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Open up and let the d e v i l in. A Field In England (2013) dir. Ben Wheatley

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Photo by Ben Soundhog

Thanks to everyone who organised, performed at or attended last weekend’s Extraction Music fundraising all-dayer in Cardiff. I thoroughly enjoyed all the performances I was able to catch, including Rhodri Davies, Form Constants and Clive Henry amongst others, all helping to raise money in aid of the current refugee crisis in Calais and elsewhere. My particular gratitude, however, must go to chief protagonist and driving force Ian Watson for just happening to have a spare UHER tape machine on hand when dear old troublesome Daphne failed to make it through the soundcheck. What are the chances of that happening, I wonder? We certainly would’ve been screwed if Daphne had decided to kick the bucket in Portugal, Copenhagen, the US or indeed anywhere else that we’ve played in the last year. Anyway, for those of you who couldn’t make it, please enjoy the above short teaser from Howlround’s closing set and do have a look at these rather natty T-shirts produced especially for the event, a limited number of which are still available online, with £10 from each sale going to charity.

Thanks must also go to David for the loan of his sofa and toaster, Ben for tending to the sick Daphne and to Victoria for general fetching, lifting, delivering and precarious balancing skills. Under her suggestion, the new addition to the ranks has been christened Jenyth after one of the lesser-heralded female members of the Radiophonic Workshop. Isn’t she cute? The machine, that is…

Jenyth: Fresh talent

Daphne: Back in the sick bay.

On a similar subject, commiserations must go once again to our friend Ian Holloway of The British Space Group who was unable to attend Extraction Music after landing himself back in hospital with yet more broken bones. His latest project, the complete collection of the group’s rather fine Phantasms EPs is now available online as a single album entitled Phantasmagoria. Clocking in at an impressive 42 tracks, I have no doubt that it would speed up his recovery no end if you were to click on the link below and have a listen and a purchase.

Finally, thanks to Mr. Adrian Shenton of Phonospheric Recordings for kindly donating a copy of his Unseen Landscapes album recorded in collaboration with Banks Bailey. That’s worth a listen, too and I shall be checking his label out further once the dust has settled. He describes Phonosheric’s the output as ‘immersive, atmospheric, experimental and broadly ambient in character – sound that surrounds’, which is exactly what I could have done with on the train home, chock-full as it was with bellowing rugby louts, drunken hen-do princesses blasting tinny iPhone house and a veritable army of screaming children. Hardly what one would expect at 8am on a Sunday, but I guess that’s just how they roll in Cardiff. No wonder it’s such a stronghold for ambient music!

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Reviews

Michael Tanner Suite for Psaltery And Dulcimer Tristan Bath , May 24th, 2016 20:56

Our collective relationship with nature and the past were at one time much more closely tied than they are now. Memories and tales were married to geography, word of mouth, and the distance one could travel by foot to tell and be told. However, while the gap gets closed by the digitisation of the indoor world, the outside world of the English countryside remains much the same. Grey and damp; imbued with the scent of decaying bark and cow pats, and dotted with steam train and spice museums. Recently, the likes of Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers or Will Sharpe’s black comedy series for Channel 4 Flowers, both vividly evoked the distinct visual nature of the English pastoral scene — equal parts grim and beautiful, the damp practically emanating from the screen.

The latest release from Kit Records by Michael Tanner is a stunning instrumental evocation of the same spirit, mired in the ancient wood and damp grass, haunted by memories. The likes of Richard Skelton have applied similar durational and instrumental techniques to impressionistic musical British landscapes, sketched utilising multiple cellos, violins, and guitars, but Michael Tanner focuses almost entirely on the two instruments namechecked in the album's title, Suite for Psaltery and Dulcimer.

Under his own name and as Plinth, Tanner’s taken cues from a few different sources in the past when shaping out music of the Sussex landscape. The bounty of waging, new age cassettes, originally designed as bliss out music for hippies, and now the sonic food of choice for many a blog, is one such key inspiration. Tanner’s Witch Elder tape out on Reckno records in 2012 used only a ‘Broken Casio PT-30’ to create drifting synthscapes that rolled on and on like the scattered greens of Sussex meeting the South Downs at the sea; akin to Popol Vuh’s Aguirre were Klaus Kinski exploring the chalky British coastline rather than the Amazonian heart of darkness. Witch Elder saw Tanner assisted by sporadic bouzouki notes from Paul Condon of United Bible Studies, the loosely knit experimental folk collective based out of Ireland (Tanner is also an on/off member), and violist Alison Cotton and percussionist Matthew Shaw compliment Tanner similarly on Suite for Psaltery and Dulcimer. For the most part though, it’s an achingly beautiful exploration of both the plucked, harp-like psaltery and effects-laden bowed dulcimer that, far from leaping into a cosmic wormhole like Laraaji, stays closely tied to the the lady Gaia.

