Category Archives: REVIEW

‘ikot akpa ntim,’ the latest from Calypso Borealis.  A community regular for the last two years, the name is familiar at an intuitive level beyond the regular appearances on Hooker Vision, Cloud Valley, House of Sun, and Kimberly Dawn, among others.  Rob of ((Cave)) provides the cover art, recalling Ted Trager’s work for early Stunned releases.  Completing the package is the sound, a half hour in sensory deprivation (so to speak), made from artifacts of focal objects: the clatter of sticks (but no resonance), the high metallic buzz (without a full, middle tone), a murmur (with no voice), the harmonic remnants of a melody (yet no melody.)  To be clear, there’s not no sound – what the mind fills in is actually a wealth of sources and instruments – but the sound that is here is lesser than a sound.  It’s remarkable, really, a stunning show of restraint.  And the knife cuts both ways: stand-out track “Kponkponto” effaces a Noise rock collision by the same method, presenting the barest of feedback fringe and motoric low end, the effect being a well-paced latticework of sound which is delicate without fragility.  While “drone” may be the over-riding genre, or at least target demographic, this would be an abuse of the breadth that is minimalism.  “Sirigi-Moke,” a fluttering stereo construction, distills the entirety of Growing’s ‘Sky’s Run Into the Sea’ to a single track, recruiting velocity to underline the generative thrust of this unconventional rock music.  100 copies with thick inserts and vellum tracklists.  Recommended.

((Cave)) Recordings C30
$5
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Sick and tired of that flood of only children into Harsh Noise?  If you were ever looking for a bunch of guys who know how to share, consider Actuary: not only are they plural (on ‘Freak Hallucinations’ they are five), they seem unable to release a disc without splitting it in half for a friend.  Today’s friend is a friend of ours, Masami Akita, the Merzbow hisself.  What the two artists share here is four ample doses of good vibes, as the title implies.  Recently hit by a hurricane, my home and I are newly acquainted with actuaries, who read risk and compensation from some magical golden tablets of “value”.  Actuary, it turns out, is of similar spirits, appearing across their three tracks as methodical, turn-taking, business casual, and generous with the humor – like a Harsher version of To Live and Shave in L.A.  Their titles evoke surreal witticisms (“Only Ghosts Hate New Things”), illiterary tongue-in-cheek (“Inhuman Bondage”), and sheer absurdity (“Ritual Embrace”).  They skate across these three groove sets in escalation from playful home brew sampling with half-speed background feedback (think Throbbing Gristle, Amps for Christ, or younger projects like Scissor Death), to a rather vile power electronics delivery with strained vocals and oscillations (in the vein of Bastard Noise) – but with an editorial distance and the foregrounding of a rhythmic vibe which swells low and steady thru the piece, loping-off its edge like a scotch.  From five men sounding one thread to one man sounding the whole knotted mess: Merzbow’s side-long “Sugamo Flower Festival” sounds an optimistic thrash of watery highs and muted lows, well-suited to the separation of the vinyl’s mastering.  In many ways a more relaxed Akita, the piece strolls the festival, encountering a diversity of organic forms, but never straying from the rhythm of the garden promenade; brassy, horny shapes appear in solo against the wisp and white-static of the atmosphere, and pass with equal pacing.  In the closing moments, consumer electronics emerge from the electronic rabble to sing a chorus of their own, suggesting we’ve crossed a boundary in the exhibition area, or the flowers have pollenated the receptors with their heady charm.   Now, the average career artist could be said to experience three or four creative “eras”, allotted to as many albums in each; Merzbow is more like eight or ten albums, but in roughly the time it takes others to get a single disc out.  So though it is possible to speak of Merzbow “eras” without sounding totally insane, you’re really not supposed to, and even he would give up the joke if it meant dissuading one from doing so.  Instead, it’s simply worth noting that Akita’s ongoing studies of Japan’s pantheistic flora and fauna have brought the artist around to a new perspective on the world, perhaps officiating the next zeitgeist for Noise with friends like Actuary.  Heavy, marbled black LPs come in a thick sleeve with art by Actuary’s Kevin Fetus.

