Frank Rothkamm has been an avant-garde pianist since his childhood in Germany. Now he is a bicoastal American with repetitive strain injury who also accepts commissions for commercials, video games and movie trailers.
I am unfamiliar with any of his previous work but am informed that it always has a conceptual framework. This is obvious here where, without cracking a smile, Rothkamm pays tribute to a Saturday morning cartoon favourite of the latest generation of toddlers, Spongebob Squarepants.
With all the seriousness in the world and making all kinds of gestures hinting at both classical styles from romanticism to modernism and great pianists from Horowitz to Richter, Rothkamm is playing for laffs. Playing very well indeed, for the joke would not work unless the teller knew what he was doing. Rothkamm´s "40 variations of the secret formula" behind the charcter are explicated further in the dense liner notes, yet another nod to the code of "serious" music - all that´s missing is that the notes appear in French and German as well as English, as is the custom.
There is of course a serious side, too - Rothkamm is toying with the idea of homo ludens, or "playful man". Grown-ups are directed and do work, children are blissfully aimless and just want to have fun - which is of greater value, and what kind of value? And to repeat, first and last Rothkamm is an excellent pianist who takes his comedy seriously. There are no squeals or bicycle wheels, just strong, intense and emotive playing.
Presenting the first collaboration between well-known Austrian field recordist Frank Rowenta and relative newcomer C.J. Larsgården from Sweden.
This piece recorded two years ago smears Swedish and English in its titles to indicate its beginning, middle and end, book-ended between which are two parts of "Alisons Garden" (sic). A plodding beat sets the pace for a simple acoustic guitar being strummed over a quiet wash of noise, before breaking off to reveal a more pastoral vista, an audio guided tour of a garden I can only assume is Alison´s. Her voice is played with electronically and blends into the birdsong and other ambient sounds of the garden until it in turn becomes replaced with a sythesizer interlude, itself sort of miming the chirping of birds over the drone of the everyday.
Alison´s voice returns after a while and she and her birds are given a pretty, lazy electronic guitar accompaniment as the piece comes to a close. A "middle" section features a far distant female voice singing wordlessly to the strummings of a guitar much closer to the mic, as static disturbances lurk in the middle ground. Again, Alison returns, leading us through a gate to the steps and deeper into what is sounding increasingly like a tropical garden, before a new electronic interlude overtakes the tour, this one ever more spacey, before landing back in the garden again. In contrast, the coda track features what sounds like a female talking head nattering in German on a television set in the other room and after a little musical flourish, the proceedings close. A lovely record of shifting character; I´d probably also enjoy listening to a whole hour of of stuff like this while walking through an actual green and humid garden.
Larsgården also pursues a passion for darker ambient under the monicker Ondo, also released on his label Tuguska. "Slow" is a, well, slow-burning outing of darkly, excruciating tormented electric guitar, while "Waiting for Shields" is much more varied and circular with a narrative in three distinct movements, not unlike the three-inch CDR messages Machinefabriek likes to send out monthly from his Netherlands studio.
A single thirty-seven minute track in three distinct movements, recorded live (and possibly improvised?) in Wouter van Veldhoven´s digs on a summer day in 2007. Rutger Zuydervelt has worked with Mariska Baars and van Veldhoven before, but never to my knowledge on the same album. Their combined talents have produced a suggestive piece as sparse and sketchy as Baars´ cover art. The guitars of Baars and Zuydervelt is absolutely angelic and van Veldhoven´s deft tape recorder manipulations almost organic.
Over a discrete electronic mat, four distinct guitar notes repeat like the call letters of an off-the-air radio station as crackles and clinkings of sonic debris (courtesy of van Veldhoven´s "metallophone" I presume) inhabit the middle field. Out of this trash, the odd, pure innocent music box twinkle becomes increasingly prevalent, like random water dripping on a xylophone left out in a summer shower.
