Current 93 & Nurse With Wound: Bright Yellow Moon

Posted on by
Reply

In August 2000 Current 93’s David Tibet was rushed to hospital suffering from peritonitis. He was operated on that night and nearly died. Bright Yellow Moon is his public articulation of this life-threatening and presumably life-changing experience. Although Tibet and Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton are full members of each other’s groups, and have also released two albums as Tibet & Stapleton, this is the first (and, one suspects, the last) full collaboration between Current 93 and Nurse With Wound. The discographical accuracy is appropriate, since Bright Yellow Moon sounds like no previous release involving either party. It sounds, in fact, like a C93 & NWW album ought to sound, with Tibet’s hallucinatory lyrical visions and Michael Cashmore’s ominous threads of acoustic guitar swathed in the livid attack of Stapleton’s hyperreal studio collages.

The album begins with a brief sung fragment, before opening out into the epic ‘Disintegrate Blur 36 Page 03’. This vast dreamscape is both the record’s creative apex and its clearest statement of intent. It depicts Tibet’s fragile state as he drifts in and out of consciousness, pumped full of drugs and experiencing severe mental disorientation. The glacially shifting guitar and doomstruck percussion frame Tibet’s debilitated attempts to come to terms with his condition: “The fault isn’t mine, it was given to me in a red house, in a dead house…”

The next piece, ‘Mothering Sunday (Legion Legion)’, is quite simply one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever heard. In barely three minutes Stapleton piles horror upon unspeakable horror, tracing a confrontation with death when the dying man is not ready or willing to abandon life. Tibet writes in his sleevenotes, “I could already see helicopters chattering over me, and they followed me to the ward.” They follow the listener too, swooping malevolently like those in Apocalypse Now and merging with insane laughter, sirens, marching, distant choirs and the crying of a baby. This is a vision of hell as disturbing in its way as anything imagined by Dante or Goya.

Stapleton and Tibet broaden the sonic palette on ‘Nichts’, acknowledging NWW’s recent turn to rhythm with an infectious bass line and a delirious percussive attack. ‘Die, Flip Or Go To India’ is another long, spacey aural collage, with Tibet’s nightmarishly treated vocal suggesting imminent collapse. The album ends softly with ‘Walking Like Shadow’, its sad text and gentle minor chords hinting at impermanence and recovery.

TS Eliot wrote: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” David Tibet came closer to ruin than most have, and Bright Yellow Moon is a moving collection of fragments attesting to his survival.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

Angels of Light: How I Loved You, Angels of Light: We Were Alive!, Michael Gira & Dan Matz: What We Did

Posted on by
Reply

When Michael Gira disbanded Swans in 1997, his main reason was that the weight of expectation surrounding the group’s name had become a liability. Since 1982, Swans had marshalled the transformative qualities of sound in a way that was, and remains, unparalleled in rock. The lurching Industrial rhythms of their earliest work were gradually sloughed off in favour of visionary, crescendo-laden sunbursts. Their last album, Soundtracks For The Blind, mixed intense balladry with spoken word tape loops and Ambient textures to ecstatic effect.

Since then, Gira has further refined his exploration into the redemptive powers of the song with the Angels of Light. (The parallel Body Lovers project, of which the first part of a promised trilogy has so far appeared, continues the journey into the realms of the psycho-Ambient.) How I Loved You, the second Angels of Light album, has recently been complemented by the release of a limited (750) edition live CD, We Were Alive!, available only through Gira’s website.

Gira is nothing if not a soul singer, and the ten songs comprising How I Loved You are saturated with pure, heartfelt emotion. The voice is bitter, regretful and yearning, as Gira maps out vast territories of love and loss. While some of Swans’ visceral attack may have been purged, there is certainly no let-up in the masterful play of tension and release on which these songs turn. The acoustic guitar is at the forefront, augmented by breathy accordion, wisps of pedal steel and firmly insistent percussion.

‘Evangeline’ is how Leonard Cohen should sound these days, if his once rich muse hadn’t been terminally derailed by clodhopping irony and an inexplicable liking for cheesy synthesised arrangements. Gira assumes the role of romantic troubadour with ease, his closely miked vocals suffused with a graceful eroticism. ‘My True Body’ is much darker. Gira comes on like an old time preacher, while the song is driven along by thunderous drumming.

The Angels really take flight, however, on the centrepiece ‘New City In The Future’ and the closing ‘Two Women’. Both last over ten minutes, and both are flawless blends of rousing chord progressions and achingly vivid melodic intensity. Multitracked guitars reverberate endlessly around Gira’s passionate incantations of desire and possession.

