>>> Key
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:: This is a super sized, invigorated revision to the original 1987 10″ release, originally on Touch. This version painstakingly reproduced and beefed up by the offices of Korm Plastics (aka Frans de Waard) is truly a sight to behold, and worth every last one of those euros you will shell out for it. This is a masterwork, remastered including gorgeous translucent text, a mini poster and post card, and an extensive booklet with reproduced images and background on Andrew McKenzie’s thoughts and the correlations he has made with the experimental artwork of Edward Moolenbeek. It even includes a bonus .mov file for your viewing pleasure. The disc includes four bonus tracks (8 in all) that are a dizzying array of fractured jazz and air raids. Squeaky wheels keep on churning, missiles keep on sailing. These sound like the field recordings from someone’s very private journal. A journey through populated train depots, scattered heels running, distorted boarding calls, violins bent to sound like cows, indistinguishable Nazi rhetoric beyond consumable recognition and a gentlemanly thank you to the invisible audience to polite bodiless applause. And that’s just after track one! Pagan owls chant like drunk UFO’s while schoolyard kid chants mutate into fat men and overfull circus animal balloons being launched with helium and laughing gas. Gun shots ring out in the spray of warped drone, and they aren’t bearing old fashioned muskets.
The vortex of a sick and dying vacuum is what you hear, but what actually is The Sea Org? Details start to make emerge once you drift into a deeper space of archival cut-ups, alarms and a false-start primal scream. But the smattering of intriguing, and still beguiling elements arrive through the word, image and sound, none are directly linked, although they all remain intently obtuse. And that is part of the majesty of such free-form communication, open canvas expressionism. But McKenzie has a twisted ability to both dupe his captive audience while leaving them every single key. Just walk through any of the dedicated websites at brainwashed.com to further puzzle yourself. But the funhouse effect is flat in comparison to what remains the larger dialogue in the work, the science and intrinsic beauty of the art.
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:: Where do you start with such a body of unfamiliar work? Well, I decided to just bite into this new box of Miscellany including 13 CDR’s in a beautifully handmade, embossed packaging. With extra material, live recordings and alternative mixes this is especially a treat for those who came to know Andrew Liles work after he started making sound back in 1984. The artwork is playfully odd and minimal, graphically simple but somehow imbedded with perversity. The box acts as an unabridged collection of his last two decades, so when I picked up the live Love Song (originally a limited edition of 100 10″ vinyl records on Macrophonies) I knew I was on to something. This brooding, intricate mix of electric waves, variable static and uninterruptible goings-on is like the sound you hear when you are half asleep in an 18 wheeler going 60 down an open road past midnight –sparse and elegant with an alien visitation or two.
The phrase “suck it” turns “The Bulbs of the Vestibule (remix)” into a disturbing comment on porn, only there is nothing even slightly sexy about this recording. On Mob Rules (2000), what was once a promotional CDR incorporates a bonus live track. The title cut splits my channeled head with indulgent atonal blasts and circular echoes. Educational voice tapes are blended into the mix to add a corporate authoritarian voice speaking of society and down syndrome. The sounds of children contained by a playground with a layer of sputtering percussion attempt to dust off memories while emphasizing that the socialization of youngsters may have caustic results, a sort of yin-yang of past and future.
Next up are recordings made between 1984-88 and my favorite title in the bunch, My Pink Derriére. An instant fairytale with the rhythm of a lost DIY soundtrack as illustrated by the virtually warped “Bendy Building (edit).” This showcases a certain pervasive habit for Liles using voiceover samples, crossed with hysterical beats and circus humor – an accordion here, heavy breathing there. All along you realize that there are some true, revealing themes throughout Liles’ work but they are all sort of secretive, somewhat sacred you might say. He’s like a mad doctor who drank an experimental elixir that was still in its development stage, but somehow between a state of still life coma and the dramatic re-enactment of live cultures something has gone terribly awry. Though he still manages to present work that creeks fearfully yet can use a traditional Japanese vibe at the same time and make it work as on “Who is Glenn Larcombe?” By adding three new tracks (originally called “Fear of Flying”) to the previous live event recording (at Rective, London) Liles has made a full-length out of the hauntingly poignant Aviatophobia. One of these unreleased tracks, “37,000 feet” is just all wind beneath its wings, but instead of being big gusts its more like one of those lazy Sunday midday warm breezes that takes randomly strewn debris slowly in its path. A creepy ambience dusted with the allure of the paler side of Fellini’s “La Strada.”
