Currently a faculty member in the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, John Bischoff has been composing music with computers and electronics since the mid 70s, and has always focused his compositions towards malleable forms that best suit live performances. Within this context, Bischoff seeks to position the construction of sound far beyond the common perception of synthetic music as a mere simulation of the intrinsic sounds of traditional instruments. Instead, Bischoff qualifies his work as the realization of a "reflective intention," where he determines sonic structure not only through the predetermined elements which go into a piece, but also through the active process of listening to the music as it happens and responding accordingly. During the '70s when programming involved crude systems of binary code, Bischoff's vision of the possibilities for computer-based composition fused to performative agency seemed implausible; yet in hindsight, his artistic imperatives were incredibly prescient of contemporary tools such as the nearly omnipotent audio synthesis language Max/MSP, which has been at the core of Bischoff's recent work. An aptly named set of compositions, Aperture opens the possibility for multiple readings through a series of diverse techniques ranging from additive synthesis to FM synthesis to sampled-based processes. Each of the pieces on the album was recorded in real-time with no overdubs. Aperture introduces itself with clusters of samples that sprawl with the deliberate pacing of Morton Feldman's later period, yet Bischoff renders what might be recognizable citations of a piano or percussion as pointillist condensations of digitized pixels and precise plastic details. Over the course of the following pieces, Bischoff unleashes coarse streams of electrons which flange and pulse within the caustic firestorm of divergent timestretching, giving the impression that Bischoff is quite literally tearing the fabric of sound. Bischoff also offers a collaboration with Kenneth Atchley and complements the oversaturated physical noise of Atchley's water fountain sculptures with short digital articulations that ride on the top of Atchley's dense textures.
This is Bischoff's first recording in quite sometime, and has been well worth the wait!
Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca had to start somewhere, somehow, before they had the clout to recruit for their guitar battalions in a quest to generate his minimalist / maximalist mantras of transcendent noise. Fellow avant-guitarist Tim Catlin has yet to branch out into territories of large ensemble guitar compositions, yet it's certainly exciting to witness the birth of an artist who will undoubtedly join the ranks of Chatham and Branca as one of the premier avant-guitar composers. A few years back, we bellowed loudly about the debut recording from Mr. Catlin, an unassumingly great album of mechanically attacked guitar vibrations entitled Slow Twitch; and now, we are just as thrilled by Catlin's second disc, the equally exquisite Radio Ghosts.
At the moment, Catlin prefers the prepared guitar, laid flat on the table Keith Rowe style, and then agitates the entire body of his instrument with any number of mechanical and magnetic means. Fan blades, E-bows, and battery-powered motors are each set up in a variety of strategies to create a complex set of droning vibrations whose multiple overtones send shockwaves of contaminated frequencies across the wood, strings, and metal of the guitar. These sounds are immaculately recorded and given only the bare minimum of mastering to heighten the exhilarating drones. Here on Radio Ghosts, Catlin fabricates the same harmonic dissonance through sustained drones that one might hear in LaMonte Young's dream theatrics or Tony Conrad's blistering violin screech or Organum's cacophonic metallic chorus or Rhys Chatham's billowing mass from 400 guitarists. Yeah, this is pretty much the pinnacle of '60s holy minimalism catapulted 40 years into the future; the only difference is that you've probably never heard of Tim Catlin. Do not miss out on this fucking brilliant album!
Second release from this droning duo. Coelacanth is our very own Jim Haynes and AQ pal Loren Chasse (Jewelled Antler, Blithe Sons, Thuja, Franciscan Hobbies, Id Battery et al). Four extended tracks of gorgeous space-y drone-y almost-ambience. Forests of cricket-like chirps are blurred into smeary ambient washes of cool greys and pale whites, beneath smatterings of clinking clicking clatter. Keening, indistinct moaning tones sound like distant foghorns, reflected from the slowly shifting terrain. Underwatery warped sonic shudders billow outward as vague melodies drift and float, chiming and reverberating, eventually dissipating into misty clusters of ethereal almost transparent notes. Hissing, fuzzy high end buzz whirs machinelike over industrial clatter that has been smoothed out into pulsing, barely-there rhythms. So so nice. All of the sounds were collected from various public and private Coelacanth performances over the last couple years, before being assembled into the Glass Sponge. Released by local sound art nonprofit 23five.
