Nurse With Wound & Aranos: Santoor Lena Bicycle

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This is Steven Stapleton’s second collaboration with the Czech violinist and multi-instrumentalist Aranos (Petr Vastl), following on from 1997’s Acts of Senseless Beauty. Whereas that album was a normal CD release, this is a limited edition artwork; in fact, its 500 copies may be sold out by the time you read this. Stapleton and Aranos painted huge, abstract designs on 8 ft by 4 ft sheets of hardwood and exhibited them for one day only at a gallery in Galway, with the CD on continuous play throughout the day. Afterwards the paintings were cut up into 1000 six-inch squares, which were then turned into the covers for the 500 CDs.

It may seem egregious, faced with such a perfectly executed conceptual art gesture, to discuss the actual music. Thankfully, however, Santoor Lena Bicycle is no mere installation piece, but a fully realised and welcome addition to the Nurse With Wound catalogue.

One of the most remarkable things about Stapleton has always been the way that his strategies of tape manipulation and studio trickery resist sounding like dry concrète experiments, being filled instead with consummate vitality and wicked humour. These gifts are well to the fore here, with Aranos’ skirling instrumentation adding fresh layers of acoustic energy.

The album differs from most NWW releases in that it consists of mostly short, concise tracks instead of extended, exploratory pieces. As a result, there is an unusually wide variety of sounds and textures. Some of these are more welcome than others: Stapleton ill-advisedly indulges his occasional fondness for conventional rhythmic patterns on the slow nightclub groove of ‘Mary Jane’ and the disastrous funk of ‘Sunset Baby Mother’. Elsewhere, the emphasis is on virulent percussion and complex, jarring shifts of tone. The mood is by turns playful and sinister, with stabbing piano and skittering violin colliding uneasily with deranged scrapings of wood and metal. This is the churning, discordant work of two gifted musicians: spaced-out, hypnotic and shudderingly creative.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 8, 2000)

Peter Hammill: None of the Above

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None of the Above is Peter Hammill’s first collection of new songs since 1998’s This. That was Hammill’s fortieth album, released in his fiftieth year, and this remarkable alignment produced an album of eloquent meditations on age and the passing of time. Refusing as ever to fall into habit and routine, Hammill has this time produced “a number of tales of people in earthy and/or earthly circumstances”. This concern with the outwardly mundane and quotidian is reflected in the title None of the Above, which is to be read as meaning “there is nothing of a spiritual/otherworldly nature here”, as well as punning on the difficulty of categorising Hammill’s music.

As we have come to expect from Hammill, this album contains several fine examples of what makes him rock’s finest, most literate songwriter. The opening ‘Touch and Go’ sees his darkly resonant vocals giving voice to urgent threads of melody, sustained by swelling, grandiose piano chords. ‘Tango for One’ is another, starker arrangement for piano and voice, illustrating why Hammill’s recent work is such artfully uneasy listening. Refusing conventional song structure, he makes listeners work hard for their rewards by forcing them to follow the undulant patterns of the text.

The promised attention to earthly detail is manifested in the subject matter, some of which is unusually explicit for Hammill: a violent husband, a demented stalker, a rose-grower mourning the death of his wife. These are vivid domestic dramas in which Hammill’s gift for idiomatic phrasing is matched by settings that range from the sombre to the pulsating, yet always foregrounding the elegance and mutability of the voice.

Most of the instruments are played by Hammill himself, with occasional contributions from violinist Stuart Gordon. The soundscape is endlessly vital and fascinating: shape-shifting changes of mood and timbre; instrumental colouring by turns delicate and brutal; the juxtaposition of the tightly arranged and the purely improvised. The final song is the blissful ‘Astart’, a grand finale of transcendent emotion that is as lyrical and beautiful as anything he has written: a wondrous end to another intensely rewarding Hammill album.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 8, 2000)

Elijah’s Mantle: Legacy of Corruption

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The latest instalment of Mark St John Ellis’ ongoing Goth/Romantic project is a setting of poems from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. This text achieved notoriety on its first publication in 1857, with the French Ministry of the Interior declaring that it “constituted an act of defiance in contempt of the laws which safeguard religion and morality.” The court, in upholding censorship of the poems, concurred that they “inevitably lead to the arousal of the senses by crude and indecent realism.”

