TOM ARTHURS/OLLIE BOWN/ISAMBARD KHROUSTALIOV/LOTHAR OHLMEIER
Long Division
NOT019
Not Applicable 2012
07 Tracks. 50mins26secs

A year and a half ago, clarinetist Lothar Ohlmeier, trumpet player Tom Arthurs and Icarus’s Ollie Bown and Sam ‘Isambard Khroustaliov’ Britton were invited to perform at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Amsterdam, Netherlands, but neither Bown, who lives in Sydney, nor Britton, who was due to be on his honeymoon at the time, were able to attend. Still, the four did perform together, in some way, as planned. Arthurs and Ohlmeier did make it to the festival and played together on stage against a backdrop of sounds generated by software developed specifically for the performance by both Bown and Britton, the particularity of the software in question being that it would generate sounds and music on its own accord and interact with the two live performers as they improvised. This was further complicated by the equation between protagonists constantly shifting between the four, or in case of Icarus, their incarnations, performing either in pairs or trio.

Beside the North Sea Jazz Festival performance, this record also documents part of a similar set at NK in Berlin. Subtitled Suite For Autonomous Electronics, Long Division is an intriguing document on self-generative music and a very interesting example of applied artificial intelligence. What results of these two sets is predictably intricate and difficult to grasp in one sitting. The balance between the two live musicians and the computer generated sounds constantly shifts, at times bringing out the organic interactions between Arthurs and Ohlmeier, at others leaning heavily on the side of the machines, but it is when all these elements are combined fairly equally that things appear to take on a different dimension altogether. This is perhaps best demonstrated in the closing piece, its first half especially, Arthurs and Ohlmeier combining forces to fight off relentless assaults of glitches and noise distortion. Before that, a similar set up delivers a marginally more gentle piece on the second track while the album’s opening piece is resolutely geared towards textures and noises, which take on various forms here, some extremely electronic and distorted, some sourced from the instruments, but Arthurs and Ohlmeier steer clear of any remotely musical components to instead work from silent blows and breathings as they attempt to emulate the fragmented patterns generated by Britton’s software.

The third, fourth, fifth and sixth pieces are all duo performances, and while the fourth provides Arthurs and Ohlmeier with a few minutes of complete acoustic freedom, the three other pieces display various scales of interaction between computers and musicians, ranging from sparse moments (the two involving Britton) to much denser and active constructions on the Bown piece.

Whether machines have souls may perhaps not be relevant here, but this experiment in self-generative electronics and how these can ‘interact’ with humans certainly poses more questions than it answers, and proves an intriguing work, which is made very accessible to all from the Not Applicable website for free – a £3 donation is suggested, a very small price to pay for a totally unique album.

The quartet will be performing Long Division live again at Kings Place in London on Monday 30 January. Visit the Kings Place website for further details.

4/5

Thomas Arthurs | Icarus | Not Applicable

ICARUS
All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible Worlds
NOT013
Not Applicable 2010
08 Tracks. 43mins27secs

Live improvisation has been part of British duo Icarus’s work for years now, and this latest offering, recorded during the pair’s European tour in support to Sylt Remixes, released last year, continues to develop this aspect.

The work here seems in part inspired by the insect behaviours filmed by architect-turned filmmaker and visual artist Martin Hampton for the pair’s tour. This transpires predominantly in how Bown and Britton articulate busy soundscapes, stabs of hyperactive rhythms, at times recalling some of their early drum’n’bass work, albeit in much more deconstructed form, and abstract melodies into dense sonic vignettes, especially on pieces such as Husky Offset, Uke ‘Em, On The Sunny Sides Of The Ocean and closing sister track On The Sunny Side Of The Oceans (note the subtle difference in these two titles). The first two are especially hectic and complex, and it is impossible to remain focussed on their various components at once, these soundscapes therefore rapidly becoming impressions more than truly concrete manifestations. This is a trick Icarus have often relied on in the past, and here again, the listener is left confused by these relentless sonic maelstroms. Bown and Britton are craftsmen when it comes to building such condensed and intricate sound formations, and while it is difficult to isolate the various sections of a piece, they collate them with precision and arrange them in very particular ways. The progression observed on the ten-minute epic On The Sunny Sides Of The Ocean, from what sounds like an hybrid between a scream and air being let out of a balloon leading first into the mechanical clinks and clanks of a series of metallic percussions, then, as layers of found sounds and noise are progressively added and percussive sounds begin to step over each other, is truly magnificent. All the way through though, the pace varies quite drastically, ebbing and flowing in relation with the intensity of the various layers of sounds used, and the pair continuously alter the impact of the piece by almost imperceptibly toning it up or down.