The first side contains one single 21-minute piece based around the lethargically plucked psaltery by Tanner. Kit Records notably mention how the pieces aren’t really ‘songs’ or ‘pieces’ at all, and that they’ve been likened to ‘little spells’. Throughout the duration of ‘Psaltery’ an ethereal environment is conjured before us, evolving through various shades and tones, even volumes. The opening minutes have strings plucked through a sketched semblance of melodies and chords in a forlorn mode, drifting without rhythm surrounded by plentiful vacant space. The entrance of Alison Cotton’s viola ushers in a flurry of psaltery notes rushing like a stream, and the centre of the piece exchanges overflowing sadness with a sort of latent bliss, both Tanner and Cotton’s strings jangling like wind chimes. They slowly dissolve for the final third of the ‘spell’, and when they’ve disappeared it is very much as if waking from a dream.

‘Dulcimer I’ and ‘Dulcimer II’ date back originally to a CD-R put out under Michael Tanner’s Plinth nom de plume in 2009, and see bowed melodies arising and interleaving from a dulcimer. The full original release also featured contributions from Richard Skelton and Aine O'Dwyer, but the remastered tracks here include only marginal atmospheric interjections from percussionist Matthew Shaw, tinkling away bell-like tones deep in the background on ‘Dulcimer I’. The intermingling bowed notes from the dulcimer crisscross constantly throughout the pair of ten-minute long pieces, to the point where the boundary lines of each sound disappear. The entire experience becomes one gradually ebbing fog of ancient string drones.

Like the landscapes and dotted villages that inspired it, this music is an emotionally complex creature trapped in time, and somewhere in between nature and artifice. Painting in such broad musical strokes is never going portray precise images or specific narratives, but the feelings that increasingly wash over you while listening to Suite for Psaltery and Dulcimer are definitely searingly potent. The physical world dissolves as we’re lulled into a dreamworld - and when it disappears, it’s hard to let it go.

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The discreet charms of the bourgeoisie owe something to the attractions of life as conjured by cookbook authors

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One of our favorite field recording works of last year, Mark Lyken and Emma Dove‘s Mirror Lands, is about to get the deluxe treatment from Time Released Sound.  Those who missed it last time will have another shot this Sunday!  To celebrate the

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Battles La Di Da Di

[Warp; 2015]

by Simon Chandler

Rating:

Not since 20 Jazz Funk Greats has there been an album titled as insincerely as La Di Da Di. An entirely instrumental album of transhuman post-rock and fiberglass math, it couldn’t be much more distant from the innocent singalongs deceitfully promised by its name. Its prickly riffs and underhanded rhythms slot frigidly into matrices that sound even further removed from childish or folkish choruses than their previous albums, evoking a domain where convoluted logic is the sole driver of life, not human wills, sentiments, and passions. Somehow, however, its ostensibly soulless fidelity to tight circuits reveals a stubbornly contrary humanity underneath, an aversion to conforming to over-exploited and trite notions of what “the human” is. As a result, it eventually redeems its initially dishonest birthmark, emerging as an appropriately naive first attempt at creating lullabies for a new kind of human culture.

That’s not to say that the openings of Battles’ third album don’t play out like some denatured mechanistic ballet. The angularity, sharpness, and linearity of “The Yabba” brings to mind the work of Russian artist Dmitry Morozov, who recently programmed a homemade stringed instrument to respond musically to fluctuations in the value of bitcoins. It’s easy enough to imagine that Williams, Konopka, and Stanier, the three remaining members of the NYC band, are a similarly autonomous instrument on this opener, reacting algorithmically to data via syncopated twitches and coiled progressions. They skitter through tightly wound phrases and heavily processed guitar on their way to a satisfyingly energetic finale, a flurry of rapid hi-hats and buoyant electronics that, for all we know from the band’s steely and clinical outer workings, was possibly induced by a downswing in the global rate of extreme poverty.