It’s unclear whether Ellis’ work is intended as an act of homage to Baudelaire or a more daring attempt to reignite the scandal he once enjoyed. Either way this album is problematic. At a time when outrage is carefully cultivated and stoked in the hallowed galleries of the Royal Academy, it’s simply not possible to shock an audience any more: we have, all too literally, seen it all before. Baudelaire’s feverish imaginings no longer resonate with the shock value they once had, and whatever residual impact they retain is well and truly dissipated here by the stiltedness of the English translations used.

The major problem, however, is one of interpretation. The life of the poems is on the page, where the words are free to create meaning and arouse emotion in the mind of the reader. The minute Ellis gets his mucky paws on them, those possibilities are closed off. What we are left with are Ellis’ dolorous tones, reciting the texts in a mannered, declamatory style.

The music is correspondingly rhetorical, relying heavily on bombastic keyboard patterns. ‘Je T’Adore’ is the exception, and the one occasion where Ellis drops the stridency of tone for something more tender and hypnotic. Otherwise, this is a misguided and unnecessary release. Buy the book of Les Fleurs du Mal instead.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 8, 2000)

Current 93: Sleep Has His House, Faust

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With Sleep Has His House David Tibet retreats even further into a hermetic zone of extreme introspection. Mortality has been a recurrent theme in Current 93’s work from the beginning, addressing this most unthinkable of subjects with a livid intensity. Now Tibet has written a moving song cycle in memory of his late father, and the private cosmology of the Current has never been more personally or painfully expressed.

The opening instrumental, ‘Love’s Young Dream’, sets the tone musically: plangent guitar chords that hang in the air unresolved, while the organic tones of the harmonium breathe heavily and sadly. This ominous overture slides into a brief burst of highly charged poetic imagery, with Tibet’s hypnotic half-sung, half-spoken delivery forming a slow, deadly incantation. The guitar and harmonium patterns recur here and throughout the album, giving the music a relentlessly sinister atmosphere.

Tibet’s voice continues the development begun on 1998’s Soft Black Stars, losing some of the manic quality expressed in earlier work and finding instead a lilting, lyrical tenderness in keeping with the sombre subject matter. The third song, ‘The Magical Bird in the Magical Woods’, is shot through with intricate shafts of recollected detail, while the voice fleetingly sounds a note of reproachful, reined-in anger: “But your gods made no sound…” Steven Stapleton, otherwise fairly restrained here, provides a typically haunted coda of treated sounds and tape manipulation.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Michael Cashmore to the album. He wrote all the music, except that of the long title track, and plays all instruments except for the harmonium (on which Tibet accompanies himself). As Tibet stated in an interview with The Wire, their meeting was a pivotal moment in the development of the Current’s sound, since Cashmore is able to enunciate on the guitar exactly the emotions that Tibet wishes to express in his lyrics. Here, his resonant strums and simple, restrained plucking provide the perfect backdrop for the sense of loss and regret that permeates the text.

The album’s terrorstruck centrepiece is ‘Niemandswasser’, in which the imagery approaches the delirious: corpses piled up almost to heaven, cottages covered in honeysuckle, trails of screaming horseflies. As the voice insists “we’re all dust”, a scouring wind blows. A short lullaby segues into the dreamlike, 24-minute title track, with its mantric refrain of “Have pity for the dead, sleep has his house” intoned endlessly into oblivion.

Faust is something else entirely, a single 35-minute piece inspired by a story of the same name (reprinted in the CD booklet) by Count Eric Stenbock. Stenbock, a member of the Estonian branch of a noble Swedish family, was a decadent writer in London at the end of the nineteenth century. Towards the end of his brief life – he died at the age of 35 from drug addiction and alcoholism – he was accompanied everywhere he went by a lifesize wooden doll that he believed to be his son.