The live album captures the Angels at a 2001 concert in Toronto. The sound quality is not perfect, but the immense power of the ensemble is well in evidence, as are the sublime touches of glockenspiel and accordion that add light and shade everywhere. Five new songs are aired, including the exceptional ‘All Souls Rising’, and in deference to history the concert ends with emotive readings of two of Swans’ finest songs, ‘God Damn The Sun’ and ‘Failure’. The CD is nicely packaged in a clear plastic wallet with a printed envelope and personalised artwork.

What We Did is a more intimate affair, a collaboration between Gira and Dan Matz of Windsor For The Derby (who supported Swans on tour in 1997). These songs edge towards the mythic Americana of the Band and Gram Parsons. Gira and Matz alternate lead vocals, and the gently played acoustic guitar patterns are strengthened by atmospheric piano and harmonica. The pairing results in an album that quietly seduces the listener with its warmth and understated sensitivity.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

AMM: Tunes Without Measure or End

Posted on by
2

Free improvisation draws up a pact between performer and listener. Refusing the comforting pillars of notation and songform, the art insists that inspiration and interaction are key to the production of meaning. The performer creates music that is unique and unrepeatable; the audience must listen actively, their hearing intent on capturing each successive moment. The improvising ensemble AMM, a 2000 concert of whose is documented on Tunes Without Measure or End, provide a particularly fine example of this singular form of communication. Their live shows are compelling spectacles of rapturous intensity, where the players’ concentration on the dynamics of their sound is matched by a deep and focused listening among the audience.

It is salutary to recall that in the years 1966-7, AMM were kindred spirits of Pink Floyd and other participants in the London psychedelic scene. Tunes Without Measure or End makes the connection clear: like the early Floyd, AMM were and are about exploring the furthest recesses of inner space. Their soundworld is like a constantly threatened earthquake, with the prepared guitar and electronics of Keith Rowe, the piano of John Tilbury and the drums of Eddie Prévost shifting and hovering like tectonic plates as they conduct a conversation that is as challenging as it is eloquent. Alive to the unfolding complexities of the music, the players deploy their instruments with the utmost grace and sensitivity.

Another parallel that comes to mind is with Jackson Pollock’s ‘drip’ paintings, some of the founding texts of abstract expressionism. At first sight, these huge canvases seem like the random or careless work of a rank amateur; it is only on closer inspection that they are revealed as the layered, pulsating creations that they are. Similarly close attention to the music of AMM enables one to discern the sublime way in which the dark rumble of Prévost’s bowed cymbals explodes into ferocious percussive attack, all the while weaving in and out of Rowe’s arsenal of effects and Tilbury’s unnervingly placid lyricism. When Rowe tunes in his radio it sounds like a transmission from a lost planet, the crackling broadcast adding to the overwhelming sense of mystery and drama that emanates from this exquisite music.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

Richard Youngs: Sapphie, Making Paper

Posted on by
1

Two remarkable albums from a genuinely unsung hero. Youngs has collaborated with Brian Lavelle, Simon Wickham Smith and Acid Mothers Temple’s Makoto Kawabata. On these two CDs, however, he shows himself to be a singer of rare sensitivity in his own right, his distinctive voice arcing and swelling to perfection around baroque solo guitar and piano.

Sapphie is a reissue of a 1998 release on which Youngs sings and plays classical guitar. It’s apparently an elegy for his dead dog, although you’d be hard pressed to tell this from the lyrics, many of which are indecipherable due to Youngs’ unusual, almost strangled vocal style. Like the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser or the early Michael Stipe, Youngs intimates through loose, partly formed phrasing that he has found himself at the centre of a complex personal cosmology. The phrases that emerge and form the titles of the songs – ‘Soon It Will Be Fire’, ‘A Fullness of Light in Your Soul’, ‘The Graze of Days’ – reverberate with private significance. On these three long pieces, Youngs sings in tender howls of rage, while his guitar issues forth sublime arpeggios and cadences.

Making Paper is even more opaque and recondite, but no less compelling. The basic template is similar, but on this album Youngs plays piano. His vocal outpourings take on an increasingly unearthly form on the 22-minute ‘Only Haligonian’, the words tumbling and sliding in counterpoint to the ornate structures delineated by the instrument. The equally epic ‘Warriors’ is dark with foreboding, its skeletal text warning of battle and slaughter; while ‘The World Is Silence In Your Head’ provides a calm, much needed interlude.

