Liminal Minimals - January 2013

Liminal Minimals – January 2013

0 Comments 31 January 2013

The new year begins with a raft of releases we didn’t have time to cover in full. Reviews by Andrew Bowman (AB), Mark Carroll (MC), Rich Hughes (RH) and Christopher Olsen (CO), Matt Poacher (MP).

Liz Christine – Sweet Mellow Cat (flau)

Liz Christine is a sound collagist from Brazil with a knack for arranging audible scraps and notions into an engaging whole. Here, we have an hour’s worth of constantly-shifting dream logic: swatches of loopy melodies that stop short of completing themselves are laid overtop movie dialogue grabs and film dissolves while household pets rub against piano tinkles, rain, and pipe thrum. With a creepy humour similar to People Like Us and Nurse With Wound’s Sylvie and Babs (imagine a Busby Berkeley movie chopped and screwed and spun backwards, and you’ll begin to get the picture) this is a rich, discursive listen that feels more like a series of small sculptures. What’s most impressive is how there are so many little idiosyncratic, oddball things going on and yet it’s organized so well that each piece unfolds evenly and steadily. It’s compelling, even puzzling, and well worth hanging onto for the ride, wondering what direction it will go next. Headphones recommended, strange dreams await you later in the night. (CO)

Cuushe – girl you know that i am here but the dream (flau)

In the age of the dematerialized sound object, Tokyo label Flau gets bonus points for releasing this collection of tracks and remixes as a triple 3″ CD set. Similar to the double 7″, this is not singular, pinpoint listening, but rather a series of vignettes. Cuushe owes a big debt to the Cocteau Twins and 4AD, with dainty dream-pop that works the breathy, twee sheen and Beach House warmth. It makes for ideal day-off music, and since it doesn’t demand that much, it’s forgivable when it meanders towards becoming cafe BGM. Similar to label-mate El Fog, there’s no point focusing too hard on its construction – it might disintegrate under close scrutiny, so it’s best to just leave it be. It’s a grower with some powerful moments, however. Kixnare’s remix of “From The Window On A Plane” is all azure sky and pixelated clouds while “I Dreamt About Silence” is six minutes of climbing delay and digital shoegaze, and it’s a shame when it fades out: all the elements unite so nicely, it could go on for an hour. Julia Holter’s remix of “Swimming in the Room” is the strongest track, offering an astringent, even academic opposite to all the floaty hypnagogia, evoking musique concrete: cut-up field recordings, isolated vocal tracks, and dry washes of sinewave. There’s a haunted time machine feel to it, as Holter’s well-studied aesthetic is askew enough to make twee dream-pop sound like Noriko Tujiko rearranged by Daphne Oram, or vice-versa. The rest of the collection pales in comparison, with the remixes reflecting current trends, almost like reading a Pitchfork year-end list. (CO)

Hywel Davies – s/t (ASC Records)

For me, reviewing “classical” music is a case of asking myself to what extent the music convinces me that there is some kind of concept or purpose behind it, and how skillfully the composer communicates that. Hywel Davies’s eponymous latest release looks epic at first glance: 17 tracks and a range of evocative titles and instrumentations. However, the aural experience is sadly far from epic, and the answer to my question quickly becomes “hardly at all”. More a scrapbook of hurried, abandoned ideas than an album of music, the recurring impression here is that Davies has assembled his untouched musical sketches in order to meet the quota of minutes for a full length release. There are some lovely exceptions – ‘Cold In The Earth’ and ‘Bow Flurry’ in particular stand out as well-developed, subtly moving soundscapes, and there is potential for richness in many places; and then again there is his incongruous and naïvely clumsy pastiche of the classical Sonata (“Sonatas in F”). On the whole, Davies’s material is under-explored or clumsily bundled together, leaving the listener with the impression that he has a few interesting ideas and if he went away, took his time and worked on them he could produce some very rich and moving musical pictures. (MC)

Koen Holtkamp – Liquid Light Forms (Barge)

