Tuesday, January 16, 2007
andrew liles and kenji siratori
black paper
[2006, beta-lactam ring]
andrew liles, from the uk, is an experimental sound artist with a pretty diverse output. i'm only familiar with a few of his releases, but they ranged from sound art, to ambient soundscapes, drone, experimental electronics and the occasional foray into noisier directions. so
me good points of reference, as far as his ambient and drone works are concerned, would be andrew chalk and vidna obmana, two artists he's also happened to work with.
kenji siratori is a japanese cyberpunk author who's had a hell of an outpouring of non-paper releases last year. this is mostly because he pimped himself out by "writing to as many industrial, ambient, ebm and goth bands he could find, including "reviews" of them in his idiosyncratic style, and asking to collaborate. (this) scattergun approach proved successful, despite his reviews of non-sequitirs and non-sensical cyberspeak being interchangeable" [discogs.com]. after all was said and done he'd put out fifteen total albums, including three that are on net labels and are availiable to download for free at smell the stench and dystonia. the bulk of them have been in the form of collaborations, most notably with gx jupitter-larsen (the haters), torturing nurse and henrik nordvargr björkk (hh9, folkstorm, mz.412, et al.). i would be surprised if that last one is anything short of amazing. i...must...stop...buying...things...
black paper opens up with barometer ii, a beautifully haunting piano piece by liles, which siratori soon begins speaking over. his words are all spoken in japanese. emphasis on spoken. this could be poetry or god knows what, but it sounds great. he's got this gruff sounding voice that imm
ediately made me think of splinter's voice from the teenage mutant ninja turtles movies. i love it. there's some great layering of his vocals near the end, too.
vtr is one of the least musical (most experimental) cuts on here. there's a whole mess of noises, electronic bleeps and textures from andrew, and kenji's vocals are affected, in parts, and panned all over. it easily has the most overall stuff going on at once, but it works well, due partly to how andrew progresses it. if that was the album's exercise in maximalism (i think i just made that word up), the title piece is its most rhythmic. half of this piece features with some very catchy xylophone (i'm guessing) playing, the rest focuses on kenji's vocals, manipulated the most here. one of my favorite parts is where its just him with no music, and there's also his sped up vocals shooting back and forth between the speakers.
jaguar is black paper's absolute highlight. over liles' sparse backdrop there's a vocal track in the left speaker, a different one in the right, a repetitious one in the center and then another, different track in the center. it's completely hypnotic, wonderful and memorable. then when that piano comes in towards the end, jaguar achieves total brilliance. it all strikes me as being rather noir, while maintaining an underlying sense of beauty. the next two tracks mainly feature andrew doing some nice, slightly stark, experimental electronic work. the closer, barometer iii is vocal less and revises the pianos from barometer ii, but adds some terrific electronic noises over it.
there's actually two separate collaborations by kenji siratori with the title black paper, the other is with tardive dyskinesia. that may cause a bit of confusion, but this one is only available from andrew liles' website or beta-lactam ring. it's part of andrew's 12 cd set, the vortex vault, limited to only 300 copies. once those 300 are gone, that's it. no reissues. i think if you get one from andrew it will be signed by him.
i'd also recommend his collaboration with gx. while it's not as memorable as this one here, there's some mighty fine noise by him, and who doesn't like mighty fine noise? after hearing all of this from kenji i've definitely become interested in his literary work...at the very least it should be interesting.
VTR
(you can also stream the entire album, or maybe just excerpts from each song, at beta's site here. either way that's very nice of them.)
[2006, beta-lactam ring]
andrew liles, from the uk, is an experimental sound artist with a pretty diverse output. i'm only familiar with a few of his releases, but they ranged from sound art, to ambient soundscapes, drone, experimental electronics and the occasional foray into noisier directions. so
me good points of reference, as far as his ambient and drone works are concerned, would be andrew chalk and vidna obmana, two artists he's also happened to work with.kenji siratori is a japanese cyberpunk author who's had a hell of an outpouring of non-paper releases last year. this is mostly because he pimped himself out by "writing to as many industrial, ambient, ebm and goth bands he could find, including "reviews" of them in his idiosyncratic style, and asking to collaborate. (this) scattergun approach proved successful, despite his reviews of non-sequitirs and non-sensical cyberspeak being interchangeable" [discogs.com]. after all was said and done he'd put out fifteen total albums, including three that are on net labels and are availiable to download for free at smell the stench and dystonia. the bulk of them have been in the form of collaborations, most notably with gx jupitter-larsen (the haters), torturing nurse and henrik nordvargr björkk (hh9, folkstorm, mz.412, et al.). i would be surprised if that last one is anything short of amazing. i...must...stop...buying...things...