Obfuscated/Love Earth Music LP
$10
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This split from Lithuanian Noise label Terror suggests via one-sheet that this is a release “of pure harsh noise,” “for purists.”  The two uses of purity are worth qualifying, as the stream of harsh noise albums has yet to slow – at least to a significant degree – and demand some reflection on their persistence.  But first, the basics: the four tracks provided come from the new project by Serbia’s Creation Through Destruction (Alex of the prolific Dead Body Collection) and Texan Richard Ramirez’s collaborative community Black Leather Jesus.  Each track is over ten minutes, and the whole disc presents a respectable 50 minutes of material.  I’ll mention the titles here – “Uncertainty Principle,” “Stellar Magnetic Field,” “Stall Exhibitionists,” and “Bearfighter” – though they offer zero insight, and their evocation is meant only to jumpstart the dialectic of harsh noise into activity.  There is no doubt this is harsh noise as we’ve come to know it historically: a wall of high-frequency cacophony almost white for its density, each piece is nearly static, filling the spectrum from dull to piercing.  Taken alone, while a dominant and objective definition of harsh noise, this does not necessarily indicate its purity – something semiotic.  Nor does it pass unproblematic from the other side, as defined by the circumscribed “purists” who have the authority to assign authenticity – something institutional.  Rather, it is the phenomenal listening experience that I am interested in – something practical – by which I think this disc can best be qualified as pure harsh noise.  As described above, the sound encoded to the disc is “pure” as in “raw material,” nearly authorless in its static nature, and composed only by the physical limits of the disc: mine is slightly melted, and therefore concave, skipping as it chafes the CD player’s cradle.  The gaps provided by the buffering of the disc provide erratic absences and recoveries, against which the truly indeterminate blasts of noise emerge (that is, a blast-ness which would not result were I to stream the disc direct, without the errors).  The few skips which result in the outermost and initial moments provides plenty of tension for the remainder of the listen, where few if any gaps appear: mastered to an obscene volume, there is no turning it down without turning it off.  This very hands-off of the author, this non-moral, nihilistic release, purifies the situation by reducing it to a listening choice of the listener, who confronts the situation as it appears and not as an ideal, mystified, impure scenario of spectatorship.  In light of this, the “purist” is co-constituted, hearing the sounds in situ, and then, continuing to listen to that demiurge of harsh noise.  Edition of 300 copies in jewelcase with booklet.

Terror CD
$15
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Body collectors Locrian snagged a big one this time.  On this collaborative LP, the trio juxtapose their black cube to the experimental excellence of Christopher Heeman, most notably, for me anyway, of Mirror.  Heeman himself is quite the decorated collaborator, in his solo guise working with Jim O’Rourke, Charlemagne Palestine, Current 93 et al, and Merzbow, among others.  Indeed, it would seem the tail wags the dog, and perhaps Heeman is on the wrong side of the ampersand when Locrian’s general plague-scape is restricted from its ‘risk society’ thesis to a palette of the avant-gardist, applied in swatches, abstracts, and generous rococo bands.  That is, the totality of so many Locrian tracks is excerpted like panoramic photographs – discrete, yet vast – in each of these four, double-digit recordings.  Echoing the first entry point – the glitched, new aestheticky cover image (art by Sean Dack) – “Hecatomb” sets in as a smear of Locrian referents: Moorish, ominous, “Battery”-like acoustics cast wide open drones staggered by horns, which abut the recent-Eno sounds of padded floor drums, sustained piano chords, and a strange urge not to run like hell.  Optimistic too is “Loathe the Light”, which employs Hannum’s black metal vocals and a brilliant theme of natural harmonics, yet which spins on a willing access of recurring rhythm, ebb and flow like a mobile; the juxtaposition is comprehensive of its elements, with the effect that the hellraiser has been ensnared by some third force, subjected to a perverse justice to our tribute.  Forming a fine pair over nearly 30 minutes, the b-sides “Edgeless City” and “The Drowned Forest” reach a synthesis with no overt seams, blending a rich, blurry symphony into a chanted swell, mounted to an atmospheric accumulation of drones.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: Locrian-program is no longer remixed by Heeman-interloper, but both are overwhelmed by the common awe of scale in mimesis.  Edition of 500 on black and swirled vinyl, in glossy gatefold jackets.  Recommended.

