MATS/MORGAN BAND – THANKS FOR FLYING WITH US (CD by Cuneiform) *
TETUZI AKIYAMA/OREN AMBARCHI/ALAN LICHT – WILLOW WEEP AND MOAN FOR ME (3″CDR by Antiopic) *
PAUL LABRECQUE AND VALERIE WEBB – TREES, CHANTS AND HOLLERS (LP by Eclipse)
RAFAEL FLORES – OLIVE DAYS (CDR by Zeromoon)
SEKVENS – REQUIEM FOR ANALOGUE TV-SIGNALS (CDR by Zeromoon)
JONAS LINDGREN – YOU CAN COME BY ANYTIME YOU WANT, I’LL BE AROUND (CDR by Zeromoon) *
VIOLET – BLIND FROM STARING TOO LONG AT THE SUN (CDR by Zeromoon) *
HMUTE – MUTABLE TENSION (CDR by Echo Music) *
SALVAGESOUND – 12 REDUCTIONS (CDR by Gears Of Sand)
PHROQ – WE WILL SHIVER WITH FEAR (CDR by Obscuria Records)
PHROQ – ATTEMPTS TO REACH USA (CDR by Harsh Noise Records)
FESSENDEN – INSIDE THE ICE FACTORY (CDR by Utech Records)
FESSENDEN & KEITH BERRY – BLEU: RÉSULTAT (3″CDR by Chat Blanc Records)
0729 – STILL.LIFE (CDR, private)
SEPLOPHOBIA/WAPSTAN (CDR by Brise Cul Records)
VARIOUS & SCANT INTONE (3″CDR by Brise Cul Records)
LUCIO CAPECE – SPACE/TIME MODULATOR (CDR by Noseso Records)
NO MORE MUSIC – AT THE SERVICE OF CAPITAL (CDR by Noseso Records)
OLD FASHIONED DONKEYS – HAMMER THE DONKEY (DVD-R by Phaseweb)
MACHINEFABRIEK – CARPS (businesscard CDR by Machinefabriek)
YANNIS KYRIAKIDES & LUCIO CAPECE – JUNCTION (MP3 by audioTong)
YANNIS KYRIAKIDES & LUCIO CAPECE – LIVE IN BRUSSELS (MP3 by audioTong)
CADUCEUS – INFLUENCE VOLUME TEN (MP3 by Caduceus Music)
MATS/MORGAN BAND – THANKS FOR FLYING WITH US (CD by Cuneiform)
This one is a captivating and stirring record from beginning to the end. Mats Öberg and Morgan Agren make up the nucleus of this impressive swedish band. In the 80s these gentlemen, great admires of the music of Frank Zappa, developed themselves into very skilled musicians, that could play about anything from Zappa. Even Zappa himself was very impressed. So no doubts concerning their craftsmanship as musicians. In the 90s they started their own band, and they had to prove themselves as composers. With their Mats/Morgan Band they released six albums up till now on their own Ultimate Audio Entertainment label. Their latest album – ‘Thanks For Flying With Us’ – is released by Cuneiform Records. So at last their music will be better distributed.
We hear Öberg on keyboards, harmonica and vocals. Agren plays drums, keyboards and programming. All compositions carry the names of Öberg and Agren. The band is completed by Jimmy Agren (guitar, bass), Robert Elovsson (keyboards, clarinet, voice) and Tommy Tordsson (bass). They are assisted by several other guest musicians, especially some female singers. As this is my fist encounter with this band, I can’t tell you anything about the development of this band, and whether their seventh album is a step forward or backward. At first hearing I was struck by the obvious 70s sound of this keyboard dominated band. It woke up old memories of Todd Rundgren’s Initiation for example. The album sounds almost like an homage to this period. But this does not mean that we are dwelling in a retro atmosphere here. All fusion, progressive and other influences inspired them to a very coherent and massive whole of full-grown music. Also from this aspect it is impossible not to be impressed by these virtuosic speed devils. Happily they do not lose themselves into meaningless technical exercises, as their music remains very open and communicative.
The album is very well produced. In all it’s complexity the music remains very transparent, so that you can enjoy every note from all the players. The bonus tracks offer some insight into how this band sounds live (in 1998 and 2002). Especially ‘Live Neff’ with Just Öberg on piano and Agren on drums has some great moments (DM).
