Turntable-cum-sampling virtuoso ErikM started his career as a rock guitarist, but over the years he’s increasingly become proficient in an outstandingly clamorous style. He mixes in fact billions of different sources - plus the classic noises derived from prepared vinyl - into a pernickety assortment of events symbolizing the sonic multiplicity of the last three centuries. Collaborations with Voice Crack, Christian Marclay and Luc Ferrari have propelled this man towards a deserved reputation, yet there was the need of a truly authoritative statement to consider him a genuine great. Well, this statement has almost certainly arrived as Zufall is one of the best pound-for-pound albums of 2008, 51 minutes that clutch the attention without letting it go for a split second, the music ensuing from two live performances recorded in Paris and Brussels.
Clearly not extraneous to the success of the album, Hungarian reed player Akosh Szelevényi - currently based in France - gives an amazing demonstration of his potential on an array of instruments that comprises saxes, clarinets, tarogato, kalimba, bells and Tibetan horn. Being this the first time in which I listened to Akosh’s playing, let it be known that he blew me away in several occasions: a lightweight hybrid of Peter Brötzmann and Alfred Harth, with hints to early John Zorn - at least in circumscribed snippets - this gentleman jiggers all the good intentions of an ordinary evening by incurving and entangling outside notes in textural chains of question marks, showing an impressive command of every known technique while discarding mere juggling and tricks in favour of meaningful locutions that systematically snap out of banality to demoralize the phonies who believe that reeds were meant for jazz exclusively.
Still, the show that ErikM puts up is nothing short of astounding, and remains the most sizzling trait of the disc: impossible not to be staggered in front of such a barrage of dissimilar stimuli - fragments of Beethoven, rap and old-fashioned muzak weighing exactly the same in this perspective - where everything becomes the infinitesimal component of a fractal complexity which, preposterously, is also comprehensible to the most minuscule detail.
If you long for fresh-sounding plunderphonics, sampladelia and cut’n’paste this is an absolute must, a really outstanding saxophonist added as an extra: the howling tarogato heard in Part 7 is alone worth of acclamation.
Ronda
Monday, 27 October 2008
Friday, 17 October 2008
STEPHAN MATHIEU - Radioland
Two names immediately hit my mind as soon as the “shortwave radio” definition comes into sight. John Duncan, who has pushed the methods of management of that particular resource towards formerly unfamiliar territories and unprecedented consequences, his Phantom Broadcast an excellent starting point for the neophyte; and Tod Dockstader, the 3-CD set Aerial signifying a pinnacle as far as the sympathetic qualities of harmonious emanations from the ether are concerned (if your collection doesn’t incorporate this masterpiece, consider yourselves slapped on the knuckles). A niche amidst these beauties is needed today, for Stephan Mathieu’s Radioland adds new connotations to the original notion preserving an awesome aesthetic magnetism for its whole extent.
Mathieu, whose Hidden Name with Janek Schaefer (released by Cronica in 2006) ranks among the most stunning albums heard in many years by this writer, created another superior objet d’art by processing signals drawn together in different sites from June 2005 to November 2006. The source treatment occurred in real time - a feature, this, endowing the record with a much treasured insinuation of “mortal blemish”, still perceivable despite the subsequent post-production. Contrarily to the above mentioned artists’ approach, which tends to leave corporeal mechanisms aside - thus giving the idea of inaccessible locations and predominantly enthralling states - Mathieu extracts the gist of what the inhabitants of those radio zones bear with themselves. Although the music definitely belongs in the top-notch area of spectral stillness (“spectral” meant in the scientific acceptation, although “eerie” wouldn’t be a totally inappropriate description for this sonic substance), there’s something that lurks behind the sheer magnificence of these overlapping, wavering shades. Short shreds of an on-air debate appear, without prior notice, only to fade away in a handful of seconds, and the materialization of a soprano banshee surprises us in a vaporous mass of frequencies. The final track “Prolog im Himmet” makes brilliant use of chanting female voices, captured somewhere between a remote station and the unidentified secrets of our remembrance, somehow recalling Akira Rabelais’ Spellewauerynsherde.
But the uppermost peak of this work, a literal stimulation of the responsive components in the apparatus of unintentional recollection, is “Auf der Gasse”: five minutes of inert echo, apparently void of particularly crucial contents yet animated by a series of hardly perceptible movements under a feeble timbral tissue, elements that cause a harmonic dislocation - bordering on downright nonbeing - which can’t possibly be engraved in the futility of inadequate words. The ones who recognize what I’m talking about will instantly realize that the moment has arrived; others are almost certainly going to try and attach doomed-to-failure definitions, in the hallowed name of their “studies on human advancement” (typically characterized by a hopeless unawareness of the fundamentals, the most important being that the terms “improvement” and “collectivity” do not exert a reciprocal pull).