In the meantime, the sweet notes of the guitar (or is it Baars´ heavily treated voice?) have turned inside-out, running tape-backwards "Tomorrow Never Knows"-style. At twenty-one minutes, everything dissolves into a near silence which grows into a broad, engulfing drone, out of which in turn emerges avian cries reminiscent of Robert Fripp´s distant electric guitar before the five-minute-long shivering denouement.
Tobias Fischer runs (at least) two labels, maintains a highly informative website where he writes eloquently about music, but above all meticulously crafts his own, very distinctive sounds, putting him in the vanguard of a new generation of ambient and drone composers. The special niche carved out by the Gruenrekorder label is field recording, and as Feu Follet, Fischer fits right in.
Though the title of the album Paradis Paysan naturally causes the mind to conjure up a bucolic landscape, we seem to be dropped right onto the central reservation of some busy urban mainstreet as the sounds of cars, trucks and automobiles whiz by. Fischer slowly insinuates his double-breasted drone, high and low pitches interweaving, as the traffic continues to rush by on rain-soaked pavement, introducing an element foreign to the environment and ultimately overtaking it.
This forty-minute piece goes through five distinct movements, and the "landscape" becomes more internal than external as it proceeds. Fischer may be suggesting an escape hatch provided by concentrating on other sounds than those which overwhelm urban man in his daily life. By the fifteenth minute, a few subtle organ notes even lend a brief sacral element to the proceedings, but for the duration various soundscapes from the most earth-bound to a sense of deep outer space relieve one another, finally winding down with I can only liken to a church service for crickets.
Two masters, two CDs. Conceived as "experiments in the dualities of music and emotion", the long-standing relationship between pianist Harold Budd and guitarist Robin Guthrie began as far back as the curious and classic "The Moon and the Melodies" EP, featuring all the members of Guthrie´s old band The Cocteau Twins and Budd. Since then other collaborations have been conducted, most recently the filmscore to "Mysterious Skin". But here we have the most music Budd and Guthrie have created in tandem and released in one shot.
Some plan, some poetic symmetry is being aimed at with the form of two, simultaneous albums - judging by the titles, After the Night Falls is to be listened to first, prior to Before the Day Breaks. The titles of each track on the respective albums reflect one another, but dimly, as if in a time-ravaged antique mirror. To wit: "How Distant Your Heart" = "How Close Your Soul"; "Seven Thousand Sunny Years" = "A Minute, A Day, No More"; "Open Book" = "Hidden Message or; "The Girl with the Colorful Thoughts" = "My Monochrome Vision".
Are the tracks themselves variations of each other? It would seem so. Does Guthrie take the lead on one version, Budd on another? Impossible to tell. Either way, two takes on one theme each time.
Both are signature stylists, Guthrie´s guitar seemingly stroking out round but hollow notes, Budd´s discreet fingers choosing each note as if it were a ripe grape on the vine intended for a fine wine, all drenched in reverb. Claims not to be ambient music, but I beg to differ; the distinction lays in the ear of the belistener. Track nine on the first CD, however, has the distinct melody and even drum play of what could have become a "song", had only someone chosen to sing (the version closing CD 2 is even gentler).
Still, classic Budd - I defy anyone to hear any major sytlistic shift between this and his reputation-making collaborations with Brian Eno back in the day (through whom
he met Guthrie, by the way). Lovely. More of the same please, at any time.
As an artist new to the recording scene, calling yourself simply "Lena" is certainly one way to make sure you don´t stand out in the crowd. I believe there are already a handful of Lenas on the record store shelves; I myself am currently working on a review of the third album by another Lena, the nom-de-reggae of French-Canadian sound artist Mathias Delplanque.
However much she - and this Lena is indeed a she - hides the light of her personality under a bushel, Lena could not be more forthcoming in calling her album Extended Gestures for Cello. For that is exactly what it is - a whopping seventy minutes delving into cello sonorities. A "gesture" is generally understood as a simple, physical movement meant to convey a rather straightforward thought, and over ten tracks ranging from one to almost fifteen minutes, Lena coaxes many exquisite ideas out of her overgrown fiddle while her husband, ambient stalwart M. Griffin, paints a slightly out of focus background with subtle electronic treatments. I particularly like the sense of enormous indoor space they create on "Crowdmurmurs, Peopletalk".
