many at their windows: marlo eggplant on ‘an electrical storm’
February 19, 2016 at 4:48 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: aetheric records, april larson, benjamin shaw, black_ops, brian hodgson, broken shoulder, burl, david vorhaus, delia derbyshire, echoes leytonstone, hollows, kek-w, marlo eggplant, slowthaw, so there, stapperton, the heartwood institute, the revenant sea, troy schafer, white feather, white noise
various artists – an electrical storm (CD-r and badge or download, aetheric records)
The 1968 album An Electric Storm by White Noise is a sound classic, inspiring avant garde/experimental pop bands such as Silver Apples and Stereolab who aimed to approximate the primitive, vestigial sound experiments curated by American electronic engineer David Vorhaus.
Having attended a lecture given by Delia Derbyshire, Vorhaus joined forces with her and fellow Radiophonic Workshop composer Brian Hodgson and the result of locking themselves away together is this classic psychedelic pop album. An Electric Storm is playful and cinematic, filled with altered samples and tape spliced salads of circus melodies, special effects, French dialogue, sexual exploits, and screams of hell. The aetheric records 2015 compilation, an electrical storm is a ‘tribute to the experimental spirit’ of White Noise’s masterpiece.
All artists were given a field recording of an electrical storm made by aetheric records’ Alistair Thaw (a.k.a slowthaw.) They could use the track as they wished to create their own compositions. One could reason that conceptually inspired by the White Noise album, this compilation is a celebration of the technique: repurposing sound or ‘tape splicing’. And it isn’t just a bunch of musicians using the sample in similar ways or even using similar procedures. Each track has its own flavour and approach to the initial recording, resulting in a true tribute to ‘how-and-why’ the White Noise album was born.
With a collection of international musicians rolling the dice with the storm, the result is an enjoyable and dramatic film journey accompanied by an unconscious familiarity with the source material. The tracks are well ordered, leaving the listener enjoying the rain.
The compilation opens with So There’s xylophones and nuanced, quiet beckonings. White Feather’s Nocturnal Storm leads us into the glowing, pretty space where the listener opens their eyes refreshed. Kek-W‘s STRm walks us on to the train tracks into a dance party, climbing past metal riveters and pulsations. Troy Schafer’s fixed emission makes me seriously homesick for shows back in the States in sweaty spaces filled with unexpected distorted shouts and dark human stimuli. The Revenant Sea’s charge separation cluster is the static that makes the baby hair on arms stand at attention, possibly receiving transmissions from the galaxy. The Heartwood Institute’s aetheric recursion did not remind me of the massage school with the same namesake in Northern California. Rather it reminded me of the The Repo Man soundtrack [Editor’s note: high praise indeed!], the listener being pursued by chain smoking UFO hunters. le pleasure beach by Benjamin Shaw washes one with watery ascending piano ripples.
April Larson’s decaying dream (electric storm mix) delivers yet another cinematic track, this time with escalating David Lynch eerie suspense. as clouds accumulate by stapperton bounces a rubber ball intermittently walking through rain storms and swarms of whispering cicadas, inducing ketamine flashbacks. black_ops pushes one through a monochromatic static void, repetitive waves of great gravity surround. Echoes …. Leytonstone concretizes one’s senses again putting them into order with shushing reassurance to move through the gap. BURL attaches you to the outer space debris floating through ancient unknown civilizations, all being swallowed slowly into a black hole. One enters another dimension on a single sound. two cars passing by Hollows is a misty-eyed moment of mortality, organs and piano keyboards reminding us that we all grow old. Broken Shoulder’s holiday’s ruined is honing in on almost nautical transmissions and resonance, the ship is brought into port after a long voyage. Coming back to the source, and nature, with the clean, sharp field recording made by slowthaw.
The compilation comes with a badge with the same disturbing, beautiful album art. I recommend listening to an electrical storm late at night with a jug of red wine, lying on a Persian rug and duvet for emotional comfort.