On Specters, the mood is somewhat different, drawing on one side from a vast library of glitches, distortions and abrasive textures, and on the other on extremely angular avant-garde piano lines, the latter cascading over the former in seemingly random formations. Eulot, which follows, appears almost gentle in comparison, at least in its first section, a piano surfacing once again in the early part of the piece before withdrawing to clear the ground for much more abstract sine waves to weave their way through increasingly complex rhythmic structures, while elsewhere on the record, echoes of strident jazz experimentations leave a ghostly mark on the record.

All The Best In the Best Off All Possible Worlds is billed as a live record, yet there is no crowd noise to validate this, however, while previous records have had, at least in parts, a bucolic feel, this latest offering is much rawer and never smoothes over enough to feel any other way than industrial and urban. It represents another step forward in the particularly fruitful and creative body of work assembled by Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, one that shows their taste for improvisation under a renewed light.

4.7/5

Icarus | Icarus (MySpace) | Not Applicable

Icarus: Uke ‘Em from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
2 | Favourite Places
AB026
Audiobulb Records 2009
10 Tracks. 56mins30secs

Amazon UK: DLD Amazon US: DLD Boomkat: DLD iTunes: DLD

The concept is pretty simple: take a number of contemporary musicians with a taste for moods and atmospheres, task them with recording sounds from their favourite places in the world and use them in a composition. This is exactly what David Newman, head of Audiobulb, did two years ago, and the result was compiled in the first instalment of Favourite Places, with contributions from Biosphere, Taylor Deupree, Claudio, Leafcutter John and John Kannenberg amongst others. The second volume in the collection brings together musicians from the UK (Michael Santos, Icarus, Autistici, Calika), Australia (Lawrence English), Belgium (Yannick Franck), Japan (Sawako), USA (Jeremy Bible, He Can Jog) and Canada (Michael Trommer), giving them each a chance to introduce their very own favourite place. The booklet accompanying this CD contains photographs and a description of these spots, providing concrete complements to the recordings.

The locations selected vary greatly here, ranging from the South Downs between London and Brighton (in two instances), a derelict concrete factory in Ohio, a forest near Brisbane, to a suburban Belgian town, a public walkway in North London, a bedroom in Brooklyn, or the Peak District National Park near Sheffield, yet, perhaps due to the very nature of the project and of the artists involved, there are great sonic consistency throughout the record. Apart for He Can Jog’s Erik Schoster who uses his bed as his source location, the other nine artists use outdoors settings as the starting point for their respective contributions, feeding sounds ranging from wind sweeping though landscapes or birdsongs to running water, rain or distant traffic noises into densely atmospheric collages where music often occurs as an impressionist counterpoint.

This especially the case on Lawrence English’s opening Quiet Planigale, which originally seems to catalogue all sorts of birdsongs but eventually gives way to a sombre drone over which lighter fragments of hazy melody take shape, or on Michael Santos’s Perfect Pitch, where field recordings, collected along Parkland Walk, between Finsbury Park and Highgate, occupy solely the first segment of the track, before outstretched chimes come in, arranged as to evoke light playing through branches and leaves. Autistici’s Winter Heather, Frozen Breath works on a similar concept, David Newman originally focusing on a walk through the vast spaces of the Peak District National Park before bringing in gently shimmering sounds to convey an element of the wide open space serving as inspiration for the track. It is also the format adopted by Michael Trommer on his portrayal of Toronto’s underground pedestrian network for TD Path 6. To complement the urban setting of the opening two and a half minute, Trommer distils a haunting and dense series of soundscapes in the remaining section of the track, crystallising the transient aspect of the paths network and its anonymity in a surprisingly vivid way.