If you are interested in the perimeter of imagination, enjoy the work or Mirror, Asmus Tietchens and Jonathan Coleclough or if you just want to be purely brainwashed you can rest assured that every penny spent on this set will be an essential return on your sensory investment.
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:: OK – I have found something real fun here –a six-track that is an instant blend of Stephan Merritt, Momus and maybe even the Thompson Twins. With the assistance of Random Number, Fluxorgy, SOM and James Cutts the artist known as Straight Outta Mongolia takes his pre-pubescent cracking “Peter Brady” vocal to task vs. the Mike Oldfield piano signatures on the hilarious “Looks Can Be Fatal.” Sounds like a happy-go-lucky chap in chaps probably tighter than a
teenager’s jockstrap as he muses on about “nothing to do but watch the
telly” and other random viruses. The schoolyard banter tone is pretty funny and light, the beats are perkier than the nipples of your favorite pin-up on “12 Bar Blues.” Provocative, primitive and thoroughly amateurish this whacked out barrage of Sisters of Mercy meets the Jetsons is real fun, with an undercurrent of stylized know-it-all throughout. The moans on “Ode to Death (je t’idm mix)” are as feisty and tongue-in-cheeky as say those muttered by My Life with the Thrill Kill Cult.
So consider The Redundancy of Saying Sorry to be what you least expected, though it’s toy atmosphere and quirky cheap beat busting is really not anything to write home about, its electronica light with a sense of funky humor.
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:: “The Beginning” ignites an instantaneous gravitational thrust of this release from Stockholm’s Fin De Siecle and Lithuania’s Rolandas Cikanacicius as Akala. Transmigration is the theme here, and with that said, the migratory vibrations are anything but good, in fact the metamorphosis that takes place is quite darkly acidic and demon like. Though somewhere during the process, a warped time machine at light speed, there is familiar rock jazz brass, but then it’s off into space – and at full throttle. This is infinitely fuel injected –like a surround sound test recording. Flying faster than a locomotive, the harnessing of industrial noise is a well-trained beast. The emerging Steve Vai-like guitars in the final minute are almost oddly out of place, but have a certain human quality that levels things off. The gunshots heard on “Of” are induced around and through an ambient drone that sounds like field recordings from the insides of a kitchen blender processed through brainwaves. A reinvented movie soundtrack, projector and all, splish-splashes through a field of horror in “The End.”
The murmuring plays with the actual output of language, while a pluralistic rumble gains weight before your ears. We are in the middle of a war-torn field, is this Africa, has freedom of speech been rendered useless? Or this reincarnation of the soul Akala is imaging. Alive and not so well, this is a trip to a reoccurring nightmare.
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:: Feedback and frolic, and a whole ‘lotta noise generated from one ubiquitously anonymous character going by the odd moniker Chefkirk. Between his releases on Samsa, TibProd and Simple Logic this kid’s off and running the prolific marathon for recording new music. In some ways that shows a bit here in that the regurgitated feedback just gets to me after a while. It is an uneven recording where nothing new except for a level of effective faded restraint just is open to improvisational interpretation. But its barren and grating until you get to the tickly “Empty Houses” where ping-pong percussion yuck it up some. The sound effective latex-stretching of “4tbbt4” is punctuated by some quick wiry frequency at key points. And the finishing touches on the repetitive recycling of “Food Combining” makes this one a recipe with a combination of mixed ingredients in one bowl. To these ears I am seeing a trend in the past three Chefkirk releases, an experimental phase as he gains ground. He opens cans, strikes metal to a beat, it’s a street performance on a dead end.
