hey, i actually got an advanced copy of something! from a publicist? and i'm doing the review before it actually comes out (january 22nd)? wow, seems so very official.

v1.1
[2008, other electricities]

the name fessenden might not mean anything to most people just yet, but this two thirds chicago, one third new york-based trio has some cred. most of it coming by way of steven hess. hess is a member of mark nelson's post-labradford project pan american (since 2004-ish, i believe) and the free improv outfit, the dropp ensemble. that latter group is more of a collective whose prominent members (to me) are éric la casa, ken vandermark, adam sonderberg (civil war) and wolfgang fuchs. steven's also involved in haptic with joseph clayton mills (dropp ensemble) and sonderberg. out of everyone's splinter-groups, i liked this one the most. i also love the fact that they have bloodyminded as one of their top friends on myspace. there's also on with french musician sylvain chauveau. sole new yorker joshua convey doesn't appear to have a whole lot out there, aside from a solo disc, vacant integument, released this year on utech, which sounds really good from what i've heard. the last member, stephen fiehn, has a few things going on: work (a duo with hess) as well as the experimental performance theatre duo cupola bobber, with tyler myers.
fessenden aren't breaking any new ground on their debut studio album of ambient experimental electronic music, but they are showing a nice knack for making it. besides, i've always favored execution over originality, but that's a whole other discussion in itself. i think that the only problem with music like this is that it's conducive to beats. ambient electronic is only a hop, skip and a jump from becoming "techno" (or idm, depending on how asinine you are)... well, maybe it's more like just a hop. for the most part this trio will hold back, but they do have a percussionist amongst their ranks, so it's not completely devoid of rhythm, but like i said, it's held in check, for the most part.

much like the title might lead you to think, not sleeping, just resting, gets the disc underway in a minimal fashion. the base is a deep, lulling, pulsating tone which will turn into a dronier soundscape. buried underneath that is a brief rhythmic loop that'll eventually make it's way to the front, as it continually echoes out of range. the combination of both of those elements creates a brooding vibe. additionally, i like the barely audible sample (sounds like a child, maybe, but not annoying) and the last minute of just resting features nice sustained tone work which will fade in and out of the mix.

the ten minute long mid-swing is fessenden's one real foray into rhythmic electronic music, and i actually don't mind it. i'm thankful that the big 808 bass sound is mixed way down, creating a much milder thump than it's surely capable of. in addition to that are skittery sounds that are more akin to ambient techno. it might sound a little sketchy at this point, but it's just starting to become more layered. there's minimal noises in the background along with a much needed (or, at the very least, welcomed) layer of drone, which serves well to take my focus away from the repetitious elements.
so, up to this point, the music has been in a colder, inorganic, vein. that's neither good, nor bad, but it warms up significantly with diode. it'll start out with some fractured synthetic beats, which aren't rhythmic, but are just there, resounding wobbly. the focus is more so on the multiple layers of warm and inviting tone play along with the high-pitched foreground drone. after a few minutes, the beats die off as organic percussion (light cymbal hits and wooden knocks) kindly take its place. then, we get added instrumentation from the guitar, as we're basically left with multiple guitar layers, steven's percussion and unobtrusive atmospheric noise. it's very pleasant.

a walk in the park reverts back to a moody atmosphere but retains the percussion, though, in this instance it's more minimal; infringing on airy jazz percussion, but never fully following through. actually, everything about a walk in the park is more minimal. two of the electronic layers are stuttery; the differing tones and depths bring about a fine texture. beyond that, there's an innocuous drone which will cut in and out and a sort of scraping noise. when taken apart from the whole, none of these individual sounds would appear to do a whole lot, but when you have layer after layer of them, it all comes together nicely.

the first two minutes of the closing track, peakv-z*sin greets us with two minutes of absolute silence, then jars us out of our confusion with a flash storm of dense distortion and basslike rumbles. i think that i'm also hearing dripping water, so the storm metaphor is actually appropriate. the trio won't do much to take away from their foundation and spend the remaining six minutes with multiple layers of high pitched sustained tones and drones. they'll meticulously tweak those sounds to prevent it from being monotonous, especially good was the work put in towards the ends of the track.

in my head, before i listened to this, i was placing a lot of weight on the connection with kranky. being pretty familiar with kranky's older output and knowing the type of electronic music that they put out, i was under the false impression that this would be an album's worth of stuff that sounded like the more accessible diode. not that that would have been a horrible thing, but i was impressed with fessenden's experimental ambitions. the bulk of their success with this release is due to their texturing and subtle, but very effective, use of drone.