The longest track "Workings of Silver Fortunetellilng Machines" is a masterpiece of patience, as Lena strokes the cello once with her bow, allows the note to sound, carry, get caught up in the discreet electrical storm surrounding it in space, and diminish before taking another swipe at the instrument. Probably one of the most meticulously created and intellectually enjoyable ambient tracks I´ve heard this year.
Not every single one of these "gestures" succeeds, but if Lena continues to carve out a career as ambient cellist, it will be interesting to see where her skill and imagination take her.
After launching their new label in a big way, with the gigantic full-length compilation CD "I, Mute Hummings" and its complement "Mute Scribbles", Tobias Fischer and Mirko Uhlig launch another big project in a more demune manner.
"Chinese whispers" is a children´s game which where I grew up, we called "broken telephone" - all the kids sit in a circle and one whispers a phrase into the ear of another, who repeats it to the next child, and so on round the circle. Normally, by the time the last child has uttered what has made it to him, the words have become totally transformed into a new, and hopefully hilariously absurd, phrase.
Here, the aim is the creation of a new artist and a piece greater than the sum of the four parts, because who can say for certain where one´s work ends and the next begins? Call it an "almost differentiated mass" - a string of discrete voices each identifiable as its own smeared into one clearly collective effort. Uhlig, Fischer (identified as Feu Follet on the front of the tiny cover, by his own on the back), Keith Berry and guitarist Jörg Eger all contribute, and the piece drifts serenely above a widely varied and colourful landscape before ending by bending a few suggestive twangs on acoustic guitar, these cowboys riding off into the sunset. Until next time, pardners. And I do mean that sincerely; I´m certainly looking forward to the next volumes in the series.
Dr. Nagual X apparently has a long history both as instrumentalist and producer, building his own studio three years ago. Illégal Dub Music is his second album. Truly a doctor without borders, he brings together the swing and sway of dub rhythms and the gritty, sweaty, unrelenting noisiness of urban life, whether it is occuring on a Nairobi street corner or on messy sheets in some bedroom in the concrete suburbs of Paris or Marseille.
Onto the rock-solidest of bass foundations, Dr. Nagual X splashes vocal samples like an action painter throwing colour at a canvas. Illégal Dub Music conjures up a busy street, a stock exchange floor, a stockyard floor of voices - constantly chattering, cajoling, confronting, seducing, making and accepting deals, for sex, for money, for temporary gratification. It is the medieval marketplace overlapping impalpably with the never-ending converse of the Internet.
It is carnival, too - singing (some wonderful, mainly female, voices have been recruited for this session) for the sheer joy of singing, with Jamaican, Indonesian, African, even, I would swear, Ladino inflection.
Dr. N has truly fashioned a fourth world music all his own, fusing many far-flung influences within the warm, motherly embrace of dub reggae. He plays almost all the instruments but his passionate Hammond organ and the trombones of Dominique Rataud and Low Brize outshine most everything else.
However: There is one serious criticism that must be levelled at this album. The last few tracks, about a quarter of the entire playing time, veer wildly off course, into another album altogether, so that we end not with the salty taste of reggae on our lips but rather some twenty minutes of pretty generic jungle.
Sometimes it´s a bad thing that there is so much space on a CD, because if this album had ended after the eighth track, its lasting impression would have been positive through and through.
Nice English lass with a pretty, well-articulated, theatrical delivery sings songs about eggs, kisses and kitchen shelves, going to or being in the movies with her best friends and whether or not the meek really would want to inherit the earth.
While seeming domesticated, Serafina Steer is, as this tiny little record claims, "public spirited". Only her contributions to the common good may not be what the other housewives and bakesale do-gooders were expecting.