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:: Dale Lloyd’s field recordings for Aionios The Fundament have an instant density in layers of unfiltered, hollow, organic chambers. With the radiance of mercury swimming through an endless pipe, and cover art that projects the shadowy depths of the murky unknown Lloyd is reaching deep into his psyche to offer something not unlike a pearl in his very own shell. Poetically dissonant, “Saline Crystals Born of Mother Solutions” rustles and streams, croons and gurgles. Lloyd is more a choreographer of the elements than a straight shot musician, which makes this seem like an outsider’s perspective – one akin to a geologist perhaps. This recording reminds me of some live work I have seen by fellow field recording artist Seth Nehil. Over five tracks and 48 minutes Lloyd takes us to atomic places formerly hinted at by Wolfgang Voight and Carsten Nicolai. His sublime rendition of “Adamite Effluvia” is a daydream inducing headtrip. Sound as satellite. “Aionios The Fundament” creates a sensual meditation, cleansing your mind, eradicating the incidental, drenching it, quenching it.
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:: This time around Birchville Cat Motel appear to be a duo made up of Campbell Kneale (beants and things) and Ben Spiers (piano accordion). Nurse is a 32-minute aching drone piece. Crying to the gods in their crafty makeshift hypertone, these men keep the hands-off premise to ignite the light inside this ship. The tone goes right through your ears like a frosty wind. These repeat offenders have brought their share of experimental fare to the table, but this is the first time that what they’ve concocted has developed into something as spine-tingling and provocative as Nurse. In what captures the final hours of dead man walking, the distorted cadence fades in and out of black. Similar to some of the early work by Maeror Tri and Lull, Birchville Cat Motel help define the guise of anonymity. How do they make a baby monitor and wood chipper sound like an ocean
wave at the center of a storm?
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:: Sijis tells me that this is a recording by a sort of anonymous copycat. Well, for the first 2 minutes or so its just silence pretty much and
then a slow wave of sound filters with a carbon monoxide-like quality. I guess these recordings were sent to the label in plain packaging with no real background info, only its enigmatic form. What emerges are radio frequency static, shaky, rattling electronic tweaks and a hissy, swirling drone. In a half-hour Johann Wlight’s “Dauswkn” presents a sort of urban decay, a memory of something that once posed promise, and the shards of what’s left behind, sort of like the shell of the USS Titanic. If you like the work of Augur or Brume you may find this to be like their homemade recordings, just with a bit more of a reductionist approach. It’s creaky, squeaky and a bit dark. One may ponder deeply in the shades of its atmosphere, one that simulates the oxidation of a turn-o-the-century tintype. He ends with Sunday church bells and a meandering dotted with white noise and filled with solemn swirling bits.
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:: OK, so years ago a band named Banco de Gaia was born and released some powerful tribal meets world electronica back about ten years ago on amazing records like Last Train to Lhasa (I think I have the 3CD set lying around somewhere). Since then, they’ve blended into the fabric of mainstream generics, until now. On You Are Here Toby Marks has arrived to mark his own radical territory! Tracks like “Zeus No Like Techno” spark some of the most effective powerhouse dance music in a while, it’s upbeat by using flavors of the past, Italian café themes and other hard driving dance beats. It is, of course, his fascination with world music that makes for the tasty bite of its surging energy. Like The Fire This Time, Banco de Gaia uses political intonation and other spoken cuts on the tongue-twisted “Waking Up in Waco.” Dipping back into his ambient world past on “Gray Over Gray” the Nora Jones-esque croon on a nameless singer instills a set of faded memories in the chilled jazzy skyline optimistically singing “I could shine through the shades of gray”. And then there’s “Tongue in Chic” that sounds like a funhouse reprise of Madonna’s “Ray of Light.” After spending some years working on projects like the Pi soundtrack and working with everyone from Jack Dangers and “Dark Side of the Moon” sax aficionado Dick Parry, Marks since poised to dip deeper into the flight of the living psyche by being the second coming of Enigma, perhaps. This is evident on the chanting, universally strange “Not In My Name” blunted by spiritual warfare and rubber rocket rhythm.
Banco de Gaia use sequencers to sculpt a mood range, anything from upbeat, hit-the-floor to lose control trance. Sanskrit comes to life in the holistic title track – Sashay, shanti!
