Tomas Korber/Phil Julian – “Herbe Zeiten”

This is a 3″ CD-R release that I ordered from Con-V records a month or so ago after reading this review on Bagatellen.

Tomas Korber is a guitarist and improvisor from Zurich who works primarily with prepared guitar, which involves using objects such as alligator clips, handheld fans, and pot scrubbers to draw odd timbres out of the guitar.  Englishman Phil Julian, who also works under the alias of Cheapmachines, employs circuit-bent electronics as well as laptop for his contributions here.

I have recently become enamored of the 3″ CD format, as it contains about 20 minutes of music, which is ideal for me. It’s enough to sink your teeth into, but you don’t have to feel like you’re committing 80 minutes to listening when you sit down and put a piece of music on, and even if I wanted to listen for that long my attention span starts betraying me around the 30 minute mark. Plus the little discs look cute. This one is packaged in an odd mini-DVD style case, which is charming except mine got a little bit mashed up in transit so I had to repair it with electrical tape.

This release consists of one 18 minute long track, which starts out with static and high sinewave drones giving way to string rumbles and creaks. After a brief respite, the static and grain returns, bathing the listener in overtones while Korber’s strings rattle like mausoleum chains. It’s a great balance between billowing static drones, electromagnetic micro-clicks, and more abrupt incidental sounds that poke and prod the ears, demanding attention. Eventually the resonances of the room take over the proceedings, with beams of feedback peering through the clouds. Another thing I like here is that the flow of the piece is not predictable, it doesn’t start out quiet and get really loud and dramatic two thirds of the way through and then end quietly. It’s a piece that breathes and evolves, with many peaks and valleys throughout, and takes you through a lot of different spaces as it unfolds. Great stuff, highly recommended.

You can visit Tomas Korber’s website here

You can visit Phil Julian’s website here

You can order this release from Con-V records. It’s limited to 50 numbered copies, so don’t dilly-dally.

Daniel Menche – “Wolf’s Milk”

I just did an order from Squidco a little while ago and took advantage of the $8 sale they were having, ordering a few titles from the Utech label which looked interesting. This particular one is a three-track piece by Portland noise/dronist Daniel Menche. Quite concussive and aggressive, but very textural and involving at the same time. Each of the untitled tracks is apparently based off of the processed sounds of one instrument, with the first track labeled “organs”, the second “gongs” and the third “trumpets”. Track 1 builds hypnotically into crescendos of raw fuzz and sizzling, whirling overtones, while track 2 is a serene interlude of plangent gongs. The third track is a nightmarish wall of nasal tone clusters and infrasonic throbs.  I love Steve Roach and that kind of more atmospheric, ambient drone, and I also like the power drone of Sunn 0))) but this is some of my favorite drone I’ve heard since it seems to incorporate my favorite elements of both; it’s meditative and spiritual like the best drone while being fuzzy, grinding and intense like the best metal and noise. Probably the work of Phill Niblock is the closest parallel I can think of, but while that is music showing painstaking fastidiousness and attention to detail, this just emits a halo of rough-hewn spontaneity, like a white-hot slab of metal freshly drawn from a blacksmith’s forge. Play it LOUD on good speakers and bask in the frequencies like a lizard in the rays of the sun.

Visit Daniel Menche’s site here.

an added reason to enjoy this release is the surfeit of excellent performance stills harvested by a simple image search.

I mean, just look at this fucking guy, and he’s not a metal frontman, he makes drone records with gongs and trumpets. It’s like the brain of Charlemagne Palestine with the attitude of David Yow from Jesus Lizard. It’s genius.

Lou Harrison – “Varied Trio No. 1″

A piece by my favorite composer. Lou Harrison was a student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg who went on to study and incorporate many elements of non-Western music into his work, particularly Javanese Gamelan music.

Read an excellent interview with Lou Harrison here.

Perfume – “Computer City/Edge” live

Complete over-the-top insanity. THIS is a concert worth paying good money to see! I’ve been feeling too pretentious lately so I’m including this to lighten things up a bit. Best enjoyed with your favorite sugary cereal and fizzy caffeinated beverage.

