REVIEWS

ZENG!From punk to free jazz there seems to be a superficial gap that can easily be replaced by an evolving cohesion of audio events. Zeng! is the collaboration album of Han Bennink and Terrie Ex and all their musical background with experimentation as one of the most obvious points of reference. Looking at each one of the artists separately, one can reach a better comprehension of the sound result. Han Bennink is better known as a Dutch jazz drummer starting his carrier in the early 60’s working close to big names of the jazz scene while still being in an early age. Later on in his carrier he has been the co-founder of a non-profit organisation put together to promote the Dutch jazz avant-garde. His drumming skills vary and harmonically shift amongst the wide range of jazz styles from one to another turning the act of music into a personal and artistic statement. Taking this as a characteristic fact about Benning’s musical identity, it is presented in all his collaborations with diverse artists, including the one with Terrie Ex. Mr. Ex, is a the guitarist of The Ex, a Dutch punk band formed in 1979. The Ex, beginning from a genuinely punk musical and anti-commercial point of view and attitude have enlarged their gamut of musical styles through experimentation and various collaborations. The Ex’s relationship with sound has gone through divergent stages throughout their artistic practice and engaged with alternations of soundscapes.

Zeng! has an indubitable maturity succeeded by the balancing of the two artists’ musical orientations to the point where they can meet in an open sound platform in which experimentation and improvisation maintain the interchange-ability of the audio experience that swings from abstraction to jazz purity. Certainly not an easy-listening piece of music, demanding observation, full-capacitated ears and open minded listening.

The main influence of this album is the local every-day life in de Zaanstreek, the first industrial area in Holland where both Benning and Ex come from. All the track titles are descriptive of some situation or local slang. Slang words such as “Spikkel” (to feel like doing something with lots of pleasure), or “Radder” (having the shits, which, when you have it, requires a special concentration to the act as if nothing is wrong), reveal a special humoristic approach and personal interpretations of the present reality. Taking this under consideration, one can tell that it is extended in the music too seen in the “lots-of-fun” element that comes through while listening. A playful and adventurous album. Sliding from nonsense to sense with spontaneity as the vehicle set on the tracks of instrumental skills, Zeng! is a purely experimental work equally sharing Benning’s virtuoso skills and Ex’s guitar intelligence.

:: Han Bennink & Terrie Ex/Zeng! - terprecords.nl/A-Musik.

DeMego 003The only time I’ve ever fallen asleep during a show, funnily enough, was at a SunnO))) show in Melbourne several years ago. They were playing deep in the night, and most people had gone home, wearied by all the noises that had been going on, more or less non-stop, since that afternoon. A few of us stayed, watching these strange bearded men in pagan outfits play monolithic one-note riffs; riffs so big, it seemed, they had to be played slowly, to bear out in volume and space what they forsook in melody. The show was all the more affecting for its meagre audience, lending it an air of esotericism the other acts, for all their wilful weirdness, couldn’t muster.
The stage had been transformed into an almost comical wall-like assemblage of amps, a swinging keyboard adorned with what seemed to be foliage hung from the venue’s faux-Roman sky. The noise was immense, the kind perfect for people who enjoy music as a more bodily sensation, the kind that bypasses the heart and heads straight for the organs. I felt it in my bowels, in my spine, vibrating through my whole body. At some point, I staggered over to a booth and lay down, curled up in a ball, awash in a drone whose size only my body could comprehend.
I haven’t had much to do with SunnO))) since then, preferring, for the most part, the tamer, warmer, more soothing end of the drone spectrum. That was until last week, when my venerable editor thrust upon me 6°FSKYQUAKE, a collaboration between SunnO)))’s Stephen O’Malley and Attila Csihar, the latest from Mego’s experimental offshoot Mego Editions. Released in a limited run of 500, 6°FSKYQUAKE was created for a gallery exhibition by Banks Violette, the American sculptor whose dark minimalism seems a perfect fit for O’Malley and Csihar’s more spacious exploration here.
The original composition, played at two galleries simultaneously, ran for eight hours and thirty minutes through three separate systems. This piece, presented here as a room recording of a part of that work, clocks in at just over half an hour, but gives us enough a sense of what original might have been like: a piece, it seems, created very clearly with the sonics and context of a gallery in mind – stretches of quiet, almost remote electronics, what sounds like processed TV static and a cold, distant wind giving way to O’Malley’s droning, sub-Gregorian voice of the ancients intoning from somewhere below you, a thin, almost sharp pulse underlying it all.