These recordings occupy a strange territory between avant rock, folk and classical musics. Together they form a serious and profound body of work, daring in conception and immaculate in execution.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 10, 2002)

Goem: Disco

Posted on by
Reply

An intriguing one, this: an hour-long album consisting almost entirely of sequenced beats, yet which manages to avoid all traces of tedium or repetitiveness. The work of Dutchmen Peter Duimelinks, Frans de Waard and Roel Meelkop, its nine untitled tracks unfold in dense salvos of electronic pulses. The rhythms and timbres of these are constantly shifting. Typically, a sharp snare drum crack or metallic texture establishes an arresting presence, gains in rhythmic interest and modulates into softer, less insistent textures.

Within this framework, there is a considerable amount of variation. At first listen anonymous and featureless, the music soon reveals itself to be highly controlled and organised by its makers. In other words, we are in the realm of electronic minimalism, where the slightest textural shift becomes a significant creative intervention.

Not that the majority of the shifts here are slight; far from it. Stripped of all melodic embellishment, the rhythms are infernal and malevolent. The BPM count is certainly too low to make dancing to this album a viable proposition, which presumably makes the title an ironic statement of some kind. So, rather than contributing to feelings of euphoria and release, Goem instead evoke tension and paranoia. These are forced into the listener’s skull like needles, carried along on invasive currents of static electricity. When relief comes, it comes in the form of soft, fuzzy beats and wispy, aerated drones, like being lowered into a warm echo chamber.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 10, 2002)

Metaxu: Metaxu

Posted on by
Reply

Metaxu are Maurizio Martusciello on sampler and electroacoustic objects, and Filippo Paolini on sampler, turntables and CDs. Their debut CD is an undistinguished addition to the sampling genre. Its eight untitled tracks are resolutely formulaic, with bursts of distortion and interference counterbalanced by high-pitched pulses and frequencies. These strategies are too irritating to be memorable, and yet when the soundfield activity turns towards the minimal, the results are no more engaging.

Sampled vocals, strings and flute drift in and out of the mix, failing to make much of an impression amid the barrage of processed sounds. The album only really takes off with the last track, an energetic yet eerie slab of noise that has a sense of urgency sadly lacking elsewhere.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 9, 2001)

Beequeen: Sugarbush

Posted on by
Reply

The German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-86) is now regarded as one of the most important visual artists of the 20th century. I’m no expert on his work, but I have come across a few examples of it in galleries and museums. Particularly memorable was his long encounter with a coyote, in which he was filmed in close proximity to this unfriendly animal in an otherwise bare room for many hours. Throughout his career he exhibited a fascination with fat and felt, which he was drawn to use as raw materials as a result of having been covered in them, and thereby having his life saved, in a wartime incident. Towards the end of his life he became something of an environmental activist, getting involved in tree-planting campaigns and adopting the position of spokesman for a disenfranchised generation.

This release by Holland’s Beequeen (a duo consisting of Frans de Waard and Freek Kinkelaar) is ‘dedicated to and inspired by’ Beuys, and repeats the words ‘nature, matter, form’ (which could be said to be central to his art) in four languages on the insert. However, the parallels break down when one actually listens to the CD. What we have here is an hour’s worth of join-the-dots Ambient, its dogged formalism only occasionally leavened by interesting interventions.

The Beuys influence is most readily noticeable in the opening and best piece, ’10 Minutes Before The Worm’, which has the feel of a processed environmental recording. It begins imperceptibly, with faint clicks and gently breaking waves gradually giving way to insistent sounds of falling water. Eventually a gloomy synth progression comes to predominate, reverberating eerily around the flooded chamber. It’s an accomplished mood piece, richly evocative of old, decaying and abandoned buildings.

Unfortunately, Beequeen cannot sustain this level of creativity, and most of the remaining pieces are fairly sterile exercises in layering and filtering synthesised washes of sound. Interest is sparked by radio tunings and softly circling rhythms, but Beequeen seem reluctant to let these elements intrude too much. Only on ‘Time Waits For No-one’ do things get really interesting, with grinding metallic clashes and focused blasts of noise. Otherwise the CD is content to meander through well trodden Ambient soundscapes, displaying none of the daring and passion of the artist who inspired it.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 9, 2001)

Amber Asylum: The Supernatural Parlour Collection

Posted on by
Reply

Amber Asylum is a strings-based group led by Kris Force (who has played on albums by Swans, Neurosis and Matmos) and Jackie Gratz. Though considerably more restrained for the most part, there is something of Swans’ sense of coiled power and release on this, their fourth album. It’s a bewitching mix of ethereal melodies, ambient textures and classical forms, with Force’s violin and Gratz’s cello lending the album a lovely chamber music quality.

