Primer MegaPost Ruidos

Amigos de Subsidio y El Club de La Serpiente les obsequiamos un megapost de trabajos difíciles de hallar en la virtualidad o mejor expresado fáciles de ubicar pero que difícilmente los busques.
Muchos Drones, poca info, pero la info en sí es la música. Así que todos felices.

Home Listening / Modern Classical

Amplifier Machine - Her Mouth Is An Outlaw 2008

Psico / Drone / Metal

Since their emergence in 2007 from the wilds of Northern California as Starving Weirdos, the duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay have been one of the experimental underground’s most consistent (and consistently undervalued) entities. A seemingly bottomless stock of recordings and, more importantly, an unerring hand with editing and arranging, mean that their discography, large though it may be, is full of highlights. This solo debut by Pyle, sharing everything the Weirdos do well, is another one.

The Weirdos’ music is successful because it occupies many moods and many perspectives on sound-shaping. It is just as evocative of harsh industrial landscapes as it is of awe-inspiring natural scenes. It could be classic studio electronica (think Stockhausen’s "Kontake") or modern-day DIY drone and noise. It harnesses dissonance like avant-garde chamber music for strings and explodes with dense energy like the best free jazz.

Because their music gives off such disparate interpretations, it’s easy to think of their finished pieces as intuitive, but they are too well-balanced and paced to not be designed. And, in another similarity to electronic composers, this is exactly how the duo works: amassing huge sound libraries, then assembling, editing and transforming later. Pyle’s sound arsenal might be sightly more stripped down than the Weirdos – limited mostly to bowed metal, distorted guitars and miniature percussion – but he delves even deeper into trance-inducing repetition and dissonant harmony. The title track is a study in mannered, tension-building pacing. On "Mud Banks Shine in Broken Shards," Pyle produces a broad, fearsome chord, a sustained burn of reeds and sizzling, extended high-frequency tones. Balancing out all the drone and drift are three brief rhythmic interludes that not only quicken the record’s pace, but suggest some promising new directions for the Weirdos.

Pyle is very good at blurring the origins of his sounds just enough so that his music does the only thing that really matters with music that aspires to mind-altering status – it evokes a palpable sense of the unknown. The percussion that keeps "In Each Cracked Shell There Is Restless Time" in constant motion could be a field recording of (some natural process), a single percussive texture chopped-up, sampled and sequenced, or a whole a chorus of drummers. The point is, you never know. "Fire," with its long stretches of fire recordings creating a crackling, very alive background, is a bit more obvious, but it gives a glimpse of how Pyle hears, how he finds patterns in random events and foregrounds them until they have their own bold presence.

So, At the Foot of Nameless Roads is another winner for the Weirdos camp, but is releasing consistently good records enough? Where is the record that really blows the top of your head off? What could a piece like "Light Reflects as Seagulls Dive" become? There are real possibilities lurking inside it, but it’s brief running time means it remains only suggestive. This is perhaps the real problem with the very prolific, genuinely creative artists – like the Weirdos – working in the underground today: Intriguing ideas appear continually, but the music always seems to stay in the realm of the possible, always becoming and never being. So, by releasing so much music, are acts like the Weirdos working against themselves, putting process over a more refined final statement? McKinlay, and especially Pyle here, do better than most at maintaining an engaging, exciting level of quality. But can they maintain that level, or even push it higher?

By Matthew Wuethrich

Ensemble Economique - At The Foot Of Nameless Roads (2008)

Drone / Home Listening / Modern Classical
'Krautrock' and 'kosmische muisk' have to be the two most overused phrases in any press release or review currently circulating in the field of electronic music or avant-rock. Perhaps more than ever before, everyone wants to sound like Harmonia, Cluster, Neu! Or Can. Inevitably, a Kranky artist is bound to occupy the more abstract, drone-based end of that current trend, and Joseph Raglani fits that bill. There's a high fidelity crispness to all this that's comparable to more contemporary acts, and you might hear the luminescent synth tones of Emeralds, or even the carefully tweaked analogue signals of a Keith Fullerton Whitman outing in the likes of 'Rivers In'. Taking a more full-blooded electroacoustic slant, 'The Promise Of Wood And Water' combines oscillator discord with flurries of processed acoustic guitar, capturing Raglani's music at its most detailed and developed. But it's not all so... civilised. 'Washed Ashore' is an exemplary analogue noise workout, not dissimilar to the sort of thing heard on the Merzbow/Jim O'Rourke/Carlos Giffoni triple header, Electric Dress. Highly recommended.