The lyrics of the first song, "Eggs", deliciously lampoon our modern-day suckerdom for the wisdom of the women´s magazines, consumer society, the whole Oprahverse of "buy spiritual fulfillment through my website and feel fine". Until next time. In a nuthell - or an eggshell.
Of course, that is more my rant than Steer´s, even if it shares a common basis. Public Spirited consists of four very wordy songs through which she rushes breathlessly, as if determined to get down as many of her thoughts as she can before the meagre running time of twelve and a half minutes is out. Accompanying herself mostly on harp is a great idea - the harp always prepares the listener to be wrapped in romantic gauze, mellowing the harsh edges of reality. Consequently it´s quite a shock to hear the singer blurt that she´s going to sell her neighbour´s dirty secrets to the tabloids to such innocent trills.
Throw in a little synthesized recorder and drums and a few dabs of clarinet from some sidepersons, and Serafina Steer´s little Barbie-sized album is ready to bewitch and deceive. And delight.
Between 1999 and 2001, Matt Hillier (aka Ishq) worked on an album as pretty and singular as the species of flower for which it is named. "Orchid" was originally released as a single (though lengthy) CD on Interchill in 2002 and shortly thereafter with an accompanying disc of some forty additional minutes on Dakini.
The album is a nearly flawless gem of limb-stretching "relax and don´t think music", including possibly the best use of a throaty, acoustic bass bottom (especially on the penulitmate track "Bakhti") on any ambient release. Happily, this CD is still available through Virutal World mail order.
Around the same time the record was released, he started making music with Jake Stephenson, who sadly passed away just recently. To mark that event, Hillier, dubbing their duo Colourform, has issued a compendium of their work from 2002 to 2007 under the title Visions of Surya on his two-year-old ambient label.
These visions are vaguely oriental, but of an imaginary Orient, or born of a lost sense of wonder in our own world, like Marco Polo telling the Kublai Khan tall tales of invisible cities in Italo Calvino´s short novel. It shimmers and glitters, but sometimes reveals that just beneath the surface lies a gritty, dank and dusty reality.
The fourth track, "Monkey Puzzle", serves to plainly illustrate the kind of "urban bucolic" atmosphere Colourform are trying to create - as it comes to an end, we hear the unmistakeable sounds of a traffic jam - of bicycles and rickshaws - here comes the real Third World.
The album is sublime when it allows female vocals to soar like Indian swallows, and ridiculous when shortly thereafter another - or the same? - voice is Stephen Hawkinged to spout incomprehensible robot-speak. But then again, the piece is named "Flying Carpet" and is a gem of cartoonish ambient orientalism.
A fine album with great ambitions, the foremost of which has been easily achieved - hailing a fallen comrade.
A real coffee-table book of a package. Housed in its handsome slipcover are a slim CD case and six quality postcards, each featuring a montage by visual artist urban9, with its title on the back.
Each title naturally corresponds to a complementary track by composer Nicolas Bernier. The idea behind this project was to collaborate over disciplinary boundaries, allowing the images to inspire the music and the music aid in assembling the visuals. If I understand correctly, this give-and-take process went back and forth through to a final revision.
The montages of urban9 are composed on grey on grey backgrounds with patient balance and painful symmetry, which becomes all the more apparent the deeper you look into each image. At the centre of each but one stand photographs of children, removed from their original context in some family album from the Victorian age or the 1940s, to judge by their clothes. In some, faces shine brightly, even preternaturally, while in others they are partially or wholly obscured. Gazing deeper into the frame there are the eponymous trees, of course, featured in every piece. But the trees are uniformly denuded, bereft of leaves and possibly also of life. Gaze even deeper and you find ghost writing, flower X-rays, an owl, and other eggingly incongruous elements, all drawn together to form a very cohesive whole. If I had to pick a favourite, it would be the second image, "This is a Portrait", with its young schoolboy cradling a lamb in his arms, unexpressive eyes fixed directly on the photographer´s lens, impatient to get this over with.
