imagine the odd school children in the film The Wicker Man as being the tailor-made audience/participants for this 1969 educational record from the BBC Drama Workshop, the educational arm of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. These recordings were designed for creative movement and improvisation exercises for young school children, though it would be surprising to see a record for kids quite like this today.
With poetry written and recited by Robert Duncan and electronic music by David Cain, this is one of those Arcadian British recordings that are so often referenced audibly and visually by the hauntological Ghost Box label and the filmstrip nostalgia of Boards of Canada. Duncan's classically-trained oration evokes a romantic yet visceral natural imagery of slightly sinister undertones, while Cain's score is both alien and lilting, its robotic sing-song melodies sometimes wistful yet bracingly warped. For this recording a piece was done for each month and each season with the final track an instrumental culmination of all the musical themes simply called "The Year". Though we can see children of the time easily getting into the odd melodies to convey visual pantomimes of leaves and wind, we can only assume that some of the spoken imagery must have gone over their heads. "Falling leaves like Severed Hands", in "October" for instance; or descriptions of nightfall where the night is characterized as a predator and the day "as a fallow deer is bled"; or the lurid connotations of the poem, "March" where Duncan speaks of the Earth as a woman, and in a series of harvest ritual descriptions, to be woken, washed, dressed and then taken????
But what is admirable about the educational side of this recording is that it doesn't talk down to children or Disney-fy nature with anthropomorphic happy/sad emotions, but rather it emphasizes a more complex set of emotional tropes to act out like awakening, longing, fearfulness, loneliness, and indifference that points to a more mature and frank attitude toward the cycle of nature and the passing of time. Though we're not sure what kids today would make of its strange antiquated quaintness, for adults its perhaps a nostalgic trip back to a bygone era where there was government funded organizations that were allowed to produce such cool shit for kids, or at the very least plenty of cool interlude fodder here for DJs and mixtapes.
Following in the footsteps of Phill Niblock and Jim O'Rourke, the Brooklyn based composer Kyle Bobby Dunn presents his own Young Person's Guide into an immersive arena of fluid minimalist gestures and post-classical ambience. Dunn sources his compositions from guitar, brass, and strings, some of which have been extracted from sessions with small ensembles of classically trained musicians; and everything is worked out in the digital studio, with the swells of a violin and timbre of a trombone elongated into introspective, somber compositions of elegant dronescaping. While this process does appear similar to Niblock's approach with his source material, Dunn is far more poetic and much more of a romantic than Mr. Niblock and presents bleary mirages revel in impressionistic images of cinematic landscapes. Tranquil organic tones manifest through gaseous shimmers, occasionally graced by a repetitive half-melodic interlude or a deep-end reverberant rumble. Much of Dunn's work could easily nestle next to one of Rhys Chatham's more placid guitar symphonies, or any of the cinematic soundscapists that Type has been championing for many years now, or the compositions of John Luther Adams, or even the narcoleptic mood engineering of Stars Of The Lid. Really beautiful stuff. Unfortunately, we only have limited stock on this title!
Kyle Bobby Dunn seems like quite a character. Photos of the Canadian ambient composer could easily stand in as an earnest dating profile image / avatar, imbued with a boyish charm and scholarly airs; yet whatever public image of poignant sincerity he seems to be cultivating is thrown completely out the window when it comes to the id-authored track titles like "Movement For The Completely Fucked," "Meadowfuck (Waltz Of The Nobodies)," and "An Excrement Suite." Given the fact that these tracks hold the exact same aesthetic scope of bleary ambience as the more sensible, allegorically charged titles like "Where Circles Never Become Circles" or "Canticle Of Votier's Flats," Dunn is obviously wanting his audience to ask the ever important question: "what the fuck?" It all may be calculated to expose the dorky / wonky bits of his personality, so that people don't assume he's just a dorky / wonky composer, but a fully-formed human being with thoughts, dreams, and ideas - some of which may be profoundly ridiculous. The sounds from "And The Infinite Sadness" are beautiful impressionist swells of tonal colors, billowing orchestrations, and elegant melancholy. Some of the tracks expose their instrumentation of guitars or horns or chamber ensembles, all of which are blurred within a luminous and richly shoegazing wash of sustained reverb and stately melodic / harmonic progressions. His work often gets compared to Stars Of The Lid; and yeah, And The Infinite Sadness is that good, perhaps his best release to date!
Ways Of Meaning is a beautifully serene ambient album from the classically trained composer Kyle Bobby Dunn. In sourcing much of his weightless tones, gossamer half-melodies, and immersive atmospherics from guitar and organ, Dunn develops a number of almost baroque flourishes throughout the haze and mist of his warm rich sounds that lean more to the sound of a medieval chorale pitched at quarter-speed than to the contemporary narcoleptic sounds of today's ambient practitioners. The looping interplay between the golden guitar tones on his "Canyon Meadow" begins to resemble an impressionist orchestration for French horns, albeit run through William Basinski's tape machinations that push all of the sounds in and out of focus. His charmingly titled "Movement For The Completely Fucked" is hardly the epithet that one might assume; rather, Dunn's placid composition for somber guitar mesmerism offers solace to whomever may be deemed completely fucked. Fans of Eno's Music For Airports, anything from Stars Of The Lid, and even some of the contemplative works of Arvo Part would be well served to check out this album. Vinyl only!