The tone is set by the intriguing opener, ‘Black Lodge’. It begins with a calm, almost military drum pattern, which is gradually bolstered by elegant string flourishes. As the track unfolds, the string sounds become longer and more drone-based. This basic structure recurs several times on the album, with Force adding chilly vocals to ‘Silence of the Setting Sun’ and ‘Disembodied Healer’. The approach pays repeated dividends, as the strings, voice and percussion coalesce with sinuous grace. Elsewhere, Amber Asylum play chamber music of ravishing beauty and precision on ‘The Shepherd’ and ‘Black Swan’, the latter (an aria from an opera called The Medium by Giancarlo Menotti) adding a darkly mesmerising oboe melody.

The closing ‘Black Sabbath’ (a version of a song of that name by the celebrated heavy metal band) sees the band taking a different approach. The strings are looser, heavier and drenched in feedback. The percussive attack is frantic and delirious, while Force’s voice approaches the scorching power of Swans’ Jarboe. The track, like the album as a whole, is testament to Amber Asylum’s success in fusing (post) rock and classical forms into an innovative and seamless whole.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 9, 2001)

Sol Invictus: Trieste, Sally Doherty & the Sumacs: Sleepy Memory

Posted on by
Reply

Tony Wakeford is the nearly man of the World Serpent family. Lacking the tragic intensity of David Tibet, the mad sonic inventiveness of Steven Stapleton and even the dramatic flourish of his former Death In June cohort Douglas P, Wakeford has over a number of albums refined his method into one of misanthropic lyrics and unadorned chamber music arrangements.

Unfortunately, this approach falls down on a number of counts, all of which are in plentiful evidence on this live recording from 1999. In the first place, Wakeford – as he candidly admits, but which honesty helps his case not a jot – is a truly awful singer. Secondly, his lyrics are a farrago of toe-curling rhymes, rank pomposity and sixth-form platitudinising. Thirdly, the music, though competently performed, lacks melodic interest and thus deprives the songs of any emotional pull.

Faced with the limitations of his voice and of his skills as a lyricist, Wakeford would be well advised to drop the in-your-face singer/songwriter approach in favour of something more abstract and impressionistic. For his current approach is riven with contradictions: he believes that he portrays the world as it really is, stripped of modern artifice, yet he cannot see that this pose is as much an artificial construct as any other.

Sally Doherty, whose backing vocals are by far the best thing about Trieste, makes the sensible decision to go it alone on Sleepy Memory. In fact the album was released in 1998 but has only now gained a full release via World Serpent. It’s a beguiling and impressive piece of work; Doherty’s oddly pure, affecting voice draws in the listener with a series of short, highly emotive lyric outpourings. The words speak plaintively of love, loss and memory, backed by a wide range of sensitive acoustic instrumentation. Nor is Doherty afraid to tackle more challenging song structures, as on ‘Chant’.

This album would be more at home on 4AD than World Serpent: there are strong echoes of Dead Can Dance’s more pastoral moments, and Doherty’s vocals are very reminiscent of His Name Is Alive’s Karin Oliver. But Sleepy Memory is in no way derivative. Rather, its restrained elegance is evidence of a highly original and distinctive talent.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 8, 2000)

Vidna Obmana & Willem Tanke: Variations for Organ, Keyboard and Processors

Posted on by
Reply

The indefatigable Vidna Obmana returns with another hour of high-concept Ambient product. Here he’s come up with a series of variations and treatments of organ pieces composed by Willem Tanke. Tanke was inspired by Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics, which draws parallels between modern Western physics and Eastern mystical traditions. The sleeve note claims that Tanke and Obmana “attempted to capture the atmosphere of the mystical visions and subatomic whirls” which form the subject of the book. Not being familiar with Capra’s work, I’m not in a position to judge the success or otherwise of this venture. But in purely musical terms the results are moody and elegant, a striking dialogue between ancient and modern that largely avoids the soporific tendencies of Obmana’s earlier The Shape of Solitude.

Tanke played his original compositions on a classical pipe organ, and Obmana then processed parts of these electronically. The organ tends to occupy the upper register while Obmana’s treatments rumble away in counterpoint. The pace is formidably slow: Tanke plays the organ with evident respect for its origins, careful not to rob the instrument of its spiritual context. Obmana layers in sonorous drones to the point where it becomes hard to distinguish between his contributions and those of Tanke. The combination is reminiscent in places of such monuments to inner space as Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra and Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack, enveloping the listener in warm cocoons of sound.

Occasionally the mood deepens. On the lengthy ‘Canon III’ the electronics quietly recede, allowing the dramatic swell of the organ to dominate. On ‘Choral (Midi-Etude)’ the clicks and noises of the original acoustic recording are looped to form soft but ominous beats. Such interventions strengthen the impact of this impressive recording.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 8, 2000)