BOJANEK & MICHALOWSKI – SOLID (CD by N_Coded Records) *
HADEWYCH – WELVING (CD by Malignant Records) *
DISTEL – NADAGEN (cassette by Beläten) *
KOOKY NUTS POP VOLUME 2 (CD by Proot Records)
ZONK’T – BANBURISMUS (LP by Sound On Probation)
ANTENNE – #1 (LP/12″, private)
THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS – THE TUNNEL OF LOVE (miniLP by Noise Noise Noise Records)
ADRIAN SHENTON – THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (CDR by Phonospheric) *
OWLBITES – Live.Bites^^//.. (CDR by Faux Amis) *
EOSIN – CALYX OF HELD (CDR by Hazard Records) *
LIMBS BIN – VOMITOUS EXCORIATIONS OF PHLEGMATIC AESTHETES (cassette by Fourth Dimension
Records)
INSTINCT PRIMAL & PURBA – FOREST RITUAL (cassette by Nil By Mouth)
BLACKHUMOUR – ENGINES OF DESIRE (cassette by Regional Bears)
SMALL CRUEL PARTY – ΚΟΙ͂ΛΟΣ (Ἡ ΛΕΠΤΟΤΗΣ ΚΑΙ ὙΑΛΟΕΙΔΗΣ) (cassette by Regional Bears)
AMK & WM ZARATE – EMBEDDED (cassette by Regional Bears)
JAZZNOIZE & MIGUEL A. GARCIA – SUVCLATTERS (cassette by Plaza Zachodnia) *
EARTH UNIVERSAL – CURTAINS OF SILENCE HUNG ABOUT THE THING (cassette by Plaza Zachodnia) *
BOJANEK & MICHALOWSKI – SOLID (CD by N_Coded Records)
From Grzegorz Bojanek I reviewed quite some work but not his 2012 release with Piotr Michalowski,
called ‘As Far As It Seems’. From Michalowski I only heard a 3″CDR release, back in Vital Weekly 934.
The two started working together in 2010 and not just in the studio but also on stage. They work along
the lines of improvisation, but all in the realm of electronics and I think especially using laptops. I might
be wrong as the press texts talks about “tape transformations and analogue instruments”, so what do I
(really) know? I was thinking of laptop treatments because the way the music sounds. It is all very
gentle and quiet, with layers of sound sources stuck together, along with warm, glitchy effects. If you
think of Fennesz you are not far off the mark. Within a piece there is not necessarily there is a lot of
things happening; just a few blocks of sound are played around with, but even at the length of
somewhere between five and eight minutes none of this sounds on a repeat mission, and that is partly
due to the fact that there is quite some variation on offer here. From the retro sounding e-bow guitars
of ‘Statues’ to the rhythms of ‘Sculptures’ or the very mellow hissy tape treatments of ‘Pillars’, it always
remains very fresh. It is standing on the shoulders of giants as Taylor Deupree, Fennesz and Stephan
Mathieu but Bojanek and Michalowski surely add a fine bit of their own doing to the equation, moving
the ambient glitch forward. Now I come to think of it, isn’t ambient glitch not due for a revival anytime
soon? If so, remember that this album could mentioned as one that kick started that revival and quite
rightfully so. Also included is a very fine remix by Jacaszek, who adds more rhythm to the mix than the
original composers do in their music but it fits the album pretty well. (FdW)
––– Address: http://ncoded.pl
HADEWYCH – WELVING (CD by Malignant Records)
DISTEL – NADAGEN (cassette by Beläten)
The first time I heard music by Hadewych (Vital Weekly 687) I had mixed feelings about it. It all was a
bit too much Cold Meat Industry and gothic for me. That was almost ten years ago and since then I
learned that the main man behind Hadewych is a local musician who calls himself here Nÿland ii, but
who is also called Peter Johan Nijland and the man behind Distel and numerous other projects. A man
dressed in black yet not without a healthy dose of self-reflection and humour. So that happens when
your local music scene is small I guess; you meet people that upon knowing them you realize they have
a much broader musical taste then you anticipate, judging by their music. Of course I forgot to ask why
there is such a gap between this new Hadewych release and the previous full-length. One reason could
be that Nijland is too busy with other musical endeavours, or perhaps because it’s not easy getting all
of these people in the studio. Nÿland ii plays prepared piano, guitars, prepared zithers, double bass,
percussion, gongs, bowls, bells, flutes, mellotron, synthesizers and vocals, and his regular band