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!
Back in 2010, G*Park performed in San Francisco for 23five's Activating The Medium festival, presenting the early sketches of his eviscerated musique concrete and disembodied field recordings, surging from vacuum-sucked voids through ice-cave drones into tumultously compacted rumblings whose frequencies were on the verge of tearing The Lab at the seams. It was an exhausting emptiness that G*Park constructed through all of his sounds, grimly alluding to a science-fictional apocalypse of an endless winter and relentless viral agents. For the next two years, G*Park (aka Marc Zeier) finessed the details of that work, tightening up the tension and further hollowing out the noises, resulting in Sub - easily the best release from his impeccable catalogue, and one of the finer outings from the Schimpfluch-Gruppe. Along with the likes of Sudden Infant, Rudolf Eb.Er, Raionbashi, and Dave Phillips, G*Park hails from the Swiss collective Schimpfluch, which extends the ideas and concepts of the Viennese Aktionists (i.e. Nitsch, Brus, Schwarzkogler, Muehl, etc.) of aestheticized violence and abject transgression through the histories of punk, performance-art, industrial/noise, and DIY cassette culture. There is horror, dread, fear, and scorn in all of the work of Schimpfluch; and it manifests in many different ways. In Sudden Infant, you will find the Dada-prankster; in Phillips, you have the psycho-sexualized demon; in Eb.Er, you've got a scatological shaman, but in G*Park, you have the haunted existentialist. Easily the most introspective and mysterious of the lot, G*Park doesn't have the numerous world tours that the other members of Schimpfluch do, but his work is revered by those in the noise and sound-art communities as being a hidden gem of grizzled collage-based compositions. His work exists somewhere between the technical constructions of Luc Ferrari and the more vacant strategies of industrial culture (i.e. Thomas Koner, John Duncan, etc.); Sub is spacious album girded by darkly radiant drones and shadowy thrummings that ebb and flow as a strange subcutaneous current akin to blood streaming though veins or a toxic algae bloom fed by the strength of the sun; but that spaciousness is not one of calm pools of ambient bliss. No, this is a very tense album as he pricks, shatters, ruptures, and bleeds out those drones with agitated harsh snaps and slaps of acoustic debris - the suffocating last breath of oxygen extracted from a scuba regulator, the murderous caw of a crow, a whipcrack burst of unknown energy, a brutalist thud of a fist striking a ribcage, static errata from EMF detectors that may or may not be dialed into paranormal activities, or just the drippings of an ice cave whose entry way has just collapsed leaving you with no escape. An unsettlingly brilliant album.
Oh, we love art made from glitches, errors, surface noise, smudges, corrosives, and just plain mistakes. Just look at how we've championed Caretaker, Phillip Jeck, William Basinksi, and Oval, and how many times we applaud something for sounding antiquated, garbbled, warbling, or just utterly fucked-up. Which brings us to New York based sound artist Richard Garet and his atypical electronic systems involving lo-tech circuits, radio transmitters, and dismembered speaker cones, we seem to have found yet another artist whose beautiful demolition deserves our attention.
