With the lamented depature of Alan Jones from Bagatellen I shall now be posting my sporadic CD reviews to this website. Below are the few reviews I have already submitted to said site.
Tarab — Take all the ships from the harbour, and sail them straight into hell.Oscillation, metal scraping on metal, dragged, large space, little sounds, pushing and pulling, drawing sounds from a well, giving way to a larger atmosphere, looks upwards, the movements made in the space, following ears and eyes, sense of touch, crunching and crackling, ebbs and flows, capturing dead industry, utilising abnormal machinery, thousands of automatons, mechanical insects, strata of life, the industry and the soil, breeds intrigue, 7:07, gives way to gradual silence, the reverberation of fricative liquids and solids, what has been, starts up, as if the mechanical insects are building from scratch the sounds of the distant sea, playing derelict objects, creating imagery that conjures their original purpose, beautiful hyperbolic crackles, 10:10, white noise, a switch to real insects, are they insects? Evolution of sound material, insects oscillating like drones reminiscent of the discs commencement, entomophobia, tunnels, passed out, miasma, life above, next layer, clamour of the upper levels seeping onto your skull, down the indented walls, are sounds coming towards you or are you going towards the sounds? Reoccurring crunching, heard with your eyes, realignment, looking up, again an open manhole cover, sparks of electricity hitting the dead concrete, what is the equivalent auditory terminology of a silent film? Relief 21:24, auditory storyboard, light, humorous, head sinking into a record player, intensely natural transition, each facet of each atmosphere is so real, so much so, it becomes harder and harder to quiet your mind, the thousands of imagistic unions.
Album cover acts as a graphic score.
Wind drenched landscape, recorded through a bottle, through a wall, a vacuum, the outside world heard through a beehive, inside out, complementarity, ectosymbiosis, felt through the senses of bacteria, auditory ecotone, saline meets fresh, attracting new life, ancient vessels rotting inside the whale, hulls rubbing against its rib bones, the blow hole of the whale creating a cyclic push and pull, enhancing the decay and rot, infrasound made audible, croaking beams, vast unseen patterns, microcosm of said images returning overhead, positive feedback, a fugue of micro and macro, each continually altering the others perspective, 37:02, torrential rain ends the story, drowning out all traces, leaving no remnants, an empty stomach to be filled with pistol shrimp, filters, a flock of birds heard through a wooden leg, temperature ebbs, ravenous birds dig at your feet, slowly engulfing. Listening through a tube whilst inside a tube, auditory retraction, cymatics, shapes form inside the tubes, sharp, a mended ear, feedback system, correlating information all over a series of circuits, receive as soon as send as soon as receive until such meanings are non-existent, roofs of the circuit in flux, naive realism, everywhere at once, vacant estates, drawing breath, a slow night, enclosed in a box, no ears, lead snow.
http://www.23five.org/tarab/
Jeph Jerman and Tom Cox — if/whenif/when comes housed in a compelling handmade box containing mushroom prints, the cd itself, and various organic matter. A profitable collaboration that involved Tom sending various recordings to Jeph who then reconstituted and playfully juggled them into their individual selves. I highly recommend looking inside this box as the cd plays itself out, as, to me, the box acts as a microcosm of Jeph’s milieu.
Whilst attempting to describe what I have heard on this disc, my grasp of words, such as it is, seems all too misleading. So I fall upon images and visual analogies that I hope might shed some light upon how I feel about this release.
The first two tracks align themselves to visual scenes, presented differently each time I listen through. Images of invertebrates burrowing in the soil beside a constant stream of traffic, time-lapse footage of plants growing (with the sound of the film crew left in the mix), walking into a restaurant and sticking one’s head into a deep fat fryer where the sounds heard blend together, slowly vying for autonomy, and the food in the fryer scratches and pulls against the sides of the machine creating various internal soundworlds. The next two tracks bring to mind the previously mentioned microcosms once more, observing lilliputian aeolian villages where the vehicles are blown along by the wind, creating all manner of scratches and whistles, and peering through the window of Andrei Tarkovsky’s model house in The Sacrifice, as if sound emanates from the reflected light that catches your ears.
if/when is full of inspired auditory strata. It is a world of quasi-communication where energy harnessed is never dormant, but under a constant state of calibration.