Icarus take the concept into a different direction by intricately linking the sounds recorded on the South Downs (football commentaries on a portable radio, human voices, insects, car noises) and the music they extract from them, articulating these two phases against each other. This is also partially the case with He Can Jog’s extremely clever Woodbine Entwist, although producing a radically different result. Here, the bed, and by extension the bedroom, is integrant part of the song, not so much through the sounds used as through the low-fi approach to the colourful electronically-tainted folk that develops from the experiment, a reminder that the music was recorded in his own living space.

Like its predecessor, this second volume of Favourite Places collects sounds and impressions, and reflects the choices made by the various contributors. Frequently characteristic of their usual work, these tracks are like open windows into the inspiration of musicians, giving an interesting, if often highly unusual and personal, insight into their intimate spaces.

4.4/5

Audiobulb Records
Amazon UK: DLD Amazon US: DLD Boomkat: DLD iTunes: DLD

ISAMBARD KHROUSTALIOV
Ohka
NO011
Not Applicable 2009
05 Tracks. 55mins18secs

With Icarus, British musicians Ollie Bown and Sam Britton have, in the twelve years since their first release, progressively moved from relatively conventional electronic music to much more challenging work. Their more recent records, I Tweet The Birdy Electric (Leaf, 2004), Carnivalesque (Not Applicable, 2005) and Sylt (Rump Recordings, 2007) have investigated the confines of experimental electronica and electro-acoustic. With his own project, Britton pushes much further into electro-acoustic territories to produce music that is, in essence, much more orchestral. Having studied architecture, Britton then went on to complete a Masters course in electronic music and composition at the IRCAM in Paris. Recording under the name Isambard Khroustaliov, Britton has collaborated with Italian-born percussionist Maurizio Ravalico and Dutch saxophonist Lothar Ohlmeier on two separate electro-acoustic projects (Five Loose Plans, 2006 and Nowhere, 2008), both released on Not Applicable, has contributed soundtracks to a handful of short films and done remixes for Icarus and Four Tet.

Britton’s latest project collects five tracks, recorded over five years, and features a number of contributors, including Gareth Humphreys (prepared piano on Ping, Traum and Ohka), Philippe Pannier (guitar on Aporia, banjo on Junkspace), Lothar Ohlmeier (bass clarinet on Traum) and Oren Marshall (tuba on Traum). Far from being straightforward and linear, the music resulting of these various collaborations is taken apart piece by piece, blasted into minute particles, treated and processed, then finally assembled in entirely new configurations, retaining very little of the original aspect of the various instruments used as sound sources. Occasionally, remote elements of melodies subsist, often in advanced stages of decomposition, but they are only fleeting pointers lost in a vast ocean of abstraction.

The primary components here are the sound sources themselves. Taken out of their original context, these become unsettling and are at times totally unrecognisable, while at others, their nature remains perfectly clear, yet the use Britton makes of them is extremely abstract. The scope of each of these five pieces is incredibly vast, ranging from the poetic and delicate, on the more nuanced moments of Ping or on the majority of Aporia, to the incredibly dense and intricate, especially in parts of Traum or Ohka. Often, this record appears to go through alternate cycles of quietude and violence, as sounds are either delicately dispensed an applied or pushed forward in chaotic clusters.

The relentless assaults of information and the constant shift in the tectonic of the various soundscapes inflicted by Britton makes Ohka a difficult record to grasp in its entirety at any particular moment, but it is also a gratifying piece of work which continuously reveals new facets of its complex structure. With Icarus, Britton has only just scratched the surface of electro-acoustic composition, but as Isambard Khroustaliov, he is free to push as deep as he can afford to. With Ohka, he does so with panache.

