Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Loren Chasse - The Footpath (Naturestrip)

Posted: 29 Mar 2009 05:32 AM PDT

Loren Chasse’s sound doesn’t feel composed. It feels fluid, messy, yet evolving. It feels outside human control, like a force of nature. I view Footpath an innovative and curious form of ambient composition, one that doesn’t pigeonhole things neatly in musical or even sound art techniques, and is content to let the roughage show. He’s using field recordings of a place and then is manipulating the sound making objects he finds in that place, rubbing rocks, walking, dragging things, recording the wind in the trees (and on the mic), and coalescing all of these sounds into these waves, surges of activity that build and subside without you really understanding why, what force of nature provoked the movement. It’s a mixture of field recordings from footpaths in California mixed with live performances in Berlin, Torino, Tarcento and San Francisco, and it’s difficult to tell what comes from where. Chasse loves texture, things crinkle, crackle, tear and rub, even the microphone doesn’t feel static, it’s moving around, as involved as the action itself. He uses a cymbal in the same way, like it’s being played by a natural force. Chasse’s compositions seem devoid of human intent even when there’s a quick strum of guitar amongst the bluster, or a warm mechanical drone. In fact throughout some of these pieces, it almost feels like there’s some light experimental music going on almost subliminally next door, perhaps leaking through a window, where we only catch what the wind wants us to hear. Whilst some of the experimental drone music does increase in volume, it is utilised in a similar manner to the field recordings, revealed, obscured, flowing, changing. The other pieces revolve around field recordings from a park in Maryland and a Bird Sanctuary in California where he does this amazing thing of obscuring the foreground of the sound, with ticks and small indecipherable movements, whilst allowing the background to ring out unhindered. It’s a technique that produces a curiously unnerving affect. This is his second album on Naturestrip and somewhat of a departure from the summery warmth of The Air In The Sand, in fact aside from his work in the Jeweled Antler Collective, this is the first I’ve heard where he is integrating (albeit subtly) musical elements into the mix. Of course the music is as fractured yet flowing as the field recordings and it’s the merging the two that provides the fascination on this mysterious and engrossing work.

Bob Baker Fish

Cultural Musical Club - Shime (World Village/ Select Audio Visual)

Posted: 29 Mar 2009 03:21 AM PDT

Founded in 1958, the Cultural Musical Club in Zanzibar (an island off the coast of Tanzania) is a meeting spot for the musicians, a place where they can get in a quick game of dominos, a prayer, watch some TV and play some music together. It’s led by accordinist Said Mwinyi who also serves as the groups musical director, chief composer and arranger. This is a daily ritual for him, aside for those times when the ensemble is on tour. The group is made up of 17 odd musicians, from singers to Mwinyi’s ever present accordian, oud, violins, double bass, dumback, and bongos. They play Taarab music, a style that is incredibly popular along the East African coast, commonly referred to as Swahilli wedding music due to its integral role in those celebrations. It’s a style that draws influence primarily from Middle Eastern music (note the presence of oud), yet there are also vague links to Indian music, as well as African dance bands, and this mix is not just unexpected but quite beguiling. The accordion acts as a spine to most of the songs, played in a middle eastern manner, often in a similar style to Arabic woodwind instruments. Then there’s the steady throb and rattle of percussion over which a singer will occassionally build, it’s orchestral taarab music and it’s absolutely compelling. This disc is a celebration of the groups 50th anniversary and sees them also getting highly percussive in the island’s Ngoma style, or dance music. The music just unfolds slowly, weaving its way along, not escpecially dynamic, rather it can be quite hypnotic.

Bob Baker Fish

Oreka Tx - Nomadak Tx (World Village/ Select Audio Visual)

Posted: 29 Mar 2009 03:19 AM PDT

The txalparta is a percussion instrument from the Basque region of Spain. It appears to be a somewhat cruder version of the vibraphone, one or more wooden planks supported by wooden stands, that are then banged with thick wooden sticks. Perhaps most interestingly you need two players to play, thus enforcing collaboration. Oreka Tx is the project of collaboration between two Spanish musicians who have played with the likes of Taraf De Haidouks and Pat Metheny, and collaboration is an important component of their work. This disc is only a small part of a much larger canvas that also includes a documentary film and live performances. It’s a multicultural journey with the duo traveling to various countries to jam with the locals. It begins with some Mongolian throat singing, on a piece that also includes a txaparta made of ice, recorded in an igloo, a horse headed fiddle and Saharan, Berber, Indian and Basque vocals all mixed together in an exotic fusion that somehow works despite the geographic inconsistencies. It’s entirely representative of the remainder of this album, in which sitars, mandolins, slide guitar, violin, lute, clarinet, Moroccan castanets, jews harp, tabla, kalimba and all manner of indigenous voices and instruments all weave around ice, cardboard, stone, and wooden tx’s of our heroes. These jams whilst incredibly well produced have a fly by the seat of your pants feel, and it’s curious to hear how each cultures music attempts to work with the melodic rhythms of the tx. Many of the instruments like the sitar, the throat singing or even the castanets are so culturally distinctive that it’s impossible to imagine how anything, particularly an ancient Basque instrument could find a way in. Yet this is never a problem, nothing feels forced, this is highly composed otherworldly world music, a true meeting of cultures, with each offering a gift, yet none emerging on top.