A joke, of course. Yet, at the same time, it’s often difficult to understand what aims Battles are pursuing throughout La Di Da Di. Notwithstanding the excellent “Yabba” and similarly conclusive upsurges of nervy musicianship like “FF Bada,” a good portion of the album unfolds seemingly without aim, comprising such cyclical and inconsequential tracks as the computerized “Dot Net” and the binary soundscaping of “Cacio E Pepe.” In “Dot Net,” bleeping synths gently rove through the same pattern for several bars, descend into a lull for a few more measures, and then start up again, duplicating exactly the same chords and intensity as they had before. What purpose they and their polite repetitions have isn’t entirely clear, yet the upshot of their undifferentiated and uneventful meanderings is that the song comes across as even more sterile and inhuman than its cyber-aesthetic would’ve had things on its own.

And the sad fact is that, even with La Di Da Di’s stronger numbers, this sterility and sense of insignificance is never too far away. For example, “Non-Violence” revolves around an enjoyably winding guitar line that’s coated in delay and reverb, yet apart from an increase in cymbal action and electronic swirls, it hardly ever changes, despite another momentary bridge that inevitably throws the trio back into the initial lick. Added to other similar exercises in ornate muzak, it helps to erect a barrier against ever truly engaging with the album, against ever being immersed in or enthralled by its vision of 21st-century “rock” and the world out of which such music emanates.

It’s tempting to claim that all of this cold inconsequentiality is the lingering result of Tyondai Braxton’s now five-year-old departure from the band, from the threesome’s lack of a leading focus that might pull it from one crescendo to the next. However, what prevents La Di Da Di from being as enjoyable as it might have been is not that it’s unfocused, but that it’s too focused, adhering to the same basic formula perhaps too dogmatically and too frequently. Given the experience of the musicians involved, the most plausible explanation for this immovable conformity is that it’s wholly intentional. Indeed, the album’s ironic title is already some indication that Battles are deliberately toying with expectations, inasmuch as they’re mocking the idea that they need a vocalist to get along. It would therefore come as little surprise if they were also purposefully abandoning the notion that music should pursue obvious endings and progressions, or that it should be emotive, cathartic, or ecstatic.

In view of this, a cut like the angularly slinking “Megatouch” is less a failure to reproduce such traditionally human constructs as narrative, teleology, and emotion, and more a willful attempt to defy and eschew them completely, as if in protest against how they constrict and damage individuals. Its flickering trains of post-guitar and warped grooves amble by in complete peace, repeating in complete insensitivity to the world around them; and even if they can once again be charged with insignificance and unimportance, they are significant and important precisely to the extent that they’re guilty of such a charge.

Yes, there is a significance inherent to Battle’s increasingly flagrant disregard for conventional wisdom on what it is to be red-blooded people in a red-blooded rock band. Their intractable attachment to their own narrow and almost emotionless dialectic, as manifested in tracks like the serene staccato of “Luu Le,” is in fact a strangely and vulnerably human trait, betraying a wish to exceed hackneyed and restrictive conceptions of “humanity.” Accordingly, La Di Da Di sees them wanting to establish their own version of what it is to be human, a version that isn’t so impulsive, violent, or egotistical. It’s therefore completely appropriate that it has the lullaby-invoking name it has, since not only are Battles actually a simple, elementary band underneath the hi-tech facade, but they’re also a band whose music is intended to nurture the development of something new, vibrant, and more hopeful. Perhaps they still haven’t quite gotten there with La Di Da Di, but they’ve come somewhere close.

01. The Yabba 02. Dot Net 03. FF Bada 04. Summer Simmer 05. Cacio E Pepe 06. Non-Violence 07. Dot Com 08. Tyne Wear 09. Tricentennial 10. Megatouch 11. Flora > Fauna 12. Luu Le

Links: Battles - Warp

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These are very preliminary notes and ideas for my presentation at “Through Post-Atomic Eyes” in Toronto next month: I would really – really – welcome any comments, suggestions or advice.  I don’t usually post presentations in advance, and this is still a long way from the finished version, but in this case I am venturing […]

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At the end of last year we highlighted David First's Electronic Works 1976-1977 as one of our favorite reissues and compilations of 2014, mentioning that the modular synth works contained within sounded "shockingly contemporary." Now we have a chance to see what Mr. First is actually doing these days with similiar equipment in the form of a cassette titled The AM Radio Band, recorded earlier this year by means of "audio oscillators modulating signal generators broadcasting to AM radios." Listen to the 13-minute "Ensemble Study #2" from side B, a wonderfully noisy undertaking created with no less than 2 tube oscillators, 3 tube signal generators, 4 transistor radios, and a tube table model radio. It sounds exactly like what would happen if you released Texas Chain Saw Massacre's Leatherface onto the spaceship of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with HAL eventually breaking down saying "Stop Dave, my mind is going." Forty years into his music career, well past the dawn of the digital age, David First shows himself to remain a true master of analog. 

