SOLO ANDATA/SEAWORTHY/TAYLOR DEUPREE
Live In Melbourne
12k2008
12K 2008
03Tracks. 49mins.37secs

Photographer, sound artist and label manager Taylor Deupree took to recording the festivities housed under the Social Club one April night in Melbourne, Australia. With good reason, too, for the night displayed here bristles with a vast array of events, too numerous to catalogue. The sonic endeavors of Solo Andata, Seaworthy, and Deupree himself, are filtered through a refined sensibility, resulting in a work of coherent flow and balance, and, perhaps most importantly, an ephemeral elegance bound to a very real sense of time and place. Continue Reading »

AUTISTICI
Volume Objects
12k1045
12K 2008
09 Tracks. 44mins05secs

Autistici gives over his first full-length to the object - to its ruses and to its allure. It’s something evident in both the album and the photographs that accompany it. Shots of metallic wires and their sharp calm; woodboards and their comforting simplicity; even a granular wall, wrinkled like an aged face, betrays a mystery that cannot be exhumed. Never in any of this is there a subject to be found.

In the album, too, pieces aren’t driven by a compositional (subjective) sense. Autistici is concerned with tracing the line of sound itself, with letting it develop, fleshing it out by (re)approaching it time and again from weirdly skewed studio perspectives. Continue Reading »

ANGEL
Kalmukia
EMEGO 087CD
Editions Mego 2008
04 Tracks. 57mins47secs

As though emerging from a pirate airwave, the deep wobbly bass and stabs of twilight noise that open Kalmukia shadow the dirty, chaotic dynamism of so much present-day metal rock. It makes for a disconcerting moment, but at the very least, the rest of the album is an oftentimes disorienting, disjointed experience.

Ilpo Vaisanen (Pan Sonic), Hildur Guonadottir (Lost In Hildurness), and Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) tie together all of their loose, flying ends, but a great deal of curiosity and tact isn’t shown in the process. Continue Reading »

As certain traditions would have it, a drawer, bedside table or any other such object is gradually overtaken by time, which solidifies until at last the object becomes the incarnation of a certain spirit. Thus the annual spring cleaning. Similarly, before the year goes out like a light, we shuffle through gifts, keepsakes, thoughts even - hoping to see where we stand. Here are some noteworthy tokens that I’ll be keeping with me from the past twelve months.

1.

IKUE MORI
Bhima Swarga: The Journey Of The Soul From Hell To Heaven
Tzadik

2.

ALISTAIR CROSBIE
This Quiet House (The Lonesome Age Of Mirrors - Volume One) / The Study Of Cycles (The Lonesome Age Of Mirrors - Volume Two)
Lefthand Pressings

3.

BHOB RAINEY & RALF WEHOWSKY
I Don’t Think I Can See You Tonight
Sedimental

4.

COH
Strings
Raster-Noton

5.

YAIR ETZIONY
Flawed
Spekk

6.

KEN IKEDA
Mist On The Window
Spekk

7.

GIUSEPPE IELASI & NICOLA RATTI
Bellows
Kning Disk

8.

SEBASTIEN ROUX
Revers Oust
Room 40

9.

MACHINEFABRIEK
Weleer
Lampse

10.

LISA BEILAWA
A Handful Of World
Tzadik

11.

MIDORI HIRANO
Lushrush
Noble

12.

MAILE COLBERT
Moborosi
Twenty Hertz

13.

PJUSK
Sart
12K

14.

HILDUR GUDNADOTTIR / BJ NILSEN / STILLUPPSTEYPA
Second Childhood
Quecksilber

15.

PETER WRIGHT
At Last A New Dawn
Students Of Decay

16.

STARS OF THE LID
And Their Refinement Of The Decline
Kranky

 

17.

ISLAJA
Ulual Yyy
Fonal

18.

MICHAEL SANTOS
Soft Pocket
U-Cover

19.

KAMMERFLIMMER KOLLEKTIEF
Jinx
Staubgold

20.

