stretch out the ermine: joe murray on dan melchior, arturas bumsteinas, bas van huizen, jake blanchard
June 29, 2016 at 1:01 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: arturas bumsteinas, bas van huizen, chocolate monk, dan melchior, intonema, jake blanchard, joe murray, moving furniture records, tor press, was ist das?
Dan Melchior – Seaslime (CD-r, Chocolate Monk, choc.336)
Arturas Bumsteinas – Organ Safari Lituanica (CD, Intonema, int019, edition of 200)
Bas van Huizen – Waanzintraan (CD, Moving Furniture Records, MFR032, edition of 200)
Jake Blanchard – Shade (lathe-cut vinyl, Was Ist Das? / Tor Press, first edition of 30, second edition of 20 or download)
Dan Melchior – Seaslime
Total goose-work and tape-munch.
In parts, it’s throbbing synth and cut-ups that are, in the best possible way, all over the fucking shop. Grunt speech gets all wrapped and folded so the vowels come out backwards/sideways. There’s some nice radio interference and guitar (?) played with cheesy feet. Nuf said?
But the main thread seems to be ‘no thread’; logic takes a holiday and the unconscious mind takes over. Dan talks of…
the ebb, flow and convergence of sound/noise/information that the human receptor experiences when passing through the urban (specifically) grotto
OK… I’ll take that signpost and waltz merrily through this bohemian neighbourhood.
It’s dandy of course with ripe colours and complex shapes vying for my mallow eyes. But what I like most is the low-moaning-multiple-vocal-drone that peppers this steak and opens ‘Seaslime Part Two’. Thick slices of
ohhhh
and
ahhhh
are piled high. Conjure up a trio of backing singers on mogs trying to drown out Tin Turna or one of them turkeys. Got it? That’s wor Dan!
Not so much the dainty Faberge egg; more a Kinder Surprise stuffed with psychic confusions.
Arturas Bumsteinas – Organ Safari Lituanica
Three wonderfully rambling organ recordings that wander between full-blown religious ecstasy and porridge-fingered fumbles.
Previously it was Ligeti’s Volumina that set my personal benchmark for Organ-oddity. I’m no organ aficionado, see, so I have to rely on the helpful sleeve notes to read that these haunting recordings are captured, field recording style, in a variety of Lithuanian locations.
But this doesn’t seem to be an act of UNESCO-sanctioned preservation. It sounds more like, with the greatest respect, a group of goofs (like me… like you) getting their grotty mittens on the thick ivories and making up gaseous routines just for the jaxx of it.
It’s a truly glorious, immersive event. At times I feel Arturas’ hand gently twisting in a shadow of reverb but mostly it’s the overlaying of short lyrical pieces played on variety of organs to create a much longer whole.
So, from steam powered fairground calliope to massive church-lungs; from street corner grinder to experimental pipe deconstruction my cloth ears are picking up ‘in the moment’ experiments and cul-de-sacs. You’ll get a straight run at one idea (forearms on upper keyboard) single note squeals on the lower or a finger-jarring arpeggio; then deep boom and lyrical honk – the sustained drones with one hand and spidery exploration with the other. At points the tones are working against each other howling at the edge of the wind, coupled with tiny metallic bells.
Lovely though this breathy miasma is you’d be right in asking,
Wot… just blessed organ jaxx for over an hour? Count me out fella!
But what you’d be missing is the ‘lostness’ the feeling of being tossed into a sea of huff, powerless in the current. Not to get too hot in these shimmering pages but it’s a submissive act of listening that I’m riffing on right now.
And… as an extra bonus fondle there’s an exquisite hiss and click to these recordings. Frenzied organ-ing comes with the occasionally ‘clunk’ of a dropped prayer book or rubber plimsoll squeak; the cluttering mechanics of pulleys and foot pedals that make a brittle accompaniment.
There’s a story about Cecil Taylor (or Sunny Murray or Ornette Coleman) where some guy asks him to sit in on the bass during a smoky after-hours jam. The dude says,
I don’t play bass, man
which is exactly the right approach when dealing with a jazz-colossus. Yeah…compared to you I don’t ‘play’ anything. But this was not just a cautious piece of self-depreciation. The guy couldn’t play a note and bent Cecil/Sunny/Ornette’s form and chops up like a crushed stubbie. Like Cecil/Sunny/Ornette said, this cat tested him in ways none of the ways a schooled player would [Editor’s note: yeah, this story sounds familiar – anyone got a citation?].