members play bass and percussion; the latter by three different players. Besides there is a cast of
people for spoken word, tribal calls, cattle calls, French horn and screams. Hadewych’s musicians
are also involved with Dead Neanderthals, Trepaneringsritualen and Turia. Hadewych’s music is
percussion heavy and it’s dark; yet it is also quite song based. From whatever releases I hear from
Malignant (I readily admit not a lot) they are usually drone based, which is not the case here. The ten
pieces are relatively short, ranging from just under three minutes to over five and each piece is very
much a ‘song’. There are lots metal like banging on percussion, kettles and drums, heavy and loud, but
also the guitar plays an important next to the voice. Lyrics are, surprisingly, sometimes in Dutch and
sometimes in English. Of course the word ‘gothic’ easily can be attached to this with it’s ritual feel,
Nordic images, campfire crackles, leaves splintering, forest mist in late dawn and dark clouds over
head. Hadewych added these tags to this album: “monolithic ritual, black ambience, ultra grotesque,
avant-garde, gazing into the abyss, lurking at the threshold, megalithic, monumental”, which says
enough, for me at least, about some of the humour involved. And some of these songs are just damn
catchy (if I am allowed to use that word at all); ‘Atavismata’ is one of the best examples of this very
musical approach and with the right video could be a dark wave hit, if ever there is a need for such a
thing. There is nothing traditional about this, not in terms of drone music, metal, noise, experiment
or gothic; it’s a bit of everything and something very much of it’s own, which is the mark of a damn
fine album.
At the same time, well more or less, there is also a new Distel cassette. I believe in them old days
we’d call this a cassingle, a cassette single, and of course it is that damn forces of marketing that this
on cassette and not on a lovely piece of black vinyl, with a diameter of 7 inches. Distel is not a Hadewych
off-shoot (or vice versa for that matter), but very much it’s own thing. Distel plays angst pop. There is
an excellent rhythm machine programming going on, slow but forcefully pulsating and synth heavy.
On ‘Galapagos’ that synth is almost like a rave thing (I was watching the Avicii documentary the other
day, so I am well versed now) and there are the slightly tortured vocals of Nijland, full of, you guessed
it, modern day angst and surely there is a lot to worry about these days. This is dark music, just like
Hadewych, but there is a very groovy approach as well, which on that very same dark wave dance floor
would do well. No campfires were lit when doing this music. I am reminded here of Tranquil Eyes (old
Dutch synth act) when it comes to vocals, and a sort of Depeche Mode in their darkest hour approach to
the music. Why not on 7”, I ask once again, or is this something that will happen in ten years time when
it is revived as a lost gem of the second cassette wave? (FdW)
––– Address: https://malignantrecs.bandcamp.com/
––– Address: https://belaten.bandcamp.com/
KOOKY NUTS POP VOLUME 2 (CD by Proot Records)
Before launching into a diatribe why I don’t like reviewing compilations (which is not the same as
saying ‘I don’t like compilations’; I sometimes do), it is still the way of getting to know a bunch of
musicians and projects one has never heard about. In this case even times twenty-one musicians that
never seem to have made to these pages. Marcin Przylecki is the man who compiled this release. Since
2006 he has a radio show “presenting all kinds of various ‘weird’ electronic music, and for the tenth
anniversary he released the first volume of this, asking his friends to supply him with tracks. Now it’s
time for a second volume and here’s a list of all of those new names; Fortyone (US), Colugo (UK), GNG
(France), Thiaz Itch (France/Mexico), Twink (US), Ett Nytt Liv (Sweden), Hercelot (Japan), Spray Poivre
(France), Retrigger (Brasil), Monster Zoku Onsomb! (Australia), Mchy i Porosty (Poland), Doudou Ti
Fess (France), Jankenpopp (France), Bacalao (Switzerland), Breakmaster Cylinder (US), Captain