—ooOoo—
the crest of a dune: joe murray on will montgomery, in atoms, slowthaw
December 10, 2015 at 1:11 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: aetheric records, in atoms, joe murray, organized music from thessaloniki, slowthaw, will montgomery
Will Montgomery – The crystal at the lips (CD, organized music from thessaloniki, t29, edition of 200)
In Atoms – WREATHS (self-released download)
slowthaw – doll cuts (download, aetheric records)
Will Montgomery – The crystal at the lips
Super-brain Will takes not one but two scores from toff-composer Manfred Werder and uses their cryptic instructions to place his hizzing field recordings about the noble Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
I’m a relative newcomer to all this kinda jazz and find the pale austerity a real turn-on. So, for once, I resist the temptation to listen ‘blind’ and check out a bunch of links that lead me to Werder’s beautiful and inventive scores and a disturbing picture of the other Will Montgomery… a so called Chicago Bear. I’m hungry for context and even beat a path to the straightest RFM bedfellow yet [Editor’s note: you’re on a warning].
So, rigid with excitement, my pink little shrimps pick up the baffling wind and stray electrix easy enough. I tune in deeper and the sea-birds start caw-cawing (it’s Southampton right) and small-city hubbub of traffic and noisy kids kind of build a bivouac between my hammer and anvil.
Some voice intones ‘honey’ or ‘honning’ or ‘awwney’ or something, adding to the general duck-egg blue fuss in the air between my speakers. I catch myself squinting as I’m listening with a fierce intensity. The high heel footsteps clip-clop and are as dubby and regular as a Pole jam from way back. And then…it’s over. You know I can’t get enough of this domestic psychedelic sound-world so press play again.
When I finally recover my frothing I check out track two, ‘Filtrate’, which is even better. It’s an exercise in reduction, redaction and erasure. Will takes a source field recording from the desk of one Mr Kostis Kilymis and proceeds to rub out all the ‘field’ frequencies. This delicate slash with the tippex leaves the lucky listener with a transparent ghost of the original recordings. Beautiful magnetic curves loop out of ether mirroring Sarah Hughes’ spare sleeve design.
I recline awkwardly and close my eyes to concentrate harder. It’s all just feedback I guess but the tones are so wonderfully grimy and smeared… all soft grey pencil rather than garish fluorescent highlighter and tracing single lonely arcs. One by one the tones rise and fall in splendid isolation. And never, until the closing seconds, do they intersect, setting off a sepia-tinted soft blossom.
Crickey!
There’s a calming desolation to these recordings, like watching sand blow off the crest of a dune.
In Atoms – WREATHS
A super-classy synth/drone affair in three parts.
- Pretty dramatic, like Black Beauty, as horses appear out of the mist. There’s a close up of a sweating flank and long-lashed eye. You can feel the yearning from the saddle.
- The intro to Sweatloaf (complete with vinyl crackles) but instead of Sabbath riffs we get lovely denuded drum patterns.
- Gentle floating? A bath of warm cumin seeds; at first a dry slithering over the body but then eczema-like patches form sticking to any protein dampness.
slowthaw – doll cuts
Blissed-out electro/drone summons the unveiling of a leisure centre in Asgard. All the gods and demi-gods stand proud as the wave machine is turned on for the first time and marvel at the heated floors and lockers you open with a 20 pee piece. After the frolics they stop for hot chocolate on their way out.
Scene: A horizon scanning meeting in the Department of Transport. While the interim Accounts Director (the real Director is on sabbatical – yeah right!) outlines our 2016/2017 business plan I track the starlings over Victoria Coach Station. Huge abstract shapes fold in on themselves. Murmurations… that’s the word for their psychedelic ravelling my shattered brain reminds me.
Their black-fuzz smears the peachy sky.
It hypnotises me to such a degree I’m absentmindedly rolling my pen across the desk, ‘clack, clack, clack’ it goes.
Anything to add Mr Murray?
The interim Director points at me.
I stammer,
It’s about all I can manage under the circumstances.
—ooOoo—
all that is left: people-eaters, aetheric records and invisible city records
April 9, 2015 at 12:39 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: aetheric records, automatic drawing, invisible city records, new music, no audience underground, noise, people-eaters, poetry, slowthaw, spiritualism, tapes, visual art
people-eaters – The Only Thing Left To Fear (A5 chapbook, 16pp, with 3” CD-r mixtape, aetheric records)
people-eaters – The Only Thing Left To Fear (tape, Invisible City Records, edition of 30 or download)
It amuses me to imagine aetheric records and Invisible City Records sharing premises. I picture a cross between the drawing room in Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and the well-appointed lounge where William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki gathers his friends to hear tales of ghost-hunting. The more decadent staff members drape themselves over the chaise longues and, deep in a fug of laudanum and absinthe, lose themselves in painfully thin volumes of German poetry. The more scientifically minded look on disapprovingly and return to their geographical analysis of Eastern European folklore, or a heated exchange as to the properties of ectoplasm.