Address: http://www.cuneiformrecords.com/
TETUZI AKIYAMA/OREN AMBARCHI/ALAN LICHT – WILLOW WEEP AND MOAN FOR ME (3″CDR by Antiopic)
Each of these three players likes the blues, and each of them plays the blues in their own specific way. Ambarchi very slow, and packed together in a bunch of tones, Licht through a more noisy guitar and Akiyama through emptiness. In 2004 the three met in Wellington, New Zealand and at the Bomb The Space festival they played this intense piece of free form blues music. It has nothing to do with the blues and rhythm simply because there is no rhythm here. Just long, sustaining sounds of which the core is formed by Ambarchi, and on top the heart felt pain in the six strings of a howling guitar – or is that howling guitarist, playing the guitar? The blues that takes the listener apart, is here subject to dissection itself. Sliced apart and dished up again, this is empty, desolate music, which however never sounds empty: the sustains melt into each other and form a great, majestic piece. Almost nineteen minutes of sheer desolation. (FdW)
Address: http://www.antiopic.com
PAUL LABRECQUE AND VALERIE WEBB – TREES, CHANTS AND HOLLERS (LP by Eclipse)
“Trees, Chants and Hollers” combines a variety of aspects of home-made, folk-influenced music – from structured melodic pieces and dreamy free plucking to the sounds of string instruments gradually losing their acoustic contours and dissolving into blurred drones. The banjo plays a major role in the instrumentation, but there are also guitars, percussion, effects and some male and female voices. The voice usually stays in the background and rather than actual singing it is mostly wordless humming, which functions as an additional layer of sound.
To my ears things are most interesting when the drone aspects of the music prevails, such as on the long “An Acre of Stone (for Rachel Corrie)” with its bowed string instruments and soft clattering percussion. The music is of a dark nature throughout and sometimes gets really spooky. Although I’m aware that it is an all to dangerous readymade notion for this kind of folk-influenced music, I cannot help thinking of it as rural music, as is also suggested by the cover (a Richard Prince-like, blurred and green tinged photography of horses on a pasture) and the song titles. So sitting in the big city and watching the sky signaling the near end of summer I imagine these people in a hut, somewhere in the woods, it is autumn and dark outside and spooky things are happening between the trees. Ok, so probably that’s just too much romantic daydreaming, but it still gives an idea of how the music sounds like. (MSS)
Address: http://www.eclipse-records.com
RAFAEL FLORES – OLIVE DAYS (CDR by Zeromoon)
SEKVENS – REQUIEM FOR ANALOGUE TV-SIGNALS (CDR by Zeromoon)
JONAS LINDGREN – YOU CAN COME BY ANYTIME YOU WANT, I’LL BE AROUND (CDR by Zeromoon)
VIOLET – BLIND FROM STARING TOO LONG AT THE SUN (CDR by Zeromoon)
That Rafael Flores is back on the music scene we knew, we reported about this in Vital Weekly 513. After a long period of silence, following an outburst of creativity in the mid eighties when he released music under the name Comando Bruno, he returned with a great CD for Monochrome Vision. The music on ‘Olive Days’ is utterly fresh, one part recorded from May to July this year and a live portion recorded in July 2006. I am sure he has up dated his equipment from whatever analogue stuff he was using before to computer treatments, but the input, say the field recordings, are still of a rather primitive kind. The first nine tracks are studio tracks, studies in taking one sound and moving them about for a while, shifting them up and down. The four live pieces didn’t hardly differ from the studio, except that they sounded a little more roughly shaped. It’s hard to say to where Flores gets his sound sources, but it still might be very simply the radio or taping electrical devices. Although ‘Olive Days’ is not the same blow that ‘Nubes Rumores/Cometas Y Orugas’ was, it’s still a lovely work of ambient industrial music.
I never heard of Sekvens, but they are a duo from Sweden, who started out last year as a live collaboration of Tobias Astrom (who is also in such bands Militant Fields and Critikal) and Martin Herterich (who is from Stockholm, the city not a band). Sekvens means ‘sequence’ in Swedish. Sweden stopped sending out analogue TV at the end of 2005 in order to just go with digital. They taped the last TV signals and created out of that a requiem, which lasts about twenty minutes. In the opening minutes sounds drift by, swirling in and out of the mix, like a detuned radio, while the non-musical hum and static form a thick cloud that slowly starts to win over with lighter clouds of ambient music passing by. In the third of this requiem (although brought us as one piece), a nice pseudo ethno rhythm emerges which keeps the piece afloat until the end. Perhaps the ending could have used something extra, with is now rather abrupt, but throughout it’s nice piece of music.
