Thursday, August 27, 2009

Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Cyclic Defrost Magazine

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Greg Headley – Fragments of the Dream Machine (28 Angles)

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 12:36 AM PDT

Electronic producer Greg Headley makes the worrying claim in the notes to ‘Fragments of the Dream Machine’ that the album started out ‘not as a musical composition but as a way to break through an impasse’. Rather than the series of sparse and slow moving ideas Headley was working on, then, we have ‘the most chaotic and noise-filled music I have ever composed’. I’m unfamiliar with Headley’s seven earlier albums on his own ‘28 Angles’ label but they’re obviously calmer than this, offering Headley a creative catharsis, of sorts.

The listener however is not guaranteed such relief, for these seemingly formless volleys of sound are difficult to digest. There’s nothing as relentless as Merzbow, but rather a series or procession of random events. The word ‘Fragments’ in the title is appropriate: elements lurch and collide like cells, randomly interacting and affecting one another but retaining their identities. Headley intersperses passages of unstructured noise with ‘musical’ passages, but there’s little to distinguish these components. Tracks like ‘Spasm’ are most abrasive, using the kind of unpleasant sounds Xenakis and followers favoured, but mostly Headley likes cosmic tones, shifted into uneasy arrangements, similar to Rafael Toral’s ongoing Space project.

More at: http://www.28angles.com

Joshua Megitt

Billy Gomberg – Days (The Land Of)

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 12:33 AM PDT

Everything on ‘Days’ by Billy Gomberg seems wispy and vague, as though the lightest breath might reduce it to ashes. It’s a bit like the musical equivalent of Cybille Shepherd on Moonlighting, beautiful but distant and softened by silk stockings. Piano and voice – Gomberg’s own as well as Anne Guthrie singing in Swedish – are heavily treated, smeared into transparent watercolours, while traces of field recording, tinkerings and rustlings, wash up alongside. There’s something of Akira Rabelais in the manner in which tones and traces twist and dissolve like the wind during ‘Darkened’, and there’s much to admire in the ethereal lightness of these pieces, their near erasure, but that also makes them frustratingly elusive. Headphones are essential; through speakers these featherweight sketches amount to nothingness.

Joshua Meggitt

at 6:16 PM