Credible (Norway), WSZYSTKO (Poland), Raxo (France), Poborsk (France), Xylitol (UK), Fourmi
(France) and Krojc (Poland). Of course somebody out there will say: “oh my, what a great cast of my
favourite musicians”. I am not sure if ‘weird’ is also the word Przylecki would use for these pieces and
I do realize it is a term that is easy to be discussed. What is weird for me can be normal for you. For me
many of these songs are very normal. I’d say all of these people studied carefully how People Like Us
constructed songs out of plundered sounds, when she did work with a lot of the exotic records (I am
not sure if she still does that); put a beat to it, make a bit dubby, steppy, or technoy and you have a
pleasant, short pop song. Sometimes I am also reminded of the music released by Bearsuit Records,
with equally sample heavy material. Of course ‘weird’ doesn’t have to equal ‘difficult’, but many of
these songs are very much happy-clappy pastiches of easy tune, exotica, commercial pop, which
makes up a nice pastime soundtrack. It is nothing more, nothing less, which is of course not a bad
thing. (FdW)
––– Address: http://prootrecords.com/
ZONK’T – BANBURISMUS (LP by Sound On Probation)
Eleven weeks ago I reviewed ‘Espace D’incertitude’ by Heal, now it’s time for Zonk’t. Both are projects
from Laurent Perrier, who also records as Pyône and Cape Fear and for his most serious work using his
given name. Like I noted eleven weeks ago it is not easy for me to point the finer differences between
all of these projects. One way or another they all seem to be electronic, rhythm plays quite a big part,
and it is usually a bit moody. Over the years Perrier has shifted from using laptops to modular
synthesizers, probably like so many others, yet with very little effect on the music itself. I tend to think
that is a good thing. The title here is from ‘the crypto-analytical process developed by Alan Turing
during the Second World War’ and if there is a finer, delicate point of difference to be noted in the
world of many Perrier names, one could say that ‘dub’ is the main interest for Zonk’t. In the past his
Zonk’t sound was bit minimal and a bit louder, but always the element of dance music woven into its
fabric. Side A has a sidelong piece, ‘Square’, while the other side has three shorter pieces. Of the
shorter ones, ‘Chronogyre’ is a bit more ‘experimental’, but with a beat and dub infested scattering
of sounds, both electronic and acoustic (percussion) and the shortest, ‘Conditional Probability’ is the
most dance like outing of the whole record, with the dark, monolith ‘Colossus’ sitting firmly in the
middle. ‘Square’ is obviously a rather slow builder, which makes I guess also a bit more experimental,
certainly with those voices in the early parts of the piece, but once the rhythm gets on its wheels, it
becomes a slow roller coaster of a piece, like a rusty squeezebox, with spacious sounds sparking about
occasionally and more excellent use of echo and reverb, just like a good dub record requires. (FdW)
––– Address: http://soundonprobation.com/
ANTENNE – #1 (LP/12″, private)
It should hardly be a secret that I used to have a small part in the world of releasing music on compact
disc, LPs and cassettes, though not anymore in recent years. Sometimes there is something in these
pages that shows that involvement, like the recent Asmus Tietchens re-issues on CD of old LPs (see
Vital Weekly 1127), now the formats are reversed. Although there is no evidence on the cover that
this was released on CD in the year 2000 by some Dutch label, I can imagine that the unassuming
buyer could think it is a very ‘now’ record (and without any dates mentioned it will always be a ‘now’
record I guess). I admit I played this a lot when it came out (loving as , but the last time I heard it is
easily more than ten years ago. Upon playing this I immediately remember what I liked back then,
and which I still like very much about this. Marie-Louise Munck’s voice is wavy and dreamy, singing
like a beautiful sleeping princess (well, not really sleeping of course) and Kim G. Hansen’s music is
slow, trippy, hoppy in it’s rhythm, but with a bunch of slides guitars, humming and buzzing electronics.