Listening to this ghostly honk is testing my improv-worn ears in the same way!
Bas Van Huizen – Waanzintraan
My good gosh! I’ve not heard a racket like this for years. Never a clubber I took my rave-powders seated in a comfortable armchair, headphones on, twisting my DNA to Autechre and the like.
It seems like so long ago but Bas Van Huizen transported me back to that armchair (long since unstuffed and burned for firewood!) as quick as a wink.
Not saying this apes any of those hollow-cheeked rascals with their granular glitch. But this has that similar heady rush, like a powerful jet of silicon/seawater mix, spraying over the dancefloor in a weighty arc and into the ruined back street behind the club. It’s littered with rusty junk and piles of broken brick and that’s just fine by me.
These excursions are uneven in length adding further angularity. You’ve just got your head round something like ‘Jichtjager’ (explosive contact-mics swimming in restaurant grease. I’m busting sick moves (in my head) as each concussive bolt whacks my ear drum) or ‘Stoppermot’ (smeared orchestra pit confined to petri dish, each bacterial horn and violin grows mutated limbs to blow and bow in erratic timings) when another jam comes along and buffers your fluffer.
Take ‘Veldverachter’ for example… the sonic equivalent of ripping off a manky plaster, bath-moulded to your ankle. Ouch!
The longer pieces (our title track for instance) are no place for napping though as ideas are burned through at dizzying speed. Channelling my inner-Goolden I’m getting, iron ravens sarcastic caw-caw, the static fizz of turned milk and clouds alive with electric shrimp. But the extra time gives Bas a chance to stretch out the ermine and get fucking regal man. Opening credits of Blade Runner regal.
To put it another way this is the rice-shaped sliver of the Venn diagram where intense pressure meets slick humidity.
So get boiled brothers & sisters.
Jake Blanchard – Shade
Watch out lightweights, there’s super-heavy intention on these five tunes.
Multi-talented Jake’s colourful designs have graced poster, book, beer bottle and even a skateboard or two. But today the easel is packed down and beret thrown to one side as a musical outing is on the agenda.
Things start with the lengthy reed-breath-piece ‘Submerged’, all Conrad-esque drone shimmering like celestial orbs, gravity surfing in warp space.
‘Unmarked’ mimics Rodger Daltry’s speed-mod stutter with some chopped ‘thug guitar’ and gritty slide all taking off into the hard desert sky. But despite the groaning blues this is truly music to build magnificent pyramids to.
Wobble-out a Saz vibe as ‘Pollination’ meshes several Middle Eastern cultures and runs them through a Copycat (or something) to create a wet-lipped smacking and the kind of unhinged fretboard gymnastics Richard Bishop would highlight in orange marker pen as Rem-fucking-betika.
This Greek 3rd Man theme continues on spy-thriller ‘Ill Advised’, kooky-keys rattle among plates of fresh octopus and we get brought back, full circle for ‘Stoney Nova’, a drone piece as soul-mirror. Ghostly reflections make a flat glassy image repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, re peat, repea t, re pe at, repe at, re peat, r epeat, rep eat, repea t, rep eat, r ep eat, r e p ea t, re p ea t, r e p e a t, r e p e a t and r e p e
—ooOoo—
black raindrop collage: joe murray on eugenio sanna, lovely honkey, dan melchior, sindre bjerga
November 27, 2015 at 1:24 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: dan melchior, eugenio sanna, ezio piermattei, joe murray, lovely honkey, luke poot, sindre bjerga, tutore burlato
Eugenio Sanna – La porta stretta (tape, Tutore Burlato, #04)
Lovely Honkey – Sharp Intake of Breadth (tape, Tutore Burlato, #07)
Dan Melchior – Human of Stow (tape, Tutore Burlato, #05)
Sindre Bjerga – Attractive Amplification (tape, Tutore Burlato, #06)
When Alexander Graham Bell released The Noble Four, his treatise on early electronic sounds, he could not have imagined how electricity and sound would become ubiquitously meshed to a point where one is almost unimaginable without the other.