PIANA
Eternal Castle
Noble

 

 

THE 2007 REVIEW

David Abravanel
Eleventh Volume
Joe Muggs
themilkman

 

VARIOUS ARTISTS
A Number Of Small Things
MORR079CD
Morr Music 2007
36 Tracks. 154mins42secs

A Number Of Small Things, the sister label to Morr Music, gathers together the residues from their 7″ releases like little trinkets and presents them in this achingly compulsive compilation of unexpected pleasures. The album presents a stage on which older, more established artists present vivid re-imaginings of their bookmarks, while other, less exposed acts utter their first words with tentative excitement. Continue Reading »

CLOUDLAND CANYON
Silver Tongued Sisyphus
KRANK111
Kranky 2007
02 Tracks. 23mins35secs

At twenty-three minutes, this EP from Cloudland Canyon is a tight, concentrated workout for freeform percussion, guitar and woozy ambient washes that pull at the listener’s nerve endings. All of the segments of which these works consist are ingeniously sequenced together, taking full advantage of each moment of contrast or continuity. The opening piece is defined by layers of telegraphic bleeps slipping and sliding over each other, to the accompaniment of distant, contorted percussive crashes, and heavy, reverberating guitar figures. Continue Reading »

SYLVAIN CHAUVEAU
S
TYPE030
Type Recordings 2007
o5 Tracks. 21mins.40secs

With his past few releases, be it under his own name or the On moniker, Sylvain Chauveau has been moving away from his gorgeously sparse and poetic piano works, towards brooding electroacoustic compositions. His first recording on the Type label attempts a fusion of these two realms, resulting in something that is heterogeneous stylistically, yet clearly reserved in its musical forms. Each track enjoys a short but seething lifespan, consisting of discrete audio chunks that are fragile, tentative, and irresolute. Continue Reading »

SEABEAR
The Ghost That Carried Us Away
MORR 076CD
Morr Music 2007
12 Tracks. 44mins22secs

The debut full-length from Icelandic group Seabear consists of understated vignettes that center upon simple three-or-four-note acoustic guitar lines, which unfold and circle in the shifting light of successive sound washes. The harmonica and violin of Gudbjorg Hlin Gudmndsdottir provides the buoyant melodies with a firmer foundation with which to wrestle and coalesce; so too does the idyllic atmosphere of lightly brushed drums, flugelhorn, and slide-guitar, all of which, at some point or other, manage to consolidate a certain degree of independence in their category, tumbling to the fore, and thus ensuring a more elastic and varied development. Continue Reading »

SWOD
Sekunden
TOWERBLOCK041
City Centre Offices 2007
09 Tracks. 41mins04secs

While Swod deviate little from the blueprint laid down on their first full-length effort, their ability to trim their music back to the essentials so as to arrive at a simple, eloquent statement remains firmly entrenched and effective. Similar to an artist who purposefully rejects any vibrant colors so to focus on shades of grey, Oliver Doerell and Stephan Wohrmann achieve an appropriate evening austerity on Sekunden. The piano, as the primary focus, is quietly ominous and melancholic, shaded lightly by electronics which add melodic elaboration on themes, scratchy stridulations, dry rattling, and, on ocassion, abstracted twittering.

Individual works are finely compact and move swiftly in unison. Ja and Exit in particular, manage to achieve a close proximity through shared textures, complementary phrasing, and consensual dynamics. Continue Reading »

CRISTIAN VOGEL
Double Deux / Delicado: Music For The Creations Of Gilles Jobion
S55003
Station 55 Records
08 Tracks. 58mins56secs / 01 Track. 33mins14secs

With this two disc set, Cristian Vogel takes his countenance for the rave dancefloor and siphons it off to that of interpretative dance. Surprising or not, this spells a sort of pyrrhic victory for Vogel, who seemed quite at home in crafting esoteric techno concoctions. Evidently, both works on display here were created in parallel with the choreography, and thus form a certain symbiosis between himself, the choreographer and, of course, the dancers themselves.

As a single thirty-minute composition, the fruits of Delicado take the form of crisp digital beats that sound like sandpaper anxiously rubbing itself to sleep. Around this foundation, pieces of static hum and other such clicks and scratches frenetically pucker, pop and fizz, working to further establish a fine sensation of pulse and energy. This opens up a fairly luminous setting, which unfolds across a series of open-ended textures, which are threaded with rolling half-melodies that often sound like tiny metal butterflies. Once erected, however, impressive as the process may have been, it nevertheless becomes apparent that, as a piece of aural architecture, it is one which cannot be wholly appreciated for what it simply is materially, but in what it actually does, that is to say, in what function it serves - namely, as an environment for and against which the dancers are meant to interact.

With Double Deux, on the other hand, Vogel manages to convey an excited monologue about concentric circles and caustic hisses spinning more and more out of control. Though similar in approach, the shorter tracks work better for him. With shorter stretches of time, his music actually does more, as he takes a slightly abrasive mechanical rhythm, pairs it with haunting synthesized and slowly moving sounds, and allows it to spin more or less maniacally around its tonic, continually injecting or stripping away elements which the piece struggles with in fascinating ways to deal with and incorporate. Also having been broken into subsections, these pieces reveal more distinctive weights and colors and, on a whole, stand up better on their own.

3.5/5

Cristian Vogel
Buy: CD