The pull-back-and-reveal (or ‘then I got off the bus’ moment – cheers Pete) in this scene occurs as the camera follows one of these chaps out of the main door and into… an anonymous, strip-lit corridor in a modern, faceless office building. What gives!? Well, despite my whimsical first paragraph I’d suggest both labels are solidly grounded in the present day and fully understand the ritual and psychological significance of the trappings they have chosen. Alistair of aetheric knows full well that his beloved photographs of spirit activity at Victorian séances are preposterous hoaxes, Craig of Invisible City knows full well that H.P. Lovecraft was a writer of fiction not a documentarian. Both can agree, with a shared wistful sigh, that there is simply no such thing as ‘cat people’ from the ‘old country’…
That said, the certainty that there are no tentacles under the bed is cold comfort. If these things don’t exist then the stories we tell about them are really attempts to explain unpalatable truths about ourselves and our place in an indifferent universe. In the absence of spirits and monsters all that is left is us, an infinity of nothing and the implications thereof. That is the only thing left to fear.
Which brings us through the woods to the album that ties the two labels together: The Only Thing Left to Fear by people-eaters. Released in two versions, on aetheric this comes as an A5 chapbook containing five poems, five automatic drawings and a 16 minute ‘mixtape’ on 3″ CD-r and on Invisible City it exists as a limited edition tape or download. You don’t get the chapbook with the latter but, beefed up with remixes, the amount of music included is more than doubled. Both editions are still available at the time of writing.
The poetry, written by Alistair using the pseudonym ‘slowthaw’, is grisly and bleak – part Baudelaire fever-dream, part Burroughs cut-up, all disgusted with the corporeal. It’s an uncomfortable read. Some of you will appreciate that. Regarding the artwork, I’m always tempted to ‘reverse engineer’ automatic drawing, to trace the lines with a fingernail or the tip of a pen and see what, if any, feelings fall out as a result. This time, appropriately enough, I got panicked – as if a spirit was trying to communicate something and getting increasingly frantic as it realised this ‘Ouija board’ had no letters on it, nor did the fleshy mechanism it had appropriated even believe in its existence.
Before accounting for the music, I should mention that all the creative aspects of this project are apparently inspired by the following quote:
Spirit sounds are usually of a peculiar character; they have an intensity and a character of their own, and, notwithstanding their great variety, can hardly be mistaken, so that they are not easily confused with common noises, such as the creaking of wood, the crackling of fire, or the ticking of a clock; spirit raps are clear and sharp, sometimes soft and light… (from The Medium’s Book by Allan Kardec published in 1861)
…as its influence is easier heard than seen. The quote is classic spiritualism – apparently saying something concrete and testable but, on examination, containing enough wiggle room to accommodate a salsa class. people-eaters play it straight, though (well, after an opening that samples a mindfulness meditation tape and thus returned me to early 90s ‘chill out’ ambient nonsense) and present a series of creaks, crackles and ticks drawn out with biomechanical rhythms for our appraisal. Anchor chains are cut and bows scrape against each other in a moonlit bay. Brass cogged difference engines strip oxidised gears. Parasitic organisms are hatched and scrabble at the walls of their red prison, the host animal oblivious.
Ghosts? We are asked. Monsters? Each time we have to look down and shake our heads: no, just us – just you, me and the fuckers on the other side of that bolted door.
Nothing else.
—ooOoo—
the severed tongue, the haunted fog, the family crypt: new from aetheric records
August 5, 2014 at 12:07 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 2 CommentsTags: aetheric records, drone, edgar allan poe, gothic horror, last year at marienbad, more black then god, new music, no audience underground, noise, people-eaters, sean derrick cooper marquardt, slowthaw, the magic of the post, troy schafer
Troy Schafer – Rigid Oppression (business card CD-r with pin badge, aetheric records, edition of 23)
more black then god – 1964 ZEN IN THE DRONES (3” CD-r, aetheric records, edition of 20)
people-eaters – disincarnate (CD-r with stickers and pin badge, aetheric records, edition of 20)
My love of the post is obsessive, bordering on fetishistic. The fact that in exchange for a small(ish) amount of money you can make an object disappear from your presence and reappear elsewhere in the world sometime later is magical to me. Despite grumbling about the continuing ubiquity of ‘stuff’ in these sleek, downloadable times the novelty never seems to wear off.
