Lawrence English

Gamma-Menge

For over 35 years, Asmus Tietchens has been creating avant-garde music. Originally fascinated with tape compositional works, his move to digital electronics bares many similar approaches to his earlier works. Tietchens says of this record 'My music is composed of aesthetic and extraordinary events which make statements for themselves, but there is absolutely no message. For myself the music most definitely has a meaning. I am an adventurer in the studio.....my aim is to discover the white dots on the landscape of sound, territories where no others have traveled.' So, with piercing spectrally altered sounds, Asmus Tietchens' welcomes you into his realm of processed audio called Gamma-Menge. It's an unusual realm to wonder through. Just as you get a sense of one of the audio environments he creates, the tables are turned and you're introduced to something unfamiliar. Even within each of the pieces on this album, Tietchens jumps, even if subtly between layers and textures. 'Teilmenge 18' for instance clunks along, set to a soft undertone before coolly erupting in the middle of the piece with a buried sound of feedback and distortion. It's hard to know what to make of this record. As a listening experience, it's rewarding in that each of the piece on this record appears to explore a similar pathway, through some unknown world of sound objects and other mutant sonic fragments. It's beautifully unusual sounding, welcoming and in the same moment foreign and unfamiliar.

Build A Fort, Set That On Fire

As the opportunities for collage recordings become more and more detailed and intricate, artists like DD and DJ/Rupture, who make up Nettle, are in a prime position to create collaged beat scapes the likes of which just weren' t possible say 10 years ago. Digesting a wide range of music between them, Nettle bares the marks of two love affairs with sound. Each of the group's members bring with them a large record collection, which has been sampled and laid out into free flowing cut-ups. There's eastern 'world' influences, gabba kick drums, dancehall grooves, one off hip-hop vocal lines, processed drum'n'bass grooves and seemingly countless other reference points that map out this duo's artistic backgrounds. The end results of this collision of sound objects is hard to summarise. Like the artwork on this disc lifted from Goin's 'Nuclear Landscapes', this record is the aftermath of a musical explosion - it's the remnant soundscapes that exist post a studio fallout. They're alien and sometimes eerily unfamiliar, but there's a character to them that's truly unique and fascinating.

Boredoms Mixed By DJ Krush

As the opening beats expose themselves, there's no question that Japanese downbeat hip-hop mastermind DJ Krush is behind this Rebore release. Not afraid to let his style come through in the mix, Krush's set starts out spare, littered with thick beats and the occasional yelled vocal before dropping into a heavily chopped mix of dyslexic rhythms, lost voices and a pulsing tone.

This segment marks the real beginning of the Krush mix - and it's not long before the phasing collage pieces give way to backwards-masked sounds, cut-up guitars and abstract noise weirdness.

The rest of the mix follows similar ground, throwing in moments of minimalism and maximalism with calculated precision.

Of all the Rebore records to date, this one is by far the most interesting. Krush has played with the ideas of Rebore and reworked a new way of coming at the project. He's set the standard and now all that follow (apparently next is UFO) must set their sights a little higher.