How he’d pinkly-blush at Luke Poot’s menacing audience participation and twirl his beard to Sindre Bjerga’s Technicolor throat spasms. I can picture a neatly-booted foot tapping to Eugenio Sanna’s trustworthy improvisations and the watercolours cracked out to better capture Dan Melchior’s solo rumblings.
In the spirit of electronic experimentations Ezio Piermattei has released his own Noble Four on the charming Tutore Burlato tape label straight-outta-Bologna. Packaged in smart plastic cases with intelligent and sensitive artwork the dreich professor could easily slip all four into his waistcoat without bothering his pocket watch.
For you, my dearest of all known and possible readers, you get a head full of gonzo-text and a couple of blue links to send you on your voyage of discovery. God speed gentle ones!
Eugenio Sanna – La Porta Stretta
Konked-out solo-guitar rottings from Italy.
Side One presents a suite of tight head-stock ‘pings’ aping the sarcastic hizz of cold milk dripped on glowing barbeque coals. These metallic pickles (reassuringly sour) rattle my pegs real good especially when the few good moo-cow moans let loose. It’s a sparse affair but full of Charles Atlas’ DYNAMIC TENSION therefore giving me and the whole family assembled space to throw in a stray cough.
When things get a bit more hectic in ‘Agosto in campagna (parte prima)’ Eugenio’s 5 supple fingers ripple unconsciously over 6 strings and a fine distortive mist descends reminding my old brain of mice pattering quickly across amplified tinfoil. You dig? A zinc rustling that’s both pacey and pink-footed.
I’m sucking on some Kendal Mint Cake when Side Two slots into place and the thin metallic scratching merges perfectly with my mouthful of sharp menthol. My nose-hairs stand to attention as similarly stiff strings are plucked with a leathery thumb. It’s simply beautiful.
Then all at once the improvisation feels less improvised and more like a slowly revealing pattern I was just too dull to recognise. If you could complete a crossword with simple silvery tones it might, after forty minutes or so of head-scratching, lock into this bedazzled lotus flower.
The final short track ‘Agosto in campagna (parte seconda)’ leaves us in no doubt of Eugenio’s experience and skill – he’s been playing improvised stuff since the 70’s with beards as grey as Phil Minton, Eddie Prevost, Derek Bailey and Roger Turner – by making his guitar sound exactly like clam shells rustling in a salt-encrusted keep net.
Lovely Honkey – Sharp Intake of Breadth
For such an active collaborator and vital live jaxxon them Lovely Honkey solo tapes are thin on the ground, eh? But Huzzah! Ezio Piermattei’s clear eye spotted Luke Poot’s theatre-whoop all the way from Bologna to let us in on this felt-tipped ritual.
Sound-wize the fidelity is fairly non-existent making this feel like you’ve carefully inserted a hosepipe into Poot’s ear and you can hear the festival of whirs and clunks direct from the old-grey-thistle.
Squeaky toys, rubber dogs, old tape glutch and office stationery get used to whip up a gentle Intonarumori. In fact you could bring a smarty-pants Futurist round for tea, jab this tape on and they could check off the officially required…
- Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Bangs and Booms
- Whistling, Hissing, Farting, Puffing
- Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttered Hip-Hop Oaths, Gurgling
- Screeching, Skanking, Creaking, Rustling, Humming, Crackling
- Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery and half-melted Sindy Dolls etc.
- Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs. Oh yes, especially the sobs.
That is of course until it all degenerates into Superman (and I don’t mean the Laurie Anderson version) which I don’t think no Russolo would ever, ever approve of. Sweet.
Poot’s Circus of Shame rolls lustily into side two in a sad convoy, wheels dropping off the primary coloured cart. We bear witness to a hidden ritual. A music box plays, a small appreciative crowd moan like ghosts and Poot’s seemingly loose hand on the helm belies the firm fingertip control. He’s got us trussed up and basted in hot butter, baby.
As the ritual continues he huffs up: tape grot, Stereophonics, (more) dog toys and frenzied choking. All component parts slide together like currents meeting round a sooty headland. Sure they gash and churn but the fluid mechanics could be scribbled on a blackboard and studied by grey beards and goofs all night. He’s got the math right you dig?
So don’t listen to the chaos, listen to the patterns beyond the chaos. Leave your expectations at home and tune in deeply and surrender. Wake the town and tell the people…there’s an inventiveness and joyful release shattering that snotty ego on this tape; a freedom that few ‘plinkerty-plonk’ merchants dare to reveal.