Raglani - Of Sirens Born (2008)


Psico / Drone / Metal / Modern Classical
Italian saxophonist and electroacoustic performer Valerio Cosi releases Heavy Electronic Pacific Rock as his first proper CD outing and by far the most widely available recording in his catalogue to date. The twenty-minute opening piece - titled 'Study For Saxophone And Electronics (Dedicated To Roberto Donnini)' - is especially arresting, layering and repeating saxophone phrases in its early stages, rendering Cosi as a one-man Philip Glass. After four minutes or so, the layers fall away to reveal a single slowed-down sax phrase, on top of which synth drones begin to amass, leading up to loosened up, miasmic soloing sounds that eventually consume themselves in a wash of noise and spoken recordings. It's an awesome piece of work and the remainder of the disc doesn't quite manage to hit the same highs, although the three pieces are still of a very high standard, each trying out new sonic configurations, whether the sustained tensions of 'A New Vipassana' or the atmospheric motorik rhythms of the (at least partially) self-explanatory 'Proud (To Be A Kraut)/A Burning OM: Reprise'. The final piece, whimsically titled 'North Pole Vibes' pairs a free-roaming lead sax with a bed of droning electronic permafrost. It's one of those rare instances in which avant-garde, microsound style composition combines with fluent musicianship without either element suffering, and it provides a fitting summary of what makes this hugely impressive album so outstanding. Boomkat

Valerio Cosi - Heavy Electronic Pacific Loop (2008)


Psico / Drone / Metal
The dark lords of doom are back, make no mistake and this time they have taken their sound even further into the annals of religious history performing in an old church in the Norwegian city of Bergen. Yep, the black metal new boys have gone back to the genre's spiritual home to show the locals that Americans can be just as dark as their Nordic compatriots, and in the hometown of Varg Vikernes, they're some locals. O'Malley and Anderson aren't on their own though, they come with a posse of collaborators, most notably Mayhem's Attila Csihar (adding theatrical vocals) and Norwegian noise God Lasse Marhaug but it's regular earth collaborator Steve Moore who really makes his presence known taking control of the church's mammoth organ. The opening track 'Why does thou hide thyself in clouds?' makes best use of this with the sweltering tones echoing through the thousand-year-old walls as Csihar utters his Satanic prose. It might not be quite the Sunn O))) we're used to, but this is a suitably theatrical introduction to an ambitious collection of tracks. From here we move back into familiar territory however, with the church acting as a giant resonator for the band's bass drones and noisy flourishes; the half-heard orchestral drone of 'Cannon', the giant throb of 'Cymatics' and the heady tidal wave of 'Masks The Aetmospheres'. Sure it might not show the band taking giant leaps in terms of sound, but there's simply nobody else out there nailing the drone sound quite like Sunn O))), and to hear them making this sacrifice to their Norwegian forebears is a grim pleasure from beginning to end. Apparently the record is going to be released on vinyl only, and past the initial pressing is never going to be reissued, so if you want one of these you'd better be quick, like everything Sunn O))) related it's not going to be around for long! Boomkat

Sunn O))) - Domkirke

Home Listening / Modern Classical

This Fantasma Parastasie sees Canadian musicians Tim Hecker and Aidan Baker fuse together in a constantly shifting surge punctuated throughout with barks, growls and excited panting in the dark from Hecker’s seemingly endless store of electronic distortions and Baker’s fractured instrumentation, which ambles to the rhythm of madness, joy and sheer exultation.

Phantom On A Pedestal supplies the first rumble of revolutionary thunder, opening with an astonishing array of guttural squeaks, burps, groans, and gasps: what sounds like their very souls were straining to burst free. With each successive segment, the piece only grows in its punishing density, and the tightly orchestrated workouts for desiccated and freeform guitar stabs and highly charged electronic thrusting positively ripples with psychosexual undercurrents.

What follows generally carries on and develops these orientations, but isn’t quite as assaultive. Instead, they are fleeter, and more musically diverse. Many of the remaining seven movements ping and eddy with bursts of static, hiss and crunch that slowly disperse themselves and are largely deployed with a sensitive hand and a general feeling of concern for the listener. Now and again, Baker even navigates an arco melody through Hecker’s granular harmonic shoals, further impressing the dynamic and emotional range of these works.

A crisp articulation of attack thereby manages to steer these movements safely through several disparate ports of call. Small wonder, as the materials germinate in the soil, not the screen; in a face to face encounter marked by a consummate reciprocity which inserts these two individual players into a shared operation of which neither is the clear creator. As though something were therefore at stake, the two elicit exciting, edgy performances that never call on all their resources, but always give off the impression that more is hiding away. http://www.themilkfactory.co.uk

Aidan Baker & Tim Hecker - Fantasma-Parastasie