Liminal Minimals - October 2012

Liminal Minimals – October 2012

0 Comments 01 November 2012

Our monthly round-up of releases we couldn’t review in full but didn’t want to let slip away unnoticed… Reviews by Joseph Burnett, Rich Hughes and Matt Poacher.

1982 & BJ Cole (Hubro)

This is something of an unusual collaboration. BJ Cole, the legendary guitar player who’s recorded with the likes of Brian Eno, David Sylvian and, erm, Sting, has paired up with the Norwegian “folk” trio 1982. The pair had played together as part of an initiative started by BBC Radio 3′s Late Junction, but this project saw them focus on writing an entire album. Most of the tracks came from a set of improvisational sessions, with further work added if they felt it were needed. The tracks have no names, only their their length is noted. As such, the album flows in an almost continuous set of music. There’s an air of coastal folk music to the album – as if a sea breeze is wafting over the quartet in their room, gently influencing the sound. What stands out is how natural a collaboration this is. Cole’s pedal steel is understated and never tries to break free of the more sedate and laid back accompaniment. The arrangements are quite sparse, but they’re never quiet. The four instruments are each given their own time and space to explore their ideas, but it’s the jazz-influenced drumming of Øyvind Skarbø that sketches a framework in which the rest can arrange themselves. It’s a mesmerising album, and one that slowly hypnotises the listener and reveals its beauty over repeated plays. (RH)

Ehnahre – Old Earth (Crucial Blast)

Black metal continues to evolve in unexpected ways, and Ehnahre might just have pushed it to the next level, alongside acts like Wolfmangler, Wolves In The Throne Room and Botanist. Distancing themselves from the (often alleged but frequently deserved) reputation for Satanism and xenophobia that blighted the early Norwegian BM scene, these American bands have honed in on the genre’s inherent darkness in more abstract ways, using it to explore more varied themes and, especially in the case of Ehnahre, exploding the sonic possibilities of the genre by experimenting with “unusual” instruments and song structures. The four eponymous tracks on Old Earth evolve gradually through a complex series of moods and atmospheres, until only the hoarse, ragged vocals can realistically be described as black metal. ‘Old Earth I’ takes the abstract guitar riffage of early Earth (makes sense) and recent records by Spanish doom meisters Orthodox and filters it through gnarly bass lines and oddball time signatures. On ‘Old Earth II’, a cello is brutally scraped until it sounds like a droning, detuned guitar, colliding with the actual six string to transform the piece into a slovenly, Khanate-like dirge. ‘Old Earth IV’, meanwhile, concludes the album with pummeling drums and brutal, unsettling vocal screams, coming on like Darkthrone duelling with Hey Colossus. Few bands are as heavy as Ehnahre, not just in terms of volume and intensity, but in their single-minded focus on pushing their sound to the extremes very, very slowly. (JB)

Luc Ferrari – Presque Rien (Recollection GRM)

Editions Mego continue to delight with their series of reissues of Groupe de Recherches Musicales recordings, this latest salvo being four of key member Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien pieces. Recorded in 1970, ‘Presque rien No. 1 ‘Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer”, which featured manipulated recordings of a seaside village in Yugoslavia at dawn, is the most famous of the tracks, but all are fascinating experiments in field recordings and musique concrète. What’s most striking is the fact that, despite the sounds being intrinsically anchored in reality (one hears shouts, snippets of conversations, waves crashing on the shore…), the way they are looped and manipulated by Ferrari is resolutely abstract, creating a disorientating atmosphere where the familiar becomes elusive even as it stares you in the face. ‘Presque rien No. 2 Ainsi continue la nuit dans ma tête multiple’, recorded at night, is unsettling and mysterious, with a fractured narrative dissipating even as Ferrari constructs it. In his writings, the composer evoked “lies and perversions” to define this untethered reconstruction of reality, especially on ‘Presque rien avec filles’, and this spirit of wilful misdirection traverses these four bizarre, minimalist and avant-garde constructions/compositions, as if Ferrari’s almost gleefully daring the listener to ask “But is it music?”. The answer is most definitely “Yes”, but it takes a while to get one’s head around the idea. (JB)

Ix Tab – Spindle and the Bregnut Tree (Ix Tab)