Dan Melchior – Human of Stow
The bottom-dwelling mud flapper attaches itself to my face and starts to pump creamy fluid into eyes, ears, nose and mouth. I’m surprised I’m not choking as pints of liquid fill up my head-holes but I’m too distracted by the fanciful visuals and audio-hallucinations.
Soft boulders shuffle slowly across a ploughed field leaving zen-streaks in their wake. The Town Mayor proclaims the moral victory in an Obese Antiques Roadshow. I blow the dust from a pair of old sneakers and hop backwards at the sight of an HO-scale field hospital nestled inside. The plane I’m on descends, descends, descends but the ground fails to appear. Super-lamb-banana melts into a shallow yellow lake – the La’s lick it into the shape of Chad.
Loaves of bread are kept in gilded cages. My once beautiful nails are chipped and grimy. Elastic muscles snap back into place more slowly now. I wake up suddenly remembering why the magic markers were left in the outhouse. A slow frog begins his chorus.
All these thoughts and more float across my soft-human-cinema as Dan’s new tape wriggles out of the stereo. The working method is important. Dan randomly fills a tape full of these evocative sounds which, in fairness, are probably sourced from field recordings, accidental damage, damp organ and domestic tape huss. They are layered and woven together without no mastering hand making it clear “that the whole idea of form is pretty elastic.”
Hey…that’s in direct contrast to the Honkey tape above. Don’t we just cover the whole field of dreams readers?
To my tin-ears this all sounds pretty dandy as drones start up then stop suddenly, dismal beats lose the will to live and conversations become one-eared affairs. It’s well documented that our brains love order and strive to overlay a regular grid on anything haphazard or irregular. The connections on Human of Stow are no-less random than a fat, black raindrop collage on a dry pavement but seem ordered like the suits in a pack of cards. The bully-boy clubs versus bleeding hearts, the razor sharp diamonds outfoxing the slow spades. And like cards this tape gives me side-eyes, never quite letting me relax.
After a flutter of sonic dry heaves things unsettle further like an early Fucking Amateurs CD-r where it’s unclear what is performance, what it added random mayhem (or in-joke) and if that regular ‘whomp’ is the sound of the broken recording equipment?
The folk next door, possibly alerted by my frantic ‘clickerty-clack’ typing, have just put their bin out and I’m convinced this is Dan’s master-stoke. Unconscious collaboration hits our collective driveway… Melchior versus Newcastle City Council!
Sindre Bjerga – Attractive Amplification
Regular readers know Sindre Bjerga’s modus operandi by now; ‘prolific-as-fuck’ yeah? And this wonderful release delivers superbly on his other well-known calling card: super-dense tape work.
Structurally we’ve got two live performances from both of the Dams – Amster and Rotter, recorded in 2015 and preserved in fine rubbery clarity.
Things start with ‘Flicker and Burst’ and it fairly slaps me across the noggin quick sharp. Jeezus…this is very, very heavy tape manipulation that thumbs a lift from Henri Chopin playing Henry Rollins.
The splutters are thick with phlegm; glottis-deep and curdled. After a time of fairly violent honks a deep perfumed-drone sets up while Sindre clatters shit-smeared chicken cages with a naked foot. You can relax into grey calm for a moment or two but don’t get too comfy because that distinctive condenser-mic jaxx starts to build and build into a full-spittin’ and bitin’ tantrum. Oof!
After a little lie down I gingerly press play on ‘Reverse Energy’. Where Sindre went wet and wild on side one this is dry, measured and sparse. In places I’m picturing the maudlin decay of Gilbert & George’s Dusty Corners, all abandoned hope and unfinished business. Sure, the tapes get mangled and strangled with that erotic ‘whurrr’ but it’s more of an internal sound, like the last sickly pulse of a tension headache.
When the volume and complexity is pitched down (a symptom of the reverse energy perhaps) it encourages a welcome introversion. The super-sad ending (some 70’s AM classic sung in pure innocent sunlight) rattles among the hiss-canyon like a lost Lambkin jam. Amber-glass perfection.