Back in 2011, Garet presented an audio-visual live piece at SFMOMA, which involved a wildly stroboscopic, flickering projection that triggered jittery noises from his table top of toy walkie-talkies and bits of circuitry. With the potential for gnarled interference and ugly distortion that the cross-currents and bare wires might impart, Garet's performance was somehow instead jaw-droppingly elegant, drawing a taut line from minimalist drone & crackle through John Duncan's psychoacoustics and back to David Tudor's Rainforest excursions, but shifted just slightly towards a hauntological mesmerism with ghosts of melody seemingly buried within. Areal works in the same way as that piece; and dates back to a different installation Garet presented at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he flooded the space with fog and shot color-field projections into the space swirling together with the eeriely divine drones. The music on the disc in all likelihood is a distillation of the Issue Project Room extravaganza, heightening the drama and intensity of the sounds without having the benefit of a fog and light show. Garet cites radio as a source material for Areal, but damn if he doesn't get the device to sound like a Rhys Chatham guitar symphony, a field of chromatic density and shivering heaviness blossoming from supple tones and crunched noises. The album's lush atmospherics wax and wane with variable degrees of intensity, with ethereal drifts collapsing into scrabbled texture later to be engulfed in a harmonic cauldron of buzzing thrum. Garet reveals his hand at the end of the 50-minute composition with some unkempt radio interference that snaps to a sudden conclusion. You may hear bits of Tim Hecker and bits of Phill Niblock in Garet's work. Everything Garet has done up until this album has been very good; but with Areal, he's taken it to another level. Absolutely required dronemuzik listening!
Throughout the '80s and '90s, Michael Gendreau worked extensively in the East Bay avant-noise project Crawling With Tarts, often constructing surreal experiments with idiosyncratic pop-babble and tape collages of art-damaged noise. For Gendreau, the turntable became an ideal instrument for his explorations; and soon, he began working with the archaic technology of lathe cut, handcrafted vinyl. Often the results were bizarre, if sporadically successful recontextualizations of homemade instrumentation, radio noise, and anti-pop. Recently, it seems as though Gendreau has put Crawling With Tarts on an extended hiatus, due to his increasing attention into the field of vibrations diagnostics and consultation. This incredibly technical arena has lead him to researching the problems of acoustic noise vibrations upon highly sensitive pieces of optical equipment, which could present faulty analysis due to the tiny, but measurable effects of environmental noise (air condititioning ducts and heating vents in particular).
"55 Pas De La Ligne Au No. 3" finds Gendreau bridging his current activities of acoustic diagnostics with his once prolific avant-turntable collages. It appears that Gendreau has hooked up a number of accelerometers - technical devices used to detect, measure, and catalogue any number of vibrational frequencies - to a series of battered record players spinning his handmade vinyl. Gendreau's accelerometers are so sensitive, that they pick up, not only the interaction between the needle and the record in question, but also the muffled whir of the thick rubber band stretching between the motor and the turntable plate. The results found on "55 Pas De La Ligne Au No. 3" are astounding, with eerie mechanical drones, minute needle crackle, and the occasional, but always unnerving upsurge of quiet voices floating though the din like the EVP sounds from "The Ghost Orchid" of purported recordings from beyond the grave. This will probably become one of my (Jim's) favorite records of the year.
Philip Jeck. Janek Schaeffer. Otomo Yoshihide. Thomas Brinkman. Saule. These have been some of the recent crop of avant-turntablists whose praises we've sung in the recent past; yet the use of the turntable with experimental music is nothing as novel as the current infatuation would indicate. Turntablism could be traced back to John Cage's Imaginary Landscape (1939), but perhaps a better historical jumping off point for those artists' delirious collage work would be with the early work of Christian Marclay and Non, who both reconfigured the noise and disembodied cultural reference from skipping records in the late '70s. It was that environment of Industrial culture that spawned Gum -- the Australian avant-turntablist duo which began quite literally with a skipping Brian Eno record. While Gum's Andrew Curtis and Philip Samartzis shared a common interest in Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and Whitehouse, their work centered upon the volatility of surface noise from cheap turntables that they rescued from thrift stores and junk shops. At the same time, Gum balanced their destructive pursuit of tumultuous noise and electrically charged static with a clinical disembodiment. Even when disco-grooves from the Bee-Gees or porno climaxes get mangled in their Frankensteinian aggregates of loops and layers, it's hardly funky or sexy... rather a wonderfully disturbing mess. Having only a couple of singles on RRR and Korm Plastics as well as two self-released LPs, Gum had remained a secret history within the prolific oeuvre of Australian sound art; and now, thanks to this Vinyl Anthology compendium which features the bulk of their recorded works, the ecstatic expressionism of Gum can now be rediscovered for what it really is: precocious genius.