Handmade Birds LP
$25
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Michael Page has settled his accounts into the ultimate institution of Sky Burial.  A very different sound from the power electronics of Fire in the Head, one of Page’s former projects (alongside Irukandji) which made its post-mortem appearance HERE a year ago, it is at times hard to believe the sensibilities of each could belong to the same individual.  Having consolidated his resources, the last year of Sky Burial releases has entered a new strata of recording through outfits like Crucial Blast, Utech, and now, Small Doses.  What I see as in spite of the album title (‘There I Saw the Grey Wolf Gaping’), the project title comes to life not just under a name, but in name: a practice of groups in elevated areas where the ground is stiff and kindling is scarce, the sky burial involves the restraint of a corpse in a clearing where scavenging birds may cart the body away in shreds.  Moving beyond the puerile reaction that this interment is “so metal,” Page begins interpretation of the event through two native lenses, translating this structural watercourse through drones and polyrhythms, glitches and synthetic horns.  Because the charm of the album is its processual reconstruction, my only complaint is the misfit of the track order, and by extension, the internal editing of the first four tracks (three of which surpass ten minutes).  I feel the real convocation starts on track two, with the stark and sudden blasts recalling the post-modernism of Arvo Pärt and Peter Greenaway: reentering the atmosphere of the “outside” – the hill, the clearing, the threshold – the dry altitude crackles with static, engulfing the human sounds with the surge of all things.  The turn of coarseness which follows in the final minutes, a stomping, whipping rhythm of abuse, feigns an early pessimism which really needs to end the piece (say as a 3”CDr), or recut toward the end of this recursive hour of music.  “Silence Moves” follows a similar triptych structure, moving through sober film-tracking and concrete grounding in a domestic mode, and into a late modern nocturne like some segue from Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Fragile.’  Wedged between the two is the counter-intuitive codecs “Carne(val)” and “Beyond the Veldt”: the first is playful jubilance of all surface – tactile electronics in a diminutive, comic, ecstatic farewell to the flesh; the latter is a slightly electrified Julee Cruise – cresting dream pop and ironic exposition like lyrics on a t-shirt – with Page playing David Lynch to the chanteuse Bridget Wishart (most tracks feature some sort of collaboration, an area Page clearly excels in).  Break yourself once again with “Fools Circel 9wys”, where Page resembles the spring-heeled Nickelodeon of recent James Ferraro, integrating a sonic excess with the greatest skill of the disc, but sacrificing the meditation of theme in the process.  Coupled with the coda of track two and swatches of the closing title-track, I take “Bone to Beak (The Vulture Speaks)” to be the true finale, quoting the concrete burial practices of many known worlds through dragging, clanging, ratcheting, and the polyphonic mourning of throats and valves.  Coil-like, the welter melts, digested, into a final void of purple-grey drones, back to the plane, the veldt, the clearing where we’ve been tied the whole time.  CD comes in an arigato pak with inserts and small poster, edition of 500 copies.