This is music that is very spacious and very poppy, but also has a very fine ambient and experimental
edge. Back then you’d call this trip hop, or something inspired by Portishead but obviously I always
thought Antenne had something very much their own sound. This LP version contains six of the eight
songs, while the first 100 copies contains a newly reworked version of ‘Here To Go’, the beautiful
original opening song (and graced with a remix CD back then) and a new song. So one song from the
original has disappeared. ‘Here To Go’ is transformed entirely into something much more creepy and
scary with processed (and possessed) radio waves, loosing the drums and brushes of the original,
making this an entirely new piece. ‘Du Er Overalt/You Are Everywhere’ on the other side is a rather
more poppy outing. It is in fact the most pop like piece on the entire package. While the vocals still
sound a bit sad the music with it’s clear piano chords and eerie electronics are topped with a nice
bass thump, making it all rather open and not as closed off as the other, earlier pieces. It seems that
‘#2’ will also be on vinyl soon, and that a ‘#4’ is in the works. If this new song is a forecast of that
album, I am looking forward to hearing that. (FdW)
––– Address: http://antenne.band/
THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS – THE TUNNEL OF LOVE (miniLP by Noise Noise Noise Records)
Visiting record stores is something that is no longer of my personal interest. I have everything I want,
thank you very much, plus writing reviews keeps me quite busy. So Record Store Day is something I
gladly let pass on, but I love to the opportunity to say something about it. Why is that people will stand
in line for a white coloured, 180 gram pressing of record X, from 1975, that they already have as an
original pressing, a loudness war suffering CD, a 2010 remaster with additional bonus disc of demos
and that will next year be on green vinyl (oh my god, green! And you realize it’s a limited of 2000
copies?) “always envisaged by the band to look like”. Who buys that crap? Go to a record store and buy
a new record. For instance you can buy ‘The Tunnel Of Love’ by The Legendary Pink Dots (regular
black vinyl, 400 copies), which is announced as a mini LP. That brings back some fine memories of the
80s when the mini LP was a much more common thing. It has a playing time of about twenty-four
minutes and is a format that fits the collage suites of the Dots very well. They are tireless
experimentalists but not for the sake of experiment only, as there is always the rock element in the
use of guitars, drum machines and lyrics. Sometimes Edward Ka-spel sings, sometimes it is more like
reciting poetry. Sometimes it is a song, but they can easily break and die out, get a rough cut and be
totally different the next second. There are lots of weird sounds, synth bubbles, field recordings even,
a melancholic piano bit and the trademark somewhat psychedelic sound, especially on the second side;
spacious, strange sound effects and such like and then a bit of song in between. That’s how I like our
Dots to be. Don’t except something different after all these years; but at least they came up with a
totally new record on Record Store Day, which is not what a lot of others can say. (FdW)
––– Address: https://legendarypinkdots1.bandcamp.com/
ADRIAN SHENTON – THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (CDR by Phonospheric)
There are lots of references with ‘the house that jack built’, but in this particular case it refers to
Jackdaws, birds that is, which were hiding in the attic of Adrian Shenton, and so a few carefully placed
microphones were used to do some field recordings and in the two pieces ‘AtticAngels’ (one is called
‘reprise’) there is also a synthesizer. I would think there is also some kind of synthesizer present in the
piece that is in the middle, ‘Nest Etiquette’. In the first and longest piece the bird sounds start out but
are quickly replaced by some more freely played overtones of the synthesizer. Birdcalls are in there
every now and then but not throughout. It is quite a moody piece, drone-like and sparse, but it is also
not the most relaxing sort of ambient pieces, which is something I for one quite enjoy. ‘Nest Etiquette’
opens quite loud, compared to the previous piece, with animal sound and with quite a loud bass
sound rotating throughout this piece. This too, one could say, is very much from the more experimental
end of the ambient/drone spectrum. If you play it louder, you will notice quite some sounds picked up
from the distance, like a thunderstorm. Towards the end the loud animals return. This seems to be a
more complex piece than the previous. In the ‘reprise’ of the first piece the balance between
synthesizers and birds is on an equal level, I think, which gives you an interesting other perspective of
this. This I thought was some rather lovely raw ambient drone music with some field recordings. (FdW)
––– Address: http://www.phonospheric.co.uk
OWLBITES – Live.Bites^^//.. (CDR by Faux Amis)
This might very well be the first CDR release on Faux Amis, at least that I see and it is a solo release
from Lärmschutz member Thanos Fotiadis. He’s the band string slinging guitar hero. He calls
Owlbites “an experimental ambient/drone project. It started as a healing process and it developed
as a continuous experiment in sound”, but I must admit it is not something one could easily see on the
two pieces here. Both are culled from various solo concerts he did over the years in what he calls
“special locations, from lighthouses to dancing studios, from dark cellars to eerie forests”. It is a sort of
diary, Fiotadis says, of his solo concerts and I am not sure how it works out in the two pieces of twenty-
some minutes each; is a collage of a various bits and bobs cobbled together? Is it various pieces
overlaying together? Or some other approach that is not yet clear to me? Using a guitar and some
sound effects, Fotiadis creates some very dense patterns of guitar drone that lingers closely to the
world of noise/drone, rather than ambient/drone, so I would think, but it is not all just about noise.