Not Sleeping, Just Resting

this next episode is long as fuck. two hours (and two minutes). i felt like this one was overdue, plus i lost my mental alarm that tells me when enough is enough.

i managed to be quite a bit more cohesive with this outing. with the exclusion of the second set (which is where the bulk of the actual songs are) this is pretty free from my usual pop and rock yearnings. yeah, this one is more about experimental electronics, psych, folk, avant-garde and noise. the noise is also not very harsh, for the most part. this one sort of splits the difference between my love for catchy music, and my love for brutal electronics.

lots of excerpts... there were quite a few artists that i wanted to incorporate into the mix, but their songs were all ten plus minutes, so i had to chop them up and use the most interesting parts. the lone exception is ortmann's track. that one isn't long to begin with, but i cut the track where the chainsaws started and overlapped that with the ending of schematic's creepily minimal piece and made my own horror movie, in audio.

ironing - my dearest dear (0:00-4:30)
taurpis tula - november 9 (excerpt) (4:31-10:08)
anahita - annayourna, i (10:08-15:08)
suttree - dark hollow (15:08-18:48)
jeremy from boise - 1000 windshields (19:12-23:16)
les belles etoiles - call and response (23:16-24:55)
fabulous diamonds - 1.49 (24:55-26:41)
slicing grandpa - daddy o strangler (26:41-31:11)
los yorks - when my mind is not live (31:11-34:04)
chow hsuan - stop singing (34:27-37:20)
helen mirra - weaving (37:20-40:19)
paul metzger - bright red stone (excerpt) (40:19-42:58)
ash castles on the ghost coast - giving thanks (42:58-46:33)
joel stern - unplugged #5 (46:33-50:06)
schematic - susie suitcase should've stayed at home last night (50:32-53:36)
andy ortmann - genesis of the mindbenders (excerpt) (53:29-54:54)
white leather - creep style, OH side a (excerpt) (54:54-57:34)
secret diary - angel of the morning (57:35-61:10)
tetsu inoue & jonah sharp - replay (61:10-67:01)
stimbox - slayground (67:28-71:52)
dead/bird - deth wiggle (71:52-74:27)
areski - bali (74:27-78:14)
starving weirdos - trancin' (excerpt) (78:14-83:14)
starbird - somewhere the sun is shining over her (83:15-84:42)
oaxacan - the ground is firm, and so is my palm (84:55-88:38)
aufgehoben - thermidor one five (88:38-92:34)
li jianhong - alone television (92:34-98:02)
two assistant deputy ministers - interpretive subtext (excerpt) (98:00-101:48)
wether - what is your flight-height (102:07-104:55)
cruel face - now that i'm alone (104:55-109:40)
demons - deviation (109:41-112:54)
x04 - all alien part one, b1 (112:55-117:14)
anders dahl - dustnoise (117:13-122:04)

untitled c40
[2007, dreamtime taped sounds]

out of the lot of tapes that lieven martens gave me, this one was the most mysterious. there's no artist info or anything at all on the tape's cover (or inside) other than lieven's new age-y artwork. if it weren't for him telling me that the tape was mountains saturnus, i wouldn't have even known what this was. after doing some googling, i found that this is another one of his projects. what i haven't been able to find is if the tape's called mountains saturnus and it's pulsating in the eye of vision / dolphins into the future related, or if this is an entirely new thing. i'm choosing to believe that mountains saturnus is its own entity, until someone corrects me.
just when i was thinking that lieven's music was becoming easily identifiable: warm, upbeat, bordering on poppy, playful synth experimentations; he puts out this tape. the warmth is still in place, but it seems like he's pandering to a different crowd, that mainly being kids on drugs. luckily for him, he's tapping into a vast fuckin' market. it's also pretty apparent, at least on this particular effort, that he draws a bit of inspiration from the skaters, not so much in the group setting, but mountains saturnus has a kindred spirit in spencer clark's monopoly child star searchers.this isn't a tape that's conducive to track by track analysis. for starters, i don't know what the fuck's going on and i'd be hard pressed to attempt to describe most of the sounds. the real constant is repetition (lots of it), but where something like the family thinkers' tape would've used that as a springboard into catchier territory, in this setting, it fuels the trippy, hypnotic mysticism. the inoffensive tape hiss plays a great supporting role, too, coming in waves like the tide's gentle rolls. the music is outstanding and perfect for mind expansion; whatever your means for achieving that are. there's a perceptible spiritual vibe resonating within these tracks, and i mean that in a looking inward sense, as opposed to blatant piety. at his best here, lieven will mix together this spirituality with tribal twists as well as extraterrestrial ones, put 'em in a jar, blow pot smoke into it and put the lid on. call it new age, minus the effeminacy.