Mika Vainio – “Aineen Musta Puhelin”

Mika Vainio is one half of the Finnish noise/techno duo Pan Sonic (formerly Panasonic until a lawsuit from a certain electronics company robbed them of their A). Vainio uses samplers, homemade noise generators, static, and sine waves/oscillators to create abstract post-industrial soundscapes in his solo work, while the same tools are used to create music that is relatively more accessible when working with Ilpo Vaisanen in Pan Sonic (although basically the difference is that Pan Sonic will sometimes have a discernible rhythm to their music and the songs have more of a recognizable dub element).

This is a VERY abstract record, with long periods of silence interrupted by bursts of fuzzy noise and disorienting sub-bass tones. Each track is like a tone poem, with Vainio deploying an intentionally limited selection of sounds (Vainio and Pan Sonic never use computers or laptops, recording everything live to DAT, which immensely adds to their appeal for me) with supreme concentration and economy of expression. Rather than being a juvenile “run everything through a bunch of pedals and make some random noises to freak people out” exercise, this is really a carefully considered musical statement in which every element is deployed for maximum effect on the listener and nothing is extraneous. I always think of martial arts as a metaphor for this kind of supremely disciplined approach, where a tremendous amount of impact and force is concentrated into very small gestures.

While I suppose this would be considered noise music, it has more in common sonically with Pierre Henry and Stockhausen’s tape/electronic works than with something like Wolf Eyes. Maybe another parallel would be the dark ambient work of Lustmord, but far more abstract and given to silence.  As out there as this record is, it’s immensely enjoyable; this record is best experienced in its entirety and without distraction, as small gestures which seem meaningless when taken individually have an immense impact on the listener when one hears them in the context of the whole piece. Bursts of static and high whistling sine waves are like bird song and insect calls which let you know the sunrise is approaching (except when a huge sustained bass note swathed in fuzz erupts at the 22 minute mark of the record, this sunrise is more like a black hole appearing over the horizon). HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION.

Check out Pan Sonic’s Myspace HERE

“Aineen Musta Puhelin/Black Telephone of Matter” is out NOW on Touch Records, and can be obtained at fine record stores everywhere (including Hoodlums).

Immortal – “All Shall Fall”

A play by play account of my reaction to the new Immortal upon first listening…

First song, the title track,  is kind of weak, no really strong riffs, and there is a kind of lame spoken word part in the bridge. And some almost-clean vocals… this does not look promising.

Not too crazy about the production, it seems like they smoothed things out a little more than necessary, losing that trademark “crispy-fried” guitar sound. They used to have a signature upper midrange tone on their guitars which gives the riffs clarity and doesn’t sound like the same old mid scooped metal guitar you hear everywhere… the tone here is a lot more generic. These are guys who used to tune all their guitars UP a step just to be different from everyone else.  A lot of reverb on Abbath’s vocals as well. One of the things I liked best about the last record was that you could really hear the overtones on the vocals (sorry, vokills). On “One by One”, the opener of their last album, Abbath sings “one by one, we took your LIIIIIVES” and you can hear the low harmonics vibrating in his voice, like Tuvan throat singing.

“The Rise of Darkness” starts much stronger, solid riff to start the song, this is a lot more melodic than Immortal has been in the past… I’m not sure how I feel about this development if this is going to continue through the album. No clean vocals this time though, so that’s good. There are a lot more midtempo riffs here, it sounds almost thrashy… The ringing arpeggio riffs sound almost like Enslaved or something. Not bad necessarily, just different. Well the second song was a huge improvement on the first in any case.

The third song, “Hordes To War”,  kicks off with a HUGE riff, throwing together tremolo picking and power chords, thrashier still. Generally though, a lot more of a black metal sound to this, this song could have been on “Battles In the North”. Good. Improving even more. Looking forward to digging into the lyric sheets to investigate the always excellent lyrics by Demonaz. OK! During the bridge there’s the sound of a bunch of horses charging! This song totally kicks ass.