Fotiadis know how to pull back, change position and let it be ‘quiet’ for some time. Perhaps this is
were I found it difficult to see the healing process aspect, unless I should see it more in private terms
for Fotiadis, healing somehow and someway and then kept on doing this more heavy approach of
massive guitar drones. Throughout the music is quite minimal but once Fotiadis gets his ‘thing’ stuck
in a looped drone form there is certainly something most captivating about this; almost trance like in
a way. Adding a sound slowly and then later on another, but never losing the uberdrone. I found the
music mostly dark and highly atmospheric, topped with some cryptic voice material dispersed
throughout these two pieces. Quite forceful, but a fine force it surely is. (FdW)
––– Address: https://fauxamisrecords.bandcamp.com
EOSIN – CALYX OF HELD (CDR by Hazard Records)
Diana Combo is from Portugal. She works with vinyl, field recordings found online and some of her
own. It is all rather intuitive and not very much pre-planned. On this release she uses music by Skull
Defekts, Joe Coley, Steve Reich, Antoine Chessex, Institut Fuer Feinmotorik and many more. Some of
this is easy to recognize I think. I can be short about this. I am usually not blown away by people who
use vinyl as sound sources, but in this case there is not a lot done with it at all. You could say this is a
DJ mix of some kind and what’s the point in releasing that? Soundcloud or Mixcloud are good platforms
to share your mixes. I couldn’t detect many home-recorded field recordings in this one either. It all
sort of eluded me. (FdW)
––– Address: http://archive.org/details/hr093
LIMBS BIN – VOMITOUS EXCORIATIONS OF PHLEGMATIC AESTHETES (cassette by Fourth Dimension
Recoords)
The man behind Limbs Bin is J.L. and he’s from Western Massachusetts and on this short tape release,
twenty minutes only, he screams his lungs out on top of distorted electronics and a drum machine with
occasional beats pumping about. Fourth Dimension says this is “strictly for the young at heart”, which
perhaps would mean that every open minded music lover can enjoy this, young or old, or maybe to
avoid grumpy old man saying; “oh but I heard this before, back in the 80s, when everybody was
screaming their lungs out on top of feedback and while the beats might have been the odd ball back
then, it’s not that odd”. Also mentioned is that is for “fans of General Dynamics, CSX and North Street”,
which is stuff I have never heard off (old at heart?). I must say it’s something that indeed sounds like
the good ol’ days of power electronics, especially Con-Dom comes to this particular mind (sans the
rhythm of course), and industrial music, but I must say that this is an excellent recording here, with
much care for depth and detail, all done in a proper studio, as opposed to the 80s bedroom cassette
qualities. Now that’s a major leap forward I’d say. It is all very aggressive on the ears and it’s a release
I enjoy very much. Play it loud and annoy your neighbours! (FdW)
––– Address: http://fourthdimensionrecords.bigcartel.com/
INSTINCT PRIMAL & PURBA – FOREST RITUAL (cassette by Nil By Mouth)
Here we have quite a lovely package, with leporello booklets, black and white pictures of the forest in
which the ritual was held and also some iconography that is not my taste (crucifix and such). I
understand that all of these sounds are recorded in the Bohemian countryside, in the forest and at the
Kutna Hora ossuary. Some of this was recorded during a snowstorm and all of the second side during
the night. I am not entirely sure but it seems that there has been battery-operated instruments in use
here to play the music. It is all about “the aural experience of bones, cosmic connections, trees, stones
and ancient spirituality”, which is not the kind of thing this 21st century sceptic has much interest in,
but as I was listening to this on headphones, sitting back with my Walkman (a rare thing to do, I
realized, but maybe something I should do more often), I actually these heavy walks in the dark, the
