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:: Field recordings of chirping birds and rushing water go to my head, my
heart, deeper still. But what differentiates them besides for the
moment in time, the rhythm of the moment? Well in the case of the
latest by Dave Phillips, expect the unexpected as the lilting ambience
turns to something of a distorted torture chamber in a flippant,
immediate way. Creating a collage of pasted parts that conceal just
enough and expose the way say, The Gerogerigegege (Juntaro Yamanouchi)
does, with quirky voice like interactive happenings and other
dramatics. Phillips crams 99, mostly micro-short, pieces into one
full-on 74-minute adventure – some tracks are pauses with pure
silence, others are tape rewinds and silly sounds ala Woody
Woodpecker. So, maybe this is for the birds after all.
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:: Bubbling cauldron of microgroove with a static-smooth-sheen finish.
Goem is back and has seemingly reinvented their sound, or filtered it
thoroughly, it just pops sublimely. On eleven untitled tracks my
brain is wracked and attacked by the inherent pure funkiness. It’s
like a building domino-effect, growing, pulsating like subdued space
invaders just kicking back on some weird weed. This has got to be the
pinnacle of anything I have yet heard from these godfathers of noisy
micro-acoustics. The perfect rumble of bass drone blends
serendipitously with a tweaky bird-like pitch like guitar tuning
feedback. With one foot in an 80s arcade and the other in some mad
CAD lab at MIT, it’s a very fresh sound.
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:: Stark and twinkling, this threesome seems to collaborate as a seamless
unit with each track melting into the next with no obvious
punctuation. This is minimal as minimal, accessorized by its raw,
static impulses and flat-line drone fill. Something is in the air
tonight, but I am unsure if it’s safe to step outdoors. It’s
something of a wintery record, chilly and softly distant. It conjures
up an abandoned space, a place not quite mapped. Free particles float
about, fiery in a moment’s glance, remote the next. The stillness is
a bit unnerving; the collected chaos is all in the science of silence.
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:: As a commission to celebrate a June 2004 marriage of friends in the
Netherlands, this Scanner composition is broken into seven pieces that
are something of a departure, radiant, indeed. Quiet, almost illusory
guitars strewn through “Walk Gently Through the World” have the
eclipse of a romantic rite of passage, a procession of sorts, a
precursor, like organ music before an event. The themes are dramatic,
the music opens up and rushes through on “One Flesh, One Home, One
Heart”. The heavens open on the totally full-spectrum soundtrack
recording of “Silent Unspoken Memories” and somehow it is just
uplifting and sad at the same time – sort of like a sun shower in the
middle of New Mexico. There’s something visionary here, it’s like
Rimbaud’s experimenting in the capture of an eclipse or something
haphazardly genius. For a moment I drifted off and thought I was
dreaming of Taxi Driver – the music is that of a gritty futuristic
thriller.
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:: It’s contemporary chamber music with the assistance of a large roster of
notable accompanying players. The Sad Mac starts out with overtly
gray tonal zones, it is a melancholy mix of geometric aural striations
that just pulls and pulls as featured on “Theme For Oud
Ammeliesweerd.” Spring birds sing, organs swoon, and randomness bring
together peaceful harmonics that are dry, yet fairly subdued. As the
piano keys are struck on “Imagination” it’s like an aural dissension of
an elongated staircase, drooping, falling, all slowly, elegantly. Is
this what Duchamp once painted? It glides effortlessly, like a
fragile young bird taking its first confident flight, awkwardly
asserting its independence. Nature mixes with technology, at points
clashing like annoying flies to farm animals in Summer, but the
mélange of worlds makes it all the more edgy and draws a sense of
superfluousness to the charted outsider territory Mathieu treads
beyond here. Like a live soundtrack, performed for an audience in a
grande theatre, The Sad Mac is a collection of bits and pieces that
have been worked together based on photographs, fragmentations and
various types of collaborations – but flows like one long, beautiful
work.
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Essential Links ::
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Read more Microview’s ::
