A tour of her burgeoning but plentiful ouevre is stimulating, impressive, appalling, and appealing, fistfuls of experimental electronica, a penchant for piercing noise but also hours of gorgeously handcrafted ambient.
[Release page] Still wet behind the ears but with seemingly inexhaustible energy as a recording artist—she only began releasing her music to the public in 2010—Veldon delights in mixing up her delivery hardware. Although just about all of her work is available via Bandcamp, she has opted for CDRs, DVD-Ds, cassette tapes, and even floppy discs. “All of her work,” by the way—there are well over a hundred releases on Bandcamp already.
A tour of her burgeoning but plentiful ouevre is stimulating, impressive, appalling, and appealing, fistfuls of experimental electronica, a penchant for piercing noise but also hours of gorgeously handcrafted ambient. Her preoccupations are legion—politics, gender issues, Christianity, community; seemingly endemic social profanities like animal abuse (particularly the badger cull), antisemitism, and the most despicable expressions of the repertoire of hegemonic manliness, rape and homophobia; the impact of war on children; musings on pop culture and the nature of music and art, with references ranging from Vaughan Williams, Mahler and Freddie Mercury to Vermeer, Jean Tinguely and Mickey Mouse; and items plucked from the daily news both ephemeral and important (she’s been giving Julian Assange a well-deserved artistic battering to match the battering his reputation has taken).
The one-minute pieces on the double floppy disc set One Moment Please (one by Veldon, one by Alistair Crosbie) are gorgeous understatements in everything from length to format. The twin, half-hour drones of “In the Ruined Chapel the Wind Sings” sound more like well-oiled machines left running in an abandoned factory, but their increasingly smooth purr is mesmerizing and possibly holy nonetheless. A long piece entitled “The Classical Tradition is a Sea in Which We Drown” (Classwar Karaoke) is a blissful way to go under.
Musically and thematically, the best of her ambient concept comes together and combines in A Blasted Victoriana, created in response to a “call for music” for the 2012 conference on Jack the Ripper held in York and a natural fit for an artist so intimately engaged in the condemnation of men’s violence toward women. Choosing to use the opportunity to re-animate the victims, five of the tracks bear the names of the murdered women and testimony from character witnesses. Veldon’s excellent idea is to use music “written or first performed the year of the Ripper to paint a portrait of late Victorian society,” but she makes us hear it at some remove, sounding like it is coming through gaps in the floorboards or travelling up Victorian plumbing, or just barely leaking through the closed heavy doors of the cozy concert hall of the well-to-do, thereby also highlighting the impoverishment of the environment in which these women lived. It’s an accomplished and moving work. At such distance, a soaring soprano makes you shudder.
Veldon utilizes a similar style in her contributions to The Persistence of Memory and Culture (A Holocausst Memorial) curated by Black Circle Records, an online collective to which she also contributes generously. The same dampened, looped and obscuring effect as A Blasted Victoriana, including era-specific music recordings, as if well aware that speaking quietly draws the attention of the listener more effectively. It is the hallmark of the most admirable aspect of her work: defiance and empathy.
A Blasted Victoriana is available on Dark Meadow. [Release page]