To find more information on Jonas Lindgren you have to go to his glitchpunkyouth.com website, and that is absolutely no indication what to expect, in case you don’t know who Lindgren is (one half of Dead+Hurt, as well as producer of drone music as a solo artist under his own name, but also as The Hurt I Feel Is My Hurt and Motopul)). His latest is “You Can Come By Anytime You Want To, I’ll Be Around” and is no different from many of his other releases. Lindgren plays drone music on guitars, effects and a little bit of computers. Here and there we spot some glitches, that may or may not arise from stretching sounds around on the computer. It’s drone music by the book: dark, loaded with sound effects, not too clean, yet not too dirty either. If you are fan of say Monos, Ora and some such, you may find this is a bit too roughly shaped, but I thought it was quite alright. Not shockingly new or anything, just quite alright.
Labelowner Jeff Surak works since a long time in music, but Violet is his most recent project, and already going for some years. On “Blind from staring too long at the sun” he has three pieces of music (two studio, one live) and two films. For his music, Violet uses field recordings (especially in ‘Plague Numbers’ there are loud and present), drones of the autoharp and failures of technique. Just like Lindgren, with whom you could compare him with, the drone music of Violet is quite present, quite loud and quite raw. In ‘Cakeshop’ volumes are raised a bit further and the music becomes a spacey and psychedelic mass, almost like shoegazing, but with some high pitched tones. Especially are the two films about ‘error mechanics’. Both are a demonstration of how Violet generates the sounds, about which I don’t want to reveal anything, but if you are looking for some interesting techniques in generating sound, be sure to view this. (FdW)
Address: http://www.zeromoon.com
HMUTE – MUTABLE TENSION (CDR by Echo Music)
Last year in Greece I attended a long evening of difficult music. A nice evening but one that never seemed to end. I do remember a lot of the evening, except the concert by Hmute somehow disappeared from my mind. Which is of course a pity, now that I have the duty to listening to his first release. Hmute is one Yiorgis Sioros, who plays his music using a computer (that I do remember). On ‘Mutable Tension’ he plays five long pieces of computerized industrial music, occasionally with a touch of mechanized rhythms. Music appears to be coming from all directions – the good thing about digital means is that it has a lot more dynamics than the old industrial music that came on cassettes. Hmute knows and understand this well, and plays around with the dynamics, from a low end bass rumble to high pitches sounds that seem to fly about here and there. There are traces of the good ol’ industrial music, but also Hmute seems to be influenced by Pan Sonic, especially in a piece like ‘Linked To A Generic Pattern’. Perhaps some of the pieces are bit too long to hold the attention throughout, it’s surely a well-made release. (FdW)
Address: http://www.echomusic.gr
SALVAGESOUND – 12 REDUCTIONS (CDR by Gears Of Sand)
One of the more professional CDR labels is Gears Of Sand. Their releases come close to the real thing of a real CD. Salvagesound is one Matthew Poulakakis, of whom we don’t know anything else. On the cover he writes that the music is all constructed from ‘audio sourced from other media’, by which he means films (video, dvd) it seems, and which are then ‘manipulated in a variety of ways’ and ‘the emphasis is more on texture and perceptual shift’. Horses gallop by, a man walks across a room and opens a bottle, a door closes: such are the sources used (as mentioned on the cover), and it’s hard to recognize these as such, but the obscurity of such sounds lead to obscure music, and that is to understood in a positive way. It’s hard to pin the music down to a specific style, as it bears relations to musique concrete, ambient and glitch music. Sampling is of course the main line of sound treatment, looping the sounds around and make multiple layers, which all play at the same time. Sometimes they are closely connected forming small clusters of sound, but at other times they are wide apart, and the uneasyness of the sounds make strangely shifting patterns. Sometimes highly cinematic music, but always staying highly abstract. The use of loops makes this being more pop music with a strong ambient touch, but the source material is of a highly musique concrete nature. A pretty strong release. (FdW)
Address: http://www.gearsofsand.net/
PHROQ – WE WILL SHIVER WITH FEAR (CDR by Obscuria Records)
PHROQ – ATTEMPTS TO REACH USA (CDR by Harsh Noise Records)
Behind the name Phroq is Francisco Meirino from Switzerland/Spain. His first releases, on cassette, date back to 1995, and since then he has created a large list of releases, mainly on cassette, CDR and some on real CDs, such as on Ground Fault. These two latest releases are on CDR. On both releases he notes that we should play them ‘as one continuous session’; index points are only there for convenience. ‘We Will Shiver With Fear’ deals with psychosis as the underlying theme. On Phroq’s website (www.phroq.com) there is a lengthy medical explanation about psychosis. Music wise Phroq is known to be a lover of noise, but one of a more interesting kind. It’s not volume to ten, distortion pedals pushed into the floor and let’s bang. His music, computer generated, deals with field recordings and contact microphone objects, which are fed into the computer and then gets all sorts of processing. Changing the numbers in whatever program he is using, he creates at times a furious beast (or feast) of noise, but he manages to take things back down, and let the sound develop in a more natural way. As such it’s not easy to compare with usual pack of noise makers, rather than perhaps a more noise related version of musique concrete. Although it seemed that this release had some more loud elements than some of his other work.
