The Answer Is In The Beat

Matthew Collings: Silence Is A Rhythm Too LP (Denovali, 2014) + Splintered Instruments LP (Fluid Audio, 2013/reissued Denovali, 2014)

November 2, 2014 at 11:08 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Scottish composer Matthew Collings creates electro-acoustic music marked by sharp contrasts and tension-filled buildups. His compositions combine scraping strings, bleating horns, and digital distortion, and often move to a point where you feel like you’re being crushed underneath. Even the relatively calm moments, like “Cicero” (from newest LP Silence Is A Rhythm Too), have a feeling of dread that’s hard to shake. “Toms” features handclaps and soft, spacious hand drums and beating around manipulated noise and feedback, as well as harpsichords and reversed pianos. The thrashing noise ebbs and flows, continually building and cutting out suddenly and growing back, with sinister guitar notes underneath it all. “I Am Made Of Endless Hours” features a strange whimpering noise sounding like a very unhappy dog stuck in a pound, along with fractured, clicking sounds and swarming pianos, horns and strings. Quite unsettling. The title track features more isolated clapping/stomping, which also gets fizzled and fractured along with distorted guitar effects.

Colling’s debut solo LP Splintered Instruments, a very apt description of his sound, has been re-released on vinyl after a limited CD release early last year. This album was produced by Ben Frost, who co-wrote opening track “Vasilia”, and the two artists certainly share tendencies for distortion and epicness. “Vasilia” is far more poppy than anything I’ve heard by Frost, though, with indie-sounding guitar and vocals along with the prepared pianos and noisy drums. “Subway” combines pounding, quaking drums with soft chimes and strings, and more ungodly distorted guitars and vocals. “Crows” obscures tremoloed vocals beneath shaking percussion and strings, and ends with a minute of soft pulsating. “Pneumonia” introduces woodwinds and manipulated crow sounds (curious why they didn’t appear in the previous song) along with more sharp, distorted instruments and vocals, and some soft pianos appear in the eye of the storm during the middle of the piece. “Paris Is Burning” has melodies reminiscent of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich underneath more crushing distortion and dissonant guitars. 10-minute closer “Routine” is comparatively soft and drifting, but it ends with a few moments of brain-blasting noise. In some ways, Splintered Instruments is the more accessible album of the two, but in other ways, it’s far more extreme.

Broken Bone: Willowbrook 12″ EP (Aperture, 2014)

November 2, 2014 at 9:42 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

This mini-album came out a few months ago and fell through the cracks, but it deserves to be heard. It’s on Andrea Parker’s label which so far has mostly been known for releasing Autechre-remixed IDM extremists Oberman Knocks, as well as a collaboration between Mark Clifford (Seefeel) and Mira Calix, and a Daphne Oram rework album. The duo behind this project have been part of several electro and industrial projects, and here they combine to create something harsh, distorted and skullcrushing. The 6 long tracks combine claustrophobic textures, spine-cracking beats, and copious amounts of feedback. “Blood On Your Hands” features 909-sounding slow beats distorted to the point of exaggeration, and swaths of ominous-sounding synths. “A Home For Phthisis” is a tension-filled noisy electro track, and “Raw” is a slow, shuddering gaze into the face of death. Opener “Building 6” and closer “The Echoes They Left Behind” both feature Raster-Noton-esque sine-wave blips, as well as submerged spoken word samples, which sound on the brink of expiration on “Echoes” (especially with those coughing sounds in the second half). Apparently this is just half of a full-length to be released digitally, which is sure to be overwhelming.

Frank Bretschneider + Steve Roden: Suite Nuit (Line, 2014)

November 2, 2014 at 4:22 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Raster-Noton co-founder Frank Bretschneider teamed up with field recording/found-sound artist Steve Roden for this session of manipulated sounds and electronics, which was commissioned for a 2004 festival at a church in Berlin, and was recently unearthed and released. The recording features the 22-minute live session as well as a 30-minute rehearsal. Both sessions feature Bretschneider’s sine-wave/clicks’n’cuts electronic tones (typical of the labels he’s recorded for, such as Mille Plateaux, 12k, Raster-Noton and Line) along with Steve Roden’s found sounds and recordings. About two minutes into the live session, a minimalist groove is flooded with cluttered, scattered thumb piano notes. After shuddering and glitching out, insect-like high-pitched tones crowd around miniscule convulsing beats. The sounds of a distant crowd appear around 7 minutes, before more swarms of chattering beats and drones emerge. The noise-scape widens around 10 minutes, with heavy reverberations, but nothing erupting into full-on harsh noise. A hypnotic beat underlines subtle, backwards loops, and around 16 minutes, gong-like tones emerge amongst more nervous, shaky beats/tones. A wash of small, wooden stick-like tones is poured around, and the final minutes of the session feature a warmer drone sound along with the continually chattering beats and bass tones. The rehearsal session lasts longer and explores similar terrain, but doesn’t arrive at the same conclusions (such is the nature of improvisation). If anything, it seems like this one sprawls out a bit longer, taking more time for sounds to develop. It gradually seems to drift away from rhythmic elements, until waves of feedback and quiet tones usher back in the vibrating, chattering beats. These give way to ambient droning for the session’s final minutes, with a few obscured field recordings which make you wonder what’s happening in the scenes being recorded.