Bob Baker Fish

Abelcain & Cdatakill – Passage (Ad Noiseam)

Posted: 29 Mar 2009 12:18 AM PDT

Abelcain

While they’re still best known to their respective mothers as Marty Frank and Zak Roberts, Abelcain and Cdatakill have both reached a point where they’re considered ‘veterans’ of the US breakcore scene, having released impressive backcatalogues through labels such as Sublight and Low Res. This shared album release ‘Passage’ on Ad Noiseam follows in the wake of Abelcain and Cdatakill’s collaborative ‘Bleeding Hearts’ 12" series of 2007, and collects together tracks from the duo’s 2002 collaborative release ‘Six Stigmata’ on Zhark International, alongside their remix ‘vs.’ EP ‘Playing With Knives’ on Low Res of the same year, and a further four previously unreleased contemporary remixes. While other recent breakcore-oriented releases on Ad Noiseam by The Teknoist and Sickboy have focussed upon the ‘cartoon’ aspects of the genre via tongue-in-cheek sampling, as this sprawling 70 minute collection illustrates, Abelcain & Cdatakill both cast a distinctly more dry and dystopian slant on proceedings.

In truth there’s precious little ‘light’ to be found here. Abelcain’s opening ‘Kissing Ice’ gives good indication as to the sort of ferocious aesthetic that predominates here, fusing fussilades of distorted trashcan junglist breakbeats with cascades of eerie minor-key piano trills in a manner that calls to mind a seriously pissed-off Squarepusher, while ‘The Dream People Call Human Life’ matches storms of drill and bass Amen breaks with ominous choir samples and fragments of off-key orchestration. Indeed, it’s no real surprise to find out that Abelcain’s previously released unofficial remixes of Skinny Puppy, as it’s that outfit’s fusion of the furiously percussive and distorted with moments of unexpected sonic beauty that’s perhaps most frequently called to mind here. Elsewhere, sidetrips into yawning dark ambience and vast industrial samples on tracks such as ‘Canto V’ and ‘Isabella’ manage to be equally, if not more terrifying and foreboding than their more bpm-loaded counterpoints, simply because they hint at so much understated darkness. As for the four new tracks, they manage to provide another impressive bonus into the bargain, with tracks such as ‘Raining Glass’ even revealing the influence of hiphop in their midtempo breakdown sections. While the unrelenting nature of this expansive collection may prove too much for some listeners in its entirety, on the whole ‘Passage’ impresses.

Forenzics - H30 (Self-Published)

Posted: 28 Mar 2009 03:55 AM PDT

forenziks

A document of live instrumental improvisation, drums (Ben Eadie) and two Guitars (Matthew Byres and Dirk Kruithol), created in one take. H30 lends heavily towards the psychedelia, predominately from one of the guitarists whose wails and wheals of the guitar create a mélange of noise while often, but not always, the other guitarist provides a more descriptive and structured stance. But perhaps you do not succumb to the notion that noise guitarists are unaware of logic and that the search for abstract noise is not a delving into an irrational world. The presence of experimentation both as activity and in a sense as a genre inform the activities of Forenzics sonic play, it can be seen as free form both as an aesthetic and the state to which the aesthetic alludes.

Drummer Ben Eadie, displays his keen ear and dab hand schooled in the worlds of art jazz, free jazz and associated art rock forms, playing with the language of these domains, controlling and pulling apart his instrument, and it's forms, creating new patterns to feed back. Clearly H30 is a guitar dominated sound formation whose play with retuned, odd and new found uses of their instruments, along with the aid of copious effects, is forcefully foregrounded. While the experimentation often hides and mutates the languages of the instruments, created from the instruments and placed upon the instruments, the trio show that speaking these in these tongues is something that becomes them as well as new found translations.

Forenzics appeals to a tuned ear, one familiar to the art rock world, high on minimalism, completely rebelling against the structured codes that their chosen instruments lend, yet succinctly reveling in their wielding. Providing powerful new landscapes of sound, abstracted estranged music that is becoming uncannily familiar and growing fonder in the ear of this 'noise' avoider.

Innerversitysound

Antoni Maiovvi – Electro Muscle Cult (Seed Records)

Posted: 28 Mar 2009 03:55 AM PDT

Antoni Maiovvi

Italian electro / disco producer Antoni Maiovvi clearly loves the polyester-clad early eighties Euro disco milieu populated by the likes of Giorgio Moroder and Hardold Faltermeyer, judging by the distinctly Italo-house centred leanings of this debut album on Seed ‘Electro Muscle Cult’, but as the visceral-sounding title suggests, there’s also a few hints towards bloody Italian cult cinema lurking just below the surface of the nine tracks collected here. Opening track ‘Tokyo Ultra Funk’ certainly kicks things into action in impressive style, fusing the sorts of dark, bassy electro-grooves and shimmering retroid synths that you’d expect from the likes of the similarly muscular Black Strobe or Alexander Robotnik with lithe, disco-house hewn rhythms, before ‘Presidente Della Notte’ takes things out on a fluoro-tinged synth-pop tip that shares far greater kinship with the likes of Cut Copy and the Kitsune set. That said, it’s the more muscular, flexing electro workouts such as the arpeggio-happy ‘Cop With A Badge’ that represent easily the most satisying offerings here, the aforementioned track particularly impressing halfway through with its spectacular breakdown into jangling New Order-y guitars. Indeed, it’s the closing electro-disco cover of the theme to cult Italian horror film ‘Zombie 2′ that offers up the best clue as to where Maiovvi’s aesthetic is anchored here, and while there’s the occasional slide into kitsch here, ‘Electro Muscle Cult’ manages to be considerably more interesting than say, much of International Deejay Gigolos’ output these days. Apparently the physical CDR release is limited to just 100 hand numbered copies though, so you’ll have to move fast.

Chris Downton