Phroq is also a world traveller, playing concerts everywhere. And just like many he made an attempt to reach the USA, and unlike others, he succeeded to reach the country. On the disc with the same name we find several pieces recorded at his ‘west coast collapse tour’ of september 2005 in California. Back home he edited the concerts into this release. The cover lists: macintosh, contact mics and beer cans. There are four longer cuts and six shorter interludes, which are all relatively soft. In the longer pieces (two of which are over twenty minutes) the music is hellish noise wise. Here he attempts to reach the Merzbow kind of noise, even when here too he knows how take back control and let things go smooth, if that is a term that might be close to what he does. Its all relative matter I guess. Listening to both in a row is a perhaps a bit much, but in a small dose, Phroq is certainly one of the more interesting noise makers. This one has a great professional cover also. (FdW)
Address: http://www.obscuria.com
Address: http://www.harshnoise.com
FESSENDEN – INSIDE THE ICE FACTORY (CDR by Utech Records)
FESSENDEN & KEITH BERRY – BLEU: RÉSULTAT (3″CDR by Chat Blanc Records)
A while ago, in Vital Weekly 509, we reviewed ‘Capture/Create’ by the Chicago trio Fessenden (being Joshua Convey on bass, Stephen Fiehn on CD players, guitar and Ipod and Steven Hess on drums and vibraphone), which had some great music that balanced improvised music, minimal music, field recordings and quietness. The band didn’t keep quiet and here are two new releases. I’m not sure if ‘Inside The ice Factory’ was recorded in an ice factory (don’t think so), but stylistically it contains ‘Capture/Create’, but it seems to be even more quiet and still. The release is just one piece that very slowly develops, half way through it finds it’s peak and then slowly falls apart in some small particles. The drums and bass create somewhere a vague notion of rhythm, which works well. Contemplative music that combines the best of improvised music, real instruments and yet manages to sound so micro-sound. That may seem like an odd combination, but it works really well.
For ‘Bleu: Résultat’ they work together with british drone meister Keith Berry. He has two tracks here, one being a pure solo piece, then he does he rework of Fessenden stuff, and then there is Fessenden playing their music, using Berry’s previous work of the CDR. That is: if I understand all of this well. In Berry’s two pieces field recordings and feedback seem to be the main protagonists to develop into a nice piece of dark drones, along the lines of Paul Bradley. The second one is more present and louder, but also more single minded developping around one sound. Strangely enough but of the Berry tracks have a similar length. The Fessenden piece is twice as long and here the Berry drones sink away in slowly strummed guitar and scraping percussion. Repeating elements give even the idea of a ‘song’, but I’m sure that is not the intention. Both releases are great! (FdW)
Address: http://www.utechrecords.com/
Address: http://www.chatblancrecords.com/
0729 – STILL.LIFE (CDR, private)
My first encounter with 0729, also known to his friends as Simon Tibor from Hungary. For the dull titled ‘Still.Life’ (or rather, in good microsound tradition, ‘still.life’), his basic idea was to discover the inner life of synthetic sounds: watching the intimacy of dead electronics and intoxicating the frequencies’. Glitch music with the capital C of clicks & cuts. There is a strong beep bass and on top bell like sounds tinkle. In the opening track ‘Process_2D’ there is just grainy rhythmic clicks, but otherwise his sound palette doesn’t show too many variations. Just some shifts in rhythm, a different key for the bell like sounds, which sound like coming from analogue synth, or perhaps something non computer. One or two tracks on a compilation would be alright of this, since the tracks in itself aren’t that bad, but as an album by itself it’s too much of the same, and it walks too many well-known paths, which have been explored by others in a better way. (FdW)
Address: <0729@citromail.hu>
SEPLOPHOBIA/WAPSTAN (CDR by Brise Cul Records)
VARIOUS & SCANT INTONE (3″CDR by Brise Cul Records)
On Brise Cul Records two releases on hand painted CDR (could there be a law against that? thank you). The first one is a split of Wapstan and Seplophobia. Whoever they are I don’t know. The Brise Cul website doesn’t give much information (it’s on myspace anyway, so communication is only for those who sign up. maybe I am old fashioned, but why should I sign up with a third party to communicate with someone? could there a law against that too?) and also their own website doesn’t tell much, but they seem to be american. Seplophobia play noise music, but one of a kind that I like. It’s loud but static, and I mean real static. Small changes in the frequencies make the music. It’s a violent form of drone music that, when played loud, will certainly go right into your brain. ‘Nightfall’ sounds like rain being played through a bunch of filters of an analogue synthesizer.