Strange that we, of all people, didn't realize this before - the Jason Kahn who has been producing extraordinary minimalist compositions and beautifully subtle sound installations in recent years is the same Jason Kahn who had stints as the drummer for mid-'80s, SST bands Trotsky Icepick, The Leaving Trains (one of Andee's all time faves!), and Universal Congress Of. Believe it! Around 1990, Kahn moved to Europe, dropping out of the US art-punk / post-hardcore scene and effortlessly transitioning into the avant-garde improv community in Zurich. He soon began experimenting with feedback systems resonating within the architecture of his drum kit, discovering a vocabulary of noises that have become the building blocks for his current body of work. A man of numerous collaborations (Gunter Muller, Ralph Steinbruchel, Asher, Steve Roden, Kevin Drumm, Jon Mueller, Toshimaru Nakamura, etc.), solo Jason Kahn records don't happen ever so often; and this one on 23five is exquisite!
On Vanishing Point, Kahn's techniques shift a little bit from the feedback bouncing around the innards of his drum kit to a series of colored noises generated from his custom built, patch-bay synth. The album reveals itself as a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned softened noises. Soon into the piece, Kahn introduces a flickered ghost of melody whose luminous tones manifest ever so slightly against his contrails of noise. The upper register hiss and statics of these layered noises slowly drop in pitch and frequency over the duration of the piece, revealing subharmonic rumblings and an oceanic current that tugs at the agitated textures of Kahn's surface noises. This glacial, minimalist shift renders Vanishing Point elegant and meditative.
For those familiar with the 23five catalogue, this fits snugly next to those awesome records on 23five from Jean-Francois Laporte and Tim Catlin; and for those who are not, the calm surfaces of Kevin Drumm, the crackled surface noise of Loren Chasse's Hedge Of Nerves, the spectral reflections from Alan Lamb's wire recordings, and even the placid side of Taiga Remains could be jumping off points into this excellent album.
Those artists, musicians, misanthropes, and just plain weirdos who not only exist musically on the fringes but have planted their entire existence on the edge have long been the greatest inspirations of Aquarius Records. For proof, you could scroll through oddball recordings that have earned the honor of Aquarius Record Of The Week. There was the Finnish sound artist Terje Isungset who crafted not just one album, but two from untreated percussive instruments entirely made of ice. Hans Edler thrilled us with his 1970s transformation from teen idol into short-circuited electronic composer. The protracted ululations of the profoundly cracked Elizabeth Clare Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant were as transcendent as anything that Lamonte Young had to offer, yet also had that creepy cult of personality vibe to boot. And who could forget Kathy McGinty? But one of the earliest recordings that truly made our collective jaw drop was the 3" cd from French-Canadian composer Jean-Francois Laporte called Mantra. Here was a mighty fine 20 minute composition of delicious vibrations, rattles, mechanical hum, and industrial drones that came with a particularly alluring back story: the source material to Mantra was a Zamboni -- the unusual machine only found at hockey rinks responsible for resurfacing its ice.
The one catch to Laporte's Zamboni sourced masterpiece was that we could never verify that a Zamboni was the actual source material. We heard from 'reliable sources' that Mantra is the sound of a Zamboni; and we wanted so desperately to believe that this was the case, just because the Zamboni is such an amazing and eccentric beast of industrial engineering. Before this turns into a dialectic on epistemology, we here at Aquarius discovered that we had been duped by a couple of mischievous DJs on KPFA without the knowledge or consent of Jean-Francois Laporte. It turns out that Laporte used nothing but a common air-compressor in composing Mantra. This factual unveiling should not in any way take away from the splendor of that piece. Here's what we had to say about Mantra many moons ago:
"Mantra opens with a trio of motors starting up and emitting a gentle purr. As these engines warm up and shift through various perfunctory cycles, a wide spectrum of metallic vibrations slowly spins through the stereo field. After a marvelous set of transitions between drones, there is the rattling sound as if a screw or bolt had been loosened by the vibrations, with two pieces of metal beginning a clamorous bell-ringing arrhythmia. When these motors finally are shut down, those pieces of metal still resonate for a beautifully sustained coda."