Radioland must be snatched from the jaws of inattentiveness, today like tomorrow. It’s a marvelous memento of how people’s rationalizations sound dimwitted, while the essential nature of existence - spelled “resonant vibration” - is there for all beings to be pervaded from. Someone’s blessed by an inborn awareness of such phenomena. Meanwhile, on the blunt side of wisdom, self-styled scientists are convinced of having taken hold of the “before and after”, blathering about unfathomable raison d'êtres that do not actually exist, utterly neglectful of the “here and now”, disrespecting the core of the fundamental matter. In a nutshell, incapable of growing up.
Die Schachtel
Mathieu, whose Hidden Name with Janek Schaefer (released by Cronica in 2006) ranks among the most stunning albums heard in many years by this writer, created another superior objet d’art by processing signals drawn together in different sites from June 2005 to November 2006. The source treatment occurred in real time - a feature, this, endowing the record with a much treasured insinuation of “mortal blemish”, still perceivable despite the subsequent post-production. Contrarily to the above mentioned artists’ approach, which tends to leave corporeal mechanisms aside - thus giving the idea of inaccessible locations and predominantly enthralling states - Mathieu extracts the gist of what the inhabitants of those radio zones bear with themselves. Although the music definitely belongs in the top-notch area of spectral stillness (“spectral” meant in the scientific acceptation, although “eerie” wouldn’t be a totally inappropriate description for this sonic substance), there’s something that lurks behind the sheer magnificence of these overlapping, wavering shades. Short shreds of an on-air debate appear, without prior notice, only to fade away in a handful of seconds, and the materialization of a soprano banshee surprises us in a vaporous mass of frequencies. The final track “Prolog im Himmet” makes brilliant use of chanting female voices, captured somewhere between a remote station and the unidentified secrets of our remembrance, somehow recalling Akira Rabelais’ Spellewauerynsherde.
But the uppermost peak of this work, a literal stimulation of the responsive components in the apparatus of unintentional recollection, is “Auf der Gasse”: five minutes of inert echo, apparently void of particularly crucial contents yet animated by a series of hardly perceptible movements under a feeble timbral tissue, elements that cause a harmonic dislocation - bordering on downright nonbeing - which can’t possibly be engraved in the futility of inadequate words. The ones who recognize what I’m talking about will instantly realize that the moment has arrived; others are almost certainly going to try and attach doomed-to-failure definitions, in the hallowed name of their “studies on human advancement” (typically characterized by a hopeless unawareness of the fundamentals, the most important being that the terms “improvement” and “collectivity” do not exert a reciprocal pull).
Radioland must be snatched from the jaws of inattentiveness, today like tomorrow. It’s a marvelous memento of how people’s rationalizations sound dimwitted, while the essential nature of existence - spelled “resonant vibration” - is there for all beings to be pervaded from. Someone’s blessed by an inborn awareness of such phenomena. Meanwhile, on the blunt side of wisdom, self-styled scientists are convinced of having taken hold of the “before and after”, blathering about unfathomable raison d'êtres that do not actually exist, utterly neglectful of the “here and now”, disrespecting the core of the fundamental matter. In a nutshell, incapable of growing up.
Die Schachtel
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
GREG HEADLEY - 24-Carat Abnormalities
In its quiet progression, the practically invisible career of Greg Headley has established a recognizable, almost familiar pattern of thorough approval in my own taste. I detect plentiful doses of sincerity in what this man does, the music sounding like the fruit of a private improvement rather than a showing off of mundane things brought out only to be able to say “here’s the new record”. This latest CDR release was to some extent influenced by a series of trips to Eastern Europe that the composer embarked on in 2007 and, above all, by “several changes, big and small” which affected his life one way or another. The basic substance was produced without too much of a previous thought - according to a logic that Headley describes as “create first, analyze later” - and with the usual means: guitar and a computer running software instruments (there are also piano and organ sounds in the album, yet it seems that everything was axe-piloted).
The uncomplicated structure of the large part of this work is exactly its winning feature: a two-note, three-note sketch of melodic material is taken, examined, reutilized and decomposed, a timbral defacement happening meanwhile, sometimes down to near-collapse, elsewhere with just a modicum of interference. Pulse and repetition are not irrelevant to the context, yet we’re pretty distant from proper minimalism - and don’t think about Fennesz, either. Picture instead someone observing an object from every possible position, in order to decide what is the better light for it to disclose a supposedly indiscernible, concealed beauty. This, too, seems to be the secret behind Headley’s artistic principles, which we should mull over excluding superficiality.
28 Angles
The uncomplicated structure of the large part of this work is exactly its winning feature: a two-note, three-note sketch of melodic material is taken, examined, reutilized and decomposed, a timbral defacement happening meanwhile, sometimes down to near-collapse, elsewhere with just a modicum of interference. Pulse and repetition are not irrelevant to the context, yet we’re pretty distant from proper minimalism - and don’t think about Fennesz, either. Picture instead someone observing an object from every possible position, in order to decide what is the better light for it to disclose a supposedly indiscernible, concealed beauty. This, too, seems to be the secret behind Headley’s artistic principles, which we should mull over excluding superficiality.
28 Angles
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