4.7/5

Isambard Khroustaliov | Not Applicable

A stone throw from the sprawling Olympic building site, Dalston is the home of Café Oto, the venue chosen by Icarus for the London leg of their current tour, coinciding with the release of Sylt Remixes. For the event, they had invited experimental laptop sound artist Yee-King, electronic story tellers Isan and the Glass Shrimp DJ to complete the bill.

First on was Yee-King, sat on the left of the stage area with a laptop and a drum machine in front of him and the fruit of his work projected behind him, showing his live editing in real time. And what he works with is no nicey-nicey cool and shiny Apple user interface but utterly geeky DOS programming. Anyone who has ever worked on an AS400 would have been familiar with the standard green text on black screen. Away from the technological aspect, Yee-King’s set ranged from the wonderfully poetic to the corrosive, often switching from one to the other in an instant. The first half of his set was ridden with bubbly electronic twitches sounding like R2D2 having a whale of a time in some exotic whore hose, but later, the tone became much more subtle and delicate as Yee-King assembled some music box-like sounds into a gentle sonic web, before crushing it all in what could only have sounded like the same R2D2 having a major crash at the end of the night.

Next to take the stage was one half of Isan, and the change of mood could hardly have been greater. Robin Saville deployed the band’s trademark melodic electronica, occasionally pushing into smooth disco-like electro, at times almost invoking, very successfully, the spirit of Giorgio Moroder, tainted with Isan’s own primary coloured vision. Over the years, the band have distilled deceptively simple and innocent electro pop gems which have at times been dismissed by many as being too bubble gum and straightforward, when they actually are a medium for creating some of the most evocative and dreamy electronic music around. This perhaps accounted for a few seats becoming free after Yee-King pretty full house set, much to the delight of those who had remained to enjoy Saville’s flawless set.

Last on were Sam Britton and Ollie Bown, aka Icarus, celebrating the release of their excellent recent Sylt Remixes album with a set of entirely new material, with stunning visuals by Martin Hampton. On record, the pair often create elegant electro-acoustic pieces centred around extremely airy and light sound structures. This set however presented a much harsher side, relying on complex beat patterns, dense soundscapes and VOLUME. From the very first beat, everything was pushed up into the red, making this as much a physical experience as it was a cerebral one.

On the screen behind insects squirmed and wriggled in close-up, and there was a definite sense of being at some sort of insectoid warehouse rave, full of multi-segmented rhythms and spindly, thrashing beats. The most enduring – and perhaps apt – image from this spectacular piece of film was of one alien, semi-transparent creature grimly clinging on while being buffeted by winds amongst an ever-shifting black grass lattice. As the layers of battering rhythms and complexities piled up around me, I had to grip the edge of my seat to avoid falling off, feeling beaten up and befuddled. The end of the piece featured some more recognisable instruments, albeit in strange new forms. The sound of a trumpet, sliced into pieces, shuffled and rearranged, hinted at the improvisational directions Bown and Britton have been heading in with their Not Applicable venture – ever onwards into uncharted and difficult terrains. Tonight may have been a momentary glance back over their respective shoulders, but they still sounded years ahead of the rest of us.

In between live sets, the Glass Shrimp DJ, who can regularly be heard on Resonance FM, provided an excellent selection of experimental works woven into seventies Afro and spiritual jazz and ethic music. Each of the three live performances proved extremely different for the others, giving this event a particularly wide ranging scope by bringing a different angle of electronic music, helping to build a surprisingly comprehensive picture of a genre that never cease to develop.

Yee-King | Yee-King (MySpace) | Isan | Isan (MySpace) | Icarus | Icarus (MySpace)

ICARUS
Sylt Remixes
RUMPCD011
Rump Recordings 2009
14 Tracks. 75mins38secs

Buy: iTunes

For the last decade or so, Icarus have continuously refined their sophisticated electronica, feeding it with layers of found sounds, prepared instruments, noise, complex rhythmic structures and electro-acoustic forms. Formed of Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, Icarus started in the mid nineties as a pretty conventional electronic act with a taste for minimal forms and beats infused with drum & bass, but progressively, the pair brought in less conformist sounds and developed a very different approach to their work, which reached full maturity for the first time with their 2004 album I Tweet The Birdy Electric, published on Leaf. Sylt, released in 2007 on Danish imprint Rump Recordings, was built around a series of live improvisations, which were later dismantled and reassembled into the seven tracks that made the album.