Spindle and the Bregnut Tree is an unsettling listen. Unsettling because it’s strange at a basic sonic level and unsettling because it feels so profoundly personal. There are worlds woven into these tracks and this depth of abstracted emotional content seems to make the music vibrate at a molecular level and as such expand beyond the available sonic terrain. The 12 tracks are pieced together from recordings made as far back as 1987 and ‘collected in a variety of locations, mostly midway between the deepest West Country hallows & the skaen boundaries of the 303’ so the collection also functions as a kind of aural incunabulum (here be monsters) – though I’d be dubious as to how useful it’d be as a dowsing tool to locate specific places. It’s a difficult job to merely describe how the album sounds, as these feel as much like landscape eructations and captured neuronal blips as anything else; but, if pushed, this has elements of Richard James’ early psychedelic explorations and the outer reaches of Coil’s more nocturnal experiments. (Or, more obscurely, the feedback from some afterlife machine onto which ‘they’ uploaded the combined yammer of Balance and Sleazy’s consciousnesses.) There’s also something of the analogue bubbling of Cluster, particularly on the 18-minute epic of ‘Oggle Hatch’ which resolves out of a welter of psychic babble into a beautifully simple synth refrain. But influences aside, this is very much a unique project with its own peculiar sonic idiolect, and it’s a project that clearly deserves to be more widely heard. Go forth. (MP)

Lau – Race The Loser (Reveal)

The latest release from the trio of Martin Green, Kris Drever and Aidan O’Rourke, more commonly known as Lau, finds them building on their excellent back catalogue and continuing their exploration of modern folk music. Rather than trying to capture their energetic live performances on Race The Loser, they’ve explored what can be achieved in a studio and this has resulted in a richer and more complex sound. Opener ‘Saint Monday’ begins with the recurring thud of a heart beat. O’Rourke’s fiddle playing slowly uncoils as Drever’s morose vocals appear and the song beautifully meanders through its tale of monetary woes. ‘Far From Portland’ finds Green’s accordion taking centre stage, a purely instrumental piece that, as is Lau’s way, features electronic tricks to flesh out their sound – in this case a folding and shuffling drone that augments the louder passages, but fades away when the music pares itself back to gentle guitar and fiddle. The album continues Lau’s blurring of genre boundaries – ambient passages, drones and pulsing electronic beats continually drive their songs outwards and away from their folk origins. One thing that’s never lost though is the emotional connection that the three impart in their music – their inspiration comes from the landscape, and their music always recounts its mixture of beauty and rawness, swirling between the two within any one track. ‘Notland Castle’ is a prime example – Drever’s delicate guitar picks out each rise and fall of the walls, Green’s accordion summons up its weather soaked walls leaving O’Rourke’s fiddle to channel the very seasons that it’s witnessed: the castle still stands no matter what man and nature have thrown at it. Race The Loser is so much more than folk music: Lau are making contemporary music influenced by the past but without being totally indebted to it, nor sullying its memory – they’re always looking to the future. (RH)

Horseback – Half-Blood (Relapse)

A strange record, this, and another that burrows away at the foundations of metal to try and propel the genre in new directions. Jenks Miller’s vocals are lifted straight from the Burzum handbook of throat-ripping screams, but the band is actually musically closer to Crazy Horse or even Calexico than to Mayhem or Neurosis. The guitars are gnarly in the same way as some alt-country music, reminiscent of Dylan Carlson’s approach on recent Earth albums, and each track has a kind of widescreen feel, as if it were intended to soundtrack a Western or road movie. The contrast of styles shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Opener ‘Mithras’ is dominated by heavy, metronomic drums, loping riffs and a lolloping melody that evokes Neil Young’s Greendale and Living With War albums, but with a long-lost cousin of Ghaal handling the singing. ‘Inheritance’ is an epic slab of monomaniacal drone, with guitars saturated to the max, whilst the album closes with the three-part 20-minute monolith ‘Hallucigenia’, on which Horseback join the dots between grisly post-metal and bleak psychedelia, like the Doors jamming with Isis. Half-Blood reconnects American metal with the primordial, dare I say pagan, snarl of much European metal, and should delight fans of SUNN O))), Cult of Luna and Ulver. (JB)

Young Smoke – Space Zone (Planet Mu)

Young Smoke is the alias of 18-year-old Chicago producer David Davis, and when one considers his age, Space Zone is a remarkable effort that sits confidently alongside those of his more established Planet Mu labelmates. Young Smoke’s music descends from Chicago’s footwork scene, but he also differs from his peers by focusing on sci-fi imagery, sounds and themes, like a slightly more pop-centred (and less ambitious, to be honest), Drexciya. The 15 tracks on Space Zone are dominated by luscious synths, rapid rhythm shifts and synthetic sound effects, owing much to recent British post-dubstep records like Kuedo’s Star Fox and Severant, or funky producers Hudson Mohawke, Zomby and Rustie, particularly in Davis’ nod to the sounds of video games. It does at times risk sounding insufferably naff, but Davis displays considerable melodic talent as he throws together the various vocodered vocal snippets, repetitive sequencers and drum patterns that make up his tracks, with ‘Destroy Him My Robots’ and ‘Korrupted Star’ possessing lots of ebullient charm in their combination of footwork rhythmic shuffles and sweeping synth-pop flourishes. Space Zone probably doesn’t have a very long listening shelf-life, but in a club or packed party, these tracks must pack a considerable punch. (JB)