#Klanggalerie

[schroettner]

song of the day: “death day” by job karma feat. magic carpathians project. file under: dark ambient, industrial.

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume Nine, Number Eight

Spiral Joy Band

The music plays on through the end of the most disastrous summer in living memory, with Maui on fire and Arizona broiled beneath a heat dome and Vermont swept away in a 100- maybe 500-year flood.  And here’s the kicker: next year will likely be worse.  Still by force of habit, we continue on with the daily grind, cooking and mowing lawns and going to shows and listening to records.  This month’s haul includes avant-black metal, turntablism, bass-forward jazz, jolting punk and music made in collaboration with our robot overlords.  Contributors this time include Jonathan Shaw, Bill Meyer, Jim Marks, Jennifer Kelly, Tim Clarke and Bryon Hayes.

夢遊病者 — Skopophoboexoskelett (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

In past thinking and writing about this tri-continental, avant-garde, jazz and black metal project (whose name translates to Sleepwalker), your faithful reviewer has made concerted efforts to set aside any references to John Zorn’s Naked City ensemble. This time around, for the project’s Skopophoboexoskelett, such efforts face real challenge holding Naked City tracks like “Saigon Pickup,” “Punk China Doll” or “Razorwire” at any sort of distance. The atmospherics on Sleepwalker’s new LP explode with unpredictable noise, then emanate a patina of Noir-ish style and sleaze, especially the excellent final track “The Bad Luck That Saved You from Worse Luck.” It’s murky like a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, sexy like a stiletto heel dotted with droplets of blood, compelling like those cinematic moments at which Humphrey Bogart (as Philip Marlowe or Glenn Griffin) would grin his mean and tight grin, presaging antic, joyful violence. In spite of that violence, Skopophoboexoskelett may be Sleepwalker’s most listenable record. That could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how much you enjoyed being subsumed in the volatile chaos of their earlier records.

Jonathan Shaw

Agnel / Lanz / Vatcher — Animals (Klanggalerie)

Animals by AGNEL LANZ VATCHER

While the ability of great improvisers to make music out immediate company, available space, and their own personal resources might amaze a listener, after a while, that might become a bit routine. Perhaps that is why French pianist Sophie Agnel and American-born, Netherlands-based drummer Michael Vatcher have sought out the company of turntablist Joke Lanz, AKA Sudden Infant. Lanz’s aesthetics have grown out of punk, noise and actionism. But, being a man of a certain age, he’s been doing what he does for a long time, too, so his onslaught of well-timed body noises, electronic squiggles and good old-fashioned scratching further confounds by evading being confounding. Construction, destruction, mutual disregard and scrupulous attunement all come into play across this album’s 13 short-for-improv episodes of absurd grace. Never mind breaking this stuff down, the players are already doing that even as they make it up.

Bill Meyer

Vicente Archer Trio — Short Stories (Cellar Music Group)

Short Stories by Vicente Archer

Reviewing a release by the Bruce Barth Trio last year, I mentioned wanting to hear more of double bassist Vicente Archer, and my wishes have been answered. Short Stories, with Gerald Clayton on piano and Bill Stewart on drums, demonstrates Archer’s strengths as a musician and composer. The tunes are generally mid-tempo, mid-length, and with a kind of timeless post-bop feel. Three were written by Archer (“Bye Nashville” deserves to become a standard), two by Stewart, and one each by Clayton, Jeremy Pelt, Nicholas Payton and Pat Metheny.

An advantage of bassist-led piano trios is that the piano is usually not allowed to dominate the sound, and Clayton plays his role just right here, taking the occasional solo, as on the bluesy “Round Comes Round,” but giving the others plenty of space. The set includes a brooding solo piece for bass, “Lighthouse,” a playful duo featuring just Archer and Stewart, “It Takes Two to Know One,” and Stewart sitting out while Clayton and Archer recreate “Message to a Friend” by Metheny and Charlie Haden. Short Stories makes clear why Archer has appeared on 50 or more recordings over the past 25 years and makes the case for him as a band leader.