sonic overload generated and the cracking of branches along with rain fall and other ghostly forest
activities. I assume, but might be wrong, that this is not a ‘live in the forest’ recording but the result
of collaging various recordings together, overlaying various sources together, which is quite rightfully
so as a choice. It enriches the music quite a bit I think and despite the somewhat gothic overtones it is
even for me a most lovely release. (FdW)
––– Address: http://www.exoteric-zine.com/nilbymouth/
BLACKHUMOUR – ENGINES OF DESIRE (cassette by Regional Bears)
SMALL CRUEL PARTY – ΚΟΙ͂ΛΟΣ (Ἡ ΛΕΠΤΟΤΗΣ ΚΑΙ ὙΑΛΟΕΙΔΗΣ) (cassette by Regional Bears)
AMK & WM ZARATE – EMBEDDED (cassette by Regional Bears)
A new label from London and the first three releases show a strong interest for the ‘old’ masters. All
three musicians started in the 80s and have by now reached their fifties. The only one I don’t know
anything about is WM Zarate. I love the music by all three projects so it was hard to start anywhere,
but I went for blackhumour, as he prefers to write it. Ever since the late 80s blackhumour uses voices
and nothing else; “no effects, back-or speed-masking”. It is ‘just’ a vast amount of loops of voices,
shifting back and forth with some great meditative effect. Back in the old days he released a whole
bunch of music on cassette and somewhere in the mid-90 he stopped for reasons I don’t know, but
came back a decade or so ago and his ‘Selected Pieces’ CD (Vital Weekly 955) was an excellent return
to form. The four pieces on this new cassette are long; three of them nineteen minutes and one sixteen
minutes. In a typical blackhumour piece a single voice sound starts a piece, ‘oh’, ‘ah’, ‘mm’ and to that
slowly the same sound is added but then layered about a 1000 times so a drone appears. It’s basically
Steve Reich’s ‘Come Out’, but where Reich stops after 16 or so layers of ‘come out’, blackhumour takes
it to the extreme. A machine like pulse can be part of the music as well. I am not sure if these days he
uses computers to do this sort of work; it could be, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn if it’s still
cassettes or reel-to-reel machines. There is always an element of ‘dirt’ in the music of blackhumour,
which is probably the very same reason he still loves to release cassettes. It is mechanical; it’s perhaps
even industrial, yet it is also very captivating. At least, I find this very captivating, but I can easily see
why someone else would deem this to be very boring. ‘Do Business’, the final piece is just the repeated
phrase ‘living fast dying young it’s like endless poetry, poetry, poetry’, very naked, not much layers
and a bit of hiss. Perhaps this is a new direction for blackhumour? Fascinating release.
For Small Cruel Party’s Greek titled release it is not something new but a re-issue of a 3″CDR by
Banned Productions in 2003. The recording is from the 1997 Artooz festival in Limoges. The B-side is
the whole piece in reverse, as made by Chop Shop’s Scott Konzelmann. It’s good to see these re-issues
of Small Cruel Party (see also Vital Weekly 1122 for instance) and maybe it could serve as an incentive
for Key Ransone to produce new work again after this long hiatus. Surely releases like this make me
think how an updated sound for Small Cruel Party could sound like. Exploring the small sounds is his
knack in music. Breaking branches and rustling leaves, along with what could be tapes of rain drops
or water sources otherwise, along with rusty metal sheets and stones; it is a very hands on approach,
playing this manually, allowing for the irregularities of the sound to shine through. Nothing here is a
loop of any kind. The reversed version is a nice idea and with the piece being louder in the first half
than in the second half, it makes surely sense as such but it is also just an idea I guess to fill up the
second side; anything better than ‘program repeats on second side’. Probably the 3″CDR is long sold
out, like many of the original Small Cruel Party releases so this is a most welcome re-issue.
