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—
fever dreams of a plush boob: joe murray on no basement is deep enough
November 5, 2014 at 9:39 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 2 CommentsTags: alvaro, andrew zuckerman, field recording, fleshtone aura, found sound, horaflora, improv, joe murray, lieven martens moana, my dance the skull, new music, no audience underground, no basement is deep enough, noise, raub roy, singing bows, spoken word, tapes, vocal improvisation
Alvaro: The Chilean with the Singing Nose – 1978 (tape, No Basement is Deep Enough, NBIDE#27, edition of 60 packaged in ‘breast-shaped construction’)
Fleshtone Aura – Wet Cocomo (tape, No Basement is Deep Enough, NBIDE#29, edition of 55 packaged in ‘triffid-shaped construction’)
Lieven Martens Moana – The Volcano, The Night that precedes all, and a hymn for Paul Gauguin (tape, No Basement is Deep Enough, ‘purple tape in leather-look wallet painted and bubbling faecal mess’)
Horaflora – No Roof is High Enough (tape, No Basement is Deep Enough, NBIDE#26, edition of 49, ‘blue tape wrapped up in multi-coloured plastic rope’)
Alvaro: The Chilean with the Singing Nose – 1978
A true original. Grey-beard Alvaro was born in Chile in the 1940’s then moved to London as Punk gobbed and pogo-ed its way into the Bill Grundy Show. For a time he was a 101’er, some cockney pre-punk pub-boys, with a bloke called Strummer but luckily he had the sense to move on before things got stale and boring.
Rejecting Punk’s uniform but rejoicing in easy-listening, avant-garde composition and wonderful daftness in three equal parts Alvaro sits down at his piano to come up with…err… I’m not quite sure.
To my tender ears I can pick out something that sounds like the Goon’s Bluebottle (possibly a quality of the nose) with the magic-realist lyrics of an Ivor Cutler. Songs concern themselves with a number of domestic situations: a love of honey, mothers milk and in one case being made of wood. But this never comes across a faux-naive or affected, it’s all utterly convincing.
For me the piano sound is a big part of the draw. It does that wonderful swooping thing, a slightly warped thing, making it all sound wide-eyed like Charlie Brown cartoons. An instant memory-bomb that detonates in less complicated times.
These lovely piano-led songs are punctuated by the occasional spoken word spiel, sax bleat or drums to keep it spicy. But it’s all kept simple and pretty uncluttered with the kind of frail gossamer-touch that Robert Wyatt musters up.
Side one ends with an augmented domestic field recordings (dentist chatter/water running/tuneless singing/plastic pipe whistle) that is as bang up-to-date as anything in the no-audience underground today.
You could waggle that ‘outsider artist’ card if you like but I think that’s a bit of a red herring. I think Alvaro (recording here in 1978) is exactly where he wants to be, doing exactly what he wants to do with confidence and, with a quality you don’t get every day, charm.
Fleshtone Aura – Wet Cocomo
OK. You wrestle with the Triffid/Venus Fly Trap package and stick the tape in. You ponder, is this jizz any good or what?
Thankfully the oval sounds within match the green construction without.
Fleshtone Aura is the one and very Andrew Zuckerman, half of mung-faves Gastric Female Reflex and involved in the very collectable Beniffer Editions label.
Found sound, loops and accidental damage are the kings here all netted up and laid out like noxious butterflies. Fleshtone Aura provides the base material and it’s the listener that has to join the dots into <><><><><><> patterns. Are you ready readers?
The different approaches work well. Found tapes of ‘X Factor-style’ auditions are charming and cheeky, the Wii sounding electronics frothy like bubble tea. Recorded cat squeals and deep throated bilge nestle up against brightly-blurring vash. But the scratched electronics stop anything becoming over-twee. The velocity is generally quick…the edit pieces are less music concrete and more attention deficit disorder channel-hopping but there’s plenty of space to stretch out and enjoy the fuzz if you are patient.
The teenage rampage card is played several times but FAura can’t help being god-damn classy on the tape’s closer, ‘Gomer’s Frontispiece’, in which wet digital clicking pitches against brass horn (downtuned) like the kinda thing Scott Walker should be thinking of next.
Listen or buy here or see NBIDE links below.
Lieven Martens Moana – The Volcano, The Night that precedes all, and a hymn for Paul Gauguin
Real name realness from Dolphins into the Future main-mung. DITF were the red-hot tip a year or two ago, name checked in Pitchfork and The Guardian. We dig a little deeper here at Radio Free Midwich so here’s an early pitch of the solo, real name project. Always an interesting prospect that when a moniker-beard goes back to the birth name. Must mean something; a glimpse under the rug? A trueness of intention?
The jams on this handsome purple tape are superb right from the off. Deep gaseous whales moan and croon churning the briny and vibrating atom to atom with greater efficiency than through air. Therefore the ‘gungs’ and ‘tungs’ meet my ear and melt into the fibrous bristle within. Like wallpaper paste its thick and gloopy but strong with purpose, an aid to mesmerism perhaps? The final snatch of close-vocal harmony (recorded in a Paris side-street) snaps me from my stunned state and prepares me to get up and turn this fella over.
Side two is an extended vocal piece for voices and recorded tape titled ‘Lava (The Bells from Above)’. It’s beautifully tropical with a Howler Monkey vibe that moves to greedily rising tones surging onwards and onwards, higher and higher like pure sine waves until my merely human ears become useless. The final section blends the sounds of the Maldives (noisy birds and insects) with a sonorous gong adding its own bronze gravity.
There’s a beautiful laziness to these recordings. I don’t mean things are careless or idle. They take their own time to do what they need to do and, as a result of that, force you to too. Prepare these for the cocktail hour! Meet me on the veranda with a Mint Julep at six o’clock.
Horaflora – No Roof is High Enough
Horaflora is just one guy going by the name of Raub Roy. He seems to be a busy fella up to his eyes in sonic experiments with a whole flotilla of names, dudes and radgies.
On this little tape he’s pretty much on his own, crouched on a rooftop, recording Cambodian Singing Kite Bows. Singing bows give off a harsh buzzing as the wind rushes by; loud enough to scare away squirrels and deep enough to summon the spirits. It’s not a gazillion miles away from the vibrations of a throat-singing guy but with the added twinkle of bells and very subtle sound manipulation it’s an altogether prettier listen. Perfect if you are after something light, yet still with experimental credentials, at the end of a busy day.
—ooOoo—
No Basement Is Deep Enough – Discogs
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