black paper opens up with barometer ii, a beautifully haunting piano piece by liles, which siratori soon begins speaking over. his words are all spoken in japanese. emphasis on spoken. this could be poetry or god knows what, but it sounds great. he's got this gruff sounding voice that imm
ediately made me think of splinter's voice from the teenage mutant ninja turtles movies. i love it. there's some great layering of his vocals near the end, too. vtr is one of the least musical (most experimental) cuts on here. there's a whole mess of noises, electronic bleeps and textures from andrew, and kenji's vocals are affected, in parts, and panned all over. it easily has the most overall stuff going on at once, but it works well, due partly to how andrew progresses it. if that was the album's exercise in maximalism (i think i just made that word up), the title piece is its most rhythmic. half of this piece features with some very catchy xylophone (i'm guessing) playing, the rest focuses on kenji's vocals, manipulated the most here. one of my favorite parts is where its just him with no music, and there's also his sped up vocals shooting back and forth between the speakers.
jaguar is black paper's absolute highlight. over liles' sparse backdrop there's a vocal track in the left speaker, a different one in the right, a repetitious one in the center and then another, different track in the center. it's completely hypnotic, wonderful and memorable. then when that piano comes in towards the end, jaguar achieves total brilliance. it all strikes me as being rather noir, while maintaining an underlying sense of beauty. the next two tracks mainly feature andrew doing some nice, slightly stark, experimental electronic work. the closer, barometer iii is vocal less and revises the pianos from barometer ii, but adds some terrific electronic noises over it.
there's actually two separate collaborations by kenji siratori with the title black paper, the other is with tardive dyskinesia. that may cause a bit of confusion, but this one is only available from andrew liles' website or beta-lactam ring. it's part of andrew's 12 cd set, the vortex vault, limited to only 300 copies. once those 300 are gone, that's it. no reissues. i think if you get one from andrew it will be signed by him.
i'd also recommend his collaboration with gx. while it's not as memorable as this one here, there's some mighty fine noise by him, and who doesn't like mighty fine noise? after hearing all of this from kenji i've definitely become interested in his literary work...at the very least it should be interesting.
VTR
(you can also stream the entire album, or maybe just excerpts from each song, at beta's site here. either way that's very nice of them.)
Monday, January 15, 2007
seht and stelzer
exactly what you lost
[2006, intransitive recordings]
boston, mass. is the home of experimental/avant-gardist howard stelzer. howie's probably more known amongst the erstwhile set due to collaborations with jason talbot, giuseppe ielasi,
frans de waard (kapotte muziek), richard francis, joseph hammer, bhob rainey, brendan murray & jay sullivan (as ouest, and as skeletons out; sans murray) and greg kelley (heathen shame), but he's also no stranger to harsher territory as evidenced by 2004's surprising pairing with phil blankenship (the cherry point). when he's not making music he's putting it out on his excellent intransitive label. i guess here he did both.
stelzer's joined this time out by wellington, new zealand's cd-r afficionado seht, aka stephen clover. while seht is stephen's solo working name, he's also in the nz "improvised psychedelic doom noise rock" (their words, not mine) supergroup the stumps, with antony milton (the pseudoarcana label, a.m. , mrtyu!, the nether dawn, claypipe, paintings of indian windows, black boned angel, with throats as fine as needles and swagger jack (possibly others)), and they are joined lastly by james kirk (sandoz lab technicians, king loser, the dead c, gate (with michael morley) and also black boned angel). oh, there was also seht's duo with ross kettle as the longshoremen. outside of those two groups i haven't really seen seht do any one-off collaborations with anyone before.
exactly what you lost really gets off to a great start right from the onset as we're instantly greeted with the always welcomed sound of cassettes being sped up and tape hiss. this three minute opener mainly just serves as a showcase for stelzer's tape manipulations, but he's damn good, as was this piece. the second track calms things down quite a bit as it has seht [pictured below] treading familiar water with a lovely blissed out drone paired with some minimal noisy effects lurking just below
the surface. the combination of a looped piece of music in the background, a gorgeous drone and the subtle electronic effects were already enough to make this a highlight, but then howie cranks up the noise and manipulations for the last minute and a half, providing an outstanding ending for a great track.