While I was playing ‘Embedded’ by AMK and WM Zarate, I was thinking not only ‘who is Zarate’
but also to what extent who does what here. I know AMK as a turntable abuser for a long time,
including his early fixation for cutting up, with a pair of scissors, flexi discs and sticking them together
in new configurations. Sometimes with a fair amount of sound effects thrown in for good noise
measure. Here however it seems to me less cut-up and vinyl abuse, yet whatever else it is that is
going on I am not sure off. There might be samples of some kind, surely, as well as electronic sound
effects, no doubt, but it is less based on broken vinyl and reconfigured flexi discs. I think. I might, of
course, be very well wrong. On side two I heard a rhythm machine, I believe a synthesizer too, and
almost a pop song like structure, as yes, there are songs on this album, twelve in total, which is quite
a lot for a thirty-minute album. Other sources may include field recordings, drones (made by guitars?
I am not sure. Again), feedback and instruments that is less easy to recognize (a violin?). It however
makes up a pretty varied disc. Obviously noise is the main place where this music resides but with
the addition of drum machines, synthesizers and an overall more song based approach, which makes
that all of this sounds pretty exciting in the world of AMK; a new direction, maybe? I admit I don’t
know all of his work, but if its a new direction, then I’d say: go ahead and do more. (FdW)
––– Address: https://regionalbears.bandcamp.com
JAZZNOIZE & MIGUEL A. GARCIA – SUVCLATTERS (cassette by Plaza Zachodnia)
EARTH UNIVERSAL – CURTAINS OF SILENCE HUNG ABOUT THE THING (cassette by Plaza Zachodnia)
If you call your project Jazznoize I would expect some jazz, my bad I guess. I had not heard of this
“Iberian noise-maker” before, who has been going since 2005 and who worked with Slavek Kwi,
Daniel Menche, Miguel A. Ruiz and here with Miguel A. Garcia. “His work is mainly based on capturing
sound realities walking towards a complete conception of concrete music directly related to its
historical time period”. I am sure Garcia need little introduction, as many of the releases he’s involved
in were reviewed in these pages. Garcia’s work is all about near broken sound devices, field recordings
and manipulations of acoustic instruments. In the six long pieces he recorded with Jazznoize us about
the “inappropriate uses of some machinery (mixers, mics) that they lately digitally manipulated”. It is
quite a noisy landscape that is depicted here by these two gentlemen, but it is quite a gentle form noise.
It is all about buzzing and humming, dotted with a fair amount of reverb on top. The sources are very
obscured in what I assume are various stages of processing. They go for either a more collage like
approach with some firm cuts in the material or a more flowing, droning set-up. Resonating electrical
currents are picked up, an occasional bump on the microphone is recorded and there is a fine vibrancy
in this material in which I believe to recognize the hand of Garcia when it comes to the final mix. This
is some excellently produced experimental music and very entertaining at that.
Earth Universal is a duo of Hubert Winczyk and Jeff Gburek, who have been working together since
many years, but only recently decided to use a band name. I don’t think I heard their work, collectively
or solo, before. As Earth Universal they do improvisations on a variety of sound devices, stomp boxes,
toys and on stage loop many of these sources around. They too play rather long pieces, usually five to
almost ten minutes and they seem to be interested in a more chaotic approach when it comes to
playing their music, with one or two exceptions. In a typical piece they start out with a very scratches,
hisses, voices from toys, a bit of hit and miss really, and then start looping a few around, which brings
some structure in the music, even when the chaos lingers on beneath. It’s not always my cup of tea
really. It sounds too much like circuit bending/improvisations, which is, I guess, not really my thing.
When things slow down and space out, like in ‘TO DELETE OR RECYCLE THE FATHER’ (capitals
intended) then they show they can play a really nice and coherent piece of music. They sure have
some funny titles, such as ‘Radiodead’, ‘Madame C. hides in Berlin’ (I assume recorded at that lovely
place in Berlin!) and ‘Take me to your humidifier’. But funny titles are not enough, of course! (FdW)
––– Address: https://plazach.bandcamp.com/