Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Oscar Vincente Slorach-Thorn - aB-3 (Albert’s Basement)

Posted: 05 Jan 2009 07:54 AM CST

Melbourne musician Oscar Vincente Slorach-Thorn, known better as one of the founders of the Albert’s Basement collective, assembled this album-length recording anonymously over the course of a couple of months as a side-step from his role as the primary member of Two Bright Lakes band Psuche. Recorded, like the forthcoming Psuche album, by Two Bright Lakes founder and Touch Typist member Nick Huggins, Slorach-Thorn announced the album with little fanfare, and a solitary launch show at The Toff In Town in Melbourne.

Perhaps it is a tribute to Slorach-Thorn’s disregard for glory and pomp in the release of music, that this album is so breathtakingly well assembled, venturing further from the experimental pop of Psuche and into lo-fi drone and noise. The sound of this album announces itself immediately, opening up with tape-distorted processing of clarinet and saxophone that for a brief one and a half minutes rips at the very fabric of the original until it is lost in tape noise. The outlook of Slorach-Thorn here is akin to Francis Plagne, small fractions of songs or vocals occasionally surfacing above, or overlapping intricately formulated sound worlds. Similarly, everything over the course of the album manages to sound vulnerable and precious, even in the full range of volume and timbres utilised. “Twilight Girl” offers up a looped ukelele and the first appearance on the album of Slorach-Thorn’s voice, buried gradually over the course of the track, until it is barely perceptible among the silence. Even more robust elements through the album have a loving warmth to them - walls of blanket keyboard, cut up pieces of tape noise and voice that somehow retain their edge over the long journey of their treatment.

The mixing throughout this release is puzzling in the best way possible. Slorach-Thorn manages the evolution of the many sounds on this album with poise and grace; texturally, no point in the album can be faulted. Fourteen minute closer “When I Watched” is a showcase for this, layers upon layers of keyboard drone co-ordinated and distributed in and amongst each other, with a puppet like control for their movement from A to B. The most valuable moments on this album, are the ones where little peeps of pitch seep through noise and drones, whether in the form of tiny, tinny keyboard sounds (”Tinder”), voice (”Spinning Objects”) or songs (”Twilight Girl”, “3d”). The weight and counterpoint of these elements makes for a beautiful listening experience.

Marcus Whale

3ofmillions - immediate (Space Dairy)

Posted: 05 Jan 2009 07:51 AM CST

It has been difficult for pianist Adrian Klumpes to step out of the shadow of the tremendous success of Triosk, his seven-year long collaboration with fellow jazz musicians Laurence Pike and Ben Waples, even with a superb solo album on Leaf and collaborations with Machinefabriek and Shoeb Ahmad under his belt. His new group 3ofmillions, enlisting the support of the style-hopping bass guitarist Abel Cross (having existed in both experimental punk group Pure Evil Trio and jazz collectives such as Trio Apoplectica) and the younger generation in Wollongong drummer Finn Ryan, have spent the year 2008 formulating a group dynamic that more trumps than rivals that of Triosk. The live shows of 3ofmillions' short history have been spectacular, if not achieving the kind of blissful balance that I found so appealing in Klumpes' previous group. 3ofmillions' album Immediate begs to be known as its own entity, divorced from any of the members' current or previous projects.

The bottom line here is that 3ofmillions is ultimately not intended to be comparable to Triosk. The interaction between the musicians is one that is entirely different – Abel Cross' huge and dirty range of bass tones is a particularly new element. What is most impressive about "Immediate", is that it manages to successfully encompass both the glorious brutality of bass heavy moments such as in "conscription", as well as the most delicate of Adrian Klumpes' playing, while keeping an incredibly tight, intense and conversational interaction between the three instrumentalists. Finn Ryan's performance should also not be ignored, the sheer power of his free playing reaching a stunning climax in "improvised explosive device", a stark counterpoint to the stillness of the bass drones that unify the piece.

In discussing Immediate, 22-minute closer "accepting what is" is undoubtedly an elephant in the room. On the opposite end from the similarly delicate opener "her subtlety in my subconscious", the freedom, space and restraint of the group's performance on this piece more than justifies its length. It is here that the most obvious Triosk comparisons would come in – the prominence of Klumpes' cascading piano, the subtle introduction of mirroring bass and drums – but what ultimately sets it apart is the contextualisation of this improvisation. After the energy-sapping menace and chaos of the majority of the previous 40 minutes, "accepting what is" becomes a significant catharsis that cements the dynamic power and skill of 3ofmillions as improvisers. In Immediate, 3ofmillions speak on their own terms and with their own language.

Marcus Whale

Murcof - The Versailles Sessions (Leaf/Inertia)

Posted: 05 Jan 2009 07:49 AM CST

For mine, Mexican sound artist Fernando Corona's processing and re-configuration of organic, particularly strings-based materials has been the forte of his releases under the Murcof name. His latest release, The Versailles Sessions, intended as a stopgap curiosity before the release of Cosmos follow-up Oceana, travels further in this direction, surrounding the treatment of French baroque instruments, particularly the viola da gamba and harpsichord. The release is the result of a site-specific commission for Les Grande Eaux Nocturnes, an arts festival based in a Versailles chateau. The resultant 50 minutes certainly outgrows its status, encompassing a huge range of sounds, without straying to the light or tacky, as has arguably occurred in the past.