That 3" cd came out almost a decade ago, became a classic, and went out of print. Thankfully, 23five Incorporated has rescued Mantra from the dustbin by issuing the first major compendium of Laporte's work in the form of Soundmatters. While we've already sung the praises of Mantra, the remainder of Soundmatters is well worth investigating on its own. The opening track "Electro-Prana" is a pristine set of field recordings of a wind that ripped through Montreal, when the city was silenced by a winter time blackout. It's a pure, chilling sound of whistling wind overtaking the urban landscape. The next piece is the only digitally rendered composition on Soundmatters, yet Laporte brings his intuitive expressionism to a series of spiraling drones that easily rival those of your favorite minimalist (e.g. Niblock, Chalk, Hafler Trio, Xenakis, etc.). For those of you who have had the pleasure of experiencing Laporte's live concerts, the third piece will certainly be familiar. He's built an instrument with a series of car horns and elongated trumpet bells attached to an air compressor with each of the valves controlled by foot pedals. This instrument can generate infinitely sustainable, blaring drones from each of the horns; and Laporte craftily layers these sounds for incredible, dynamic results. Well, for this recording, Laporte lugged this instrument into the hull of a giant cargo ship and recorded this composition using the massive reverb of that space and the results are simply jaw-dropping. Imagine the most Nordic bellow from a Wagner symphony stretched out into its melancholic, raw sound and allowed to decay in space and time. Wow!
Following this is the aforementioned Mantra; and then Soundmatters' final piece which explores a quiet, yet thoroughly rich harmonic tapestry produced by a quartet of saxophones that could be Laporte's imagined summit between Evan Parker and Morton Feldman with rasping breaths of sound breaking across a silent event horizon with the ghostly energy of subatomic particles flickering and dissolving in a cloud chamber before amassing into a delirious swarm of Tony Conrad-esque acoustic dissonance. It's all utterly magnificent and one of finest collections of 'serious' composition that we've come across.
There's an important rule of thumb to apply to Francisco Lopez records: if it's silent, then avoid it; if there's sound, it'll be well worth your time. Since there aren't any urban legends of Lopez doing his silent material in a live context, it's a pretty safe bet that any live recording is something to consider. That said, Live In San Francisco is a fantastic document of his pursuit of an 'absolute concrete music.' In previous recordings, Lopez has recontextualized the insects from rainforests, ambient din of the urban environment, human voices, the run-out grooves of vinyl, and even death metal blast beats in constructing his textural slabs of gray sound; and his live concerts rework similar themes and source material with compositional strategies that best fit the performance context. While he's performed in San Francisco numerous times, the two performances that found their way onto Live In San Francisco were the Hexaphonic show at the Lab in August 2000 and an intimate performance at 3feetofftheground in July 2001. The documentation from The Lab show opens with a noxious hiss that builds up to loud crash like a heavy steel plated door slamming shut in a cavernous warehouse. Slowly another hiss ramps out of the reverberation of his initial crescendo and becomes more and more volatile until the kill switch is cut some 25 minutes later. The second recording from 3feeofftheground resembles some of the leviathan plods from Daniel Menche as a monstrous mechanical rhythm increases in strength and ominously marches forward. As with the previous Live in 'S-Hertogenbosch document, Live in San Francisco comes with a blindfold so you too can replicate the experience of being blindfolded at a Francisco Lopez show.