As you can imagine, running a blog in celebration of a fringe art form created by a taskforce of the unco-opted invites odd correspondence. Many’s the time that the contents of a parcel have caused a raised eyebrow. Always notable, for example, are packages from Dr. Adolf Steg of Spon – the painting/collage encrusted with toenail clippings being especially alarming – but a couple of weeks ago he was momentarily outdone: Alistair of aetheric records sent me a severed tongue.
It wasn’t real, thankfully, just a squishy, sticky, joke-shop toy – the sort of thing a ghoulish pre-teen might throw at his classroom window to gross-out his contemporaries – but it made me jump, then made me laugh. It fit right in with the goth/horror aesthetic of the label too. Sadly, it had leaked a foul, petrol-smelling, oily substance over everything in the envelope but, hey, it’s the thought that counts. It also reminded me that I’d had a couple of his releases on the pile for months now and that I should really dig them out. Now, I don’t want the lesson you take away from this to be ‘send Rob body parts = jump the queue’ but I have to admit it was a diverting tactic…
I mentioned the goth/horror aesthetic. This isn’t the backwoods/back alley grindcore of, say, certain Matching Head/Oracle atmospheres, more a sort of Victorian gothic: dimly lit séances, air thick with incense, charlatans fooling the gullible with fake ectoplasm and stigmata only to be dragged under themselves by offended spirits. Occasionally it reaches a tentacle into the cosmic horror of Lovecraftian weird tales or, in moments of full-on noise, to the tongue-severing schlock of EC Comics. The packaging is artfully realised – sharing a Pennine-corridor affiliation with Crow Versus Crow – and the releases are, by and large, conveniently short.
Presented on a dinky business card CD-r and clocking in at a mere five minutes, Rigid Oppression by Troy Schafer delivers a right kicking. This is the visceral clattering of actual physical objects being violently rearranged. I often find this kind of noise comical at first – like a floppy-fringed teenager ordered to sort the recycling and making as much racket as possible because it’s just not fair – but repeat listens reveal the chaos is contained within a bowed rise and fall. I imagine the breathing of a junkyard Smaug, his heaving chest – lungs ragged from years of smoking – dislodging detritus from the mountain of crap he is splayed across.
more black then god [sic], nom de plume of Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt, stretches his three tracks to a relatively epic total of 20 minutes. This is the stuff of seafaring nightmare – sodden souls gripping the slippery rail of their ghost ship as it glides into harbour. There is a formal, shot-in-black-and-white, austerity to it too though, as if the haunted fog is rolling in over the manicured lawns of L’Année dernière à Marienbad. Bourgeois hotel guests shift uneasily as they play the matchstick game and order another cocktail. There is a tapping at the window…
disincarnate is the latest from aetheric house band people-eaters and is the longest of the trio at just under half an hour. On the album’s Bandcamp page it is noted that…
This album contains eight threnodies for my late father (1942-2013).
…which I found rather numbed my critical response. There is a passage in Martin Amis’s autobiography in which, to paraphrase, he describes reaching a point in middle age when the only things that have any real importance are births and deaths. I am (un)comfortably within that zone myself now and, as such, my reaction to a dedication like that is to listen to the music in a solemn and contemplative mood. It isn’t conducive to flights of descriptive fancy but I see that, as ever, I am late to the party and reviews rich in the figurative can already be read at heathenharvest, riverrockreviews, forestpunk and musicuratum – all written by talents less psychologically squeamish than me.
What I can say is that I was impressed that the band’s usual atmosphere of dread has not been dialled back in the slightest. This is a wake as desolate as could be described by Poe and, shockingly, the sixth track, ‘me mokutu vakamatea’, contains a poem written by fellow aetheric label mate slowthaw reminiscent of Poe’s translator Baudelaire or maybe something from a ritual hallucinated in a Lovecraftian fever-dream. Given the declared context it is bold stuff. I listened to this album whilst sat in a sun trap created by the concrete geometries of the campus where I work and was transported to a windswept, hillside graveyard where a group of horrified mourners wonder what the hell could have torn the doors from the family crypt…
—ooOoo—
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