Immediately, the sound worlds created by Corona in particularly his treatment of string instruments are pungent, deriving the most weighty elements of their sound. The introduction of a mezzo-soprano in "A Lesson For The Future, Farewell" widens the character of the release significantly, the voice struggling in and out of particularly haunting reverb treatments and the melodic mirroring of a viola da gamba. A great range of timbres are achieved, not least for these instruments' intrinsic differences, but also Corona's diverse re-arrangements of their sounds, simultaneously channeling their antiquity, as well as consciously acknowledging the modernity of his treatments. The resulting impression ranges from the solemn to the utterly malignant, akin more to Medieval brutality than baroque subtlety, the arrangement and processing of instruments here exploiting their most gutteral and biting timbres.

The baroque period seems apt for Corona's musical outlook, the passion, drama and darkness of its underside, as against the more widely peddled light dance music of the French baroque, mirrors the heavy, gothic tones that Corona regularly channels in his treatment of sampled materials. The Versailles Sessions is a considerably interesting musical exercise, and perhaps outdoes other, more significant releases under the Murcof moniker for its musicality and inventiveness.

Marcus Whale

The Bug – London Zoo (Ninja Tune)

Posted: 05 Jan 2009 09:05 PM CST

bug

Ninja Tune's roster has always impressed me, they have held my ears captive for so long and I have implicitly trusted their judgment. If you take the label notion as a meta-dj act then releases on the label would as a matter of course meld with your trust of the selector's view(s) of the landscape of sound/time/ideas.

So why does The Bug just fall off the radar of sensibility for me? Let me try to explain, it isn't that the beats aren't bass heavy, they are and extra warm would it be on the dance floor, wondrous body mashing effects that put the body into electronic body music, so to speak. It isn't that the sophistication of the beats, excellent multi- layered structure, well honed effects and for a generally vocal album Bug holds the vocals skillfully in the mix not stepping over them nor over emphasizing. If we can see the dubstep style as the logical inheritor of the rave/dub/hardcore then this is definitely an example of the sound. And form for forms sake is as reasonable an act as any other is it not? If so why does it need to hang it's hat on such lyrics?

It is the sheer savagery and naïve hypocrisy of the vocals that ring the alarm bells. Vocals if we take them to be a form of poetry in the sense presented, as 'message', instruction to youth on a correct way of life, and concerns itself with 'resistance', 'righteousness', 'Jah' and the 'wrongness of the world'. At one point it is proclaiming peace, another righteous anger, at another that only the good survive, at another smoking pot, at another Rastarfarianism (remember Haile Selassie {Ras Tafari} died in 1975), at another that everyone is going insane, at another a list of enemies(fuckaz). It comes across as incoherent and deliberately contradictory and chooses to read biblical text as literal and fundamental rather than as allegorical or poetic. I never thought I would live to hear a fundamentalist Rastafarian message, despite the seriousness it has always held for me a lightness of feel and poetic beauty which is missing here.

Yes Bug you may rally against ('Haters, Biters, Bigots, Music Industry sharks, Sheep, Racists, Vampires, Dollar Suckas, Fame Fuckers, The uncommitted, The Average, The Mediocre, The innocent bystanders, the anglo-american war machine and the international elite') but truly you are an elite of hate. Your product is bile.

If people could get beyond themselves to see that people who do not hold their views are not necessarily wrong or mad then it is quite possible that they would not always end in a dark place as a result of this peculiar solipsism. Prescient is the sentiment of You and Me which tails off "… into darkness we go".

You could just read them as advanced tropes of the reggae dub genre meet activist mindset and the terminally dissident. The Bug under this reading would just be part of a continuing narrative as the latest incarnation of the 'sound carrier' of the messages from these arenas. As such the album could be seen to be a manifestation of the interests of the communities who have their cultural lives 'invested' in these specific tropes. If dissent in the cultural political equals dissonance and anger in sound then this equation could explain London Zoo to an extent. (Even the idea London Zoo (too closely akin to Zoo York) has the sense of encaged, outraged prisoners, born to be wild, screaming their jungle roar to their jailers. It is almost a cartoon. ) Dissonance as sound form has never rung true, although it may ring true to those who live in the bleak house and to teenagers 'oppressed by authority' quite willing replicate this structure ad infinitum until it makes them sick. An alternative society of complaint does not make a sustainable community.

It is too easy to sell dissent to teenagers, yes Bug the cash registers ring at every cry of wrong; another sale is chalked up amongst the disaffected. The identification factor, seeing within your message the mirror of their world, as well as a reflection of the personal, is too easy a lure for the musical fisherman puts out to the sea. It is harder to give the conceptual and linguistic poetry that would enable the listeners to overcome this sense of disaffection and enable them within life. Dissent is too easy. Chomsky-lite for toddlers.

Innerversitysound