RY-OM - III

The duo of Tom Shelton (laptop, acoustic guitar, feedback loops, vocals) and Ryo Ikeshiro (laptop, electric guitar, feedback loops), Ry-Om is the kind of project that inspires confidence ever since the very first listen, pushing our will to repeat the experience time and again. Theirs is one of the most exquisitely meaningful types of computer-based blends heard in the last ten years: evanescent implications and bell-and-whistle attitudes don’t belong here, structural steadiness and compositional rationality do - no questions about it.

Kaleidoscopic timbres and unstable frequencies aren’t used as an excuse for intellectual mystification, each element finding an ideal placement in the fastidious logic of a particular segment, linking its connotation with a far-from-foolhardy approach to the extremities of the audible range. Throbbing regularities - when existing - coincide with the shortage of directional lights, the music stabilized by an inherent consistency which makes us perceive it as rock-solid despite the volatility of some of its constituents. We’re offered apocalyptic droning ecstasies, bubbling marmalades, acid syrups, unfriendly integralism, entomic interferences. Sharp-witted interceptions remove the cancerous growths of sterile repetition in the right moments, at the same time introducing new factors of interest. When the infected physicality of the guitars is involved, its frail concreteness gets agonizingly mangled by the absolute nonexistence of canonical mercy, leading to repeated episodes of forthright hostility.

Thus here we are, numerous consecutive spins over a week’s span still insufficient to really determine what works so well for us to stamp the record with a seal of unconditional excellence, wholly justified and without reservations. Choice track: “3.4”, utter magnificence for ears willing to be horsewhipped by the redeeming values of tetchy dissonance and clogged up by the wax of reiterated enmity.

Creative Sources

NIKOS VELIOTIS & ANASTASIS GRIVAS – Vertical

Through the use of a specifically designed bow, Nikos Veliotis extracts the quintessence of harmonic indeterminacy from an instrument habitually bracketed together with string quartets and classic repertoires. In his hands the cello becomes a means for infusing different areas of perception with a foretaste of what individuals suppose to be “coming after”, a sort of prescience about a merely hypothetical post-existential phase usually leaving sensitive (and, face it, often plain stupid) believers suspended in inexplicable anguish. In Vertical, Veliotis is flanked by Anastasis Grivas, who plays a custom-made guitar that results as complementary to the cellist’s grievous drones as the distress that comes by looking outside the window when the snow falls, the sky is grey and the challenges of daily occurrences destined to add further trouble to already difficult periods are inevitably going to hit the pit of the stomach.

In case you didn’t get the picture, this record contains the materialization of dolefully dissonant murmurs that are not likely to elicit smiles. Still, they do possess an inherent grace which, in actual fact, derives from the softly clashing emanations of the upper partials in the extreme regions of the frequency spectrum. Not just that: in the third movement we’re presented with an altered combination of impalpable metallic whispers, slightly tarnished sonic capsules dragged across the ice of a hopeless pessimism. When the cello reappears, it’s like a friend’s hand on the shoulder in a useless try to raise spirits, but the dejection lingers on. The whole, interspersed with the customary long silences (up to over five minutes) separating the tracks, constitutes one of the most unfathomable listening experiences of a winter that’s not prone to grant any favours.

Only a severely concentrated incursion across the dormant nuances of tone could really cure the inexcusable incompetents who roam about things fabricated for personal purposes. The problem is that many people – including several self-defined “musicians” – are manifestly unable to decode what life itself communicates. There’s no more time to waste with conceptual tawdriness, as interior resonance chooses the worthy ones to reveal its magnificence inside their indiscernible nucleus. An apparently cruel natural selection, necessary to preserve a handful of elected amidst the ruins of human collapse.

Low Impedance

CHRISTOPH HEEMANN – The Rings Of Saturn

It’s been a long time without new solo albums by Christoph Heemann and I, for one, was missing them a lot. If there’s an artist whose individual music is perfectly symbolized by the worn out adjective “cinematic”, that’s the introvert gentleman from Aachen. Many illustrious projects have seen him as a fundamental contributor – HNAS, Seclusion, Mirror, In Camera to name a few, a collaborative effort with Charlemagne Palestine upcoming; still, there’s something in the personal releases that, by some means, distances this farsighted visionary from practically everybody. Maybe - just maybe - a comparable creative entity might correspond to Jim O’Rourke – not surprisingly an erstwhile Heemann collaborator – but the concoctions of altered reality and concreteness generated by this man are unambiguously unique, The Rings Of Saturn – a self-released limited edition - being no exception.