The AM Radio Band is out now on Robert & Leopold.

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I-LP-O IN DUB Communist Dub

[Editions Mego; 2015]

by DeForrest Brown Jr.

Rating:

To begin, Pansonic member Ilpo Väisänen’s I-LP-O IN DUB project is essentially, as the press notes state, a “statement against technocracy and the erosion of human community,” utilizing Jamaican dub and ska as a “strategy as opposed to genre — the precise manipulation of sound and the removal of all extraneous material to create a disorientating landscape of austere spaces.”

I-LP-O IN DUB’s clinical gestation of social/environmental critique through sound is reminiscent of Henri Lefebvre’s quite audacious and epically precise book, Critique of Everyday Life. In a particularly poignant portion of the book, Lefebvre writes, “Rational criticism, when carried through to its logical conclusion, will deal not only with ‘Pure Reason’ but also with life in all its impurity. From an intellectual heaven where the ghosts of former gods battle on, critical thought will descend into everyday life. Criticism of ideas will not be abandoned, far from it: taken up on another level, it will become deeper, since it will have become criticism of men and actions.”

The minimalism with which Ilpo conjures and churns the sonic particles present is seemingly an act of defiance against the state of his surroundings. Dub music, and especially minimalism, is about microbes in contained spaces exfoliating and growing in spite of itself. This is ecology in action.

The general formula for each track on Communist Dub is an exercise in expansion through repetitive progressions and eventual quality transgressions. Cluttered drum patterns bounce off of blunt kicks, fractured dub stabs hang back filling in the space in inverted ways. Very much like the descriptions from famous texts on dub music by Michael Veal and Kode9’s “Sonic Warfare,” Ilpo works toward dromoscopic relations emparted. In other words, the blurring of the distinctions between object and perception is a tornadic weapon for Ilpo, as he wrestles with both sound and context to develop hypertextual progeny from his own onto-spatial stance. The very act is metabolic: he is hypersculpting viral objects to introduce into the system. Dub music, when combined with the complex of the laptop, becomes a music of warfare aimed at total annihilation and total rebirth through mimesis and infection.

There’s a particularly sublimated occurrence in the record’s closer “Bengazi,” in which Ilpo fully metabolizes dub’s origins, future, and appropriations to create a collaged, gauzy blast of digi-spatial violence. Emerging into a space compromised by the brutality of digital debris and heavyweight snare flams, a sample of “Sweet Emotion” arises with an air of irony, a devastatingly eschatological wink.

None of this is to say that the work at present is particularly heady, especially to the point of being devoid of the context at which it hopes to assault. If anything, it builds from histographical understandings of the mode in which Ilpo has chosen to practice. The eschaton is rendered through the mimicking of a microclimatic sonic zone, imparted with the unfortunate coverage of impending doom and natural expiration.

But in this is a Yeats-esque hope for a rise in the form of a second coming. Hope here is in the reformation of present conditions into unfamiliar territories that leave us, the human enactors, shredded and consumed: the ultimate beauty of the anthrobscene’s total push towards rhizomatic totality, wholeness in the move.

01. Gulag General 02. Father Sun Rudealis 03. Donbass Hybrid 04. Crocodile Submerged 05. Donetsk Disciplies 06. Kolyma Stoned -36 07. Rudealis Dub 08. Vorkuta Ground Pipe 09. Uncle Ho Sticks 10. Benghazi Affair

Links: Editions Mego

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Ominous piano chords resound; a violin is strummed with growing anxiety; shuffling percussion imbues a sense of agitation. Just over a minute in, drums enter and the clouds break, the piano briefly bestowing calm before whisking us somewhere else. What

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The other night I was reading about how caterpillars turn into this sentient goo substance when they enter metamorphosis. The idea held me, and for a second I imagined myself having led a different life – instead of being the captain of the varsity football team at my boarding school (that’s football played with feet, plebs) and the heir to a fortune made in imported beeswax for vanity soaps and rifle lubricant, I was a fragile boy who couldn’t stay outside long due to severe asthma. I would watch as my overprotective mother carefully cultivated different species of caterpillar in a large wooden cage in our den. When they transformed into butterflies, she would smother them in chloroform filled jars, and pin them in straight rows on ivory paper.