The piece marks a return to the Current’s pre-Swastikas for Noddy mode: dark, mangled slabs of sound that form a genuinely disturbing picture of a mind in the throes of collapse. Steven Stapleton is a malign presence throughout, from the unearthly child’s voice that haunts many Nurse With Wound recordings to the endlessly vital and creative layering of sounds and textures. Tibet himself recites Stenbock’s secret history in a devilish, chattering whisper, bells chime softly and human souls wail and moan in a nightmarish chorale of agony and helplessness.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 8, 2000)

Koji Asano: Preparing for April

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Koji Asano is a young Japanese composer and performer with a prolific manner; his discography runs to fifteen full-length releases in the past five years. Preparing for April is the fourth of these to feature solo piano, but the first to be recorded wholly on microcassette tape. It’s heartening to see this serviceable little medium, previously thought to be the sole domain of tired senior managers and their overworked secretaries, being put to such creative good use as it is here by Asano.

The album consists of six untitled tracks varying in length from three to 27 minutes. Asano’s style is edgy and unnerving: dense, cramped pianistics that tumble gracelessly through the ether. It’s music that definitely rewards repeated listenings – the first impression is one of clunkiness, even ineptitude, but eventually this is replaced by a strange kind of intensity. There is a quiet but insistent sense of refusal here: notions of fluidity and virtuosity which are usually associated with solo piano performance are rejected. Patterns fail to resolve, melodies are no sooner embarked upon than discarded, silence makes its presence felt.

The intensity of the music stems in large part from the soundworld in which it exists. The use of microcassette tape means that the recording is constantly indistinct, with heavy amounts of tape hiss. At quiet moments I’m sure you can hear the mechanism of the tape recorder itself in action. As a consequence the music has an ineffable, ghostly quality, as though it’s being heard from down a distant hallway or picked up by a faint radio signal. This striking effect, paradoxically, makes the album far more listenable than it might otherwise have been.

Over the course of the album, the mood shifts from stridency in the first three pieces to something more like gentleness in the fourth and sixth, with the fifth providing an almost jaunty interlude. The pieces are linked, however, by the rumbles and interference of the recording, as the medium reclaims through its own deficiencies the space between performer and listener.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 8, 2000)

Whitehouse: Asceticists

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Whitehouse follow up 2003’s Bird Seed with another set of songs notable for their scouring, attack-dog energy and relentlessly hectoring lyrical style. It’s their first album since the departure from the band of taboo-tickling American Peter Sotos, but his absence is noticeable only in that the album lacks one of the bleak spoken-word collages of sexual abuse victims’ testimonies that were his stock-in-trade and that disrupted the flow of Bird Seed and 2001’s Cruise. Otherwise, the record is of a piece with its predecessors, evincing a scalpel-sharp intelligence and a harmonic complexity that belie Whitehouse’s reputation as thuggish purveyors of bludgeoning aural assaults.

Asceticists is less than half an hour long, but its righteous anger and splenetic delivery mean that the listener never feels remotely short-changed. With Whitehouse down to a duo, William Bennett and Philip Best share vocal and compositional duties between them, and their respective approaches are revealingly different. Best delivers most of the bilious, obscenity-fuelled rants in the snarling, barking tone of a psychotic rap artist. If “Language Recovery” and “Ruthless Babysitting” come over as vicious condemnations of Best’s former bandmate Sotos, on “Dans” it is practically impossible to discern the object of his anger. The lyric contains enough moments of directness (“Legs give way outside Asda… Picture a ballet at Sadler’s Wells… Remember creeping out the Arab bookstore”) to imply that Best has a definite target in mind, but specificity is held tantalisingly out of reach and finally crushed under an avalanche of seething hatred.

Bennett’s own lyrical contributions on “Guru” and “Killing Hurts Give You The Secrets” take the form of a synthesis of everyday conversational tics with invasive philosophical inquiry. As one familiar with neurolinguistic programming, a set of techniques that aims to influence behaviour through patterns of language, Bennett is well aware of the ability of language to suggest and unsettle. Here, he exchanges his trademark guttural howl for a sober, almost hesitant form of delivery, instilling deep regret and reproachfulness into lines like “you’ll be left holding only thoughts of what could have, might have, should have been”. Only on the closing “Dumping The Fucking Rubbish” does Bennett give full vent to his voice, with a fearsome invocation to “rise up now… kill this fucking nightmare that is inside you.”

Musically, Asceticists continues Whitehouse’s movement away from the crushing use of drones and frequencies, towards a compelling and highly original form of electronic harshness. The Whitehouse sound is livid and dangerous, with monstrously birthed synth noises and deranged, clattering percussion. Only on “Guru’’ do the disorientating frequencies of ‘classic’ Whitehouse appear, forming nasty aural slaps around the head as Bennett insidiously asks “Would you feel others would be better off without you?” Elsewhere, the heavily processed and mangled sounds shore up the brutality of the texts to perfection.