After an introductive collective conversation (Italians, of all humanity), the record starts to unveil its seducing grace, an untainted attractiveness that only recurring listens can really bring forth. Merging urban environments, chatting characters, kids at play, passing cars, birds in gardens and shoes on pavements – plus a myriad of other indecipherable, yet welcome to the ears sources – with absurdist takes on actuality, the composer explores the remote corners of the listener’s psyche, filling the surrounding air with materializations that get disfigured and processed that necessary bit to maintain their origin visible through delirious dreams. Case in point, the hilariously disquieting detuned-and-delayed marching band heard in the third movement before eloquently austere sounds of bells – first a railroad, then a church - take center stage, letting us in silent pondering. We’re used to listen to these manifestations, yet Heemann manages to make them appear as the most pleasant occurrence in the world.

A minute or so of cut-up including various scraps of muzak – typical of earlier masterpieces such as Invisible Barrier – introduces the fifth chapter, made of haunting aural snapshots characterized by the whistling voices of hundred of feathered creatures whose presence, aptly treated and mixed with the sound of automobiles, represents an ethereal apparition from which an ill-omened foreshadowing emerge under the guise of slowed-down, droning frequencies (possibly an elongated piano reverberation, but it could be anything). A fabulous moment of intense emotion, among the absolute best of the disc.

Much appreciated here are the glimpses of pregnant silence characteristic of rural areas at dawn, blackbirds and roosters mixing their existences while, somehow, a radio appears in the distant background to fade away almost instantly. A refreshing element of familiar awareness soon overwhelmed by a looming moan out of nowhere, as to remind that the end is never too far even when things get calmer. It’s doubtful that people untrained to this kind of introspection will be able to penetrate the essence of moments like this; luckily for them, a motorcycle and a dog promptly arrive to cement our feet in an unwelcome reality once and for all, despite the tolling from another bell tower ending the vision.

The sonic narrative is concluded by a track based on looped-and-destroyed orchestral fragments and mariachi-styled trumpets, an untitled piece of poignancy that, again, leaves the whole in a state of uncertainty and suspension, a “to be continued” of sorts which seals a stunning present for 2008’s Christmas. A superb release, destined to 100 lucky owners who – hopefully – don’t deserve to be called “latecomers”.

Available at DIE STADT and DRONE RECORDS

CELER - Nacreous Clouds

“Nacreous clouds” is just another definition for “Polar stratospheric clouds” or PSCs, whose abnormal shining occurs before dawn or after dusk due to the sunlight received from beyond the horizon, a luminosity that is also reflected to the ground in those circumstances. To sonically represent this phenomenon, Will Thomas Long and Dani Baquet-Long recorded several segments of music and human activity, either by playing regular instruments (cello, violin, piano and bells) or aptly described “household sounds” (water, TV static, etc.) together with “classic” field recordings. Afterwards, they made tape loops of the whole, setting the playback at various speeds in different combinations, the results processed by laptops and “channelled back out into a Kaiser filter”.

If you think that it’s possible to detect even a slight particle of the above mentioned sources while listening to this CD you’re completely wrong, as the 37 pieces forming this malleable architecture – improvable by shuffling the tracks according to the composers – are short glimpses of a state of conscious stupor that renders this work, in all probability, the best Celer album I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy. The “raw iridescent ambience” depiction used in the press release is a good one: umbrageous entities, whispered amorphousness, sudden disappearances and somnolent reminiscences are all part of a same mental condition, the nerves receiving a much needed rubdown that transforms a latent tenseness into a resinous melancholy. Goodbye to vigilance, welcome to inside responsiveness. A fine paradigm of contemporary ambient at low volume, but also an exciting titillation of particular frequencies as the mixture is left free to reveal its stifled resonances more deliberately.

And/OAR