Field recordings, auditory documentation, whatever you wish to call them, have come a long way in the last decade, and if listening to if/when evokes the precarious motion of stepping from rock to rock, observing the mosses underfoot, then the first two tracks of @stuk remind me that it’s all too easy to forget everyday objects and their inherent sonic worth.
Jeph Jerman — @stukI consider achieving a satisfactory and interesting recording — plucked from the mundane — to be equally impressive to, say, the surface tension of a frozen pond or Stag Beetles a metre underground. Within the latter it is more about presuppositions, careful thought followed by minimum action, the former, the process as a whole. It can be very easy for artists to overlook such things — holding firm to the belief that there is nothing new to be found. The first track is a recording of a radiator in Jeph’s room, where we can hear vehicles drive past, intermingling with the interior of the pipes, creating a bleak sense of space coloured in white. The second recording (which can easily be mistaken for that of the first, if you’re not paying attention) is of the electric meter in Jeph’s room. It resides in a similar atmosphere to that of the first, but there is a lighter and more transitory feel to this track. It brings to mind the railroad imagery of Emile Zola’s La Bete Humaine — its twists, cranks, seeping mist, a more foreboding domain.
The last track on this cd is a solo live performance by Jeph. The track starts abruptly and leads the listener to believe that the concert has already started; such is Jeph’s polyrhythmic ability that one can mistakenly confuse the conscious shuffling of an audience for one person. Having heard (sadly never in the flesh) a large number of Jeph’s live performances with natural objects, I have found it can become somewhat tricky to find large differences between many of them. But therein lies the task. Studying these events reveals a whole manner of sound suspended within the larger and more obviously recognisable sounds.
Metaphors and linkages aside, it is also simply a pleasure to forgo the analysis and enjoy the playfulness of this particular artist.
http://www.jerman.littleenjoyer.com/
Ben Owen - radio>inBen Owen, who runs the wonderful winds measure label, describes this release as a “document recording consiting of an fm radio transmitter, a portable fm radio, and mixer. The fm transmitter sent a signal to the portable radio, the portable radio to the mixer, and back into the fm transmitter. No radio station signal was used, tuned to a fragment of unused fm radio band, the fm transmitter signal is captured and sent back to the fm transmitter via the mixer. ”
I can’t usually concentrate on anything else whilst I have a CD playing. I constantly find myself drawn back to whatever I’m listening to at the expense of other work, but this album seems to aid my concentration, where even if I’m paying attention to Ben’s radio detailing, I’m able to imagine myself working, and lo and behold… I am working. The degree of repetition involved with these three tracks can perhaps open up subjective interpretations in that the tones prevalent in the background seem to be traveling through a varying morphology upon every listen. This is a recording that sounds different wherever I place myself in relation to the speakers, and upon leaving the room I had to ask someone if it was still playing as tinnitus — which is evidently of similar prevalence — took over.
Yet the music stays in one’s head otherwise. Around nine minutes into the first track a large oscillating feedback drone is introduced — whether accidentally or not I can’t tell — but it serves to bring the piece forward, engulfing the subtler elements of sound that are the subject of focus. Towards the end of the last track more recognisable radio static weaves its way between the two speakers at different levels of audibility, leaving the possibility that what was heard was actually psycho-responsive and not encoded onto the CD.
The documentation of the radiophonic processes within the particular unused FM band that Ben is working from is an intriguing and very pleasing aesthetic, one that is full of processes on the brink of collapse as feedback engulfs the piece for sporadic moments, highlighting a more literal, creational process. It’s full of slight flutters and flicks that, if you you listen carefully, denote subtle changes in the sound, even if only for brief moments that serve to disassemble the omnidirectional sonic frequencies that run pretty much throughout all three tracks; frequencies that bring to mind the sound generated by plug-in mosquito repellents.
radio>in, for all its repetition and unrelenting high-pitched tones, possesses a surprising warmth, one that requires close listening, but lends itself to anything but.
http://windsmeasurerecordings.net/en3er.html