:: Stephen O'Malley & Attila Csihar/6°FSKYQUAKE - DeMego 003/Groove Attack.

m.b.+e.d.a.M.B. + E.D.A., it seems, are made up of two Italians on either side of the generational divide – Maurizio Bianchi, an elder statesman of the Italian experimental scene, and solo noisenik Emanuela De Angelis, twenty years his junior. Though the two share roots in noise, together De Angelis and Bianchi retire to gentler pastures on Regolelettroniche, their first LP as a duo, trafficking in a kind of muted, cyclic noise, a language of soporific repetition limited in its range and sure in its execution. A set of rules the two came up with, apparently, were the basis for this collaboration, an unspoken framework the two call ‘ruletronics’, a system whose provenance is as uncertain as the resulting drones are beautiful, all wondering about whatever conceptual arrangement arrived at these experiments moot once you actually hear them. ‘Universal Order’, the record’s third track, trades in the same grainy greys as Belong’s excellent October Language, but is even more static, allowing each loop to bend, warp, expand and contract until each beginning is lost in its end. In this sense, much of Regolelettroniche speaks the same tones as William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, the songs gaining direction and movement from staying in one place and revealing their shadows and lights, content to play without anything resembling conventional songform. ‘Cosmic Norms’, the record’s 25-minute centrepiece and undeniable highlight, is a gorgeous, shifting wash of oceanic noise that shows Bianchi and De Angelis, for all their rules, very clearly of one mind. As elsewhere on the record, ‘Cosmic Norms’ sees only a few phrases given voice, but each are stretched and unfurled in a way that they never outstay their welcome. De Angelis and Bianchi play with the kind of sonics that displace normal notions of time, progression and order, replacing them with something simpler, truer even.

M.B + E.D.A/Regolelettroniche - Baskaro/A-Musik

black mountainMaybe the sound was just bad that night in Festsaal Kreuzberg (24th November 2007), or I was too close to the speaker, whatever, Black Mountain are anyway, quite a musically complex band. Using various instrumentation combinations to create varied textures and ambiences, Black Mountain also have knack of using mood controlling rhythm changes and contrasts between fragility and stark power. I particularly like the drums and riff combination on the start of Tyrants, the 16 minute epic, slow build, heavy riffed, slightly psychedelic Bright Lights, and the stuff the keyboard player does. The synth sounds, I guess, from his Memotronic, have lovely presence, quite acoustic in timbre at times. His organ playing on Evil Ways has an almost Charlatans feel to it, cool, the Charlatans are ok, but I really like Rob Collins. In my previous review I had mentioned that the female singer/percussionist had a unique singing style, using a kind of “warbling”, which was cool, but in the show after a while got a bit tiresome. In the CD however, she uses it a little bit less and in the mix it comes across very nice, almost operatic. She does, however, have a nice straight singing voice, as displayed in Queens Will Play.
So, still, I have the same opinion of them, they’re good, interesting musicians that create quite varied and well put together guitar based music. I think from now listening to In The Future I want to see them live again, but maybe a better sound system and I’ll back off a bit from the speakers ::

Black Mountain/In The Future – Jagjaguwar/Cargo.

