#ziggy devriendt

[longformeditions]

LE046 Pablo’s Eye Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien

Pablo’s Eye is a Brussels-based international collective of musicians and artists who share a vision to make magic through music. 2019 marked the 30th year of Pablo's Eye’s loose existence. Their common goal has always been to create a feeling of travelling in time and space, by going from past memories to future hopes. Their aim remains to express the ideal and explore the real through both personal and global stories.

Back in the 1990s, Pablo’s Eye were signed to Swim records and Extreme records but the project was relatively dormant in its recorded output throughout the 2000s until 2018, when Ziggy Devriendt began curating a series of three compilations for his Stroom heritage label, one of which Bardo for Pablo received a glowing review on Pitchfork and the coveted banner of Best New Reissue.

Pablo’s Eye don't really endeavour to be a band, it is more a temporary atmosphere, like a taste, like a dream…

Artist notes: One of our greatest pleasures is trying to translate our view of the world into sounds and music. We have always been inspired by different languages and cultures, spoken words and Richard Skinner's writings in particular.

“October 1974, the French writer Georges Perec spent three days at Le Café de la Mairie in Place Saint-Sulpice, Paris, recording everything that passed through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the centre of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all. He called this exercise Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, ‘An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris’. A wonderful exercise in observation and description.” Richard Skinner, Extract from Joiners: Essays, Reviews & Interviews, Vanguard Editions 2019. Recorded and reprinted with permission of the author.

Deep listening is intense listening, immersive and environmental. A deeper awareness of the things around you. The city with its social life can be perfect for a deep listening experience. We’ve tried to relive sonically with Georges Perec in mind our drifting away at the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris, a special place in our heart.

For this project Pablo’s Eye are: Axel Libeert, Luc Laret, Marie Mandi, Johan Coopman and Richard Skinner. Music composed, recorded and mixed by Pablo’s Eye at Soundscube Studio, Brussels, August 2019.

[thesunlounge]

Reviews 263: Benjamin Lew

Every retrospective release on STROOM tells a story and one of my favorite yet comes via Benjamin Lew’s Le personnage principal est un peuple isolé. In this case, STROOM transports us to 80s Brussels and a loose community of musical expats that were perhaps enticed to Belgium by labels such as Les Disques du Crépuscule, Factory Benelux, and Marc Hollander’s Crammed Discs. A meeting place within this creative scene was a tropically themed bar called Le Papaya, which employed author, poet, and generous creative vessel Benjamin Lew…a “enlightened amateur” in the words of Hollander who came to music rather nefariously, having no interest in the form until stealing some records from a local shop in his youth. Of course, renaissance man as he is, Lew at some point developed a passion for analog synthesis, using the daylight hours, his electronics, and an 8-track recorder borrowed from Hollander to explore ancient African cosmologies and Arabian desert fantasies. He began bringing his tapes into Le Papaya and passing them on to the resident musicians, which led to a rich partnership with Tuxedomoon, especially Steven Brown. After shifts at the bar, Lew would return to his apartment with Brown, giving him free reign to color the taped synthesizer compositions with saxophone and keys…a process that eventually involved Gilles Martin and Hollander as well, resulting in Lew’s debut album: Douzième journée: le verbe, la parure, l’Amour, released in 1982 on Crammed Discs.

But it is the period following this album that STROOM is concerned with on Le personnage principal est un peuple isolé, which collects together tracks from 1986’s A propos d’un paysage (also written with Brown and including Vini Reilly), Nebka from 1988, Le parfum du raki from 1993, and a curious collaboration with Samy Birnbach of Minimal Compact called When God Was Famous that married Lew’s enigmatic compositions to Birnbach’s evocative readings of poetry from Yeats, Hesse, Apollinaire, Patchen, and many other famous poets from across America and Europe. As always, label head Ziggy Devriendt has assembled from these albums a weird and wonderful collection of songs and arranged them into a wholly unique journey, one that ignores temporal borders and instead attempts to strike at the very heart of Lew’s magical and collaborative sonic world. Across the twelve tracks, we hear chamber ensembles playing from the sea floor, exotic lounge jazz emanating from shadowy clubs at the edge of time, sea shanty horn minimalism and Afro-idiophonics, spiritual ragas beamed in from alien dimensions, ambient liquids dripping within crystal caverns, dramatic spoken word flowing above dark industrial lullabies, scraped string riffs wandering beneath fourth world flutes, and choirs of distortion singing above wandering pianos and glimmering chimes…all led by Lew’s otherworldly synthesizer, the imaginative production of Martin, and the clarinets, keys, and drums of Hollander.

