bowels no move & space-in-whale-in-space
[2007, mang-disc]

shea is from maine. the end. well, he also collaborates with id m theft able under the guise of shea and skot from maine. a little redundant, yes, but i don't have much to work with here.
the first of two tracks on this cd, bowels no move (a moving bowel poem), is both the shortest (at fourteen minutes) and the most involved (sounding). considering the oddness of the titles for these pieces of music, i was expecting something a bit crazier. while perhaps not as frenzied as skot's work, something pretty out there. what i'm hearing on this disc is rather restrained, and it's quite good. like i said, this first track has a bit more going on. there's quite a few different layers of digital squeals, blips and odd synth sounds. fourteen minutes of squeaky electronics might drive some people batty, but i don't think it's too bad.

the fifty minutes of space-in-whale is what i'm really enamored with, though. a slow, whirling synth tone marks the onset of the track. soon, multiple sustained tones come into play; some higher pitched, others panned, but it's all accompanied by background drones. real fucking good. the different stereo channel sounds as well as the panning are all done brilliantly, exponentially bettering the music. it will pretty much continue like this throughout, adding some lovely feedback every now and again. the beauty is the slow pace (thanks to the atmospheric drones) offset by the high pitch whines. i don't even mind the fact that it's so fucking long. it's the kind of track where if it played endlessly, i'd gladly drift along with it. no complaints.

Bowels No Move (A Moving Bowel Poem)

*works again.

podomatic has been utter shit lately, this time they "lost" everyone's media, so for now all of the old episodes are gone from that page. i still have them on my hard drive, though, thankfully. also, since they only allow 500mb of space, i'll have to start deleting older ones to make room for the new ones. i keep telling myself that i'll get a real webhost for this blog and podcast soon, but i continue to procrastinate.

this particular episode is rather heavy on honest to god songs. jeez, looking at the playlist, it's real fucking heavy. there are quite a few experimental noise tracks as well as some harsh noise. i saved the noise for the latter part (the loud noise, at least), for continuity's sake. standard fare genre-hopping as usual from me. you like that, right? ha.



buffy sainte-marie - house carpenter (0:00 to 3:40)
ed askew - fancy that (3:41 to 8:30)
liu fang - the romance of the red river valley (8:31 to 11:59)
morita doji - back light (12:00 to 14:38)
joe mcphee - blues for new chicago (14:39 to 20:07)
mississippi john hurt - got the blues (20:37 to 23:26)
the sonics - have love, will travel (23:27 to 25:58)
king khan & bbq show - into the snow (25:59 to 29:08)
miss ludella black - this room (29:09 to 31:55)
wanda jackson - fujiyama mama (31:56 to 34:06)
gum - injected by a certain amount of charisma (34:44 to 38:16)
amk & kitten on the keys - now & forever (38:17 to 40:18)
chop shop - hello (40:19 to 43:11)
russian tsarcasm - my life is as natural as my grip on the machete #1 (43:12 to 46:27)
blues control - end zone (46:28 to 52:33)
bad times - streets of iron (52:58 to 54:44)
teengenerate - let's get hurt (54:45 to 57:38)
urinals - dead flowers (57:39 to 58:34)
april march - chick habit (58:35 to 60:40)
fabienne delsol - catch me a rat (60:41 to 62:48)
anouk - jimmy est parti (62:49 to 64:31)
jung hyun and the men - grass (64:32 to 69:18)
octopus frontier - #5 (70:04 to 71:45)
locust sympathizer - wyoming 1873 (71:46 to 77:02)
pedestrian deposit - lurking behind doors (77:03 to 81:00)
fckn'bstrds - katsvast (81:01 to 82:15)
julian bradley - opener (82:16 to 85:48)
facialmess - dub specialist (86:16 to 89:15)

*i'd strongly recommend turning down your speakers a bit just before the 77:03 mark.

matt sent me this cd after i chatted with him a bit at the splinter squid affair; it turned out that he'd actually been to this site before, so that was cool.

070315ap01
[2007, self-released]

when i saw vancouver, washington's brizbomb (matt brislawn) at luna's cafe in sacramento earlier this year, he was decked out in a lab coat and plugging shit into what could only be described as the mother of all refrigerators. in actuality, it's just a big fucking rack. a big fucking rack pimped out with a fog machine and strobe lights. real nice. sadly, it looks like matt's taken off those bells and whistles, so it no longer looks like a partybot.

070315ap01 is one long, fifty-four minute, track which was recorded live from a performance on portland's kboo 90.7 fm.

while brizbomb regularly hobnobs and performs with noise artists, i think that his personal descriptor of experimental ambient suits what matt's doing. his music is high on atmosphere and will also implement some legitimate beats. it's his texturing along with the more experimental sounds that prevent 070315ap01 from becoming something more along the lines of techno. god forbid. just as the imagery of brizbomb's live performance projects futurism, his music follows suit. this starts off predominately with synthy sweeps and channel panning, producing an extraterrestrial vibe. eventually, those will become background fodder as the piece becomes drony and fixed. there will continue to be some interplay between the two distinct sounds until the sci-fi noises fade out completely once the slow paced rhythm makes its entry. despite having a deep throbbing bass that could rattle a few trunks, the music will stay nicely mellow thanks to the ambient background sounds and drones. once the beats give way, i really got into the dual channels of sputtery synth along with the delayed atmospherics. matter of fact, i really love the entire second half of this. there's still a few different things happening in that time frame, but they're of a more droning variety. there are a couple of rhythmic segments that will pop up, but they're rather brief, until the last one, which closes out the disc. that one is more along the lines of the first entry, but skewed just a bit.
my only gripe is that this disc is fifty-four minutes long for one track. yet, i've still managed to listen to 070315ap01 about five times now. i enjoyed the alien synth sounds combined with the great ambient synth work and drones. while experimental music of a sci-fi vein (especially when you factor in the presence of beats!) has a strong tendency to come off a bit hackneyed, matt managed to deftly avoid that. i liked this quite a bit, but this review is coming from someone who listens to the original dr. who theme song for pleasure and wants to dub the soundtrack to reanimator.