Small Doses CD
$10.5
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Half of Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio is no novice when it comes to electronic abstraction.  Whereas the duo have always evoked the marital relationship which cannot but emerge in collaboration (“can we just have a good fucking time for once?!”), this solo work appears more like a husband’s spare-room wizardry, matured to a frenzied esotericism.  The disc littered with the technocratic affect of Alva Noto, ‘FE304 Magnetite’ suggests a scentless scientism analogous to the “math” of mathrock, grounded only in vague, smell-of-gasoline like repulse-attractions to something we don’t really understand.  Or maybe that’s unfair.  The tracks/permutations of ‘Magnetite’ (there are six, e.g. “Magnetosphere”, “Magnetism”, “Magnetism”), with their common thread of thick, quavering drone, shares many distinct features with Sunn O)))’s alchemistic ‘Domkirke’, which incants demiurges of/in the clouds, consummated in “Masks the Aetmosphere.”  Not to imply a common darkness between the drone demons and Vainio – they are clearly evoking entirely different epochs of science – but the essential elements ring true, as though the Whiggishness of scientific structure mapped doubly onto music, as real and imagined history.  With the mute background of a modernist vacuum, each version of sine function (this is hard, atomistic minimalism) emerges out of total control, a culture on a gel, blossoming out and tearing across the ether.  Each conjugation of “magnetite” resembles a different episteme of the lab metaphysics – organic, energetic, perceptual – and while not complete, offers a look into the possible modes of study available from a pure synthesis of sound and no sound.  Rarely does a second object appear in the sound field, multiplying concern over the observation of the listener, and the initial object perceived when a splitting does occur.  This is perfected in the consummate and longest (by a hair) track, “Magnetosome,” where a vaporous tone implies cloud figures, fingered and bulbous, before hinging and crashing into itself at higher registers.  As if to say “ahh, I’m just shitting ya!” Vainio concludes the disc with “Elvis’s TV Room,” which tells more than it shows, though subtly breaking methodology to introduce all new mutations of mass and depth; atmospheric in the sense of a still life, the track teems with the various systems stilled in a common space, evoking unspent currents and echoes of action dissipating at long-distance.  Yet the track is consumed by the same deep belief which generates the prior disc, and all this energy is pitched to a sole object turned death tone.  Bleak, except for the scientists unflagging faith, compressed to a single function.

Touch CD
$14.5
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The highest-profile submission in the recent bottleneck of releases by Oren Ambarchi, ‘Audience of One’ betrays no hint that the urbane Australian has his hands in other projects.  Four tracks spread across four sides of this double LP (including the 33 dominating minutes of “Knots,” requiring its division in two) have the grottoed feel of a master, not amateur, who controls the palette with total skill rather than surrendering to whatever sounds may come.  Starting with the touch-tones of hymnal “Salt”, vocalist Paul Duncan resembling Michael Gira in his Angels of Light recordings, the air is rarified and modern like those institutions of the avant-garde where doors are marked “F. Frith” and “K. Rowe;” the sounds of swelling strings and pastel dub blots are all that frame the white wall of production where this voice floats in duplicate.  Most like Ambarchi’s tenure as a part of Sunn O))), “Knots” surges with quiet, pulling the canvas tight with tacks of cymbal tapped on the bell.  Feedback is cut and sampled, streaking this country-mile lead-in to the rolling drums and fuzzed beam that peaks for no more than five minutes in the dead center.  Never so careless as to be called “improv”, the piece suppresses the muscle-twitch excesses of real-time composition and cools the edges of this controlled burn into the gingerly drone passage “Passage.”  A daydreamy half-thought turned into segue, the six minutes erases itself in the process of resetting the ear for the final groove of the record.  “Fractured Mirror” (reported to be an Ace Frehley cover), with the optimism of Pell Mell fitted alongside the massive sprawl of “Knots,” recalls Jim O’Rourke’s recent guitar symphony ‘The Visitor’ for the attention to analogue right-angles and almost “body music”-like gesture in its minimalism; this is a pedestrian’s song if there ever was one, holding a gait with the looping guitar phrases and plosive little beats, but all the while reframing the perspective with a camera’s shutter.  A rising vocalization oohs the underlying buzz to ecstatic proportions til the whole thing collapses on its back in the city sun.  On black vinyl with a gatefold cover. 

Touch 2LP
$20
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Rob of ((Cave)) recordings brings together two fellow home label endeavorers by inviting a split between House of Alchemy’s Adam Richards (aka Chapels) and Notice Recordings’ Evan Lindorff-Ellery.  It’s been some time since we last saw Chapels despite Richards’ consistent output through the last year, and even accounting for this oversight, “We Are the Sum Total of our Data” feels like an all-new incarnation of the Chapels project: a multi-part program of mostly unaffected field-recordings, Richards swings an organic dark ambience through authentic setting and lo-fi capture which induces the natural drone in the energy fields he presents; the gothic abstractions of his earlier work have aged into a less figurative, more cynical, more brutal realism full with everyday, gut feelings of worry and dread – wandering, threatening, alienating.  Lindorff-Ellery, in his time away from Dense Reduction, comes with the solo mix “The Apartment Piece”: unlike Richards’ singular scenes, this side offers immediate layers of accumulation – clattering adjustments, unwanted details, fade-ups; droning hum, ticking contrast, whips of ostinato feedback – in other words, causes and effects.  The sounds suggest so much activity, but exclude any clear image of that activity.  Less contrast than comparison, the two sides of the split tie-together the bitter vacancy of a world carrying on with you.  Cassettes come in heavy inserts, art by Lindorff-Ellery.

