The Answer Is In The Beat

John Wiese: Magnetic Stencil 1-3 LPs (Helicopter/Troniks, 2020-2021/vinyl reissues by Gilgongo, 2023)

July 30, 2023 at 4:17 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

John Wiese’s Magnetic Stencil series, released on CD a few years ago and now pressed to vinyl, consists of lengthy collage pieces featuring sonic contributions from an extensive list of noise and experimental visionaries, including Aaron Dilloway, C. Spencer Yeh, C. Lavender, Lasse Marhaug, and Gilgongo’s James Fella. That’s about half the guest list on the first volume alone. Also, the first 2 parts were composed and mixed in one day, and the third was created on another. How?!?! There’s so much going on during these records. Wiese always has fascinating ways of combining controlled, sudden bursts of sound with space, so that everything sounds clear even when it’s noisy and chaotic. Sounds shift between varying levels of clarity, across multiple layers and channels, with tape sputter, deformed human voices, and broken, struggling frequencies all appearing at will. A smudged, slowed down rhythm worms its way into the picture near the end of the first side, and I’m guessing Dilloway had something to do with it, but there’s no way of telling for sure. After it disappears, several layers of metallic buzzing emerge, and some how it’s elevating instead of headache-inducing. Side B starts out with some A Big 10-8 Place-like voices that are zapped and splashed to oblivion. It then slithers between more tape-fried voices, more metallic vibrations, delicate string plucks, and blankets of jammed frequencies. More delicate but sharp bowing and buzzing is intercut with fluttering feedback, mutated whispers, and alien messages from dozens of different angles. There’s something symphonic about the way these sounds are paced until they converge into a violent roar. Totally bewildering.

Volume 2 features Dilloway, T. Mikawa, Joe Potts, and Robert Turman. A little different than the sporadic interjections of the first volume, this one starts out as a sort of terror scene, with dense walls of noise blazing, slowly shifting to reveal exactly what type of damage is being caused. Jammed tapes cause sudden whiplash, support systems strain and crack. A house of horrors is engulfed in flames. The second side is less panic-stricken, at least at first. It moves a lot more slowly, but it’s clearly haunted, and there are moments that bleed into heavy harshness. Mostly it’s just vast, sooty layers with buried voices, industrious hissing, and moments when half-forgotten music bubbles through. Somehow near the end, the acoustics suggest that this might be a live performance. If it was, the very end might have been something like Hanatarash bulldozing a venue.

Volume 3 features Tim Kinsella, Howard Stelzer, John Collins McCormick, and several others. Another haunted house of abrasive tape manipulations and rumbling acoustic noises, this time with some more kitchen-like sounds sprinkling and smashing in near the beginning. Some half-sliced voices semi-sing near the end of side 1, almost as if they can only communicate their message by being extremely distorted. Then a cartoonish thwack kicks it out like a football. The second side is a fog of spacey delay, pretzel twist feedback fuzz, and voices nearly ground into dust. There’s moments that elevate further, particularly the counting voice in the middle and the atmospheric drift that follows after it. Then it ends up with a particularly impressive homemade rocket blast for its ending.