The Austrian noise artist Helmut Schafer died in 2007, leaving behind only a handful of recordings despite his constant travels to music / art festival around the world, including appearances at ARS Electronica and Documenta back in 1997. His work dealt mostly with psychoacoustic principles of intense frequencies at intense volumes, as such he found a sympathetic ear in Zbigniew Karkowski - who became a longtime friend and often collaborator. Yet, beginning around 2003 he came across some dismantled church organ pipes and began experimenting with alternative ways of activating the tones and timbres of those pipes, including a contraption of hairdryers that pushed small currents through the pipes to generate hushed, muffled tones. In building compositions through this system of organ pipes, he radically shifted away from the searing noise and towards a very quiet, contemplative electro-acoustic sound, involving violin, electronics, percussion, and ample pockets of empty space. Thought Provoking III is Schafer's final recording dating back to 2006 when he employed percussionist Will Guthrie and violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner to perform the piece in a Vienna church. In fact, Guthrie stitched this recording together from the rehearsal sessions and the performance itself, attempting to keep true to Schafer's wishes. The proceedings are solemn excursions in electro-acoustic mark-making built around those bellowing hums from Schafer's organ pipes amidst intermittent percussive flourishes, subtle gong overtones, sustained violin trills, and fizzling electronics. The non-repetitive clustered events sound akin to anyone from the Miasmah roster taking up the task of remaking late period Morton Feldman. For the final track of the album, Zbigniew Karkowksi took up remixing elements of Thought Provoking III into a piece reflective of Schafer's more volatile compositions. While full of the frigid vibration and electric toxicity, Karkowski shows considerable restraint in his remix, and constructing a poignant tribute to his lost friend.
"Careful arrangements of sonic rubbish." That's one hell of a great artist's statement, courtesy of Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab). Over the past decade or so, this Australian sound-artist has quietly produced some of the finer examples of composition through field recording. His work is hardly the stuff of pleasantries from a soft ambient whoosh set as the backdrop to various birdsongs plopped willy-nilly for the intrepid listener to identify. Nope, there's always the threat of psychological, psychic, and existential violence lurking throughout Sprod's work. When the insect chorales push through to the foreground, it's symbolic of pestilence, disease, blight, and the simple fact that much in the outback can fucking kill you. It's easy to tap into the ultra-violent, post-apocalyptic, doomsayer, and/or isolationist scenarios mapped out elsewhere through the Australian psyche (e.g. Mad Max, Chopper, On The Beach, Bad Boy Bubby, etc.); and Sprod carves out his own niche in digging through the hinterlands of urban neglect, locating meaning of psychogeographical import (or the lack there of) within a recontextualized sound object. Since his debut Surfacedrift back in 2004, Sprod's work has steadily exhibited a maturation in conceptualization and aesthetic complexity, culminating in the schizophonic collage-tactics of I'm Lost.
The opening salvo of leaden thud, turbine roar, and pressurized blasts of air slithering through release valves is a torrent of concrete-actions, jump-cuts, and dead-ends, as if Sprod has decided to dematerialize the listener and purposefully mistranslate the coordinates between alternate realities of equally miserable / fascinating locations of industrialized bleakness. When he settles upon a singular space-time continuum, it's a vat of uranium churning at the bottom of an oil drum, while the container itself quickens its half-life through atomic fission. Another turn and Sprod channels an ethereally unholy skree of a thousand particle accelerators amassing their beams on a single contact microphone, ending up with something akin to a far more uncomfortable Phill Niblock or Rhys Chatham, manifested through what could be fluorescent bulbs. The quiet passages of textural rummaging that Sprod intersperses throughout I'm Lost have the queasy feel of somebody pulling off scabs from old wounds. Equal parts Cronenberg and Schimpfluch (Lanz, Phillips, Eb.Er., Zeier, etc.) - so of course, it's fucking awesome.