Music by Wapstan has been reviewed before, in Vital Weekly 517 and here is some more. Wapstan is Martin Sasseville, also the owner of the label. The three pieces here are dedicated for reasons entirely unclear to Andreas Wollenweider, the harpist of the new age. Wapstan’s music has nothing to do with that. He too play upfront drone music, in a static way, slowly changing the dials on whatever apparatus he is using (might very well be an analogue synthesizer). It works well after the music of Seplophobia, which had a little bit more variation, but Wapstan does a fine job too.
Under the banner Various & Scant Intone, there is a mini CD called ‘La Salle D’Attente’. I have no idea who or what we are dealing with here, but the three tracks were recorded in Montreal in February of this year. The three tracks are called ‘Green’, ‘Yellow’ and ‘Red’, and my best guess is Wapstan is somewhere included. More of processing static, white and pink noise, feeding it off through a bunch of sound effects. Nice again, this violent form of drone music, but somehow it lacks the power of the Seplophobia/Wapstan release. Maybe live this was great, but it doesn’t get its power across on disc. (FdW)
Address: http://www.brise-cul-records.cjb.net
LUCIO CAPECE – SPACE/TIME MODULATOR (CDR by Noseso Records)
NO MORE MUSIC – AT THE SERVICE OF CAPITAL (CDR by Noseso Records)
Originally from Argentina but now in what some think is the centre of the musical universe, Berlin: Lucio Capece, who plays bass clarinet, soprano saxophone and mixer feedback. Of these two CDR releases, ‘Space/Time Modulator’ is a solo release. It contains the lengthy title piece and two shorter pieces. The title piece is inspired by Laszlo Moholy Nagy, who built a mechanic ensemble between 1922 and 1930, made up of an electric structure, in synthetic material and metal grilles, with mirrors and lamps. Capese uses a similar, albeit somewhat free set up, to play around with three forms of sounds: feedback recorded on to two different mini discs set to random and the soprano saxophone and bass clarinet, recorded by two microphones, and two volume controllers: one for the left and one for the right channel. In the almost forty-four minute piece this leads to quite some intense results. Sometimes the sound drops out, drops back in, and throughout the piece changes. Some of the frequencies are of course quite nasty, but it’s never too long. The shorter version of the same piece of two minutes is very silent and passes without noting. The third piece, ‘Mixer In Feedback Modified By Inside Amplified Saxophone’, uses sound material by Julia Eckhardt on viola and for some strange reason doesn’t sound too similar from the previous two pieces.