I fell asleep to this fantasy, while Danny Clay & Karl Fousek’s collaborative tape on Phinery Records played in the background. I dreamed I was swimming in a sentient goo, the pale green of mucus, which spoke to me through my skin in pings of electricity. When I woke up I discovered I had actually been awake for two weeks, pen in hand, madly scrawling measures and staves onto the walls, trying to decipher the arrow of these abstracts jaunts of modular synthesis and pipe organ. The music was sad at times, but any brazen emotion eluded me as if it was the communication of a species I couldn’t understand. The warm familiarity of a pipe organ, over which the modular continues to thrive, pushing the boundaries of a cassette.

• Phinery Tapes: http://www.phinery.net • Danny Clay: http://ift.tt/1RHntzV • Karl Fousek: http://karlfousek.com

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Eye - Electrical Storm (Winterwork - Nyali 9) by Nyali Recordings http://ift.tt/1JgKVRq

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Andy Moor & Yannis Kyriakides - A Life Is A Billion Heartbeats (LP Preview) by Discrepant http://ift.tt/1AFFBFM

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Yannick Dauby - The Growth of Artefacts (Tape preview) by Discrepant http://ift.tt/1AFFBpu

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Unknown Mortal Orchestra - "Multi-Love" by Jagjaguwar http://ift.tt/1KvM6dj

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Remember when The Postal Service was really big and everyone was all aflutter because they wrote songs by sending each other recordings through the mail? It was, like, so romantic and old school and quirky/arty. People like that shit. Well, now it’s 2015, and sending stuff through your friendly mail carrier is sooooo over. It’s been done. Plus, if you’re a newly formed supergroup of experimental artists, you just gotta think up something weirder, something more forward-/beyond-thinking, something more… occult.

And so, now, to fill the void in our lives left by not having enough gimmicky collaboration stories, there comes Terepa. Except for Terepa’s story isn’t really gimmicky; it’s just freakin’ awesome. This thing consists of Laurel Halo, Julia Holter, artist and mastering engineer Rashad Becker, Lucrecia Dalt, sound wizard NHK’Koyxen, violinist Grégoire Simon, and Charlotte Collin, all of whom recorded two sessions in L.A., Berlin, Osaka, and Paris that would make up the compositions on their forthcoming white vinyl EP on Nicolas Jaar’s label Other People. As part of the collaboration, they all began recording simultaneously for 20 minutes without communicating with each other “outside of their own telepathic capacities.” The resulting recordings were then layered and mixed into two compositions — in the same way they created the artwork, which you’ll find printed right onto the surface of the EP.

The vinyl/digital release will be available on July 13.

Tracklisting: A. 28th October 2014 B. 8th August 2014

• Other People: http://ift.tt/1rWfwYJ

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After releasing The Hawk last year, Nick James (a.k.a. TMTer SCVSCV) is back, and he’s got some conceptual AMMO. Just last month, he released the electronic monstrosity that was Airbnb Sutras, and on June 16, he’s dropping Drago (via Asystems), which is described as “a violent consideration on the imperialism inherent to any ‘Great Beauty’,” a release so aesthetically jarring yet conceptually intriguing that I’ve decided to finally entertain the tricky, conflictual idea of writing about a TMTer’s music for once.

“Axis,” the track we’re premiering below, is an obvious first single for Drago: upbeat, melodic, playful as fuck. But its complex orchestration of syncopated synths, bouncy melodies, and tinkling pianos are aggravated by distortions in the system, chugging rhythms that stutter awkwardly amongst the clinking and clanking that drag this epic through the digital stream. It’s a mechanical celebration with no obvious event, a 20th-century ceremony rotating around the axis of 21st-century everything-time, whipping excess narratives throughout, all of it in costume and in accordance to the kind of disruptions already well-articulated by Asystems.

“Axis” comes with a website (design/images by Music For Your Plants’s Norman Orro, coding by The Actual School’s Xander Seren) and a video by SCP22, all of which say much more than the words above.

Drago is out June 16 on Asystems. Catch Nick James at Hopstoch 2015.

• Nick James: http://ift.tt/1qpkEbF • Asystems: http://asystems.co