This remix album sees a wide array of artists, from Opiate to Isan, Svartag to Xela, Digitonal to Ital Tek, getting their hands on Sylt and once again pull its sounds apart to create something entirely new. Icarus themselves have taken part in the process by revisiting Keet, in this case renamed Keets, while Sam Britton, under his Isambard Khroustaliov guise, gets to rework Jyske and Rugkiks into one with bass clarinettist Lothar Ohlmeier. The scope of this record is equally as vast, ranging from tidy electronica (Isan, Ital Tek) to atmospheric guitars and noise (Svartbag, Xela) to thorough experimentation (Opiate, Karsten Pflum, CoH). This odd amalgam seems to strangely sum up at least part of the Icarus equation by invoking various aspects of the duo’s career, whether relating to Sylt or not, and articulate them into some fascinating configurations.

While both Isan and Ital Tek create rather pastoral and peaceful pieces by recycling the intricate patchwork of noise of Keet and the more abrasive textures of Selfautoparent respectively, Badun later on offers a more complex and sombre, yet at the same time more stripped down, reading of, once again, Keet (the piece is presented here in no less than six very different versions). Xela feeds on the early textures of the original mix of First Inf(E)Rænce to build a dense and moody version, adding out-of-focus vocals to accentuate on the gloomy tone of the piece, and GoTo80 transforms Second Inf(E)Rænce into a disjointed video game soundtrack where 8-bit cheesy melodies would be replaced with distortions and micro noises, while Lothar Ohlmeier and Isambard Khroustaliov improvise freely on Jyske Rugkiks. Earlier, Opiate’s version of Keet originally appears as little more than a skeleton of disjointed sounds, but in toward the end, these are bound by a somewhat chaotic beat.

These fourteen remixes are as many curveballs, giving the music of Icarus new angles and directions, or re-jigging the pair’s sonic world into something that, although occasionally close, appears totally distorted. Sylt Remixes is a consistently challenging record which opens up the already vast sound world of Icarus to entirely new textures.

4.6/5

Icarus | Icarus (MySpace) | Rump Recordings
Buy: iTunes

Keets from not applicable on Vimeo.

LOTHAR OHLMEIER/ISAMBARD KHROUSTALIOV
Nowhere
NOT008
Not Applicable 2008
05 Tracks. 33mins48secs

Nowhere is the first collaboration between Dutch jazz bass clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Lothar Ohlmeier and Isambard Khroustaliov, the alter ego of British experimental musician Sam Britton, who is more commonly known as one half of electronic entity Icarus. Ohlmeier studied music in Hannover and Amsterdam before establishing himself at the forefront of the Dutch improvised music scene. He has since collaborated with a wide range of jazz artists, including pianist Julia Sassoon and drummer Bart van Helsdinger, with whom he formed Azilut! in 2000. Now living in England, Ohlmeier continues to perform all over Europe. Meanwhile, beside his regular stint with Icarus, Sam Britton has been working on solo projects under his Isambard Khroustaliov guise, releasing a first limited CDR, entitled 8 Minutes, on the band’s imprint, Not Applicable, in 2002, followed by a collaborative effort with Italian-born percussionist Maurizio Ravalico, Five Loose Plans, in 2006.

The fruit of three years of work, the five tracks presented here, culled from recordings made during a residency at the IRCAM in Paris and at various music festivals across Europe, demonstrate the increasing connections between traditional improvised music and modern forms. While similar collaborations have been flourishing in recent years, that of Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden and jazz drummer and percussionist Steve Reid being the most high profile, Ohlmeier and Britton create here a rich and vibrant sonic space within which they freely feed from each other. Ohlmeier’s clarinet is the main focal element throughout, in turn floating high above the sonic backdrop or simple source component for Britton’s intricate constructions. It is as if every possible sound had been extracted from the instrument, from its most common to its most visceral. The clickety-clicks of the keys, the surplus air escaping through the tone holes, the breathing of the wood become as many structural elements for Britton, who creates here a tapestry as finely detailed and diaphanous as the wind chime-like drapes crafted with Icarus in their wonderfully poetic I Tweet The Birdy Electric album.

