Stephen Fruitman

Moon Wiring Club, An Audience of Art Deco Eyes (Gecophonic)

Out of the lovely, non-existent municipality of Clinkskell in northern England comes the concept that is the Blank Workshop and its recording arm, Moon Wiring Club. Wedged into a tiny space in an already heavily-niched genre (suggested by postmodern DJ mixology and the recontextualizing of others´ work) , the Club has created its own hermetic "bakelite" world, lurid with the promises of mid-twentieth century modernity, living made easier by chemicals.

The website offers a virtual tour of this thoroughly modern town. This record, An Audience of Art Deco Eyes, purports to be a 1928 theatrical production of "electrical experimentation, British seaside concert-party music, uneasy conjuring and soft-shoe shuffle", whose reputation is more memorable than the actual music! As deftly as on the site, the compact disc artwork gathers fake ephemera from the era, adverts and programmes, even a review.

An Audience of Art Deco Eyes is all about nurturing an unabashed fondness for so-called "library music" - instructional records, sound effectery, plays on tape and early electronic music usually made for broadcast commercial purposes but recontextualized in a bizarre reimagining of rural Edwardian England. A further step into the "meta" is taken as the new soundworld "reads" like it is all being imagined by some visionary of that era, using that era´s frames of reference for dreaming about the future - an audio version of H.G. Wells´ "The Shape of Things to Come", if you will.

The music is haunting, amusing but never smart-alecky, sometimes strangely unsettling - I don´t know why - all keeping time to the beat of wonderfully diverse percussion.

A narrative voice near the start assumes the role of patriarchal storyteller with "Long ago, in this ancient and beautiful England...", whereupon Moon Wiring Club sets to work recapturing not only our own (partly-imagined) youth, innocence and guilelessness, but a whole generation´s, a whole nation´s.

http://www.blankworkshop.co.uk

Aidan Baker & Tim Hecker, Fantasma Parastasie (Alien8 Recordings)

Two Canadian sasquatches in the small but dense and fierce woods of abstract electronics come to blows. While Aidan Baker is a downright collaboration slut, having already recorded numerous duets with the likes of Matt Borghi, Fear Falls Burning, and Ultra Milkmaids (as well as being one half of the band Nadja), Fantasma Parastasie is somewhat surprisingly Tim Hecker´s loss of collaborative virginity. I express surprise due to the fact that for some years now, he has been receiving nothing but plaudits from both critics and fellow musicians around the globe.

"Phantom on a Pedastal" unleashes the duo as twin mad scientists barely in control of incomprehensible amounts of electric power crackling between the two in Hecker´s Montreal studio. An anti-church organ tries to batter its way through the static, but is beaten back down. In contrast, "Hymn to the Idea of Night" comes across like a sweet melody borne on a summer breeze, before the even gentler drizzle of "Auditory Spirits" floats by on the wings of plucked strings and ends so very angelically - before opening the door to the harsher "Gallery of the Invisible Woman", where metal riffs are ground down until pulverized by machine-gun fire distortion, while a lone guitar loops like a vulture circling overhead, observing the macabre slaughter.

"Dream of the Nightmare" opens a sacral, if not comforting space which in fact proves to be a chasm without sides and without end, frighteningly cavernous. For the good of our souls, Baker and Hecker end the proceedings with a soothing organ coda, the title track.

Absolutely one of the year´s best collaborations.

http://www.alien8recordings.com

North Gambier Amateur Bowers Society

"C Sharp Blues" is an exploration of "violinness". After the deceptive tinkling of a wind chime, one of the members of the North Gambier Amateur Bowers Society begins plucking a simple melody on the strings of his violin before drawing his bow across them, sliding up and down in a manner likely to cause seasickness, and is soon joined by a mass of fellow fiddlers, all following his lead with slight variations of their own.

Soon, amplified and affected with delay pedals, an impenetrable wall of increasingly dark and distorted drone is raised before the listener. And just keeps increasing in strength and sheer power until it devolves upon itself and after a few more tinkles in the wind, returns to the silence from whence it came.

The NGABS is either led or imagined by Australian sound artist and art prankster Cameron Wood. Is this really a group with an undetermined number of members founded by one James Caird, or Wood himself manifoldly dubbed? Hard to determine which. A clipping by purported zine journalist Arthur Shackleton describes visiting the "band" in Mount Gambier and listening to them record this epic.

Whatever the case, it works; and Wood has also has released a number of other ideas on the handier three-inch format, including "Keep Breathing in a Cave", looped ambient guitar which is lightweight, sparklingly refreshing, and not unlike the groudbreaking "(No Pussyfooting)" experiments of Fripp and Eno without the heavy handedness. Also an untitled treated piano piece of singular loveliness.

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