There’s one final, troubling element to all of this. Bennett has written about the torture and mutilation that takes place in some parts of present-day Africa, and the Bird Seed track “Cut Hands Has The Solution” made direct reference to some of these chilling practices. In the similarly fractured almost-English of this album’s “Killing Hurts Gives You The Secrets”, in the African-inflected title of the instrumental piece “Nzambi Ia Lufua” and in the cover lettering which picks out the artist and title in the pan-African colours of red, yellow and gold, Whitehouse make glancing, almost subliminal reference to this unimaginable cruelty. (“Nzambi Ia Lufua” itself is a brief, stricken instrumental, mingling disquieting percussive stabs with ghostly, metallic shards of noise.) Stalking malevolently between interiorised psychodrama and uncomfortable misanthropy, Whitehouse have once again demonstrated their mastery of the aesthetics of conflict.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 15, 2007)

The Science Group: A Mere Coincidence

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The continuing presence of Chris Cutler in so many areas of musical activity is something to be welcomed and treasured. As well as releasing his own music, and that of his extensive network of collaborators and associates, through his ReR label, he has remained a committed live and studio performer. Live, his drumming is a wonder to behold. No other performer plays the drumkit as he does, his arms weaving dynamically about his equipment in a virtuoso display of controlled aggression. Yet Cutler’s primary impulse is towards self-effacement and collaboration, as is evidenced by countless group concerts and recordings.

A Mere Coincidence is the most recent of these, and a particularly fine example. Cutler’s aphoristic lyrics on aspects of scientific theory are given berserk settings by composer Stevan Tickmayer. The album is a succession of short, frenziedly inventive musical spasms, presided over by fierce guiding intelligence. Cutler’s old mucker Fred Frith contributes wild guitar riffs, while Tickmayer weighs in with demented keyboard pounding. Cutler himself agitates powerfully on drums and electronics.

Cutler’s texts are sung by Amy Denio, whose ethereal voice swoops and glides around the group’s formidably intense playing. Lurching shifts of sound and tempo create a confrontational, yet engrossing listening experience.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

Vidna Obmana & Serge Devadder: The Shape of Solitude

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Vidna Obmana is a Belgian sound sculptor whose recent Motives for Recycling, a remix of work by Asmus Tietchens, was reviewed in the last Sound Projector. On this occasion he teams up with guitarist Serge Devadder for an hour’s worth of fairly run-of-the-mill Ambient fare.

The CD opens with some virtuoso guitar playing from Devadder. His technique may be faultless, but the effect is soporific. Interwoven with these tasteful pluckings are Obmana’s more testing manipulations, which gradually come to dominate the album.

‘Perceptual Edge’ sees Devadder’s playing move up a notch, his intricate picking complemented nicely by Obmana’s sustained washes of sound. The lengthy ‘A Stinging Memory Of Shared Skin’ is the album’s high point; the heavily treated guitar floats malevolently around the listener, producing an eerie, alien sound world. This ominous mood continues in the album’s effective closing piece, ‘Leaving This Place Again’.

Over the course of an hour, however, interest palls. The above highlights aside, it all sounds so terribly inert, its aimlessness evidence of a lack of imagination and spirit rather than any kind of contemplative detachment.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

90º South: The Barrier Silence

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The folks at Ochre Records continue their mission to bring quality electronica to the people with this impressive CD by Kevin Fox, aka 90º South. Fox namechecks labelmates EAR on the insert, and he shares Sonic Boom’s fondness for vintage equipment; instruments used include valve amplifiers, Stylophones and ‘various mechanical and electronic toys’. Thankfully, however, such gimmickry is related to a minor role. Instead it’s the Fender electric piano that predominates, its warm emotional timbre lending a quiet strength to these nine mostly instrumental pieces.