Here though, it is the organic nature of the instrument that commends attention. Both through Ohlmeier’s elegant flourishes and variations and Britton’s infinitesimal renderings, the clarinet comes to life, erupts in multiple forms, circles above and lingers below, lives deep within and far out, with only occasional external sounds (a prepared piano, most notably, on After Sunrise and Dusk as well as furtive found sounds) to widen the core soundscapes. The level of symbiosis between the two musicians is such that the boundaries of their respective interactions is at times blurred, but even when the roles are clearly defined, the work remains dense, coherent, and of very high standard, making this record an unmissable experience.

4.7/5

Not Applicable
Buy: CD | iTunes

ICARUS
Sylt
RUMPCD007
Rump Recordings 2007
07 Tracks. 59mins37secs

Icarus, the duo formed of Sam Britton and Ollie Bown, began life as an experimental drum’n'bass formation, releasing records on Recordings Of Substance, Output, Hydrogen Dukebox, Temporary Residence and their own Not Applicable imprint. In recent years, their work has become much more focused on pure sonic experimentation, with albums such as I Tweet The Birdie Electric (The Leaf Label, 2004) and Carnivalesque (Not Applicable) showcasing incredibly dense and complex, yet light and airy, sonic formations, often built out of lengthy improv sessions.

The pair’s latest project is centred around two epic sister pieces, First Inf(e)rænce and Second Inf(e)rænce,  each spanning well over fifteen minutes. Recorded live in May 2006 at Les Abattoires in Toulouse, France, during a single session, these two improvisations are amongst the most complex and intricate pieces the band have recorded. The first piece begins with interferences and extensive signal processing, but as the soundscapes morphs into a much more arid core formation of light percussive noise, the ambience deepens. The piece becomes progressively alive as a myriad of sounds come and go, climb on each other and fight for the slightest moment of attention, evoking the apparent random commotion of an ant colony in full effervescence. This level of hyperactivity only lasts a few minutes, and is eventually brought back to a much lower intensity as Britton and Bown introduce a surprisingly linear beat and reduce the amount of sounds with which they play to a minimum. Soon though, the rhythmic pattern disintegrates and the scope is once more left free for dense noise collages to populate it.

Second Inf(e)rænce kicks off on a much more musical foot with a few jazz-influenced piano chords, but these processed sounds are rapidly stretched and distorted to become simple pointers in a soundscape that chimes and prickles from all sides. Once again, the piece goes through a series of transformations over its seventeen minutes, although the processed piano remains, in various forms, a constant pretty much throughout. Icarus keep up with the erratic nature of the piece much more consistently here, dropping the sonic tension only occasionally. This contributes to Second Inf(e)rænce being a much more demanding creation than its predecessor.

The rest of the album constitutes of five shorter pieces made from amalgams of live and edited work, with additional contributions from clarinettist Lothar Ohlmeier and cellist Susie Winkworth on Rugkiks and Jyske. The album opens with the rather gentle Keet, which demonstrates a surprising light-heartedness and flirts with conventional melodic forms, albeit partly hidden from sight by a dense sonic carpet. Both Rugkiks and Jyske explore the confines of contemporary electronic music and musique concrete, while on Volks, Icarus incorporate crowd noises as part of a piece which begins in rather subtle mood and builds up to a much more consistent structure toward the end.

With Sylt, Icarus continue to develop their highly experimental format and manage to bring in fresh elements without destabilising their usual template. Sam Britton and Ollie Bown create uncompromising experimental improvised music that manages to be at once evocative and captivating, and Sylt only serves to strongly reinforce their vision.

4.4/5

Icarus | Rump Recordings
iTunes