Jim Marks

BEEF — BEEF (Feel It)

BEEF by BEEF

BEEF jolts hard on the four-four, their songs a continuous up-and-down battery of guitar slashes, bass thunks and relentless, manic drums. There is nothing fancy or florid or even fluid about these songs. They rain down like punches, though there’s undeniable glee in the violence. Maybe it’s because the drummer, Takoda Hortenberry, is the main singer and songwriter that the songs take on such a percussive air. He’s not in it by himself, though. His wife Ally pounds the keyboards with equal force, while guitarist Sam Richardson (who also runs Feel It Records) keeps the riffs super short and super explosive. Whatever the secret, this is punk rock that slaps hard and makes you like it.  “I know you want it! BEEF coming,” shouts Hortenberry in the closer, “I Want BEEF,” and the thing is, you do.

Jennifer Kelly

Jaap Blonk / Damon Smith / Ra Kalam Bob Moses — Rune Kitchen (Balance Point Acoustics)

Rune Kitchen by Jaap Blonk / Damon Smith / Ra Kalam Bob Moses

Titles can tell you things, and in this case, the words on the front clue you to the lack of words in the music. Texts have their place in Jaap Blonk’s concrete poetry, but this session is improvisation most pure. It went down in a town near St. Louis during a transitional moment; bassist Damon Smith was ending one short tour with Blonk, and about to begin another with (now Memphis-based) veteran drummer Ra Kalam Bob Moses. Perhaps inspired by anticipation, Smith and Moses lock right in, playing briskly evolving sound configurations that bristle with forthright gesture and woody texture and even confronting the vocalist with swinging, time-keeping grooves near the end. Derek Bailey once opined that there are players, and then there are artists, and Blonk’s extension of century-deep Dada actions has often seemed to put him in the latter camp. But he also has a skilled improviser’s ability to detect prevailing winds and respond with strategic counter-huffs; in the company of two men playing their asses off, he follows suit. Unburdened by pages, he digs deep into the rudiments, growling like a fever dream of throat singing, muttering strings of phonemes, and uttering proclamations that sound so important, he had to invent a new language to convey them.

Bill Meyer

Cloudland Canyon — S-T (Medical)

Cloudland Canyon (MR-091) by Cloudland Canyon

Cloudland Canyon’s Kip Uhlhorn has long favored the non-organic end of the psychedelic experience, with long, wigged out experiments in synth tone like 2008’s “Krautwerk” from Lie in Light or the squiggly fogs of “pinklight/version” from 2011’s Fin Eaves.  For this self-titled album, number four in the Cloudland discography, he engages even more deeply with the machine by tapping AI as a collaborator. The result is blippy, buoyant, denatured dance anthems, like “Internet Dreams” and “Circuit City,” which sound like the mathematical average of 100 other synth popiscles. Still even robots hit the mark occasionally, and “Future Perfect (Bad Decision)” is a woozy, blurred rainbow of psych pop longing, not unlike the work of another recent Uhlhorn collaborator, Sonic Boom.

Jennifer Kelly

Annie Hart — Weight of a Wave (Uninhabitable Mansions)

The Weight of a Wave by Annie Hart

Annie Hart has made four solo albums since her days in Au Revoir Simone, an all-female Brooklyn synth pop trio beloved of David Lynch, but she hasn’t moved too far away. Weight of a Wave floats flickery synth tones over rackety drums, splitting the difference between bedroom pop and strobe lit dance. “Boy You Got Me Good” does the classic girl-group trick of lacing sweet cooing melodies with the bitter taste of arsenic. “Crowded Cloud” rides synthesizer overload like a Pat Benatar anthem, then cuts back to the antsy minimum of drum machine and whispered chants. Yet though the soft-focus, gentle bop sonics haven’t changed much from Hart’s Au Revoir Simone days, time does its work on the mood. “Nothing Makes Me Happy Anymore” layers shadowy doubled vocals over a wheedling Casio riff, as Hart enumerates the people she’s loved in various ways whose phone calls no longer suffice to cheer her up

Jennifer Kelly

Holy Wave — Five of Cups (Suicide Squeeze)

Five of Cups by HOLY WAVE

Austin, Texas quartet Holy Wave have been at it for over a decade now and Five of Cups is their sixth full-length. The band mines a similar seam to Work and Non-Work-eraBroadcast: droning organs, motorik drums heavy on the ride cymbal, spaced-out vocals, jangly guitars. Though there’s nothing inherently off-putting about this 42-minute record, the songs feel listless compared to previous efforts such as Freaks of Nurture. The performances are tight, the production is three-dimensional and the arrangements are woozy and trippy, but it sounds like the last couple of years have knocked the wind out of Holy Wave’s sails. There are some bright moments in the track list, such as the dubby grooves and female vocals of “The Darkest Timeline,” plus late highlight “Nothing in the Dark,” which is a dead ringer for early Tame Impala.

Tim Clarke

Koeosaeme — Beige (Orange Milk)

Beige by koeosaeme

With Beige, sound artist Ryu Yoshizawa throttles down his usual breakneck blipscapes in favor of expressive phrasing and varied tempos. The serial Orange Milk resident allows his compositions to breathe, to hang back and to interject when necessary. His palette remains obviously synthetic: the strings are a touch too sweet, the reeds slightly nasally. Yoshizawa coalesces these inhuman tones into lush dreamscapes, embedded with only the subtlest hint of crackling glitch. He leverages the dynamics of modern classical and musique concrète to achieve a sense of movement and surprise. Coughs, harrumphs and whispers interject at random, but Yoshizawa uses these human elements sparingly. Instead, he relies on the lushness of his (synthetic) instrumentation to set the mood. At times he lets things get a little corny, such as when a Kenny G-like sax periodically slithers into focus, but for the most part Yoshizawa’s futuristic fusion is beguiling. Unlike its neutrally hued namesake, Beige is far from boring.  

Bryon Hayes

Molly Ringworm — Despicable (Self-released)

This Molly Ringworm comes from Austin, TX, and seeks to do for hardcore what Jane Pain has done for black metal (careful with this link). Yikes. Despicable’ssongs land somewhere between energizing provocation and snotty gross-out, with the occasional nods to street punk and sludge. There’s another punky Molly Ringworm — an indie-twee outfit from Jersey whose music is more compatible with the 1980s cinema of John Hughes, with which actress Molly Ringwald will forever be associated. I prefer this band, with their snarling, trashy anti-aesthetic and their nasty sonic sensibility (which may put you in the mind of Ringwald’s work in Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer). So goes culture. I had a high school girlfriend in the mid-1980s who looked a lot like the actress, and she (the girlfriend) would spit with all the imperiousness and venom that only a 17 year old can summon, “Oh great, another movie with Molly Ring-worm.” Sorry, folks — doesn’t matter to me if you’re filthy, fractious Texas guttersnipes or ironical white kids from New Jersey. Susie E. from Berks County, PA, gets dibs on the name “Molly Ringworm,” now and forever.

Jonathan Shaw

Matt Robidoux — Music For Aluminum Corn (Crash Symbols)

music for aluminum corn by matt robidoux

Mills College may be shuttered, but its students carry on.  Matt Robidoux combines symbolic and social action with accessible invention on Music For Aluminum Corn. The title derives from an instrument that the Mills graduate devised in homage to an early Buchla synthesizer that was kept at Mills. Essentially, they wired up an aluminum casting of two corn cobs to make a touch and movement-activated electronic instrument, and then called upon their fellow graduates to help him take it for a drive. A string quartet, a reed ensemble and the other instruments in Robidoux’s studio round out the sound palette, which is applied to a series of themes which, depending on their arrangement, sound like 1970s TV show themes, syndrum exotica and texture-oriented investigations. Robidoux’s electronic instrument proves more versatile than its novelty packaging might success, and the assembled crew play with a commitment to the endeavor that signals this heartening piece of news; while Mills College isn’t around anymore, the artistic community it fostered caries on.

Bill Meyer 

Spiral Joy Band — Elvehjem (Feeding Tube)

Elvehjem by Spiral Joy Band

Without Saturn, you got no rings, right? It’s easy to see Spiral Joy Band as a similarly orbital entity, forever existing in relation to its parent band, Pelt. But, just as all those hunks of space rock would feel equally substantial if your rocket ship hit them whilst circling a planet or floating on their own through the galaxy, Spiral Joy Band has demonstrated on the recent archival recordings culled from its Wisconsin sojourn in the early 2010s, it has been its own thing, and that thing is pretty solid. Elvehjem is another album-length excerpt from Patrick Best, Mikel Dimmick and Troy Schafer’s trove of basement jams, and on this one, they assert an identity separate from Pelt. Sure, there’s plenty of long bell and gong tones, but there’s also some guitar and amp activity that’ll singe your whiskers with sheer crackle action.

Bill Meyer

Heleen Van Haegenborgh — Squaring The Circle (El Negocito)

Squaring the Circle by Heleen Van Haegenborgh

Sometimes, awareness of an artist’s inspiration will help you grasp their work. With Squaring The Circle, that’ll only get you so far. Squaring The Circle is Belgian composer Heleen Van Haegenborgh’s response to Johan De Widle’s Pi — Fugue pour les survivants, a graphic piece representing the number pi which is extended each year by its maker. While the mathematic foundation of this CD-length piece’s contents are hard to discern, their sounds just might give you a glimpse into the infinite. Performed by the composer and GAME, a percussion quartet, it combines the reverberant tones of drums, vibraphones, bells and other strikable metal objects with close-up, voltage-derived zaps. Even coming out of a home hi-fi, it creates a sense of ever-expanding space.

Bill Meyer

[ozkar-krapo]

NOID

"Ausflug ins Grüne"

(7". Klanggalerie. 2006) [AT]

[circleofshit]

Section 25 - Girls don't count (live)

[markholub]

Balancing writing a PhD thesis, looking after two kids and being a freelance musician is not leaving loads of time for website updates BUT, most of my gigs in the next few months are now up on the site AND, here is the new album from Anthropods! Available in the shops(are there still shops that sell CDs?) in May, but available from Klanggalerie NOW.

[korqatt]

just followed klanggalerie on bandcamp huRHHH they don't have a mailing list on their website so this will do 😁😁😁😁😁😁 auhshgsghshhg

[disease]

SNOWFLAKE / ILLUSIVE 7″ P/D PSYCHIC TV | KLANGGALERIE, 2002

[dustedandsocial]

The Lo Yo Yo - Bad Intentions

[burlveneer-music]

Eric Random - No-Go - new album from Manchester electronica veteran (Klanggallerie)

Eric Random is a British pioneer of post punk electronica. Born in 1961 Eric soon joined the Buzzcocks’ road crew. At the age of 17 he became a third of a group called The Tiller Boys, the other two being Pete Shelley and Francis Cookson. They played their live debut in 1978, supporting Joy Division at Manchester’s Factory club. For Pete Shelley The Buzzcocks were his main concern, so The Tiller Boys soon fell apart. Eric founded Free Agents with Cookson and soon met Richard Kirk and Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire. Thus, he got involved in the Sheffield scene as much as the Manchester one. Despite the two cities being only an hour’s drive apart, their respective music scenes were very different. Manchester was the number one spot for postpunk with band like Joy Division/New Order, The Smiths, James, Magazine or A Certain Ratio. Sheffield went a very different way. It is birthplace for groups like The Cabs, The Human League, Clock DVA, ABC or Heaven 17, all influential European acts of electronic music. Eric Random felt home in both scenes. His first solo efforts were recorded and produced at Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works studio. A change in sound became obvious. Eric later merged his electro funk with ethnic influences. Playing with people like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sparked an interest in sufi music. He travelled extensively, regularly to India where he once even spent eleven months in a row. Random also fronted Nico’s band until her untimely death in 1988. They recorded and album together, Camera Obscura, produced by John Cale. Random then went on a long hiatus. In 2014 he made his comeback - since then three purely electronic albums have been released, the fourth now being No-Go. On this new long player, Eric goes further into an electronic dance direction, leaving his ethnic influences further behind. Think Wrangler, think Kraftwerk and you get the idea.

Written, performed and produced by Eric Random. Mastered by Martin Bowes. Layout by Lisa Robotka.

[nedison]

Santa Dog - Randy & Uz Jsme Doma (2010)

A greeting and a meeting team of hoarse and frosty words for @merelygifted.

YOU HAVE BEEN BLESSED BY SANTA DOG ‘10!!

[restwaerme]

Chrystal Belle Scrodd ‎– Belle De Jour https://www.discogs.com/Chrystal-Belle-Scrodd-Belle-De-Jour/release/466812

Chrystal Belle Scrodd ‎– The Inevitable Chrystal Belle Scrodd Record https://www.discogs.com/Chrystal-Belle-Scrodd-The-Inevitable-Chrystal-Belle-Scrodd-Record/release/466794

[dustedmagazine]

Gurdy Hurding Men: An interview with Renaldo and the Loaf

“Isn’t this exciting …” Brian Poole’s voice manages to be simultaneously hushed, expectant and playful. He’s waiting for David Janssen, the other half of Renaldo and the Loaf, to be added to our Skype interview, a first for this technically challenged writer. “Hello, yes, I can hear both of you …” Janssen doesn’t have quite the same smile in his voice, at least superficially; he’s the more deliberately spoken of the two yet ready with a laugh and a witty aside as our conversation progresses. The voices alternately drifting laconically and rising in mirth as they exit my speakers give the impression of both as English gentlemen, which is certainly accurate on one level but which is a vision somehow also antithetical to the music they make.

The interview is precipitated by Gurdy Hurding, the English duo’s most recent album, which was released by Klanggalerie in October of 2016, capping off the Austrian label’s deluxe and absolutely superb program to reissue the group’s entire catalog. More on that presently, but even the seemingly simple fact of a new album’s existence is not quite as straightforward as it appears to be. Remarkably, Gurdy Hurding is the duo’s first disc in nearly 30 years. “For a while, until about 18 months before it was released, we weren’t even sure we were actually going to make an album,” smiles Janssen. “We were just working on various tracks, and at some point, there it was.”    

Gurdy Hurding by RENALDO & THE LOAF

Brian Poole (Renaldo Malpractice) and David Janssen (Ted the Loaf) met as teenagers in 1970, but, at this point, their shared musical tastes and long collaboration history have been documented in such detail that our interview almost entirely avoids the subject. Some brief musical context does, however, seem appropriate, so that the duo’s soundworlds can be fully appreciated. Just as jazz was supposed to have moved up the Mississippi in the very early part of the 20th century, progressive rock was supposed to have given way to the totally antithetical punk scene and associated genres in the middle to late 1970s. As with all mythologies, there are kernels of truth amidst what is really a wide-ranging and confusing multivalent narrative of non-linear developments. Renaldo and the Loaf straddle various portions of that narrative complexity. They neither reject nor accept convention and form out of hand. It might be fair to say that they tiptoe into the waters of whatever musical trends abound at the moment but only submerge ankle-deep, and the rest is unique to them.

In order for their accomplishments to make anything approaching teleological sense, a word or two elucidating the duo’s relationship to the Residents is in order. Superficial comparisons based solely on the weirdness factor are too often posited and parroted, and the music made by both groups suffers. True, their song structures could be described as harmonically and melodically simple, but timbral complexities abound, repetitions vying for prominence amidst tape manipulations, synthetic colors and voices tweaked out of all facile recognition. The two groups demonstrate relationships to popular music analogous to This Heat’s to punk or to Harry Partsch’s inhabitation of spaces near classical music. This Heat exploded conventional song form while never completely abandoning it, and their paint-peeling take on the late 1970s rock zeitgeist was similar in spirit to Partsch’s supposedly theoretical but actually sensually corporeal and often downright snarky approach to the classical tradition. Janson and Poole were timbral explorers from their earliest collaborations—more on these presently--and it was only a matter of time before Poole and Janson discovered their kindred spirits across the pond. The Residents’ independent label, Ralph Records, was distributed in England by Chris Cutler’s Recommended Records, now RER Megacorp.

“The first of their albums I bought was Duckstab,” remembers Poole.

“For me,” muses Janssen, “It was Third Reich and Roll.”  

The multiple cans of worms opened by that title lie beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that the Residents’ radically dark yet whimsical take on many familiar 1960s pop tunes caught Renaldo and the Loaf, hereafter RatL’s collective ear. “There was something about the naivety of the early stuff,” reminisces Janssen. “It was catchy. They obviously couldn’t play their instruments all that well, but they didn’t let that stand in their way; they had a lot of interesting ideas, an interesting approach to arranging, and there was an appeal in that, and it was weird,” he smiles. It was Ralph that made RatL material available to a wider public as it was released in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. They even made a trip to the United States to meet the Residents, out of which came the collaborative Title in Limbo album. 

However, beyond a penchant for repetition, homebrewed technological wizardry and a taste for the bizarre, the too-often made Residents comparison really does RatL’s music little justice. To get an idea of the rich transgenerational vistas opened up in the group’s early aesthetic, listen to “A Sob Story” from 1980’s Songs for Swinging Larvae, with those crystalline bells fading into a humorous but unsettling mélange of vocal and choral snippets, skewed rhythms, shrill eruptions and sci-fi descents, all supporting the rustic falsetto Poole has made ubiquitous to any fans of the band. It’s as if a baroque chamber choir has been caught in a holding pattern set to a soundtrack of ethereal drummers. Amidst it all, a dramatically sobbing woman, disconcertingly looped, takes center stage, and it was this emotionally raw titular nod that caught my attention in 1988, when I first heard the track. Only later did I learn that she was, in fact, Cathy Berberian, snipped unceremoniously out of Luciano Berio’s stunning electroacoustic 1960 masterpiece “Visage.” 

Poole and Janssen are somehow nonchalant as they discuss their exposure to Classical music. After all, their mill was given grist from so many disparate sources, from the cross-cultural references of a late 1980s track like “Hambu Hodo,” awash in the samples and mechanical beats that would parallel the various genres related to world-music-driven electronica, to the more folky and pastoral elements on 1984’s Arabic Yodeling. They demonstrate no dogmatic bias, taking it all in stride, especially the so-called period practice movement that would play an integral role in Gurdy Hurding’s conception and execution.  

When the duo decided to take a break in 1988, there was a project in the works that involved an at-that-point undefined use of medieval instruments. “I saw the New London Consort on a television show,” Janssen says of the initial idea. “They were performing music from the Carmina Burana manuscript.”  While many are familiar with Orff’s loose reconstruction, Philip Pickett and company were performing a scholarly take on what survives from those bawdy, religious and political medieval melodies. RatL had found transgenerational kindred spirits, as Poole makes abundantly clear.

“We were drawn especially to some of the vocalizations, where they would imitate drunkards, make animal sounds, and it was quite inspirational in that way; the rhythms were very dancy, very catchy.”

“You could say that it was the pop music of its day,” Janssen agrees. “Very simple, fun, and we loved the repetition!”  

Nothing came of the project, at least not at that time. “It was just pub talk, you know,” grins Poole. Janssen offers further explication. “We’d kind of run out of steam; after all, we’d been making music together for 18 years, but it was more than that. At the time, we had neither the equipment nor the instruments to make the music work.”

Sampling technology was in such an early state, as the duo explain, that even to create a melody necessitated jumping through hoops of multi-tracking akin only to those brave souls in the late 1940s involved in the disc manipulations of the first Musique Concrète compositions. Everything was exacerbated by the fact that their small studio moved from Janssen’s to Poole’s flat, forcing Janssen to forgo the sonic experimenting so vital to RatL’s unique soundworld.

Fast-forward to the early 2000s, when the two musicians resumed collaboration, first sporadically, supplying music for films, a medium in which both have long been interested. Walter Robotka, the mind and spirit behind Klanggalerie, takes up the narrative via Email:  

“I approached Brian Poole a few years ago about the idea of RatL doing a remix for UK band Section 25. They agreed, and the next step was asking about reissuing the material (in their back-catalog). During the process, the band spent time together again, and so it was quite a logical step to record new material.”

The collating of so much RatL material was a gargantuan effort. The group’s devotees now have some of their earliest recorded collaborations, their single live performance along with a reflective remix of it and all of the original albums and Eps in seven deluxe packages. Poole and Janssen became heavily involved in these reissues, remastering and sonically refurbishing the albums where possible but also adding a RatL fan’s treasure-trove of extra material on bonus discs that sometimes resemble new albums in their cinematic programming and diversity.

The lion’s share of these radically different alternate versions and unheard music was preserved in Poole’s cassette archive. “Before it lived in my flat, our studio lived in David’s. He would make cassette copies for me of whatever we’d done that day, so that I could take them home, listen, rehearse, that sort of thing. That’s why we still have all of the bits, used and unused, as well as works in progress.”  

Far beyond the often uninteresting hodgepodge of outtakes and alternate mixes usual for devotee satisfaction, the bonus discs recontextualize tracks die-hard fans have heard numerous times, taking on a double life as sketchbook and newly minted artistic statement. RatL’s breakthrough album, Songs for Swinging Larvae, is a case in point; the bonus disc bears the quasicryptic title Songs from the Surgery.

Many of its tracks are both brief and obviously incomplete compared to their released counterparts, but one such fragment would prove foundational to the new album’s opener. “Henry Lies” begins Songs from the Surgery with a militaristic drum beat and guitar with clarinet in open fifths, containing only the lyrics “Henry lies, never to die.”  Thirty-five years later, the track was sampled and morphed into Hurdy Gurding opener “Henri Rise.”  “Yeah,” laughs Janssen, “Henri’s been with us for a long time.”  

While the new track’s rhythmic undercurrent is similar, we are immediately aware of the passage of time and how it has shaped the creative process. In listening to the new RatL material, I keep remembering a line from David Bowie’s song “Sunday,” where he reflects, “Nothing has changed, everything has changed.”  

It’s all still RatL; the quirky rhythmic displacements are all there, as are the jump-cuts, the catchy tunes and the timbres that seem as if they are just on the point of orbiting recognition. On one level, the album picks up where 1987’s The Elbow is Taboo left off, and it’s all made infinitely easier by the technological advances of 30 years. Software manipulation has allowed the 1982 fragment to be transformed into what sounds like a big band in some huge swinging bachelor pad. The crooner is still at the helm, Tiny Tim falsetto at the ready, but Henri has become some sort of shepherd, struggling with his goats, sheep and the daily grind of rising too early and food preparation.

By way of nearly complete contrast comes “A Convivial Ode,” a study in electro-acoustic chopping and reordering. The delightfully medieval harmonies float gently along to a voice that I only now learn is Poole’s singing a syllabically scrambled folk song, a bit of reinventive fun mirroring the track’s title. “It’s an anagram for the working title, which was Viola and Voice,” he explains. Yet, there are continual nods to various genres associated with electronic dance music, and the disc is replete with infectiously varied beats. “I like dancing, though I don’t have the physique for it anymore,” giggles Poole. “I’m not so sure you can really dance to our music though …”  

“Reminds me of the time I smuggled “Hambu Hodo” into Brian’s wedding,” remembers Janssen, and they both burst out laughing. Janssen was Poole’s best man, but the prank seems to have been unexpected.

“It kind of sounds like a dance tune,” Poole explains, “but it’s actually quite complicated, and there are all my friends and business associates trying to dance to it!”  The two are perfectly happy to discuss the merits of techno, house and the like, its infectious groove, its connection to the heartbeat, and they’re clearly excited about it, but it certainly does not dominate the album.  

Gurdy Hurding’s title track brings the medieval references into clear focus, delivered in what sounds like a Middle English dialect and even quoting “Miri It Is,” a song of the period. The musicologist in me, the one whose interest in Berio was sparked so long ago by these same musicians, senses completion of the circle. It is irrepressibly tempting to see Gurdy Hurding as a unification, solidifying everything RatL has done before, their corpus now unified and the reissue series presenting an equally complete and parallel history. “If you say so,” drawls Janssen gently. They’re smiling but really having none of it. To them, for whom music has been a life-long hobby, these synchronicities simply occurred. Poole encapsulates it all with concision. “We just get together and make music, like people get together and play squash.”  While they are pleased with the disc’s reception, it is clear that they have no theoretical axes to grind. I ask if they plan to make another album. “Sure, it’s possible,” reflects Janssen, “But it might be better if we didn’t wait 30 years to do it.”

Marc Medwin 

[zaphmann]

In Memory of John Peel Show 220218 Podcast & Playlist

In Memory of John Peel Show 220218 Podcast & Playlist

“From Modern life to Medieval machinations, new music from the far west to China, strap in and hold on!” https://radiopublic.com/in-memory-of-john-peel-show-6nVPd6/s1!73a2d >> the best new music, independent of the industry system – back this show on patreon Paypal to zaph@zaphmann.com heard in over 90 countries via independent stations (RSS)Pod-Subscribe for free here or embed/listen at…

[continuo-docs]

Music reviews by Laurent Fairon, April 2021

Ute Wassermann und Joke Lanz – Half Dead Half Alive (February 2021) Christian Marclay – Graffiti Composition (March 2021) Louis Dufort – Volume (March 2021) Makunouchi Bento – Post​-​Muzica 34 (April 2021)

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Ute Wassermann und Joke Lanz – Half Dead Half Alive - Live In Nickelsdorf (Klanggalerie) https://klanggalerie.bandcamp.com/album/half-dead-half-alive-live-in-nickelsdorf

Sound poetry and sound collage duet by German vocalist Ute Wassermann with Swiss turntablist and noise artist Joke Lanz, formerly of Sudden Infant and Schimpfluch groups, recorded live during a performance in Germany in 2019. Ute Wassermann's vocal range is astonishing, from high shrieks to gargling to deep low moans, and she proffers an incredible variety of utterances and noises here, while also complementing her vocals with toy instruments and bird whistles. Joke Lanz plays found vinyl records, special dubplates and sampler—perhaps the bespoke sampling function of a Technics turntable. Some sounds from records are recognizable, like child babble, film music, spoken word, accordion, Japanese shamisen traditional, or even techno, but most of the sampling only plays a fraction of a sound, sometimes reduced to a mere pulp or abstract texture. The duo's music is jumping all over the place in search of new sound combinations, and the album is constantly playful and fun throughout thanks to many unexpected U-turns.

Christian Marclay – Graffiti Composition (Superpang) https://superpang.bandcamp.com/album/christian-marclay-graffiti-composition

This is a new version of Christian Marclay's 1996 Graffiti Composition, a graphic score created from thousands of blank sheet music papers posted in Berlin streets for passers-by to graffiti over. Their anonymous contributions apparently included actual notated music and words as well as any kind of blotches Marclay eventually collected and assembled into a graphic score. Graffiti Composition was premiered in the UK in 2005 by an instrumental ensemble led by Steve Beresford, and then recorded by a New York guitar quintet including Elliott Sharp and Lee Ranaldo in 2006—also available on Bandcamp. This new version is interpreted here by British avant-garde music ensemble Apartment House, and they manage to elevate Graffiti Composition to a gorgeous sound art piece for piano, cello, flute, harp, synthesizer, toy instruments, vocal interjections and noises, all superbly played by ensemble members. While the score itself is a semi-aleatoric assemblage of unconnected abstract parts, it ultimately sounds here like a Fluxus event mixed with classical contemporary music. Apartment House leader Anton Lukoszevieze delivers a great performance on cello, yet he shall also be credited for providing coherence to the original collage work, here delivered as a decent piece of contemporary music in itself, both playful and great fun to listen.

Louis Dufort – Volume (Superpang) https://superpang.bandcamp.com/album/volume

Canadian Louis Dufort, born 1970 in Montréal, is a composer of electronic and electroacoustic music, contemporary instrumental music, as well as compositions combining electronic and acoustic instruments. His music is published by the Empreintes DIGITALes and Pogus labels, among others. Volume is a series of 5 electroacoustic compositions for environmental sound recordings and synthesizer, mingled into dense, homogenous textures with a variety of sound events occuring at all times. Spectacular electroacoustic sound treatments are at work here, with a profusion of radical EQ-ing, algorithmic sound processing effects and stereo positioning, all deliciously ear-tickling, especially on headphones. Unfortunately, both orginal location recordings—rain, stones, stones throwned into water, footsteps—and sound treatments are a tad too traditional and conform to the Empreintes DIGITALes dogma. While the music is cleverly assembled into a coherent whole, the end result is perhaps too polished and lacks diversity and excitement. This is still superb electroacoustic music but more originality and fresh ideas would have been welcomed.

Makunouchi Bento – Post​-​Muzica 34 (self released) https://makunouchibento.bandcamp.com/album/post-muzica-34

The duo of Felix Petrescu and Valentin Toma from Timișoara, Makunouchi Bento are the first experimental electronic musicians we heard from Romania 20 years ago—before that, us Westerners only knew of the Romanian composers like Iancu Dumitrescu, Ana-Maria Avram or Costin Miereanu. Post​-​Muzica 34 is a radiophonic sound art piece Makunouchi Bento created for a Romanian radio broadcast in April 2021. It is entirely based on environmental sound recordings from Timișoara, processed and assembled into an aural narrative, a portrait of their hometown. To the unexpected ear, the music might sound entirely electronic, but in fact is largely based on processed field recordings of trains, car engines, car horns, sirens, birds, animals in a zoo, voices, etc. All original sounds being heavily processed, you have to pay attention to recognize some of them. What you can't fail to notice, though, is the great variety of sound effects applied, the weird, fantastic sounds, and the Surrealist atmosphere of the piece, which is also remarkably assembled into a coherent narrative, almost like a hörspiel. My only complain is the lack of stereo use throughout, perhaps because this was an improvised live broadcast and the duo didn't care for stereo then. This petty drawback only adds to the vintage aspect of Post​-​Muzica 34, which brought to my mind echoes of Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna's "Ritratto di Città" [Portrait of a City], 1955, and even Walter Ruttman's silent movie "Berlin, Symphony of a Great City", 1927, in regard to the narrative form. An ambitious hörspiel, Post​-​Muzica 34 has that kind of historical-cum-avantgarde approach.