—ooOoo—
respectfully anxious: joe murray on recent releases from spam
September 20, 2015 at 7:39 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: baldruin, dan melchior, flamingo creatures, joe murray, jooklo duo, metabolismu, sinergia elettronica, spam
Flamingo Creatures – Rock Classics Vol 1 (tape, SPAM, spam11)
Sinergia Elettronica – Maribor (tape, SPAM, spam9, edition of 80)
Baldruin – Klaue (tape, SPAM, spam12, edition of 40)
Dan Melchior – Black Night/New Morning (tape and riso-printed art zine, SPAM, spam10, edition of 80)
Flamingo Creatures – Rock Classics Vol 1
Spam in a cabin? Spamalot? Hey man… Spam gets a bad press these days. But for the chopped pork/tinned meat generation Spam holds a heart-warming place next to austerity-busting Woolton Pie and greasy Snoek. But my RFM groovers… I’m digressing. This bundle of very welcome Spam slapped onto the welcome mat and worked its way straight up to the tape deck with no delay.
First up it’s the sinister playground sound of FLAMINGO CREATURES, the CEO(s) of all this delightful SPAM. Imagine a Mesopotamian naming ceremony with Sun Ra guesting on keyboards and winsome chanting (via perished inner tube), then tune into a very delicate use of reverb giving each sound a mauve shadow. Plucked violin makes me think patchwork thoughts while electronic wheezes huff asthmatically. Each phrase is coupled perfectly; the buba-buba-buba rumbles give much needed bass heft to the lighter pinched strings. The ‘poing’ of amplified springs is coddled in gritty looped finesse. All this jiggery-pokery is paced gently. Don’t run away with the thought this is rushed or hurled about willy-nilly (the approach of many a goof-merchant). The confidence to just let sounds be, explore and stretch out shows a deeply sedative practice, a mastery of one’s art. A love of what matters: sound, space and magic.
Sinergia Elettronica – Maribor
Full-on wonk/skronk and gronk from this sooper-grooper of jaxx-monks The Jooklo Duo and gibbet-swingers Metabolismu.
I know what you’re thinking…
This is going to be a meeting of THAT GOD DAMN free jazz beast and 60’s style, horn-rimmed spectacles wearing, white-coat sporting radiophonic electronics goof.
I can’t fool you dear readers… you are on the darn dirty dollar with your perceptive deductions.
Each musical moment of this seriously funky tape is bished and bashed through copper circuits and magnetic mercury pools. It hums and squeals. It soars and plummets. The black becomes white, the up becomes down. Electricity has the upper hand here; lightning squiggles through drainpipes, ROM memory crashes in a spectacular fashion, empty batteries prompt fluctuating voltage through Tron’s soldered city. But… it’s not all Robocop trap work. Oh no. Real life human intervention beats a flexitone solo over hot dusty wire. Bamboo pipes hiss real-life breath over the meta-organic complexity. The effect is future/retro… Tetuso the Iron Man with ice-hockey hair. We see a pre-Skynet meeting of minds; human and blow-bot both digging Don Cherry’s pocket trumpet squark and the blunt architecture of machine code as beautiful sides of a similar moist coin.
Further listening seems to plunge me deeper into this parallel universe. Steam Punks… you got it so wrong. In Sinergia Elettronica’s alternate reality Halim El-Dabh got that Mohawk he always fancied.
Years later we all wake up and Bad Brains are fresh for raspberry Pi.
Baldruin – Klaue
New Day Rising!
Lo-fi keyboard studies like a little Ludwig Van champing away at his harpsichord in a powdered wig (dripping glitter).
The Bandcamp blurb says Baldruin is showing a more distorted, noisy and abstract side on this saucy tape which makes me think ‘blimey’ as this is as tripped out as a tie-dyed vest with ‘GONG’ written on it.
All the colours are swirling man…
But, let’s get serious. That’s no dig at a soft head. No way. The Baldruin delivers the hum and fuss of machine-made circuits, the flipped out, the turned on.
A Space Echo doubles each fingered shove so things ripple nice across your personal spectrum. Tunes waft in soft on the jasmine winds, suggested as such, and then gently tugged away. But not before they spiral-drill into the soft grey matter (tiny delicate earworms); so when dislodged they pull my precious neurons free!
This Baldruin plays with the edges, mastering the indistinct and implied. In the same way a micro-movement of the cheek and eye muscles can turn a smile into a snarl, twists of the sonic palette warm up chilly electronics until they are a comfortable 98.6 Fahrenheit all over.