i think this tape is great. i love the psychedelic overtones in tandem with the spacier elements and ethereal currents. again, i have to use some of the skaters' solo projects as points of reference, but without their sampling fetish. dope. most likely, literally.

Untitled A4*
(*i broke down the tape based on where it seemed appropriate)

accidental visitor
[2007, cut hands]

century plants are an offshoot of albany, new york's burnt hills, featuring guitarists eric hardiman (who also runs the tape drift imprint) and ray hare.

i'm really glad that i listened to this cd before i knew anything about century plants. my lone prior experience with burnt hills came via their to your head 12", which was two tracks, forty minutes, of a meandering jam session. not really my thing. accidental visitor: much more my thing.

the twilight reflexed starts the disc off in nice drone fashion. out of the four pieces of music on the album, this particular one seems to adopt the most purist (*relating to drone) approach. it begins with a primary layer of fluctuating guitar drone. the second guitar will provide a little more texture with some repetitious (not in a rhythmic sense) chord playing and there's also a token layer of background ambiance. as it builds up, and this is only a five and a half minute track, it will establish a nice back and forth between the guitars in the background, as the field recording ambiance begins to envelope everything. one of the guitars will begin to free form solo and then the track ends as soon as it seems like it's about to get more interesting. coincidentally, they'll have the opposite problem two tracks later.
the following piece, mantaphasmatodea, brings together a fuzzily distorted background with a scrapping and screeching noise. it's a terrific dynamic, but this time out the guitars are the show; alternating between a buzzing drone and memorable riffing. i think that everything is enhanced because of that main layer of dissonance, which was completely unexpected, but worked as a weird compliment to their hazy psychedelia.

ah, florid gestures. this track. it's nearly twenty-six minutes long (the whole disc is only runs for forty-seven minutes) and within that large chunk of time is thirteen minutes of fucking brilliance. here's my gripe, though: it's all in the beginning. what i'm gushing about are dual drones, but the awesomeness (wow, it is a word) transcends that word. first off, it doesn't sound like they're employing anything other than their guitars, so the minimalism is working in their favor. the drones are warm and captivating; one has a higher tone to it, the other deeper and it sounds like it's being played with a slide because of the way that it'll continue to run up and down. eventually, the first guitar will begin to slowly play chords and while i'm not really picking up on any cohesion to its playing, it works as a fantastic accompanying layer of sound. where, initially, i felt like gestures was on its way to something epic, they completely abandon all of the previous sounds for chimes and muffled guitar noise. it isn't until the very last minute that they drop the noise, and at least dig up the skeleton of the first half of the track for a minimal exit. it just seems that they should've flipped this track around; use the more experimental and noisy shit for a build-up to something more poignant. instead, they gave us the best part of the track in the beginning and once that was over with, there was nothing to look forward to. oh well, there's always those thirteen minutes... maybe i'll just edit the track down my personal enjoyment..

the closer, ruinous circle, is another emphatic journey into psych, with a nice assist coming by way of the delay pedal. even with guitar soloing happening beneath everything, it's hard to look past the noisy, swirling epicenter that this track has and i have no problem with that.

for just being two guitarists, i've got to hand it to eric and ray. they didn't overcompensate for the fact that there's only two of them by adding too much unnecessary shit, but at the same time, they also didn't go the this just sounds like two guys with guitars route. there's a good balance to the music, and while i'm not completely sure what the sum of what they were doing was, it certainly has a fuller sound to it. overall, i enjoyed what i heard from century plants on this release enough to want to check out the other albums that are floating around by them. it'll be interesting to hear this duo's evolution as they've shown quite a few inspired moments throughout accidental visitor.

Mantaphasmatodea