Benjamin Lew - Le personnage principal est un peuple isolé (STROOM, 2019) “Profondeurs des eaux des laques” features lazily flowing guitar arpeggios from Vini Reilly that remind me of The Durutti Columns “All That Love and Maths Can Do” while Steven Brown uses clarinet and soprano sax to weave deep earth mysticisms and layers of opium den ambiance, with occasional emotive bends into the feverish night. Lew enters with aquatic pings and deep sea refractions…his soft electro-pulsations coalescing with the reed instruments and guitars to create a mysterious underwater landscape. “Moments” follows with space bubbles sequenced into an exotica waltz and layered horns moaning in desperation. Brown traces melancholia spirals high in the sky on clarinet and a jazz rhythm emerges from the ether, with Alain Lefebvre’s tapped rides and brushed snares locking into a daydream glide. Lew’s electronic evoke plucked string instruments from alien planets and Hollander adds a touch of synthesis, with ascendent Afro-jazz melodies sourced from synthetic brass. The title track is built around world percussion hypnotics from Gilles Martin while Renaud Pion and Michel Berckmans evoke a small scale orchestra of woodwinds and reeds moving through mystic motions. Denis Moulin’s sky-seeking violin performance recalls the ecstatic folk ragas of Henry Flynt and the air is colored through by chanting voices, fluttering horn solos, and wavering tremolo breaths as ethnological drums merge completely with Lew’s percolating synthesis…the whole thing like a soundtrack for a robed caravan of desert sages marching in unison beneath a blood red moon.

“Face a ce qui se derobe” is dominated by the clarinets and saxophones of Brown and Hollander, which periodically wash over a disturbing panorama of cosmic chimes, rapid motion synth trails, and polyrhythmic pad layers creating strange swirling vortices. The woodwinds lock into slow motion and slightly drunken trance patterns that align with the contemporaneous work of Yasuaki Shimizu while also presaging the guttural sax spells of Colin Stetson. And Reilly is supposedly somewhere in the mix on guitar, though he’s impossible to discern…so alien are Lew’s electronics and so overwhelming are the cycling reed hallucinations. The exotica of “Qu’il fosse suit” sees electronics mimicking birds of paradise as kalimbas and balafons play minimalist spirituals for an African sunrise. Rainforest hand drums weave shambolic polyrhythms while Tuxedomoon’s Blaine L. Reininger soars to transcendental heights on violin and as in the previous track, dazzling woodwind patterns drift through the mix, though here moving in round, with layers sourced from Hollander’s clarinet flowing ear-to-ear and dreamily overlapping…his bubbling runs giving way to gaseous drones and then repeating. “The Wheel” is one of two pieces featuring Samy Birnbach’s poetry readings, and here Lew’s synths and Peter Principle’s guitars background a double-tracked and pained reading of W.B. Yeats’ “The Tower.” Bass throbs, feedback wisps, scraped starshine textures, and bell-tone modulations sit above glowing reverb metals and there’s a kinship with Current 93, though more so Tibet’s later explorations of pagan neo-folk and dream psychedelia.

The second Lew and Birnbach collaboration is “Little Birds Sit on Your Shoulder,” which floats upon the springtide cellos of Aurelia Boven. Her themes for fairy flower forests are accompanied by Lew’s silvery electronics and liquid space glitters…all setting the stage for Birnbach’s reading of a poem from Kenneth Patchen, though no longer delivered in a desperate swoon, but instead clearly spoken and apathetic. “Etendue” hearkens back to Lew’s early experiments accompanying his one-off Fossile fanzine, as warbling and wavering tape loops featuring choral arias are smothered in burning smoke. Majestic voices sing together…their waves of heavenly power washing side to side while Brown wanders through it all on piano, with beauteous chordscapes and fantasy dream strands. Lew adds further tape layers featuring wild laughter and whispered conversations that slowly wash out the choirs and all the while, the pianos grow in intensity. Black hole vapors flow in from the void in “Ces Personnages” while machines communicate with spirits of the cosmos. New age sequences swim through oceanic dream worlds, wisps of galactic light wrap around quivering feedback textures, and searing fuzz leads scream through ethereal hazes of blue, with everything supported by bass synths floating on unseen currents. There’s a connection with the underwater galaxy explorations of ÆOLUS and Iury Lech, though it’s all interspersed by the moaning reed and brass spiritualisms of Pion and Luc Van Lieshout…these skronking and slow motion atmospheres of New Orleans jazz transmuted into a funereal drift.