This week’s contribution to Vital Weekly by Mattin is hidden somewhat in the band name No More Music. That is Mattin together with Capece. So far they played in Berlin (where Mattin now also lives), Strasbourg, Brussels and Oslo. Here we find both in a very noisy mood: the feedback that was once the trade mark of Mattin has full on returned here and it’s doubled with the mixer feedback of Capece ‘modified by saxophone’. Furiously loud it starts, but throughout the piece they drop back in volume, rather than in intensity. Even when things are ‘soft’, the intensity is still there, present and painfully. Towards the end they seem to play around with silence, with just a little bit of sound and even that sounds overwhelming. A loud release for sure, but in varying degrees. Very intense, from start till finish. (FdW)
Address: http://www.luciocapece.8k.com
OLD FASHIONED DONKEYS – HAMMER THE DONKEY (DVD-R by Phaseweb)
Perhaps I noted it before, but noise music makes always more sense when you see it happening, especially when it’s noise that comes out of an action. Old Fashioned Donkeys are Nicolas Malevitsis (the unsung hero of the Greek musiclife) and Panagiotis Spoulos of Phaseweb. His label released this CDR with two videos of them playing at the Masynergy III festival, held in Athens last year. Spoulos is the man who provides the psychedelic drones and feedback, while Malevitsis hammers his way, destroying turntables, records and CDs. This is not some autistic kid running a few distortion boxes, but we see the action happening and the noise makes all the more sense. Shot with a single camera that somehow takes something of the action away, it’s of course not the same thing as witnessing the real thing (the action itself), it leaves enough impression to make a valid statement. And what a statement it is. (FdW)
Address: http://www.phaseweb.tk
MACHINEFABRIEK – CARPS (businesscard CDR by Machinefabriek)
The ever so active Machinefabriek presents here something very short but highly beautiful: a two minute and eleven second remix of Soccer Committe, which is one Mariska Baars from Leiden, The Netherlands. She sings and plays guitar in a very silent way. I don’t know the original, but I can imagine what it would sound like: perhaps a female Nick Drake. Machinefabriek gets the best out of it, by using the silence in between in the words and the playing and cranks that up, adds some of his wizardry on the computer and sound effects, and creates a way too short beauty of it. It’s almost like a small whisper, rather than a full on track. There should be been more of this, perhaps a whole 3″, expanding on the silence. Now you have to put it on repeat, like I did, for at least ten times and let the piece fully get to you. (FdW)
Address: http://www.machinefabriek.tk/
YANNIS KYRIAKIDES & LUCIO CAPECE – JUNCTION (MP3 by audioTong)
YANNIS KYRIAKIDES & LUCIO CAPECE – LIVE IN BRUSSELS (MP3 by audioTong)
Yannis Kyriakides on laptop and Lucio Capece on soprano saxophone and bass clarinet met in a small studio in Paris in January 2003 to record the album “Juncture” which is now available online from the fine audioTong label. Capece makes use of a whole array of extended playing techniques to create long sustained tones, short throbs and bubbling, hissing and squeaking textures that match perfectly with Kyriakides’ mostly subdued electronic pulses and ticks. With a few exceptions the duo doesn’t go for the large crescendos, but organizes the sound horizontally, creating vivid fields of small acoustic events. Tension is gradually built and resolved and things are kept in motion all the time, with quiet passages, sometimes just above the threshold of audibility, alternating with more fragmented playing.
Together with these studio tracks audioTong also releases a live recording of Kyriakides and Capece at the Van Vlaanderen Festival in Brussels in 2004. Again they play laptop and wind instruments and again the result is fascinating. The first of the two sets starts in a quiet way, along the line of the ‘classic’ improv approach, with soft gliding electronic tones and the careful hiss and bubbling of the acoustic instruments. Gradually the volume is raised and the playing gets more and more hectic. The dense textured noise is then transformed into a beautiful drone passage, which is built upon the warm sound of the bass clarinet framed by subtle electronics. The second set stays in the drone area throughout. Over the course of about 20 minutes a variety of delicate warm and clear sounds is woven together, ranging from loop-like repetitive structures to stretched-out amorphous fields. Once more this demonstrates the duo’s ability for carefully reacting on each other’s playing and their subtle sense for structure, variety and the interaction of electronic and acoustic sounds.
Both albums are certainly among the best online-releases I’ve come across recently, and proof again that there is high quality music available online that well deserves finding an audience. (MSS)
Address: http://audiotong.net/
CADUCEUS – INFLUENCE VOLUME TEN (MP3 by Caduceus Music)
It could hardly be not one of their influences: ‘+-‘ by Ryoji Ikeda. A timeless classic, released by Touch and an album that defined a whole genre. Of course they are a major influence on Caduceus, more than any of the other tributes the paid so far (with perhaps the exception of ø). The minimalism of the material, the beat stuff that is so groovy: all the ingredients are there that Caduceus uses in their own music. Strong bass lines, and sine waves shattering into bits (or should that be bites?), its exactly those ingredients that Caduceus need to play their music. They take Ikeda’s original into a new territory, making it swing like more like the original. Whereas the previous releases where a bit uneven, taking their approach to music that not always allowed them to go there, this is a perfect match. The best influence release so far. (FdW)
Address: http://www.caduceusmusic.net
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