volcano: amidstA stained patchwork quilt of the last 30 years of experimental music – hints of Popol Vuh’s reverent choral drones, the busted-up earnestness of the ‘80s Kiwi underground, the spastic rhythms and eclectic instrumentation of This Heat (perhaps their closest neighbours), the unhinged playfulness of Faust, and the knowing eccentricities of Robert Wyatt – Amidst the Noise and Twigs nevertheless wanders enough in its own orbit to be its own thing entirely, a slippery conveyer belt of left-field instrumentation, sudden, skittering percussion, elliptical, sometimes damaged vocals, and flutters of post-processing trickery, a kind of throwing shit against the wall and not caring what sticks. VTB seem to consciously avoid the kind of hypnotism trafficked in by bands frequently described as of the same ilk – Jackie-o-Motherfucker, Vibracathedral Orchestra – settling upon grooves in short spurts before abandoning them just as suddenly, preferring to move onto new ideas, or deconstruct the old ones, for their momentum. For the celebrated British four-piece, now twelve-years young and piling up a heady discography, setting out with such a consciously wide, undefined scope means moments of unabashed prettiness (the almost saccharine vocal coda to ‘Before We Came to This Religion’) are as much flotsam as artless noise (the ceaseless overdriven yelling of ‘One Hundred Years of Infamy’), all of it to be run through, played with, discarded anyhow. Why use a real piano when a sour one will do? By the last track, the relatively grounded ‘The Three Twins’, VTB band their damaged ivories with enough baby’s crying, Wyatt-by-way-of-This Heat vocals, scrapes of violin and double bass, to allow the piano to become the song’s melodic heart, its tunelessness less a distraction than a strength, altering the listener’s frame of reference to encourage, as the whole record’s whole forty-five minutes does, a different way of hearing melody, of anticipating tension, release, and resolution ::

Volcano The Bear/Amidst The Noise And Twigs – Beta Lactam/blrrecords.com/A-Musik

objects in mirrorSo this guy, looks, sounds and feels like he is some kind of time traveller. I watched a video of him taken from Dutch TV and he was in some studio, and it was a lovely juxtaposition as they placed him in front of an autobahn in black medieval-esque clothing playing his Renaissance/Baroque Lute, and that’s along with his bowl cut hairdo. He looks, well, authentic and a great bonus is that he sounds good too. The lute is a wonderful instrument, it isn’t as common as the modern or classical guitar, isn’t as twangy as a banjo but has that brighter, higher tone whilst retaining expressiveness. With his Lute Josef creates lovely compositions, some with delightful, catchier melodies, but mostly more minimal and contemporary, quite far away from the spritely lutes of the Renaissance. He also has a bit of a fetish shall we say for recording places and atmospheres. He mainly records airports and train stations, the catalyst for this I think is two things; the amount of traveling he had done between Europe and America, and people talking through his performances at art galleries, Josef said that after he played the recordings he had made whilst playing the Lute people were self conscious and didn’t talk through anymore. One very interesting point to mention is his use of palindromic composition. These are works that are the same backwards and forwards, or mirrored. The interesting thing is trying to hear this though. When I think of Palindromic Compositions I also think of other such technical compositional styles such as Fugue, and I like the idea of these, they are in themselves very intelligent and they require a special kind of creativity. I do think however that through this they kind of lose something, maybe a little continuity or natural flow. From the tracks on Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear I really liked Stichomythy which had more rhythmical progressions and had a slight Eastern vibe to it with pentatonic bells and the constant offbeat, crossover contemporary lute! Listening to Lost in Transit with headphones on I noticed the frequent panning of the airport recording, this was a little disorienting and distorted my perception of what the recording was. I would suggest you try it on headphones if you get the  chance.

