Recorded at Argos VZW Ways Of Hearing Festival on October 18, 2007, this performance comes in an extremely limited edition CD (50 copies autographed by the composer). As the label’s name implies, John Duncan’s ideas leave us asking questions rather than finding answers, this mysterious set being no exception.
The opening drone – a wonderfully wavering pulsation shifting in the stereo field with evident effects on the nerves – is suddenly cut short by a discharge of disposable sonic materials, abruptly interrupting the state of illusion created in the initial segment. From then on, the audibility level diminishes quite a bit and one is forced to turn the volume way up – provided that you’re not wearing headphones, of course – in order to presume (not really understanding) what’s going on.
At first, intangible appearances – the sound similar to a twister blowing through a hundred bottlenecks - maintain the atmosphere relatively static, although disturbed at last by a measure of electronic interference. This section works well also by mixing it with the sounds coming from the outside, but that’s not the point. What matters is the customary sense of somewhat anxious awareness of an implied deeper process, ever less than predictable in its cross-pollination of human expression and mechanical amorphousness. The muffled helicopter-like throb appearing after approximately 15 minutes introduces an even more impenetrable setting during which Duncan’s shortwave mastery shines of its very radiance, additional fragments of brain-stimulating frequencies mixed with urban echoes and a few whispered words to perplex the listener once again.
Remote explosions, contaminated air, biotic resemblances enhanced by processed vocal phonemes, humming mantras picturing a hardly bearable solitude, distant sirens, ill minds, suffering people, a desperate search for a solution amidst ominous reverberations highlighting the limitations of mankind. Duncan is neither a teacher nor a healer - or maybe he is both? - yet his performances always manage to elicit serious distress and important indications - which is what real art is all about.
Allquestions
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Saturday, 10 October 2009
MARINOS KOUTSOMICHALIS – Anasiseipsychos
A full hour of sine waves, the result of “late-night improvisations” at home by this knob-twiddling Greek man who knows what he’s doing. Let’s make it clear right now: Anasiseipsychos is a great CD, one of those releases made to be played endlessly, day in day out. For this writer sinusoidal tones represent something nearing cosmic perfection, therefore how could anybody expect a “critical” analysis of what’s just a product of interweaving purities?
OK, here we go, get a cheap description: permanent lines, slowly arching frequencies, decaying ellipses, intertwining glissandos. Wait a minute, I hear voices shouting, everybody can do this. No, sir: a person must possess a special kind of ear to set this type of resonance into a structure definable as “music”, and it looks to me that Koutsomichalis is up to the task.
Nothing here is designable as “unprecedented”, but these creations are peacefully beautiful in their crystalline minimalism. Not to mention all those deceptive geometric allusions that inquisitive ears find tangentially, or in some corner, or at the vertex of a virtual triangle…more or less everywhere. And what about the customary natural equalizations deriving from the different inclination of the head, and the non-existent pulses that an efficient cerebrum generates? Pure illusion, like everything that’s being told to keep believers docile and ignorant, as Frank Zappa would have it, until “enlightenment”.
Sound does not claim to heal people; on the contrary, it kills those who are talking nonsense around it, little by little. So be careful: what is functional for complex intelligences is instead lethal for hollow-minded followers of alleged deities that, in turn, encourage psychological illness, the whole inevitably causing the rational (and possibly physical) collapse of both creators and adorers in a reciprocal sucking of vital juices.
When losers are left alone with the purity of real vibration – that which a creature is (or is not) able to resonate within from the birth, and nobody can teach - the inconclusive bitterness of loophole living becomes really hard to swallow. You are what your brain and body eat, you are what you say, you die for what you are. And you didn’t learn to listen.
Entr'acte
OK, here we go, get a cheap description: permanent lines, slowly arching frequencies, decaying ellipses, intertwining glissandos. Wait a minute, I hear voices shouting, everybody can do this. No, sir: a person must possess a special kind of ear to set this type of resonance into a structure definable as “music”, and it looks to me that Koutsomichalis is up to the task.
Nothing here is designable as “unprecedented”, but these creations are peacefully beautiful in their crystalline minimalism. Not to mention all those deceptive geometric allusions that inquisitive ears find tangentially, or in some corner, or at the vertex of a virtual triangle…more or less everywhere. And what about the customary natural equalizations deriving from the different inclination of the head, and the non-existent pulses that an efficient cerebrum generates? Pure illusion, like everything that’s being told to keep believers docile and ignorant, as Frank Zappa would have it, until “enlightenment”.
Sound does not claim to heal people; on the contrary, it kills those who are talking nonsense around it, little by little. So be careful: what is functional for complex intelligences is instead lethal for hollow-minded followers of alleged deities that, in turn, encourage psychological illness, the whole inevitably causing the rational (and possibly physical) collapse of both creators and adorers in a reciprocal sucking of vital juices.
When losers are left alone with the purity of real vibration – that which a creature is (or is not) able to resonate within from the birth, and nobody can teach - the inconclusive bitterness of loophole living becomes really hard to swallow. You are what your brain and body eat, you are what you say, you die for what you are. And you didn’t learn to listen.
Entr'acte
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