gil gershman

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Me Shape

[ review of: Me Shape by Freeform (CD Album) ]

Simon Pyke is one of the few electronica auteurs for whom the concept of the rhythmic preset holds little significance. Like all his work, this collection of tracks created by Pyke "for, between, and after live sets" is instead rife with tiny drum machine tics and clicks, blips, and buzzes. Pyke's pseudorhythms are less bipedal beats than multi-legged infestations, swarming, clustering, and bouncing about erratically. If the programming is slightly less convoluted and bewildering than the free-associative anti-rhythms that pepper the impressive Freeform back-catalogue, the synth textures bubbling above it are even more succulent and satisfying than usual. Pyke shapes melodies the way Jackson Pollack paints - with gooey spatters of metallic tones and drippy synths. The mingling of rich, tuneful substance, wayward and weird tonalities, and diffused Afro-Cuban percussive spasms actually places such Freeform frolics as "Arial Automatic," "Gni," and "Tangle" in league with the far-gone-and-out jazz of the Art Ensemble of Chicago or Sun Ra's Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy. Defying an apparent underlying randomness, Pyke's irresistible, unpredictable grooves dodge composite abstraction and carry you along on their weirded-out trips. Tracks such as "Yours Sincerely," "Foil," the spastic jazz-funk of "Hey," and the ingeniously house-slanted "Munchogram" and "Superfink" caper along circular paths like headless pigeons, seemingly leading nowhere - until the clumps and dots suddenly shake themselves into a giddy groove that is pure momentum.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 16 Aug 1999

An Introduction To EVP

[ review of: An Introduction To EVP by The Ghost Orchid (CD Album) ]

EVP is Electronic Voice Phenomena, a curious, somewhat disturbing audio occurrence observed as early as the '30s by military radiomen and later investigated and catalogued by Swedish film-maker/spiritualist Friedrich Jürgensen (in the '50s) and by Latvian parapsychologist Dr. Konstantin Raudive. The Ghost Orchid completes (in digital form) the documentary efforts of Raymond Cass, an English paranormal hobbyist who devoted himself to a study of the EVP mysteries detailed in Raudive's definitive 1971 volume, Breakthrough. EVP describes unidentifiable but coherent speech-like sounds of unknown origin that "break through" during radio transmissions. The numerous classic examples presented on this necessarily narration-heavy disc (courtesy of Cass' home-recordings and The Ghost Orchid compiler Leif Elggren) tend to be garbled, unintelligible bursts of interference and singsong or pan-lingual nonsense. But there are enough chillingly clear pronouncements ("We Originate On A Planet"), cryptic fragments ("So Strange I Remember You"), and ominously prophetic warnings ("Carefully With Nerve Gas") to silence the skeptics. Elggren has previously dabbled with paranormal sound, most notably in his intriguing "Speaking To A Dead Queen" and "Experimenting With Dreams" Investigations. Like those projects, The Ghost Orchid maintains a scientific distance, drawing no conclusions but simply offering samples of EVP for the listeners' consideration - each repeated thrice, as per the traditional presentation. Are these the voices of the dead, as some of the more eerily subjective examples might suggest? Are they proof of alien intelligence or of covert military activity akin to the infamous "numbers stations" chronicled by Irdial's CONET discs? Are they nothing more exotic than stray wireless transmissions? Or is EVP merely a freely interpretable fluke, another vagary eagerly seized upon by those desperate to believe? There is something going on here; that much is undeniable. The samples proffered by Raudive on Breakthrough's accompanying seven-inch, both sides of which are included here, are especially cogent. The crude, unearthly, but definitely human voices heard on these tracks, often responding directly to the investigators' questions in words and idiomatic expressions typical of deceased colleagues, make the strongest case for EVP's supernatural origins. The Ghost Orchid's selective sampling leaves too many questions - most notably the Euro-centric linguistic leanings of the EVP voices - but is, as its subtitle claims, a satisfying "introduction" to the phenomenon. Frustratingly, EVP remains unexplained, despite the advances in audio technology and scientific understanding. And, as a document, The Ghost Orchid adds little to the sum of EVP knowledge. But Ash International (surely the most active "dead" label ever, no?) does a fine job of keeping this little-discussed 20th Century mystery alive.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 12 Aug 1999

Touchless: The Sensuality of Music Made Without Touching

[ review of: Touchless: The Sensuality of Music Made Without Touching by Elizabeth Schimana (CD Album) ]