Clip 1
Clip 2
Clip 3
Clip 4

(i'm hotlinking these from brizbomb's website because i am lazy)

brizbomb in the shed

ostrowski was nice enough to send me an advanced copy of his new release, which comes out tomorrow. i'm amazed that i was able to review this (i.e. was not slow) before it became available.

magnificent forest cd / dvd
[2007, self-released]

seattle's eric ostrowski is a free improv musician (guitar and violin) as well as a filmmaker. he might be more known for his work as half of the duo noggin, with michael griffen. health issues with griffen have, unfortunately, shelved that project.

magnificent forest is a reference to, well, the magnificent forest in seward park, here in seattle. there's a lot of visual imagery related to flora, from the leafy cover art to the pictures in the insert booklet, suggesting that if it's not conceptual, it is at least inspired by the mystique of the forest. with this in mind, eric's choice of instrumentation, the violin, seems like a curious one for such an homage. even more so when it's played with the kind of reckless abandon which paul flaherty reserves for the sax; squeals and screeches aplenty throughout these thirty-four tracks, which are spread out over seventy-four minutes. (nearly) needless to say, it's an exhaustive listen. it doesn't really seem like the kind of album that you'd put on to listen to from beginning to end, i've got to think that listener fatigue would become an issue. i had to spread it out over the course of two days, but that was because i didn't have the time to listen to it all.

usually, free-improv skree (especially of the saxophone variety) comes off better in a group setting. when it's as stripped down as it is on this cd, you're taking more of a gamble, appealing to a smaller portion of individuals. of course, you can subtract from that number once you factor in this disc's length, but i actually like this quite a bit. i love the violin and i'm sure that that helps. despite the fact that magnificent forest is devoid of noticeable structure, there are several pieces of music here which will stand out. this is why i think that it's best to take the music in small chunks. you're more liable to focus in on a handful of tracks than you are if you just consume it in its entirety.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

after watching the dvd, it would appear that the cd portion of magnificent forest is ancillary. i did enjoy it, but the dvd's impact is less ephemeral. the main section of the dvd features music "videos", while the bonus features are a pair of silent videos, a little home movie, and a film short. this disc won't recycle the material from the cd (with the exception of woodpecker, which was the only track that did not feature the violin), but instead we're treated to some really good experimental noise (with only a few deviations).

much like eric's music is experimental, his visual art doesn't miss a beat. the best descriptors that i could offer up would be colorful and manic. if you're prone to fits of epilepsy, stay far, far away from these videos. i don't know anything about filmmaking, or techniques thereof, but i believe that what he's doing is called monoprinting. it seems like a lot of the pieces involve painting on film strips (and recording the movement of it at high speeds) as well as manipulating / distorting some of those strips. the results are definitely visual eye candy, bursting forth with beautiful colors and shapes which constantly (and rapidly) evolve.
this is not just artiness for artiness' sake, however; there are themes in the films' titles which will emerge, some subtly, others more obviously. for instance, in bumblebee you'll be able to see a flash of a painted bumblebee as the film strip quickly races upward. blink and you'll miss it as it mutates into mere traces of that original image, until surrendering to a swell of yellow and black colors. the musical accompaniment also has a buzzing sound, fully establishing the theme. on bamboo, pine and cedar, and the latter portion of skull and blackberries, eric will incorporate those actual sources. for the skull part, he'll use a drawing of a skull. most of the imagery is from really close-up and would appear microscopic at times. it kind of makes you feel like you're watching a cool version of nova.

daisies will use a painting of those flowers, but turn it into the most haunting film about flowers that i could imagine. what really gives it that aura is the harrowing violin music. the screechy drones combined with stop-motion cinematography (with the angle rotating continually), as well as the darker hues just give it a nice creepy factor. if i don't have nightmares about daisies trying to kill me, i'll be surprised.the fourteen minute long sidewalkography also has a gloomy vibe to it. credit for that is owed to the soundtrack by garek druss ((a) story of rats) as well as the dark hues of the film: purple, black, grays and the occasional deep reds. a lot of people are listed as being sidewalkographers at the end of this, including some notable musicians bryan eubanks and leif sundstrum (aka god), but i'm not quite sure what being a sidewalkographer entailed. there were times that i thought i could make out faces and the shapes of bodies during the film, but that could be my mind playing tricks on me.

the final piece on the dvd is the turtle shell and it will break form, substantially. this one, draped in lovely sepia tones and film grains, is mostly of eric playing the violin outside, but interspersed, periodically, are more artistic shots and effects, making it a whole lot more interesting.
pink elephant, the short film in the bonus features, is easily one of my favorites. it's a sped up and spliced together vignette which was shot from the inside of a car. you're looking out of the windshield (there's an ever present doll holding a pink elephant on the dashboard) as the car zooms about on a lovely afternoon. the terrific, upbeat (yet, still slightly forlorn) acoustic guitar music really drives the whole thing home, so to speak.

while i had initially gotten it into my head that this was going to be somehow related to the magnificent forest, i realize that it was more of an overture than anything else. what really matters is that this was a visual delight, and the music on it played more than just a supplementary role as both aspects played off of each other perfectly. definitely recommended.

not from the dvd