Aside from treatments by Martin, “Joyeux regrets imprécis” is a Lew solo adventure, with electronics evoking chimes and gemstones gently colliding and decaying through gaseous fx. Synthesized pianos lock into mesmeric sequences, mermaids weave joyous siren songs, and ominous bass pulses and soothing percussive clacks float through the mix, with the music once again touching on the darker and more exploratory shades of new age. Though Lew contorts his synths into many unbelievable forms across this collection, his work in “Hommes assis devant un mur chaulé” is truly mystifying, as electronics evoke Afro-psych guitars and electrified Middle Eastern string instruments, only as if reduced to a shamanic trance. Wiggling scrapes and glissando runs are interspersed between an esoteric riff out and flutey leads work over top, all fragile, spacey, and vaporous. Choirs are smeared into a shadow panorama, Arabian symphonies play desert incantations, and as things progress, there’s the overwhelming sense of galloping camelback across some infinite expanse of sand and desolation. Closing track “La magnifique alcoolique” is named after a patron of Le Papaya…a mysterious woman into alcohol and maybe “other things” who Lew avoided for fear of being pulled into her dark world. Musically, sampled pianos shamble through a hallucinogenic procession, almost harp-like and playful, though washed over by tones of sadness. Peter Principle’s e-bow guitars sing out alongside Martins ethno-drums, with layers of sustaining and reversing psychedelia swimming within smoldering clouds of bass distortion.

(images from my personal copy)

[zattirizat]

Stroom Spring Break’in ardından Pablo’s Eye’ın bir albümünü daha yayınlıyor

Ziggy’nin küratörlüğünü yaptığı ve Stroom etiketi ile Nisan 2018′te yayınlanan Spring Break albümünden sonra, aynı estetik tavırı paylaşmanın beraber müzik yapmaktan daha önemli olarak gören 1989′da kurulan kollektif grup Pablo’s Eye’ın bir albümü daha 22 Haziran’da yayınlanıyor.  Bardo for Pablo ismini taşıyan altı şarkının bulunduğu albümü bandcamp aracılığı ile öncelikli sipariş verebilirsiniz. Pablo’s Eye - Bardo for Pablo

[burlveneer-music]

Ruins - Occasional Visits (Italy, not Japan)

Stroom's valentine special for 2019. "Lovely" Electro / Wave from Venice, Italy (1981-1984)

All songs produced and arranged by Piergiuseppe Ciranna & Alessandro Pizzin Artwork by Nana Esi Mastered by Mathieu Savenay Selection by Ziggy Devriendt Recorded and mixed at Anna Rich Studios, Venice

[underthecovershop]

NEW! @record_magazine issue 10 is here! ⚡️ Featuring DJ Harvey, Sofie, Jun Takahashi, Ziggy Devriendt, DJ Sundae, Pedro Winter, Ariel Kalma, Octo Octa, Max Essa, Moxie, Pierre Rousseau, CC:DISCO!, and the visual feature, “White Columns Retrospective: 1977–1986.” #underthecovershop #recordculturemagazine https://www.instagram.com/p/CaRmvUaMdI4/?utm_medium=tumblr

[shredderslodge]

Radio Feb 2018, Nosedrip

Radio Feb 2018, Nosedrip

  https://soundcloud.com/carharttwip/carhartt-wip-radio-february-2018   Be it new age, new wave, psychedelic, minimal synth, post-punk and all those other musical zones that make you get in touch with unheard worlds: if you tune in to Ziggy Devriendt’s aka Nosedrip’s show at NTS unremarked sounds from all decades and all around the globe will seduce you. Since a while Nosedrip is part of…

[thesunlounge]

[thesunlounge]