The Answer Is In The Beat

Loren Connors/Vapour Theories: split LP (Carbon Records, 2014)

November 4, 2014 at 8:41 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Yet another LP from astonishingly prolific avant-guitarist Loren Connors, who’s released at least a hundred records since the ’70s. His side of this split LP is a live session from 2011, which is slow, reserved, and sparse, and alternates between being drowned in distortion/echo and being clear and upfront. Plenty of silence surrounds the echoing guitar notes, and it feels like he’s playing huddled in the corner of a cave with just a single candle providing light. Sometimes it’s more languid and calm, and other times he’s ruthlessly attacking his guitar. A few times, swirling wah-wah affects are present, which seem to trigger avalanches of feedback. The other side of the LP is by John and Michael Gibbons of Bardo Pond, Alasehir, Hash Jar Tempo, and a ton of other projects. This side seems to take a straighter path, with one guitar playing a more rhythmic pattern and the other soaring above, twisting into shapes and singing a mournful, feedback-drenched cry. It’s rough, but not quite as dirty/scuzzy as Bardo Pond, and is pretty accessible, unless you’re averse to long guitar jams. It fades out after 19 minutes, but honestly I wouldn’t mind hearing it go on a lot longer than that.

Little Mack: Drac Juke (Raveyard, 2014)

November 4, 2014 at 12:12 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Josh Hedges moved to Nashville, but he will forever be a part of the Michigan breakcore scene. This EP contains 5 tracks, including material he performed at Codename: Dracula last year. As the title suggests, this is his haunted take on juke/footwork, which means fast hi-hats and hip-hop samples combined with gabber kicks and harsh breaks. The 13-minute title track is the highlight, and it’s dark and giddy. It’s like Halloween, it’s evil but not really evil, it’s just for fun. It’s more of an excuse to wear fangs and use fake blood than anything else. And eat lots of candy (but no Milk Duds, Dracula cannot chew them). “Point Detroit” is a similar uptempo juke/ghettotech track, with skittering 808 beats and halftime samples that seem to move in slow motion compared to the beats. Elsewhere, we have some thrashy metal breakcore (“Cannon”, Little Mack’s remix of DJ Skull Vomit’s “Antigoon”), and dilapidated harsh breaks with a harsh noise ending (“Get It Together”). Free download, grab it now, no excuse.

Oscar Mulero: Vertigo 12″ EP (Warm Up Recordings)

November 3, 2014 at 11:50 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Clear vinyl 12″ of pounding minimal techno. “Epley Manoeuvre” is a long stare down a metallic tunnel, which gets more intense as the beats flare up. “Gravity” is a paranoid number with a beeping pattern that moves quicker than the beat, keeping things nervous. “Particle Repositioning” has the biggest bass and the deepest, most reverberating sounds. The hi-hat pattern has a little bit of swing to it, but still sounds purely robotic.

Korma: Springblade/Chain 2.0 single + Skyline EP (Car Crash Set/Ice Rink, 2014)

November 3, 2014 at 12:09 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

I can’t say I keep up with grime that much, but there are a few producers who cross my radar who work in that idiom who create interesting sounds. Korma is based in Seattle, but he’s attracted attention from grime DJ’s such as Dusk + Blackdown. The “Springblade” single is the more club-friendly of his two Car Crash Set releases, with both tracks featuring Baltimore-inspired cutup breaks along with grime bass. “Springblade” has snapping camera sounds, while “Chain 2.0” is tougher and has broken glass, sinister melodies and chopped vocal samples. The flanging beats at the end are particularly exciting.

Even more exciting, however, is the Skyline EP, which takes things in a much weirder, less club-friendly direction. “Skyline” starts with sirens and a voice saying “warning”, and you can’t say you weren’t, as all manners of sword-like slashing sounds fly past you, arranged with precision. “Mech” is even crazier, an evil surveillance camera nightmare that makes you feel probed within an inch of your life. It’s so brutal and bludgeoning, but in a fun, enjoyable way. “Hornacek” is a stiff, mechanical droid-battler, with buzzing bass, smashing beats, and not much in the way of melody or emotion, because what good are those for if you’re a destructive robot? “Sky Hook” is another surveillance camera riddim, with beats that roll to the point of sounding like machine gun fire, and more flat yet heavy grime basslines.

Samuel Kerridge: Deficit Of Wonder 12″ EP (Blueprint, 2014)

November 2, 2014 at 11:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

A pretty harsh peering into the abyss from a producer who bridges techno with industrial noise. “Operation Neptune” is really the only dancefloor-accessible track here, and even it seems hellbent on bludgeoning dancers and dragging them to hell. “Surrender To The Void” is slow, pounding, and fiery, with lunging beats and doomy distortion. “Paint It Black” has crushing beats seared in molten white-hot noise, and the “Reprise” does away with the beats for a full-on magma bath. It strikes hard and obliterates. Yeowch.

Courtis/Moore: KPPB (Earbook Recordings, 2014)

November 2, 2014 at 11:28 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

International collaboration between Anla Courtis (of brilliant Argentinian band Reynols) and Aaron Moore (of Volcano The Bear). Two 20-minute pieces which alternate between frenzied drumming and more languid droning. “King Pancreas” definitely starts out on the frantic site, and gets lost in some fuzzy loops before getting stuck in a stammering glitch. But then it’s back to clean, sleepy guitar drifts, and lots of cascading cymbal rolls. Things slowly get more spooky and detached, with whispering wind, stray radio waves, sour violin and eventually mallet percussion patterns coming into play. “Punk Butter” has more scurrying, scraping string instruments and precipitous percussion before a forcefield of dark, meditative string droning appears, and then a howling coyote (possibly slowed down a bit to sound more evil), and a bustling, crashing percussion coda. Pretty disconcerting, but there’s definitely some thrilling moments to be heard in both pieces. Available from Bandcamp.

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.

Ricardo Donoso: A Song For Echo LP (Kathexis, 2014) + Beginning Of The Shape EP (Denovali, 2014)

October 25, 2014 at 5:28 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Sound designer and electronic artist Ricardo Donoso has been racking up a pretty sizeable discography of vinyl and tape releases on Digitalis the past few years, but now he’s branching out with an LP on his own label and a free digital EP on Denovali, in anticipation of a new album for the label next year. A Song For Echo is a 7-part epic work which touches on rhythmic pulses but never fully immerses itself into structured beats. The album mostly focuses on dark and mysterious, yet bright and alluring synthetic atmospheres. Parts 1 and 6 have some clattering moments, 3 dips a little bit into shuddering beats, and the final part centralizes a fast, gabber-like beat, surrounded by dark synth clouds and metallic squealing.

Beginning Of The Shape is centered around 7-minute “Shape Collateral”, a moody, cavernous piece which sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a particularly illuminating documentary about space or nature. There’s also a darker, more desolate “Condemned Version” of the piece as the EP’s final track. In between is “The View Of The Overlook (Rendition)”, an icy-cold beatless variation on the “Shape Collateral” melody. This EP sounds like it’s sure to be the beginning of something vibrant and intriguing.