With a huge clamorous slash of metal grinding against metal, Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) introduces the aptly titled album Take All The Ships From The Harbour, And Sail Them Straight Into Hell. This Australian sound artist has in the past already deeply impressed us with his incredible albums of field recordings interspliced with found object manipulation. In previous recordings, Tarab has exhibited sleights of hand in turning the sounds of the dry scrub lands outside of Melbourne into watery, sinewy compositions with haunted ambience lurking throughout. Here, Tarab activates the resonance of abandoned spaces (including a handful of recordings made at Angel Island with all of its crumbling beauty housed here in the San Francisco Bay); and the watery details, which emerged as illusion before, are pronounced in an ominous rumble of surf, rain, and wind rattling the undercarriage of this album. An album of extreme dynamics, Take All The Ships evolves quite effortlessly from that opening metallic klang through a series of softened white noises culled from oceanic sources and cutting into a quiet passage of vacant spaces with sand and pebbles pushed slowly across the stereo's surface. Through these events, Tarab presents his album with a cinematic grandeur and an orchestral pacing, despite the fact that all of the sounds are derived from those field recordings and found objects. Aside from a few choice backwards masked tracks and the timbral emphasis of EQ, there's no apparent electronic manipulation in his sympathetic layering of sound. The details have all of the presence of the best sound ecologists (e.g. Chris Watson, Douglas Quin, Eric La Casa, etc.), and have been enhanced through the unveiling drama of Tarab's compositions. This is best noted in the album's concluding 15 minutes which gradually build out of a concoction of insect chorales, piles of tumbling sand, and corroded metal handrail being coaxed to emit a gong-like resonant drone. A series of ramped accumulations of sound are cut away to reveal a thicker set of reverberant drones and humid ambience which swell and grow more in keeping with those minimalists we love so much (Chalk, Coleclough, Svarte Greiner, Xela, Peter Wright, etc.). As infernal as the opening of the album is and as prophetic as the title is, this coda to Take All The Ships is uncannily beautiful, almost hallowed, and certainly imbued with melancholy. A damn great record!
It would be a stretch, even for us habitual hyperbolists, to proclaim Tasmania as the next eccentric origin for unusual music to join the ranks of Finland, New Zealand, and Iceland. But there have been two cultural exports from Tasmania which have blown our collective minds: those being the black metal misanthrope Striborg and the elemental sound ecologist Tarab (aka Eamon Sprod). No, there is nothing really connecting the two other than the fact that they originated from the tiny Australian island; and even now, Sprod has migrated across the channel to Melbourne, but the case could be made that the compacted Tasmanian environments of bleached deserts, scraped coastlines, and tempestuous rain forests still tug at Sprod's heart. These landscapes which Sprod documents, agitates, and amplifies, sound as if they herald the end of the world, which may speak to a communal Tasmanian bleakness shared with Mr. Striborg. This allusion might be validated through the few interviews conducted with Sprod that highlight his nihilist traits; and maybe in that, there is some black metal oozing in Sprod's veins.
Anyway, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away is only the second full album as Tarab, yet in his small discography of manipulated field recordings and agitated objects, he's proven himself a masterful sound artist, on par with all time Aquarius favorites Chris Watson, Toshiya Tsunoda, Matt Shoemaker, and Loren Chasse. But even in comparison to those esteemed artists, Tarab's work is considerably darker, as you might imagine with that end of the world reference posited earlier. Field recordings are central to the Tarab sound, augmented by the complementary sounds of Sprod tossing leaves, rust, dirt, and shattered glass, all of which get mulched into seamless compositions swollen with expansive low end drones and electrocuted vibrations. As on his first album Surfacedrift, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away navigates barren landscapes between the industrial wasteland and the wilderness of the outback, with jolts of shattered glass and heavy rains breaking up the tactile sounds and sympathetic frequencies that make this album so incredible. Very highly recommended!
With a government that legitimately funds the arts, France has long been at the forefront of sound art, electronic music, and experimentation in general. This tradition began with the inception of INA GRM, a pioneering institution dedicated to advancements in sound experimentation. While the most lasting contribution INA GRM offers is the Musique Concrete experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri, an impressive list of composers have passed through the INA GRM studios, including Eliane Radigue, Luc Ferrari, Bernard Parmegiani, and Michel Chion. However, the impact of INA GRM has been a blessing and a curse for French sound art, as its institutionality offers impeccable facilities and opportunities to those following the program, while marginalizing those who fall outside of its aesthetics and ideals. The historical splinters and fluctuations of French sound art has not gone unnoticed, as Laurent Dailleau organized the third co-presentation between 23five and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The result of Dailleau's efforts was a 10 hour listening room experience, presenting historical material dating back to the early 1950s.
The CD compendium of 33 RPM celebrates the contemporary models that French composers have employed in response to the historical influences of INA GRM. The artists featured on 33 RPM include Kasper T. Toeplitz, Kristoff K. Roll, Jean-Claude Risset, Lionel Marchetti, Christophe Havel, Laurent Dailleau, Mathieu Chamagne, pizMO, Jean-Phillipe Gross, and Mimetic. Armed with current tools of DSP factories and Max-MSP patches, this selection of French artists tends to concentrate on the acousmatic ends of the electro-acoustic spectrum. As with the two previous 23five / SFMOMA presentations, 33 RPM is a great collection.
Last year, local educational sound-arts organization 23five and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art co-presented a ten hour listening event/installation documenting the past 50 years of Japanese experimental music entitled "Ju-Jikan" (which translates as '10 hours' in Japanese). Curators Atau Tanaka, Ryoji Ikeda, and Shunichiro Okada described it not as a comprehensive taxonomy of Japanese experimentation, but simply sought "to trace the complex web of sonic style that constitutes the current Japenese musical landscape." Tanaka, who wrote the liner notes for the program, further explained that the curatorial choices were also guided by how the West perceives Japan and how Japan considers its own representation towards the West.
This double cd compiles elements selected from that ten hour listening event at SFMOMA (the full ten hours would have required mp3 encoding and much in the way of complicated licensing arrangements!), focusing upon the more contemporary elements of experimental Japanese music. These sounds draw their connections through the recombinant power of electronic synthesis and the juxtaposition of disparate styles; which together have become a standard if elusively-defined musical vocabulary for Japanese music. "Ju-Jikan" features physically challenging noise from Merzbow, Masonna, Hanatarash (Eye from the Boredoms), Pain Jerk, and Tetsuo Furudate; 'anti-academic' reactionary modes of Yasunao Tone and Yuji Takahashi; purist minimalism of tonal austerity from Ryoji Ikeda, Otomo Yoshihide, and Nerve Net Noise; and delicate electrodrone work from Kazuo Uehara, Tamami Tono, and Kozo Inada. A really important collection indeed. We're told some tracks are previously released, some not, but it's hard to tell which -- chances are you'd have to be a really geeked-out collector to have many of these already, and even in that case you'd still want this for the rest. The cd booklet gives Tanaka's detailed notes on all styles covered, a graphic timeline of Japanese experimental sound genres, and a program for the full ten-hour event so you can see what you missed.
"Variable Resistance" was the second 'listening room' event co-sponsored by SF sound art organization 23five, Incorporated and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Where the first collaboration between 23five and the Museum centered on Japanese experimental music, this one takes a southern route to Australia, which has enjoyed a healthy explosion of adventurous musicians exporting their wares across the globe. Assembled by noted sound artist Philip Samartzis, "Variable Resistance" is a title that encapsulates the tone and extent of the work on hand, referencing not only the electronic gizmo (the variable resistor) as key to many of the featured homespun constructions, but also as an applicable non-definition of those artists who "offer variable resistance in how they are defined and the positions they occupy in a broader cultural context, fragmented, and dispersed among remote cities and divided by enormous physical and psychological space." That said, Samartzis attempts to breakdown the Australian aesthetic into a number of sub-genres: Microphonics, Metallic Plates & Resonating Strings, Residue, Flutter & Flux, Malfunction & Resistance, Improvised Composition, Suspended Time & Expanding Space, Electrical Impulses & Variable Flow, Soundhackers, and Microwaves, Collisions, & Noise.
While each of these subgenres do offer some help in interpreting the work of these artists, those featuring on this cd (a condensed version of the SFMOMA event) are pretty good at resisting any imposed characterization. Much of the work on "Variable Resistance" is based upon live improvisation filtered through a number of DSP techniques (with obvious exceptions and detours) with tracks from Oren Ambarchi, Robbie Avenaim, Philip Samartzis, David Brown, Xonk, Thembi Soddell, Darrin Verhagen, Pimmon, and Delire.
