Experimental electronics and sound art curators, Baskaru, issue few but select releases each year. With a roster spanning Maurizio Bianchi to Lawrence English through Francisco López, enhancement of the French imprint’s artistic and visual project, seen last year here on igloo, is further pursued with a brace of bright sparks from different spheres and eras of the electronic world, Celer and Achim Wollscheid & Bernhard Schreiner.
‘On a walk through the crowded streets of Kyoto, or a half-asleep morning, what was it like? Later, what do you remember?’ So writes Will Long in his notes to Sky Limits. The Celer man captures this thought-sensation, between concept and feeling, by interspersing field recordings of routine quotidian activity in Tokyo and Kyoto with billowy ambient drones that tap into affective and cognitive wells. The care Long puts into his compositions is matched only by an astonishing prolificity over a stream of releases on labels like Spekk, Infraction, Dragon’s Eye, and/OAR, Chemical Tapes, and now Baskaru. The airy reflections of the opening “Circle Routes” with its gliding tones and expansive layers recedes to the sound of tea-making against a TV broadcast backdrop before drifting back to reverie mode with “In Plum and Magenta”—elegant, somewhat sparser, still the same meditation-emotion dyad. This interleaving becomes a compositional leitmotif, as audio-documentary interludes—of the commute and of the domestic mundane—cede to luxuriant immersion zones with titles bearing poignantly prosaic-poetic anchorage. It thus stands as a reflection on the slightly dissonant feeling of ‘a contrast and connection between this reality and imagination.’ The middle pieces of the album swell somewhat in intensity–“Tangent Lines” denser with dramatic weight, the following “Equal to Moments of Completion” more grandiloquent, while the final two are gentler–“Wishes to Prolong” wispily floating, “Attempts to Make Time Pass Differently” similarly spectral, ending in liminal space. ‘A reflection on the evanescent nature of memories, dreams, and reality,’ these string-laden daydream-scapes induce a strangely compelling tension–in parts so remote and hermetic, in others so tremulous and intimate, the whole imbued with a sense of arcane seductivity.
Achim Wollscheid may not be a household name, but experimental music completists will know him as a leading light of the murkier corners of ’80s Industrial–see S.B.O.T.H.I.–and of ’90s/’00s computer music and avant-garde electronics–see works on Ritornell and his own Selektion label, and collaborations with Merzbow and Asmus Tietchens. The past decade, sound art installations apart, has seen largely radio silence. Sidekick here, photographer, film-maker, installation artist, and musician Bernhard Schreiner, like Wollscheid, has more exhibitions than records behind him, sharing strong affinities. Calibrated Contingency is a stereo-mix of a continuous 4-channel live-improvised performance in Graz in 2011 re-presented by Baskaru, partly conceptual in that both performed simultaneously, wall-separated, each with computer and minimal external input devices (a boundary microphone, an induction coil, a radio), with a pair of stereo speakers, all four in a straight line facing the audience, each playing one stereo set-up. A mix of mangled frequencies, machine whir, wind-blown electronics woven loosely with clips, glitches, and odd lacunae. Drones, chimes, ambient rumble and radio frequencies spill from the speakers somewhat amorphously, as sounds from Wollscheid’s side collide with noises off from Schreiner. Clashes are intended to be serendipitous, and some interesting moments are occasioned, but to enervating as often as exciting effect. Though authorial intention is clear and present, with aleatory sound events throughout, there are as many fails as felicitous falls, dynamics conflicting as often as complementary. Calibrated Contingency may stand as something of a modern artefact, then–a grower for lovers of old school experimentalism that newer Electro-acoustic and Drone crones may shrink from.
Sky Limits and Calibrated Contingency are available on Baskaru (karu35 | karu34). Sky Limits is also available on vinyl LP from Two Acorns.