I am also very attracted by the music for this piece, which features longtime Bernier collaborator Delphine Measroch on accordion and cello with Bernier on guitar and "audio transfiguration". This piece is as truly murky and deep with layers as urban9´s visuals.The strings and accordion even add a hint of French-Canadian folk music, if only by mere presence rather than express style.
With his computerized hammer and chisel, Bernier has sculpted each piece out of sparse instrumentation - a guitar or two, some brass, piano, strings and the above-mentioned squeeze-box.
At times his interpretations are much more literal - "sound-effect-y", if I may coin an unwieldy term - than expected, or necessary. When this happens it appears that more restraint at the computer keyboard would have been preferred.
However, most of the time his electronics complement his acoustics admirably, lending them just the righ patina. Les Arbres is gloomily enchanting, for example "Piano", where the thoughtful depression of a deep piano note is allowed to swell and subside before venturing a new one. "Bora", an "audio bricolage" according to the composer, is not my favourite track - too much of the sound-effectery mentioned before - but the foghorn rumble he has his sampled trombones emitting is almost physically seductive. The sentimenal violin of Pierre-Olivier Gaudreau on the closing track (perversly titled "Ouverture") is peppered with very unsentimental electronic debris but this sonic juxtaposition only works to enhance the feeling of oneness between the visual art with its layered depth and the musical art´s similarly stratified sonic geography.
An exciting, possibly even profound work from a young composer, and an introduction to the work of one very interesting visual artist.
Danish electronic musician with a discography scattered across labels from Europe to Hong Kong, home of the Lona label. Defraktor is just one of the names under which Karsten Hamre releases his various styles of electronic music (elsewhere in these pages you can read about one such album under the name Dense Vision Shrine). This double 3" set comprises a suite of outside versus inside, close at hand and far away, finite and infinite.
However, "Darkness Envisioned" leads off by building a rather pleasant and cozy nest of slow rhythmic patterns, which "In a Time" takes over, with its junkyard percussion and synthesized bass which, after only a few moments breaks off, giving the listener a chance to settle in for a minute of near silence - only a distant, quiet rumble can be heard - until resuming its monomaniacal beating on metal scraps. Perhaps that breathing space was a glimpse of the vaunted "void"? In Defraktor´s portrayal, it is not scary, just unimaginably vast.
The second disc brings us much closer to the void and distant from the persistent clanging, reversing the perspective. Now we are inside, or at least proximate, "The Black Hole", a huge sucking drone into which all aural matter seems to rush. In the finale, "The Void of Universe", the beat has become obscured, more abstracted and more rapid, as if stricken by panic. The airspace around the beat has constricted and as there is not much room for soundwaves, there is not much sound. The void folding in upon us and imploding? (But what´s with the choo-choo effect at the end?).
A far-from-meaningless journey into the centre of nothingness.
Tzesne is a sound artist from the Basque region of Spain fascinated by its countyside. "The Path" leads us into this world of his, a slowly-evolving one which would appear heralded by this track with the absurdly stretched-out pealing of a giant bell - clapper meeting metal, the long gong, excruciatingly pleasurable reverberation and ultimate disintegration of the sound just short of the twenty-minute mark. Beautifully rendered - even though it probably has nothing to do with bells and my fantasticized reading of what I´ve heard.
The next drone discreetly whirls itself into an off-kilter rotation, quite disorienting on close listening. The hum growing louder as it gives the impression of spiralling downward induces that sickly, vertiginous feeling you have when dreaming of falling - wake up before hitting rock bottom! Fortunately, Tzesne fades out before coming near to the ground.