Song four, “Norden On Fire”, starts with an almost clean guitar line, followed by a riff that sounds pretty similar to “Tyrants”. The whole song does, actually. A pretty solid but unremarkable mid-tempo stomper. Another spoken semi-monologue in the middle, but this time delivered by Abbath in his best Popeye quack, which of course makes everything better. My favorite thing about Immortal is that they are so campy but it’s really past being intentional or unintentional because they are 100 percent sincere about it. They put on their war paint, change their names, dress up in spiked boots and  go all the way with creating their own aesthetic universe in which nothing is ridiculous, and by doing that they just completely create their own musical world in which they inhabit  totally different personalities from their day-to-day lives. Black metal in general is exciting to me for this reason, because people who make that music  just go all the way in creating an alternate personality, with the name and the corpse paint, and in going through this ritualistic process they transcend the limits of what they would normally allow themselves creatively. It’s like the black metal aesthetic is a system of rituals intended to allow one to shed the baggage and self-conscoiusness of one’s everyday life and create a completely different persona for the express purpose of making art.  Way too much reverb on his voice throughout this record so far though.

Song five, “Arctic Swarm”, is another  piece in the “Sons of Northern Darkness” style, great spidery guitar riffs throughout here, and some… synth strings or something. Mixed low, mercifully. Guitar solo sounds like Dave Mustaine. In a good way.

Song six starts with the sound of winds (frozen blizzard ones, no doubt)! This is a good omen! Yup, pretty solid so far, kind of weird chord progression, oddly timed. I love it when Immortal write riffs like this- totally weird and off the wall, but instantly memorable. This song is awesome, although there is a part that sounds like it was written to be a crowd chant. “Mount North!”…. this song still kicks ass though. Some wimpy clean guitars near the end of the song though. This isn’t Isis, guys, you are IMMORTAL. There shouldn’t be any clean guitars, ever. At least the early dalliance with clean vocals was quickly abandoned.

“Unearthly Kingdom” starts with a keyboard and some… clean female vocals. Just something for atmosphere I hope. Ah ok, so this is another epic “Tyrants”-paced deathmarch… a solid chiming chordal riff, love it when they don’t just stick to the power chords. As Piggy said “there are other strings on the instrument, y’know?”. The bridge kicks into a really satisfying, crushing riff, with Abbath making a quack and that noise the dead Japanese chick makes in “Grudge” before continuing on about some icy mystical forest shit. And another classic riff. This is awesome, but someone please mix the synthesized clean vocal pads out of here. Ah well. Here’s the fadeout, so I guess that’s it. Not bad for an album closer, pretty awesome and majestic. So ends my 40 minute vacation in Blashyrkh, I believe I will be returning very soon.

Verdict: Not as good as the last 3 Immortal records, but those were masterpieces, and this record is still better than 95 percent of the metal records out there.

4 out of 5 Nordic battleaxes for “All Shall Fall”.

Vladislav Delay- “Tummaa”

Finland’s Vladislav Delay (known to his mom as Sasu Ripatti) has put out his first record in two years, titled “Tummaa”, which is Finnish for “Stupid Cover Art”. Not really, but the cover art is pretty dorky, not sure what’s going on with that. Once you get past that, though, this is another excellent release from Mr. Ripatti. I was expecting something a little jazzier since much has been made of this album being influenced by his former life as a jazz drummer, as well as the fact that he is playing percussion in Moritz Van Oswald’s trio (although that’s not particularly jazzy either, it’s more like live dub techno). It is very focused on percussion, more so than other releases under his Vladislav Delay alias, but at the same time there is always a melodic element to his pieces and they are quite accessible here, with Craig Armstrong’s acoustic and electric piano bringing to mind Eno’s “Thursday Afternoon”. As with earlier releases such as “Entain” the percussive elements are pretty abstractly conceived, but they show a huge amount of detail and variety in timbre.

A lot of the record stumbles along at a dub-like pace with the drums, melodic samples, and live elements like electric piano interlocking and drifting apart- that’s one of the things I always find interesting about Delay’s productions, that he doesn’t feel compelled to force everything to fit together in lockstep. It adds an element of seeming entropy to things- a bunch of interesting musical things are happening and they add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, but you never feel like he’s just slapping a bunch of beat-matched loops together in Ableton or something.