For Touchless, "non-singer" Elizabeth Schimana assembled an International Theremin Orchestra - musicians exploring the musical possibilities of various theremins and theremin-triggered electronic devices - to support her vocal improvisations. The first three tracks were recorded during an Internet and radio simulcast, with the musicians wired in from such scattered zones as Madrid, Moscow, and Vienna. Purposely sounding more like a beached beluga than a songbird, Schimana warbles in timbres that mimic, complement, and melt naturally with the trebly tones of the ensemble's varicolored electrical hum. Contributors such as Christoph Kurzmann (Orchester 33/13), Robin Rimbaud, and Pedro López subject their oscillations to sampler and processing mutations, adding texture and a smattering of digital crunch. Among the Russian delegates, Yuri Spitsin plays his theremin with a powerglove, Andre Smirnov's passes through a ring modulator, and jazz-educated singer Lana Aksenova, a student at The Theremin Center in Moscow, also joins Schimana in the free-voice arena. With an Italian (Sergio Messina, on a commercial-model fuzz thereminette), an Australian (multimedia composer Andrew Garton), and numerous Austrians also contributing to the event, one might expect a melee of tangled frequencies and scrambled tones. But the concert is rather sedate, often sounding like a small gathering of finches atop a rusty garden gate or tree frogs sharing a mid-afternoon kaffeklatsch. Schimana's second concert, an hour-long performance of "virtual vowels," was set in an Austrian church where the eight musicians shared four strategically situated workstations. Using the acoustics of the cathedral as an oral cavity and the theremin players as vocal chords, the tracks presented here simulate the apparatus of speech. Schimana and her Orchestra carve out resonant grottos of sound, defined by the familiar pitch-sweeps and tremulous sighs of the massed theremins. With an understanding of the theremin's unique mechanics, these extraordinary performances live up to the album's subtitle. The sound hovers, throbbing and vibrating like a fleshy apparition, even though no actual contact can be made as the musicians' hands move between the instruments' antennae. "E" even manifests a quavering, lustful pulse, lending an orgasmic tension that builds relentlessly as the music twitches wildly. If you think about it, these tracks are like a good Victorian romance. The atmosphere of carnal electricity is all the more maddening and inebriating for the aching restraint that must be shown, to the point where the charge of sexual tension is carried by even the thought of the slightest gesture within the theremin's excitable electric field.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 28 Jul 1999

Crashes To Light Minutes To Its Fall

[ review of: Crashes To Light Minutes To Its Fall by Cul De Sac (CD Album) ]

With Crashes To Light Minutes To Its Fall, Cul de Sac's third album (not counting the stopgap I Don't Want To Go To Bed and the John Fahey collaboration, The Epiphany Of Glenn Jones), the Boston band strengthens its hold on the title of standard-bearer for a brave, new American instrumental psychedelia. Cul De Sac continues to draw from diverse dialects - surf guitar, Pere Ubu's avant-garage, the firestorm psych-pop of the '60s and '70s, Loren MazzaCane-Connors' ghost-blues exorcisms, and the ethnically flavored freeform folk of such mavericks as Sandy Bull, Robbie Basho, John Fahey, and the Sun City Girls. Given the guitar-centric quality of Cul de Sac's music, Glenn Jones is the immediate attraction. He is certainly a phenomenon, an axe-wielding artisan whose signatures include iridescent peacock-plume filigree, writhing feedback trails, twangy scales, and intricate, feather-light fingerpicking similar to that of his Takoma idols. "Father Silence" dallies in the same magical acoustic space that the Grateful Dead would traverse on occasion. "A Voice Through A Cloud" and "K" meander like budding vines ready to burst forth with exotic blossoms. Jones is equally capable of breathtaking aerial acrobatics, exhaling sigils of flame and smoke like a dragon-god, as "Hagstrom" describes dizzy melodic spirals and the Eastern arabesques of "Etaoin Shrdlu" coquettishly tickle the clouds. Jones also supplies the indescribable sonic grain of Cul de Sac's unique Contraption, a modified Hawaiian lap-steel guitar. Just as essential to Cul de Sac's designs, Michael Bloom supplies the undulating, pivotal basslines - cosmic glue that keeps the band's universe from flying to bits. Robin Amos' shows wizard-like command of unearthly synthesizer tones 'n' drones, his buffetings pitched between the Cosmic Jokers' headspace and the vorticular chaos of Chrome. The astonishing "Far Off, The Fabulous Iron Serpent Whistles" and "Sands of Iwo Jima" turn on Bloom and Amos' whims. The newest band member is drummer Jon Proudman - in whom Cul de Sac have at last found a perfect complement. Proudman demonstrates rare dexterity and intuition, going from gallop to canter without a missed step. As the dramatic, tympani-heavy (and rather Anthony Phillips-like) concluding track states, Crashes ... definitely finds Cul de Sac "On the Roof of the World," looking down.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 21 Jul 1999

Filament 2

[ review of: Filament 2 by Sachiko M. (CD Album) ]

A post-Ground Zero Yoshihide and Sachiko Matsubara square off against For 4 Ears proprietor Günter Müller in this superior sequel to 1998's Filament 1 (Extreme). Matsubara again works solely with the sine wave emissions of a sampler emptied of all memory. Her choice of sounds may be limiting, but she resourcefully bends and tweaks the clean, shrill frequencies in sympathetic response to Müller's ultra-sparse freeform percussion and spattering of electronic crackle. An uncommonly restrained Yoshihide, acting anything but the plunderphonic dervish, supplies the tiniest fragments of sampled CD and vinyl grooves. Throughout the first two pieces, the trio's improvisation is surgically precise - an exacting, controlled performance that produces just enough audible information to suggest the memory traces of music and maintain a peripheral conscious presence. An infrequent blip quickens the pulse; a frugal drum-machine tattoo or the ghost of a recorded voice pricks the ears like a lance. The busier "Filament 2-3" and "Filament 2-5" are genuinely exciting. Matsubara and Müller's electronics fall in unpredictable anti-patterns, sounding on the former like the enigmatic growlers and whistlers heard in VLF-shortwave sferic recordings (see Stephen P. McGreevy's definitive Electric Enigma (Irdial) for further study) and mimicking Xenakis-like packets of compressed computerized sound-data in the latter. Yoshihide isn't quite as stingy with his well-chewed sound-bites in these later "Filament"s, and the plentiful bits of microscopic sound begin to form macroscopic clumps. Müller, an experienced improviser whose seemingly haphazard and disposable contributions here are in fact the backbone for the process of cohesion, is the key to Filament 2's success. His dry clicks, so prominent as to suggest an almost Sähkö-esque techno-minimalist grid on "Filament 2-4," corral the dispersed sampledelic debris. Like a vigilant sheepdog, Müller drops a percussive signal or an admonishing bleep to redirect the flow of the improvisation whenever he senses that Matsubara or Yoshihide has strayed from the instinctive course.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 15 Jul 1999

La Selva

[ review of: La Selva by Francisco López (CD Album) ]

I can't decide what is more surprising about La Selva. Is it that López, whose work is usually all but silent, has created an album that is quite audible at even the lowest volumes? Or is it that La Selva is not just audible but also a dense and powerful Tudor-de-force of reconstructed rainforest sounds? As with López's Azoic Zone, a fathomless sub-aquascape, La Selva's Equatorial environment is not so much a location recording as it is a superb piece of set-design. In this sense, it can be seen as a sequel to another López forest construction, Addy en El Pas de las Frutas y los Chunches. López has less in common with such sonic ethnographers as Chris Watson than he does with "virtual naturalists" such as Bill Fontana. As real as López's rainforest sounds, with its torrential downpours, twittering birds, scolding monkeys, rustling leaves, and suffocating clouds of humming and chirring insects, this La Selva can not be located on any map. It's pure fabrication. In reality, this tropical menagerie and these mercurial stormsóthough all represent the taped traces of actual lives and eventsóhave never occupied the same temporal space. Edited from recordings made during rainy seasons a year apart, López's 70-minute work never gives the faintest indication of digital tampering or other audio-artifice The illusion of La Selva is seamless. López takes obvious pride in a representational ultra-realism that shies away from obvious signifiers or staged spectacle. Even the unseen beast who wanders into the scene at 40:25 and adds his mournful, hacking howl to the score is not reading from any script. The miracle of La Selva is that it is entirely constructed and yet completely instantaneous. It is also never the same experience twice. Play La Selva at daybreak on a wet morning, with the window open, allowing Lopez's environments to absorb the birdsong and cicada chirps from outside. Become a part of the magic.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 07 Jul 1999

Bass Time Continuum

[ review of: Bass Time Continuum by Bass Junkie (CD Album) ]

As "Breakers Throwndown (Final Battle Mix)" announces, "The music doesn't follow you; you follow the music. And that's what really makes a B-Boy." Bass Time Continuum, like Phil Klein's previous In Bass No One Can Hear You Scream, envisions electro not as a nostalgic refuge for those who miss Zaxxon and Ms. Pac-Man, but as the only religion fit for these technocentric (and otherwise spiritually bankrupt) times. Hanging most tracks on a B-boy vocal hook, Klein styles his Bass Junkie tracks with reverence for the beatbox bashers of the past, forsaking the "cool" '90s-style irony that cheapens many of the neo-electricians. "A New Order Of Intelligence" enters on an angelic choir, giving the feel and fervor of an evangelical sermon to the ensuing rhythmic tirade. Klein's revivalist electro comes at you as a densely packed, speaker churning rush of fidgety 303 runs, detuned Atari synth, fitful slice n' dice beats, and vocodered proselytizing - an earnest address delivered from atop the bass bins. And, of course, there is bass; undiluted, soul-juddering bass. In a modern rite of flagellation, Klein scratches feverishly and offers the benediction of "R-M-T-S" ("Records-Mixer-Turntables-Speakers") as though it were liturgy. Like Drexciya, Bass Junkie has a techno-utopian New Jerusalem in mind (Futura), whose anthem is an electronic hymn in the holy Detroit style. Moreover, Bass Time Continuum's titles suggest an underlying sense of history and myth to rival the Pentateuchóa Genesis ("Bass Time Continuum," the birth of the "Bass Mutant (Re-Mutated")), an Exodus ("A Bass Odyssey"), a Leviticus (the commandment of "Listen To The Beat"), a Numbers (the stray-flock wanderings of "Back In The Jungle"), a Deuteronomy ("Welcome To Futura"), and even a Messianic prophecy ("Return Of The OVC," wherein "Man is finally ready to move into Bass"). All Klein needs is a congregation - and maybe a satellite-radio hookup - and his ministry is primed for worldwide conquest.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 29 Jun 1999

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