For fans of day-dreaming and the soft ‘swussh’ of traffic skimming down rain-drenched streets.
?????????????
Dan Melchior – Black Night/New Morning
Dan pushes this tape/pen & ink combo to create a wonderful multi-platform experience.
Very gradual tape melange fritters the start of ‘Black Night’ until things settle into electronic tones both deep and ribbed. Like running a stick across the railings the juddering swoops soon become symphonic, softly shouldering each other into little human pyramids.
The jagged malfunction vibe increases as ghostly voices compete with the black-night vibrations; things start to crash like trees yelling ‘TIMBER’ from splintered mouths as they fall beneath the developer’s mega-deforestation-tank.
The warble continues. Fresh noise is squeezed on from time-to-time but the lolling, rolling tones keep on keeping on like dark tidal soul.
Turning the tape over to ‘New Morning’ creates a sharp contrast. This side long piece is a guitar meditation full of those optimistic swells that give me little tingles. It must be some sort of AMSR shit but certain notes, in certain orders under certain circumstances give me a shiver – a shudder of electricity just under the skin. Add to this the slow pace and classy VOX stuttery r-e-v-e-r-b and I drift back to teenage summer holidays – that blissful ache of warm cider evenings and unrequited love. But before this gets all Spacemen 3 a gentle organ-huff blows across the stereo-skies, human chatter leaks through the gaseous wobble and the tape is rounded off chalky and lavender.
The accompanying zine ‘Biro Crimes’ is even more direct than the tape; a selection of drawings made at the Duke Cancer clinic are respectfully anxious and never less than beautiful.
A treasure, like all this wonderful SPAM. Be sure to check out the SPAM bandcamp for more tapes, zines and vinyl.
—ooOoo—
SPAM blog – Flamingo Creatures and Baldruin releases (also: Baldruin on Bandcamp)
SPAM blog – Sinergia Elettronica release
SPAM blog – Dan Melchior release (also: Dan Melchior via Meudiademorte Records)
scatty and clotted the rattling: joe murray gets hep to schrein, melchior & piermattei, dylan nyoukis
November 10, 2014 at 8:20 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: bastian hagedorn, chocolate monk, collage, dan melchior, dictaphonics, dylan nyoukis, ezio piermattei, improv, jazz, joe murray, meudiademorte records, my dance the skull, new music, no audience underground, noise, ronnie oliveras, ruth-maria adam, schrein, tapes, vocal improvisation
Schrein – EinsZweinSchrein (vinyl LP, Meudiademorte Records, edition of 500 or download)
Dan Melchior & Ezio Piermattei (tape, My Dance The Skull, MDTS 10)
Dylan Nyoukis – Yellow Belly (tape, Chocolate Monk, choc.292, edition of 21 in individual collage slipcases)
Jazz.
I’m just going to let that word sit there for a while and shimmer.
Jazz.
There it is again. The ‘J’ word. That’s right. I’m talking about Jazz right now.
Ask anyone:
Does Joe like his Jazz?
…and they’d say:
Joe? Jazz? He is Jazz. He loves it inside out fella. MilesDizzyColtraneOrnetteRaMonkArmstrong. He lives for that crazy-ass Jass music.
And of course they would be right. Jazz is the cornerstone of my listening habits. So it’s with great anticipation I sit down to rap with Schrein – a real Jazz group from Germany. Ruth-Maria Adam (violin) , Bastian Hagedorn (drums) and Ronnie Oliveras (clarinet) take their three very jazz implements and imbue them with no-audience underground chops rather than beardy Trad swing. This makes for a strung-out and exhilarating listen.
‘Llullaillaco’ is particularly medicated with Ritalin drums pushing and rushing everything forward at breakneck speed until three dark voices join in profane chorus like a mini-Popol Vuh complete with dank Kecak koff.
You spot something on the horizon.
In ‘Emi Koussi’ the creaks and scratches lay beneath keening clarinet gasps (similar to PEEESSEYE kinda) and dark fractured electronics. The drums clump and skit across your field of listening as brittle as slates on a roof.
You venture deeper into the woods.
During ‘Fogo’ the horns/violin/something gets processed into the austere tones you’d expect on an Editions Mego record as the bristling hubbub clears the forest floor below. The night draws in on ‘Shinmoedake’ covering you and your party with heavy black murk, liquid bumps and waxy scratches making your neck hairs stand to attention. ‘Eyjafjallajokull’ is the finisher. Scatty and clotted the rattling of prayer bowls adds no comfort to you now. Trapped in dark magic the metallic tones ‘k-u-n-g’ and ‘c-h-u-n-g’ all wobbly. Just at the limits of your hearing a toad licks its lips hungrily. Wet slobbery anticipation?
At times the sound is as hectic as worker bees. At others it’s as mellow as a fat caterpillar basking in the mid-afternoon sun. But it’s in the bringing together of all these sounds and textures: wet and dry, soft and hard, clear and occluded that keeps this disc filed next to Alexander von Schlippenbach in the dusty racks.
Dan Melchior/Ezio Piermattei
Exquisite tape collage collaboration between two crackling bonfires of good ideas. Voice, tapes, guitar, organ, synth, percussion etc get chucked into a pot and ladled out into rough clay bowls. The soup is a steaming but cleansing broth full of herbs and piquant with fine vinegar dressing.
I think what I am trying to say is there is no confusion here. Sounds and structure are distinct and clear.
The casio-tone rhythm of ‘Bad Gateway’ may be emboldened by rubbery ripping but it’s very deliberate. As if to prove the point a simple piano sparkles in 3D above the misty sounding mung below. ‘Lurch’, a micro song, betrays Dan’s Medway roots and acts like a punky sorbet before the prog-tastic ‘A Corner of the Forest’ in which the sound of Cluster artfully collapsing in a doorway, folding way into nothingness, is channelled through psych-guitar and no-audience vocal hink. The sung coda, picking up the guitar part, is pure genius and worth the price of the tape alone.
‘Two Tiny Kingdoms’, the longest piece on the tape, is an epic construction. Through whirling sound-strobes and dainty vocal recordings a humble theme emerges. Over, under and between this central frame echoes of Italian and American voice the bilingual, the act of listening to another language jabbing my pleasure centres just like a Phil Minton jam. Subtle tape skizz adds some sonic grit and gets cautiously heavier with some occasional fretboard fuggery until the creaking of old ropes leads us out the maze.
The final song makes me smile the widest, because ‘A Teacher Star’ sounds exactly like Portishead jacked-up on Dictaphone Jazz and filthy vocal Jizz. Can you imagine that? Of course you can. And I have to tell you it sounds bloody right and bloody great.
Dylan Nyoukis – Yellow Belly
Another cracking tape from Chocolate Monk. This time it’s Dylan doing the gumming on this peachy, peachy release. The website said ‘dictaphone, voice, organ, delay’ and was recorded a few days after my birthday…the omens were good so I slipped a fiver in an envelope and waited.
A scant week later the postie plopped this beauty through the door and we all gathered round the cheap-o stereo to listen.
If you’re expecting hi-jinks and ear-tuggery look away now for this is a beautiful gush. A gentle warming, an egg-shaped fondle.
A brief introduction of Dictaphone voice ‘glurrr’ is exact and well placed. You can hear the rush of cars somewhere and the delightful button-click between takes as thoughts form and a plan emerges.
Here’s the real world in all its domestic charm
…it seems to say…
remember this and remember this well for we are going on a voyage long and arduous.
With a breathy chuff the organ begins to takes centre stage. A simple one-handed motif rises through the gently churning windpipes. It is spotted left, then right then centre stage; ever changing and growing – a misty grey dream world pulsing gently to the end of the side.
Side two opens tentatively but soon revisits the multi-layered world of rushing amber tones. Things are more clotted here, like a bust-out church organ with small dogs sleeping on the keys. Dank notes tumble down through a well of souls. The Dictaphone adds its trademark gristle and grime (rain falling, plastic crackling?) as the organ is fingered bluntly by the parishioners.
I’m writing gently in bed to the seemingly random fug of notes, all placed next to each other with ever-so-slight overlap and digging this scene immensely until the Dictaphone trills like a funky Oboe. Vocal snatches are FFWed across the church roof from Nave to Transept in a soft Suffolk burrrrrrrrr bringing things to a crystalline climax. Whoooshhh.
Individual artwork and super limited (21 copies only). Sold out but sure to surface again – keep your eyes peeled.
—ooOoo—
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