Finally, "By the dry sea...by the falling leaves" is decidedly more airborne; as this particular drone blows past our ears the faintist melody of two or three notes can be discerned in the mix - or maybe it is just implied, or extrapolated, or (again) imagined. Either way, Tzesne has created sonic magic. Here at last I at least "feel" the presence of the cliffs mentioned in the title, sheer faces dropping drastically into the sea, whipped into foam by the jagged rocks below. "By the dry sea..." skirts and plays with this sheer cliffside, getting caught on its outcrops and bending into its indentations. Terrifying, churning seas below but nothing but endless blues skies above.
Like the pervasive influence of dub in the nineties, dubstep is now proving to be more than just a club style. Rather, it is more of an approach, a skeletal structure of deep bass and prickling percussion that proves liberating to move about within for many artists with many different preconditions to their music. A recent review had Alva Noto of all artists drawing on dubstep for his rhythms. But then again, of course.
Hot on the heels of its two "Boxes of Dub" and many vinyl singles, Soul Jazz presents Steppas´ Delight, a more comprehensive collection organized in such manner as to satisfy the collector and geeky historian within. This double set is comprised of numbers which have "made" the scene through club play and pirate radio rotation, like Shakleton´s "Blood on My Hands" and Kode9´s "Samurai" - and newer stuff showcasing the genre´s inherent variety. Reggae influence sits comfortably alongside the rantings of techno animals.
Disc One opens majestically with Kode9´s above-mentioned, cinemascopic death march "Samurai", after which we get yelled at by Plasticman´s spokestoaster Spekta ("Intensive Snare") and are subjected to jittery, space-invaders electronica by Benga´s "Evolution". Uncle Sam´s rollicking organ-skank ode to (male) sexual promiscuity "Round the World Girls (Tes La Rok Mix)" is immediately shot down with a "Poison Dart" fired off by Warrior Queen and The Bug (the latter of whom must be by far the elder statesman of this crowd, having of course curated the essential 4 CD "Macro Dub Infection" series back when dub first broke across genres). Also worthy of praise is the odd, spectral soul of TRG´s "Broken Hearts".
The second disc actually lacks the depth and variety of the first; it seems less organized, as if the selector overextended his or herself on the first disc´s mix and just threw together what was left onto the second with no though for sequence. At the end the last track breaks off sloppily, just when your appetite for something nice, dark and rumbly for dessert had been properly whetted.
Still, there are interesting moments. Joker scores a shlock-horror movie theme song. Geiom picks apart structure and the hackneyed r´n´b vocals of Marita ("I´m reminiscin´ missin´ you") with the precision of a Swiss watchmaster. A minor triumph. Honourable mention also to Goth Trad, first for the name, and secondly for "Genesis", which opens with an "X Files"-like fanfare before bongomania and too-wobbly electronic bass overwhelm the artist.
Despite the plethora of dubstep compilation discs out there, Soul Jazz continues to show the way as far as depth and breadth are concerned.
Very new label under the direction of Duncan ó Ceallaigh, a gentleman of Scots-Irish decent now living and working on the Baltic coast of Germany. John Carlson, who lives in the same town, will apparently be the only other artist on the roster of this self-proclaimed "microlabel", which also pledges to be true to the 3" CDR format in all its releases, partially as an expression of aesthetic asceticism - too many CDs with their looong running time, are bulked up with filler. Agreed. Parvoart also promises that this will lead to a greater frequency of releases, allowing an interested audience immediate access to the progress of their canon of work. This is certainly a concept which has worked for Machinefabriek, for instance.
Five unedited improvisations on a grand piano in a room with a very nice, crisp acoustic. Ranging from just over two minutes to eight and a half, American-born Carlson´s pieces are all very pretty and witty, optimistic narratives which do more to ward off the November chills that attempt to recreate them (that task is ably accomplished by the sombre landscape photography gracing the back and front covers by label partner ó Ceallaigh).
Carlson is in my mind some improviser - the skill and symmetry with which each number is designed and executed would lead the uninformed to believe them fully composed before the soloist took his seat. Carlson is thinking his way several steps ahead of what he is playing at all times, seeing the whole picture in his head.
This tiny perfect album is available through http://www.parvoart.org