Koen Holtkamp’s Liquid Light Forms has been around in digital format for a few months now, but the delayed vinyl release (out on Barge in early March) has meant a slow accumulation of experience – the record has kind of percolated into me over an extended period. My initial impression was that it was merely another appropriation of the firmly 70s-rooted kosmische sound, with all the attendant baggage that brings, but repeated listens have revealed it to be a subtle and thematically interesting recording. I guess part of it comes down to trust in the end: Holtkamp, as part of the duo Mountains, has always had an ear for the skilful blending (of albeit mainly acoustic) sounds, and it’s this that comes through on Liquid Light Forms. He might have changed the means (he’s using modular synths and sequencers, instead of say an egg whisk) but the sophisticated layering is there, as is the emotional engagement. Named after the Hudson River, and two of its tributaries, the 3 long tracks glisten and shimmer, readily evoking the play of light on water. There isn’t a traditional bassline undertow as such; instead the various modulated melodies intertwine and roll across one another creating an illusion of riverine gravity. The closing track, ‘Hudson Static (Live at Shea Stadium)’ is the most ebullient here, and almost crosses into punch-the-air Emeralds territory. The lingering sonic memory of the previous tracks and Holtkamp’s poise thankfully keeps this in check. Worth the wait, this one. (MP)

Tape Loop Orchestra – In A Lonely Place (Fluid Audio)

Andrew Hargreaves and his Tape Loop Orchestra have captured the essence of cinematic decay with his latest album, In A Lonely Place. The work is based upon three lines of dialogue from the classic Bogart film noir released back in 1950: ‘I Was Born When She Kissed Me’, ‘I Died When She Left Me’ and ‘I Lived A Few Weeks When She Loved Me’. Recorded using a modified 4-track Walkman that looped back into itself, creating a delay and adding a rippling noise of feedback, the sound was augmented with additional loops from a laptop and simple guitar pedal for effects. The album is aglow in analogue noise. This isn’t deliberately retro, but a more appropriate means of reflecting the non-digital days of the 50s and the simplicity of film noir as a medium. The slow drones that underpin the album are the sound of celluloid film disintegrating in front of you. What makes it even more affecting is the fact that the music consists of a series of manipulated noir-esque strings and piano. The crackle of static akin to the reels of film fluttering as they play. The use of strings fill the album with a morose longing and resonate with an emotional fervour, as if the souls of the protagonists from In A Lonely Place have been caught and trapped in the music – 60 years of hurt and longing distilled and injecting into these slow, dark and groaning pieces of music. That tape-loop delay and shudder just amplify this, as if you’re looking back in time through a distorted portal. The album decomposes in a haze of tape crackle and fading strings, a final homage to not only his cinematic inspiration, but his chosen musical medium as well. (RH)

Various Artists – Change The Beat: The Celluloid Records Story 1979-1987 (Strut)

Having successfully navigated the archives of ZE Records and Factory, compilers Strut set themselves a particularly difficult task with Celluloid. Started in 70s Paris by Jean Georgakarakos, former partner in free jazz label BYG/Actuel, Celluloid eventually became synonymous with the work of New York bassist, producer and relentless pie-fingerer, Bill Laswell. Given its transatlantic set-up and the latter’s restlessness, it’s no surprise the history is messy, and as such Change The Beat is an uneven, uneasy collection. French ‘cold wave’ (Nini Raviolette) rubs shoulders with nascent hip-hop (DST, Fab 5 Freddy, Afrika Bambaataa’s Time Zone), downtown punk (Richard Hell) and Senegalese pop (Touré Kunda) – some borrowed from other labels to license to France or reissue globally (Last Poets). The slightly stiffened funk of Laswell’s 80s productions which make up roughly 2/3 of the 26 tracks, at least lends the set some consistency and offers many of its highlights. ‘Makossa Rock’ by his lesser-known supergroup Deadline, with AACM drummer Phillip Wilson, Cameroonian sax star Manu Dibango and P-Funk alumnus Bernie Worrell, benefits from the relative restraint missing from some of Laswell’s naïve flights of fancy. Then there are the outliers: Shockabilly’s strangulation of ‘Day Tripper’, a Dennis Bovell dub, the slowly unfolding African desert blues of Ginger Baker’s ‘Dust To Dust’…There’s really nothing bad here. Approach from odd angles. (AB)