As the artwork makes clear, this is programme music. The sleeve note is an extract from a poem by Edward Wilson, the chief scientific officer on the 1911-12 Antarctic expedition, and there is a strong sense of exploration and discovery in the music. The unexplored landscape is evocatively described through the sparing use of bass and percussion. Fluid guitar and piano patterns depict the human presence, their attenuation hinting at the insignificance of the explorers within the vastness of the landscape.  The mood is mostly quiet and sober, evoking stillness and contemplation rather than excitement or danger. Only on ‘Streamliner’ does Fox break into a sweat, pumping out a bustling groove reminiscent of Stereolab.

Occasionally, as on ‘ITOM’, Fox’s debt to Sonic Boom (in his Spectrum incarnation) becomes rather too obvious, as a burbling synth threatens to overwhelm the guitar and piano. But this is a rare lapse of judgement. Otherwise, the tone of the album is summed up in the marvellous ‘Winter Road Movie’, with acoustic and electric elements darting among each other in vivid and highly expressive interplay.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

Swans: Various Failures, Angels of Light: New Mother, Body Lovers: Body Lovers

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Michael Gira is a myth-maker, acutely aware of the danger of ossification and constantly realigning his position to avoid it. When Swans emerged in the early 1980s, their grindingly repetitious sonic assault (once memorably described as “the sound of a man walking round in circles with his neck chained”) seemed like a strategy for obsessive rearrangement of a basic set of lyrical and musical permutations. The songs didn’t end; they stopped.

Gira eventually tired of this game and, coincident with the introduction of female vocalist/keyboardist Jarboe, began to introduce chilling acoustic elements into his songwriting on 1987’s essential Children of God LP. Over the next several years, Swans would refine and develop this approach in a series of albums that merged immense rhythmic power with an unearthly delicacy of acoustic instrumentation.These records – 1989’s The Burning World, 1991’s White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and 1992’s Love of Life – have long been deleted and are consequently much sought after. Various Failures is a double CD containing a generous selection of material from the period (complete reissues were ruled out, partly on economic grounds but also because Gira was content to let some of the songs disappear).

Listening again to this music, one is struck by how expansive it all sounds, the polar opposite of the early records’ savage inward spin. The loudest pieces here, such as ‘Will We Survive’ and the wonderfully titled ‘The Golden Boy that was Swallowed by the Sea’, are mesmerising dramas of layered orchestration, the massed guitars and drums perfectly framing Gira’s resonant vocals. These songs construct boundaries only to dissolve them: the spaces they occupy are vast and limitless. Elsewhere, Gira and Jarboe offer up unbearable intimacies of form and language, with the shimmering acoustic beauty of the music and the spectral sighs of Jarboe’s voice drawing the listener unmercifully into dense narratives of isolation and failure.

Gira has taken this loose, bluesy strain even further in his new song-based project, Angels of Light. These songs are less reliant on the apocalyptic visual imagery that underpinned Swans’ relentless, thrilling surge. Gira’s new voice is one of humble intimacy, the sound of a man shedding past burdens and discovering new ways of seeing. The musical palette is restrained and absorbing, with accordion and dulcimer adding colour and intimacy throughout.

The results are occasionally stunning; ‘Forever Yours’ and ‘Song For My Father’ in particular are among the most affecting things Gira has written. But there is a schematic quality to some of the other songs that strikes a jarring note. The lyrics are recited slowly and dolefully, with little melodic invention to lighten the mood. At their recent London concert, the Angels of Light shrugged off these limitations in the songs and transformed them into blinding, ecstatic convulsions of pure energy. The record, sadly, suffers from a listlessness that the warm and delicate arrangements are unable to dissipate.

If New Mother represents a slackening off from Swans’ intense emotional charge, Gira’s parallel Body Lovers/Body Haters project can be seen as a move in the opposite direction, a ratcheting of atmosphere and tension. These two CDs, representing the first phase in a projected three-album series, were originally issued separately in the USA and have now been brought together for European release.

Gira accurately describes this mainly instrumental music as ‘psycho-ambient’. While its abstract drifts and swirls share many of the formal properties of Ambient, they are determinedly inward-looking. Also, unlike much Ambient there is a restless intelligence at work here, ordering, shaping and defining. Distant, rumbling drones are picked apart by alien sounds, stately rhythms and sparing acoustic instrumentation. Occasional vocal interventions – a woman’s weeping, a baby’s screaming and a short, mournful song – all serve to heighten the sense of unease. Seriously effective, but not to be listened to with the lights off.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 6, 1999)