the fifth piece, which closes out the disc, clocks in at a monstrous twenty-six minutes, but stephen and howie do a great job of making you hardly even notice it's that long. starting off dominated by drones, it slowly begins to unravel more layers; namely field recordings and denser distortion. after six minutes have gone by, they throw a loop of music into the right channel that doesn't repeat over and over, but returns periodically. at eleven minutes things switch up pretty drastically (a main reason that you won't really notice the track's length). it's still centered around drones, but the tone now is quite a bit noisier and there's additional noises going on again in the right channel. for the most part everything that's laid out on top (or underneath) the drones, takes place in the right channel on this one. while the sound of everything else may have changed, the bird calls and that musical loop still remain, tying the track together quite nicely. the last six minutes appear to be dominated by stelzer as the drones fade out, leaving a more ambientish background that he then applies some great noise and manipulations to, sending this album off on a high note.
the general vibe over most of these tracks is a slow one, but there's nary a dull moment to be found. exactly what you lost is two people doing what they do best, together, and the results make for an album you shouldn't miss out on.
one thing worth mentioning is that this was a mail collaboration. the two exchanged tapes back and forth over the course of a year and this is the result. there was no set idea for how the album was to turn out or any real direction of any kind. to that i say, simply enough, wow. each of the tracks comes off extremely fluid and for them to just merely bounce pieces of music off of each other, put this together and have it be as good as it is, that's impressive. hopefully, they'll work together again in the future because there's definitely some great chemistry here.
Untitled Track 4
[2006, intransitive recordings]
boston, mass. is the home of experimental/avant-gardist howard stelzer. howie's probably more known amongst the erstwhile set due to collaborations with jason talbot, giuseppe ielasi,
frans de waard (kapotte muziek), richard francis, joseph hammer, bhob rainey, brendan murray & jay sullivan (as ouest, and as skeletons out; sans murray) and greg kelley (heathen shame), but he's also no stranger to harsher territory as evidenced by 2004's surprising pairing with phil blankenship (the cherry point). when he's not making music he's putting it out on his excellent intransitive label. i guess here he did both.stelzer's joined this time out by wellington, new zealand's cd-r afficionado seht, aka stephen clover. while seht is stephen's solo working name, he's also in the nz "improvised psychedelic doom noise rock" (their words, not mine) supergroup the stumps, with antony milton (the pseudoarcana label, a.m. , mrtyu!, the nether dawn, claypipe, paintings of indian windows, black boned angel, with throats as fine as needles and swagger jack (possibly others)), and they are joined lastly by james kirk (sandoz lab technicians, king loser, the dead c, gate (with michael morley) and also black boned angel). oh, there was also seht's duo with ross kettle as the longshoremen. outside of those two groups i haven't really seen seht do any one-off collaborations with anyone before.
exactly what you lost really gets off to a great start right from the onset as we're instantly greeted with the always welcomed sound of cassettes being sped up and tape hiss. this three minute opener mainly just serves as a showcase for stelzer's tape manipulations, but he's damn good, as was this piece. the second track calms things down quite a bit as it has seht [pictured below] treading familiar water with a lovely blissed out drone paired with some minimal noisy effects lurking just below
the surface. the combination of a looped piece of music in the background, a gorgeous drone and the subtle electronic effects were already enough to make this a highlight, but then howie cranks up the noise and manipulations for the last minute and a half, providing an outstanding ending for a great track.the fifth piece, which closes out the disc, clocks in at a monstrous twenty-six minutes, but stephen and howie do a great job of making you hardly even notice it's that long. starting off dominated by drones, it slowly begins to unravel more layers; namely field recordings and denser distortion. after six minutes have gone by, they throw a loop of music into the right channel that doesn't repeat over and over, but returns periodically. at eleven minutes things switch up pretty drastically (a main reason that you won't really notice the track's length). it's still centered around drones, but the tone now is quite a bit noisier and there's additional noises going on again in the right channel. for the most part everything that's laid out on top (or underneath) the drones, takes place in the right channel on this one. while the sound of everything else may have changed, the bird calls and that musical loop still remain, tying the track together quite nicely. the last six minutes appear to be dominated by stelzer as the drones fade out, leaving a more ambientish background that he then applies some great noise and manipulations to, sending this album off on a high note.
the general vibe over most of these tracks is a slow one, but there's nary a dull moment to be found. exactly what you lost is two people doing what they do best, together, and the results make for an album you shouldn't miss out on.
one thing worth mentioning is that this was a mail collaboration. the two exchanged tapes back and forth over the course of a year and this is the result. there was no set idea for how the album was to turn out or any real direction of any kind. to that i say, simply enough, wow. each of the tracks comes off extremely fluid and for them to just merely bounce pieces of music off of each other, put this together and have it be as good as it is, that's impressive. hopefully, they'll work together again in the future because there's definitely some great chemistry here.
Untitled Track 4