stations of the crossStations Of The Cross is a more “classically” inspired album, more rhythmical and using the Lute, I guess, more in the way it was intended. I would like to know if the piece I hear is played at one time or overdubbed in sections as I can hear 3, 4 and sometimes 5 different parts at the same time. He still uses the natural recordings he makes at stations, etc. I particularly like the comedy and again juxtaposition near the end of Low Mass the security announcement “for security reasons, please keep your luggage with you at al times, unattended luggage will be destroyed, etc.”. This CD is a lot more relaxing than the other and sometimes quite brow furling, I mean it generates real emotion, I feel the music, it’s kind of dreamy. If I close my eyes I could be in a court in traditional Renaissance dress, although the music is a little more contemporary than it would have been the essence and emotion that the lute projects is similar. One more thing is the song titles, they are at times very descriptive, for example, All Day within the Dreamy House the Doors upon their Hinges Creaked, that instantly sets the scene for the music, we instantly have an image in our head and the music matches up and reinforces that image. Grand Central Confessional is a little more obvious as it’s an outside recording, but the interesting thing is how many religious references are in the titling of the tracks, that is one example, but others include; The Weeping Virgin, Trembles before the Weeping Sun, Low Mass, Smokeless Altar, All the Earth was Black, All Heaven was Blind. This CD is not something I would listen to regularly, but it is a lovely thing to experience and have to turn back to if I require something very light and but also containing substance, another juxtaposition, a subtle selection of songs but when you investigate further, go deeper, we find it to be very fulfilling and revelatory ::

Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear - BVHaast/A-Musik
Stations Of The Cross - Incunabulum/A-Musik

earth : beesIm Zick-Zack der Schlangenlinien kriechend, monochrom, fast wellenförmig und  kontemplativ, wie Neil Youngs Vogel mit seinen Flügeln, gemacht aus Stein, erhebt sich molltonlastig und im Breitwandformat der Film um Seattles Non-Stoner Brigade Earth, so auch auf dem neuen Album "The Bees Made Honey In The Lions Skull". Nun, wo die satanischen Verse fehlen, stellt Dylan Carlson mit seinem instrumentalen Trip über 7 Tracks fest, dass es sich aushalten lässt, in der monumental verlangsamten Freischwebe. Jazzer Bill Frisell ist mit dabei, Bassist Don McGreevy braucht seit dem zuletzt erschienen Album Hex! auch hier nicht lange nach komplexen Tonfolgen oder geheimen tonalen Algorithmen zu suchen. Angewärmt wird das quecksilbrig schimmernde Amalgam auf "The Bees Made.." durch Steve Moores Wurlitzer, E-Piano und Hammond Organspiel. "Engine Of Ruin" fällt durch Carlsons getupftes Gitarrensoli angenehm bluesig aus, und über all den düster angehauchten Visionen aus verbrannten Resten Steppengras mit in den Weiten der Prärie holprig gegen den flachen Horizont anrollenden Planwagenzügen thront Cormac McCarthys Anti-West Bibel Blood Meridian, denn Carlson ist wie McCarthy beschwörend auf der eigenen Suche nach dem Geist, der dem Ablauf der Dinge eine rechtmässige Deutung geben will. From strength, sweetness-, lautet die Unterzeile von "The Bees Made Honey In The Lions Skull", und -from darkness, light. Und auf halben Wege durch die glimmende Melancholie von Track no. 6 "Hung From The Moon" könnte man leicht auf den Gedanken kommen, Dylan Carlson hat sich nun endlich angefreundet, mit seinen beiden Flügeln, gemacht aus Stein :: Earth: The Bees Made Honey In The Lions Skull - Southern Lord/Soulfood. 

xbxrx:warsNot really my cup of tea, but still an interesting listen. Very charged, I read one review of the CD, well actually the reviewer concentrated more on the band name, and they called it Splatterrock. Now I’m not sure what that means but the image I get kind of suits. The XBXRX sound is impulsive, it charges in at something like 200bpm rattles around a bit smashing everything in sight and then kicks you in the arse before it slams the door shut, with the last picture hanging crashing to the floor. If you like it loud, angry and chaotic then get this. Or see a show, I read that they’re very interesting and verge on the “performance art” side of town :: XBXRX: Wars - Polyvinyl/Cargo.