Also intriguing is the mix itself; he really keeps the mix dry and natural-sounding  here;  you can really hear the different spaces these sounds came from, with some samples bathed in natural room space and other sounds so dry they graze your eyeballs. A transporting and utterly beautiful listening experience.  It’s just too bad about the cover art.

Read more and listen on Vladislav Delay’s website.

Cloaks – “Versus Grain”

Latest recommendation is this newly-released slab of brutal dubstep by UK duo Cloaks, about whom I know nothing. I’ve been kind of edging into dubstep a little through the Maryanne Hobbs comps and the Appleblim Dubstep All-Stars comp, but I just bit the bullet and ordered a couple of recent full-lengths that sounded interesting because I wanted to get a little more in depth rather than just a Skream track here, a Benga track there or whatever. So I ordered this based on a review I read on Boomkat, and it is just fucking MEAN. I like dubstep as a genre but it can be a little sterile. No such worries here, it’s just super dark, aggressive and distorted, exactly what I want out of a dubstep record. Even the vocal samples are distorted beyond recognition, it’s like Burial on PCP. No need to worry about this showing up in a cellphone ad or something, that’s for sure! When I started finding out about this genre, I would read these descriptions about huge loping two-step beats and fuzzy wobbly bass drops, and it sounded like it should be the raddest thing ever. After finally hearing some of that stuff I was kind of underwhelmed but this is EXACTLY what I was hoping for when I read those reviews, it’s like someone looked into my head and made a record out of what I imagined dubstep should sound like. You know that awesome breakdown in “Raining Blood” where the guitars are going “chunk chunk…chunk chunk… chunk chunk” and you just sit there nodding your head because it’s fricking heavy and grooves hard at the same time? This whole record is exactly like that.

Listen to them on their Myspace.

Dawid Szczesny – “Drafts”

Dawid Szczesny is a laptop composer, sound artist, and vinyl manipulator from the sunny south of Poland. I enjoyed Dawid’’s recent LP “Luxated Symmetry” (see my review here) so much that I ordered this earlier release (Monotype Records, 2005) from a guy in Holland. It’s similar in approach from what I can tell (vinyl samples and loops processed and assembled on a laptop) but is more glitch/ambient sounding and the sound sources are less recognizable (it seems like he’s moving in a direction of using less processing and letting the samples and loops be more transparent). It’s just as beautiful though, and highly recommended. In the space of a couple of months he has gone from being a weird name on a release list to one of my favorite artists. I’m definitely going to be watching out for anything he does in the future.

Visit Dawid Szczesny’s Myspace here.

He is also now performing with a bassist and drummer as Luxated Trio. Looking forward to a release from them.

Luigi Archetti/Bo Wiget – “Low Tide Digitals III”

So I bought the new Fennesz record a few weeks ago at work and when Justin asked what it sounded like, I replied “Oh, it’s another one of those guitar/laptop records that I always buy” to which he replied “How much of that stuff can you listen to without getting tired of it?”

Well guess what, HERE’S ANOTHER ONE!

Actually it’s a duo record with Luigi Archetti playing guitar, mandolin, and electronics, and Bo Wiget playing cello and electronics. I have to say that I really am reaching my saturation point when it comes to “guitar through MAX/MSP” records, though. I loved the Keith Fullerton Whitman “Playthroughs” record and the first few Fennesz records, but really that latest Fennesz record bored me to death (this is my way of saying that Justin was right). Everyone is doing the “strum a G chord through a granular synth patch” thing these days, it seems. At first, the focus seems to be on the cello here, though, and the result is something like Eno’s “Discreet Music” string quartet pieces, buried in clouds of  processing and wind-blown digital dust. When the guitar starts taking a more prominent role some ways into the record, it dumps out unexpected sheets of noise and clanging drones instead of pretty shoegazing blandification; the tension and contrast between the consonance of the rich cello sounds and the almost industrial-sounding guitar makes the record even more interesting to listen to. And of course the design by Kim Hiorthoy is a big plus, as is always the case with Rune Grammofon releases.  Sounds like something I would listen to while watching a documentary about creepy deep sea creatures like this: