Thursday, June 01, 2006
astromero
self-titled
[2006, tronks/p tapes]
i’ve come up with two possible explanations for why damion romero, and astromero, his ten years running collaboration with hiroshi hasegawa (aka astro, formerly of c.c.c.c.), continues to amaze me in a way that only a handful of noise and related artists do:
1) damion’s skills with (seemingly) simple and straightforward low end synth drones far surpass nearly everyone else in noise and avant-electronics. he has spent a good part of his life obsessively exploring and studying them, and understands how to harness them in ways one could only through years of dedication.
2) damion is not some kind of obsessive master craftsman, but just one of the only people around sharp enough to realize that certain synth tones let go for minutes straight with only very minor changes can be way heavier than many other sonic ideas which would involve way more obvious, visible effort.
i have no idea if either of these are actually the case. and although i can’t stop wondering every time i put this on, it really doesn’t matter. this double cd is hands down the single awesomest new record i’ve heard all year and the one of the most glorious head trips of recent memory. these guys are operating on an entirely different level than the masses of fairly predictable, straight ahead knob-noodlers. this shit is seriously intense.
there are 4 tracks here, each somewhere between a little under 20 and a little over 30 minutes. its two dudes on custom analog synths, much of it droney and minimal sections transitioning into glorious, distorted noise crunch, with a heaping spoonful of analog squiggles and blips mixed in. huge, focused builds, huge climaxes, and beyond-formless synth jams. i really don’t know how to describe any of the more superficial aspects of astromero in a way which gets across the focus, the heaviness, and the even more indescribable emotion at work here, so i’m not even going to try. call it lazy journalism if you want, but this is pretty much beyond any worthy description as far as i’m concerned.
for a while i couldn’t figure out what made the finest points on these two discs so totally overwhelming, so i kept relistening hoping some more of damion and hiroshi’s wisdom would reveal itself. i’m around listen number ten right now, and it’s finally beginning to make sense to me. there’s an idea at work here, particularly on the two almost religious tracks which begin and end this album, which is so simple, but so, so perfectly executed.
i’m not going to spoil your potential fun and explain any more, you should instead get this and spend some time with it yourself. when you listen to someone like, say, daniel menche, or merzbow, much of what makes their records so engaging is immediately engaging and, dare i say, in some sense even accessible. when i listen to a record by either of these artists, i can usually articulate a lot of what i like about it on first listen before the record is even over. it is an entirely different and even more satisfying thing to be blown away by something, but still have no adequate way to explain why until you’ve spent days or weeks willfully struggling with it.
Astral Fight Excerpt (from 0:00 to 10:00)
reviewed by newfangled
[2006, tronks/p tapes]
i’ve come up with two possible explanations for why damion romero, and astromero, his ten years running collaboration with hiroshi hasegawa (aka astro, formerly of c.c.c.c.), continues to amaze me in a way that only a handful of noise and related artists do:1) damion’s skills with (seemingly) simple and straightforward low end synth drones far surpass nearly everyone else in noise and avant-electronics. he has spent a good part of his life obsessively exploring and studying them, and understands how to harness them in ways one could only through years of dedication.
2) damion is not some kind of obsessive master craftsman, but just one of the only people around sharp enough to realize that certain synth tones let go for minutes straight with only very minor changes can be way heavier than many other sonic ideas which would involve way more obvious, visible effort.
i have no idea if either of these are actually the case. and although i can’t stop wondering every time i put this on, it really doesn’t matter. this double cd is hands down the single awesomest new record i’ve heard all year and the one of the most glorious head trips of recent memory. these guys are operating on an entirely different level than the masses of fairly predictable, straight ahead knob-noodlers. this shit is seriously intense.
there are 4 tracks here, each somewhere between a little under 20 and a little over 30 minutes. its two dudes on custom analog synths, much of it droney and minimal sections transitioning into glorious, distorted noise crunch, with a heaping spoonful of analog squiggles and blips mixed in. huge, focused builds, huge climaxes, and beyond-formless synth jams. i really don’t know how to describe any of the more superficial aspects of astromero in a way which gets across the focus, the heaviness, and the even more indescribable emotion at work here, so i’m not even going to try. call it lazy journalism if you want, but this is pretty much beyond any worthy description as far as i’m concerned.
for a while i couldn’t figure out what made the finest points on these two discs so totally overwhelming, so i kept relistening hoping some more of damion and hiroshi’s wisdom would reveal itself. i’m around listen number ten right now, and it’s finally beginning to make sense to me. there’s an idea at work here, particularly on the two almost religious tracks which begin and end this album, which is so simple, but so, so perfectly executed.
i’m not going to spoil your potential fun and explain any more, you should instead get this and spend some time with it yourself. when you listen to someone like, say, daniel menche, or merzbow, much of what makes their records so engaging is immediately engaging and, dare i say, in some sense even accessible. when i listen to a record by either of these artists, i can usually articulate a lot of what i like about it on first listen before the record is even over. it is an entirely different and even more satisfying thing to be blown away by something, but still have no adequate way to explain why until you’ve spent days or weeks willfully struggling with it.Astral Fight Excerpt (from 0:00 to 10:00)
reviewed by newfangled
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
len lye
composing motion
[2006, atoll]
of all the nz art heroes, lye had the quality which'd most appeal to the noise generation: reckless ambition. he pioneered abstract film and sculpture, but the sheer obsessive vision of it all seemed to have alienated him a little from, at least, the nz public. not to say that, as nz artists go, he hasn't got his share of recognition; it's just you'll generally find lye and
his legacy embodied in quietly spectacular kinetic sculptures around the country. the most famous installations of his writhe to their own individual logics, but it's a logic that's easier to identify with cool consideration than lye's somewhat impulsive legend.
given all that, you'd be forgiven for expecting shades of the pythagorean "harmony of the spheres", with large bodies quietly carving out balletic sound trails in the air. not so, as the new atoll reissue throws that expectation back in your face and returns to a wilder, unregulated vision of the sculptor. motion here isn't so much in service of visual aesthetic than it is in generating strange and unusual sounds. trilogy, for one, is a killer: a giant looped belt of metal hangs innocuously from the ceiling, rotating, it slowly gathers speed until the metal twists wildly as the forces increase. peaking at a near freight-train roar before the momentum rips the twists out, the sight's apparently enough to scare the shit out of onlookers and gallery staff alike.
more sedate are the grass and big blade sculptures; thin strips of steel serving as a mimic in grass, while big blade acts as a giant repeating gong of sorts, heard here in an isolated spot amid
a swarm of cicadas. there are some less successful pieces amongst it all, as you might expect, but as a whole it most resembles a sculptural analogue to the portfolios of sound put out by the modern free-improv crowd. unlike that scene though, the liner notes anchor the sounds to their sculptures, laying out photos and details of each. definitely worth a look, and refreshingly, this time it doesn't cost sweaty fistfuls of cash like their lilburn reissue.
Blade
reviewed by blackandgold
[2006, atoll]
of all the nz art heroes, lye had the quality which'd most appeal to the noise generation: reckless ambition. he pioneered abstract film and sculpture, but the sheer obsessive vision of it all seemed to have alienated him a little from, at least, the nz public. not to say that, as nz artists go, he hasn't got his share of recognition; it's just you'll generally find lye and
his legacy embodied in quietly spectacular kinetic sculptures around the country. the most famous installations of his writhe to their own individual logics, but it's a logic that's easier to identify with cool consideration than lye's somewhat impulsive legend.given all that, you'd be forgiven for expecting shades of the pythagorean "harmony of the spheres", with large bodies quietly carving out balletic sound trails in the air. not so, as the new atoll reissue throws that expectation back in your face and returns to a wilder, unregulated vision of the sculptor. motion here isn't so much in service of visual aesthetic than it is in generating strange and unusual sounds. trilogy, for one, is a killer: a giant looped belt of metal hangs innocuously from the ceiling, rotating, it slowly gathers speed until the metal twists wildly as the forces increase. peaking at a near freight-train roar before the momentum rips the twists out, the sight's apparently enough to scare the shit out of onlookers and gallery staff alike.
more sedate are the grass and big blade sculptures; thin strips of steel serving as a mimic in grass, while big blade acts as a giant repeating gong of sorts, heard here in an isolated spot amid
a swarm of cicadas. there are some less successful pieces amongst it all, as you might expect, but as a whole it most resembles a sculptural analogue to the portfolios of sound put out by the modern free-improv crowd. unlike that scene though, the liner notes anchor the sounds to their sculptures, laying out photos and details of each. definitely worth a look, and refreshingly, this time it doesn't cost sweaty fistfuls of cash like their lilburn reissue.Blade
reviewed by blackandgold
max eisenberg
internal breeding
[2006, oceans of missouri]
max eisenberg is the newest addition to twig harper and carly ptak’s baltimore, maryland based nautical almanac, who have been making their special brand of 3-d sound explorations with a mess of junk scraps and intentionally half-broken electronic and acoustic instruments as a duo since the late 90s. i can’t say i know exactly what the premise was for twig and carly to invite max into their most fully formed project, but after checking out this release it’s looks like he’d be a good fit as a full-time addition to their group.
each of the eight tracks on this cd revolves around a different texture or idea which max stumbles upon and toys with to its natural one to four minute end. aside from tracks one and five, which are both totally lovely, lofi crackly-crunchy field recordings of (i think) a windy field in which an airplane passes closely overhead, every piece is quite different from every other,
ranging from pretty, calming vocal cut ups to ring modulated oscillator blasts to a small onslaught of menacing high end mouse squeaks. It’s all at least vaguely reminiscent of nautical almanac in terms of the kinds of sounds he gets, but where na, particularly their last major maxless release rooting for the microbes, seem to have set out to antagonize, or at least mentally exhaust, much of their already noise-conditioned audience (not that that’s a bad thing), this feels much more like one man’s solitary, introspective expression of his current state of existence a la kites’ royal paint for the metallic gardener...
also like kites’ chris forgues, max is something of a visual artist, and the cd comes packaged in a big white envelope with a booklet of reproductions of max’s drawings on lined notebook paper. while his art is not stunning in the way that the album artwork of royal paint is, nor does it try to be, the more I look at them the more i enjoy max’s scribbly pencil drawings (my favorite one so far is a cartoon of a man with a pretzel shaped face, eyes full of tears, captioned in humorless bubble letters, “I’ve been a pretzel my whole goddam life”). there’s a certain sadness and an intentional ugliness to them, but they have a childlike sense of freedom and unselfconsciousness which is hard to come by, in spirit not unlike paperrad’s drawings and comics.
the more i think about it the more i realize that the point of the drawings, and the sounds, are not necessarily to please the audience with any notion of artistic merit (even by most avant-garde electronics standards) but to give a very close, flaws-and-all look into the person of max eisenberg, an experience which ends up being in many ways richer than that which you get from the work of many experimenters and improvisers with a more meticulous or carefully orchestrated approach.
Untitled Track Four
reviewed by newfangled
[2006, oceans of missouri]
max eisenberg is the newest addition to twig harper and carly ptak’s baltimore, maryland based nautical almanac, who have been making their special brand of 3-d sound explorations with a mess of junk scraps and intentionally half-broken electronic and acoustic instruments as a duo since the late 90s. i can’t say i know exactly what the premise was for twig and carly to invite max into their most fully formed project, but after checking out this release it’s looks like he’d be a good fit as a full-time addition to their group.
each of the eight tracks on this cd revolves around a different texture or idea which max stumbles upon and toys with to its natural one to four minute end. aside from tracks one and five, which are both totally lovely, lofi crackly-crunchy field recordings of (i think) a windy field in which an airplane passes closely overhead, every piece is quite different from every other,
ranging from pretty, calming vocal cut ups to ring modulated oscillator blasts to a small onslaught of menacing high end mouse squeaks. It’s all at least vaguely reminiscent of nautical almanac in terms of the kinds of sounds he gets, but where na, particularly their last major maxless release rooting for the microbes, seem to have set out to antagonize, or at least mentally exhaust, much of their already noise-conditioned audience (not that that’s a bad thing), this feels much more like one man’s solitary, introspective expression of his current state of existence a la kites’ royal paint for the metallic gardener...also like kites’ chris forgues, max is something of a visual artist, and the cd comes packaged in a big white envelope with a booklet of reproductions of max’s drawings on lined notebook paper. while his art is not stunning in the way that the album artwork of royal paint is, nor does it try to be, the more I look at them the more i enjoy max’s scribbly pencil drawings (my favorite one so far is a cartoon of a man with a pretzel shaped face, eyes full of tears, captioned in humorless bubble letters, “I’ve been a pretzel my whole goddam life”). there’s a certain sadness and an intentional ugliness to them, but they have a childlike sense of freedom and unselfconsciousness which is hard to come by, in spirit not unlike paperrad’s drawings and comics.
the more i think about it the more i realize that the point of the drawings, and the sounds, are not necessarily to please the audience with any notion of artistic merit (even by most avant-garde electronics standards) but to give a very close, flaws-and-all look into the person of max eisenberg, an experience which ends up being in many ways richer than that which you get from the work of many experimenters and improvisers with a more meticulous or carefully orchestrated approach.Untitled Track Four
reviewed by newfangled
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
impregnable
beauty stone c15
[2006, iatrogenesis]
los angeles noisemaker impregnable, jeffrey d. witscher, is one of the area's more notable newcomers. making himself known with his unrelenting harsh noise. in addition to his solo noise project, he's in rainbow blanket and also runs the callow god label.
when i saw this cassette i thought to myself, i like impregnable a lot, i'll pick this up, i know what i'm getting into. come to find out, no, i did not know what i was getting into. side a starts off with a..wait..what..an organ? okay, maybe it's just like the beginning of the smile she says 7 inch, a little sample to pull you off guard and then bam! full on harsh noise. two minutes in...i'm still waiting... 
beauty stone is impregnable's first excursion into ambient music, atleast as far as his recordings go. gone is the dense noise. feedback, non-existant. what we're treated to instead is a very welcomed change of pace. with it's warm drones and organs, the tape has a very soothing affect. definitely not what i had expected, but i'm not complaining at all. (my girlfriend said it 'sounds like church music'. not quite, but it does have a heavenly feel to it). the b side, while still ambient, has some darker undertones to it, but it's still great.
the tracklisting shows titles for four tracks, but they all kind of blend together. i think i did a decent job of chopping the songs up at the right part, but who knows. it sounds good to me.
Femoral
[2006, iatrogenesis]
los angeles noisemaker impregnable, jeffrey d. witscher, is one of the area's more notable newcomers. making himself known with his unrelenting harsh noise. in addition to his solo noise project, he's in rainbow blanket and also runs the callow god label.
when i saw this cassette i thought to myself, i like impregnable a lot, i'll pick this up, i know what i'm getting into. come to find out, no, i did not know what i was getting into. side a starts off with a..wait..what..an organ? okay, maybe it's just like the beginning of the smile she says 7 inch, a little sample to pull you off guard and then bam! full on harsh noise. two minutes in...i'm still waiting... beauty stone is impregnable's first excursion into ambient music, atleast as far as his recordings go. gone is the dense noise. feedback, non-existant. what we're treated to instead is a very welcomed change of pace. with it's warm drones and organs, the tape has a very soothing affect. definitely not what i had expected, but i'm not complaining at all. (my girlfriend said it 'sounds like church music'. not quite, but it does have a heavenly feel to it). the b side, while still ambient, has some darker undertones to it, but it's still great.the tracklisting shows titles for four tracks, but they all kind of blend together. i think i did a decent job of chopping the songs up at the right part, but who knows. it sounds good to me.
Femoral