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:: Come in, Houston – we may have a problem! Nebula 9.3 is the electronic fabrication of deceleration. If jet fuel were pouring from this 20-minute flight most of Rhode Island would be covered in gloppy murk. This is the first collaboration to find Argentinian ambient artist Pablo Reche and Puerto Rican media duo Cornucopia (Jorge Castro and Claudius Chea) working together. Both use manipulated concrete sound sources that layer in harmony and based in scintillating drone on “Nebula 9.3.” The multi-textured warm sound is rich as it churns and burns and blisters. You know the feeling you have in an airplane when you are 3000 feet off the ground? This one force-feeds atonalities to your left lobe, without precaution –a defiant physical recording.
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:: This may be the recital of a bunch of kids playing their toy watches, synchronizing the happy time together. But Tel-Aviv’s Adi Gelbart managed to get his piano cum four-track mixer recordings to me through the continuous strife of his homeland. And maybe this is a perfect foil for the political unrest. His pet instrument is the Yamaha CS01 which is a perky lil’ thing – only highlighted by the thirty-two tracks, each that run an average of a minute and a half or so. Gelbart takes on the pageantry of Duke Ellington’s extremely lovely “Mood Indigo” and transforms it into something that crosses all the many eras to become a space-age electronica jazzmobile. This is exultant music, almost syrupy, but survives the term “sappy.” Every note seems to count, and at times he seems to be making fun of pop music in general, but it relates to much of what we are hearing in clubs, minus the big unnecessary production and booming bass. It’s Mouse on Mars on acid with a hint of the Troggs – LOL.
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:: Zeromoon has helped to unearth twenty more minutes of Tokyo’s Ellende, the evolving enigma. Proof is in the Pudding (from “The Little Suicide Book”) is one long piece that shifts drone around electronically, magnetically, shaping its own red planet of uncertain terror. The chord reverb and vault like baby birds with the first whiff of spring pollen. Deep in the building brew is a slight grumbling, purring. The mumbling voices tease and tantalize numbingly. What they are saying is pretty much your guess, but you might imagine someone speaking a language pattern completely off the map. Are those bagpipes or some type of marching band mixed in there real good, its kind of a foiled mirage. The last 30 seconds is a short prayer, monk style (oh, not Thelonious).
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:: Glitch Letters is a 21 minute long live manipulated field recording made in Dublin. SINE (meaning “silence is not empty”) is still so new that their site has only been hit up less than 500 times. Pawel’s Grabowski’s work, with its sticks and stones, fire and spark,
reminds me some of contemporaries like jfrede, however, he adds a digital dimension of pitched sine waves which counterbalances the straightforwardness of the simple elements. It’s a faucet of fire – very subdued, yet stealth. Grabowski’s layering of very thin glitch sounds like snowflakes landing upon a car grille, just a miniscule sizzle and then its completely gone. His electro acoustic music uses vibrant chimes and crusted percussion, lots of breath and a snails timing; The character is encrypted by its faint gestural zips and live open mic appeal towards its conclusion when you can hear the audience talking a bit. But Grabowski takes a rain sample through the finish line to calm, and balance his experiment.
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:: Italy’s Fringes Recordings main man, Giuseppe Ielasi has spent a good part of eighteen months piecing together a 31 minute piece called Plans which crosses field recordings with ambient electronica in a way I have never heard before. His mousey tweaks are dashed off anxiously amid awash of cathedral drone orchestration that screens back the entire surface of the recording with a blaze of shimmering light. Growing and building to a crescendo and punctuated with dull, rubbed static and odd clatter, with metallic twists and keys and shutters, this only leads to a tripped up bevy of paradoxical percussion. With a bit of jazz savvy the mix of cymbals, wood and drum kit rile and fluster, but only just beneath the surface. At one point it sounds like tires on a gravel pathway sans engine, that warm crackly sound that only rubber and stone make together, but after a while you hear what could be rain, or fire –it sounds mysteriously homey. The eclipse of birds fly through in the building middle ground, chirping prettily as Ielasi plays a folky guitar with just the right amount of modulation. All instrumentation, analogue and electro, come together in congruity in the last few minutes, with a fine elastic melody that makes way for organic clicks, tears and crisp peeling sounds. The passage starts out granulated, permeated, and by disc end you have a fine fluid mix that winds away like a wisp of wind.
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Essential Links ::
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Read more Microview’s ::
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*Note :: Graphic for this country not available at time of publication.