((Cave)) Recordings cassette
$5
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Exemplifying the west coast pop underground as people-centric and – perhaps ironically coming from “the West” – pedestrian in its accessibility (in the sense of a patio, not pap), Folktale records has served so relentlessly its community as to remind the audience on no uncertain terms who exactly that community contains.  With this in mind, it is something of a Hallmark moment to see this 7” split shared between long-time friends Ezra Buchla and Folktale operator Christopher Payne, aka Whitman.  Though regular collaborators, we have yet to see a joint effort of the nature of a split, which in the records game is a much stronger pledge of allegiance than even servitude on another’s recording.  Both working in their familiar forms (the newly-solo Buchla’s recognizable from his time in Gowns), the boys won’t make eye contact on this brief trip, but seem rather in a predetermined contest to out-mope one another.  However, as earnest as they are, this does not escalate into some bleak-wave bullshit nihilism, but stays this side the lowest thematic range that both have explored before.  Buchla’s “Black Rabbit” burns slow with layers of vocals and fragments of electric guitar and synthesizers, the tide quickly rising in a minimal noir which the lead Buchla tries to remain on top of, the sound of his craning neck audible in the pinch of his larynx.  Copious production evident, the interest in glitch germinating from back in Buchla’s Mae Shi days has matured to a depth and breadth of composition which excels beyond the mere novelties of its process and structure of its song.  This would be the method unifying the disc, as Payne’s “Scorpion” elevates his usual twee folk presentation with the addition of extra vocal dubs and cello, propped against a background of artificial night, made of black gauze and the chirp of crickets.  Still more evidently song-based, this contextualization is a fulfillment of so many foregone suggestions in Payne’s previous work – once a throwaway, now a total mode of expression.  Black vinyl discs come in a beautiful print on heavy paper sleeves and lyric inserts.

Folktale 7”
$8
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‘Lonely House’ marks a sharp, early turn for the Galtta label, their catalog having not yet reached double-digits.  Still based in instrumental virtuosity, the tape by Mark Przybylowski diverges from the familiar jazz sounds of previous releases by utilizing stringed instruments alone, and then in a distinctly folk idiom familiar to Kottke and Fahey.  Beyond the choice of strings (cello, bass, and guitar), it is the use of space and architecture – the title house, standing empty, utilized for its reverb – which makes the most radical break in concept compared to Galtta’s previous studio pieces, and which brings it back around to reunite with the instrumental novelties/innovations which distinguish each release.  The space is both vital and subverted: the reflections of the house make the rich, bold sounds of each strum and pluck, but the house becomes abstract as each layer is recorded and edited together into one piece.  That is, rather than present each stringed instrument in a solo piece, and thereby contextualizing the space in the real-time of a “single take” (real or faked), two and sometimes all three of the instruments appear together, overlapping sounds from different moments into one, achieving not just impossible harmonics, but bringing with all the artifacts of each moment and imposing them into one space of the song.  This neo-classicism likens the sound to prime Johann Johannsson and Peter Broderick in songs like “Sunday”, which by this process juxtaposes multiple tones across these multiple spaces, materializing the structure of the house through activity.  Perhaps the only thing close to uni-dimensional is the theme of the tape – relentlessly melancholy, with titles like “Slow Winter”, “Lamentation”, “The Pain” – but this is not to say flat or uninteresting: the vocals which appear on “Blank Walls” are subdued but youthful, the guitar perky and waltzing across the floors and natural light that cello chords bring.  Even the coda, “Rejoice,” reverses this formula only slightly, lacking what would otherwise pass as joy but isolating well those strains of optimism which pass quietly through these seven tracks.  Professional cassettes come in heavy cards with art by Przybylowski’s grandfather John Carl Bulthuis, hand-numbered to 200.

Galtta cassette
$7
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