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Vital Weekly 720

  Tobias

GUY FRANK PELLERIN - PERIPLO (CD by Cosmic Pride)
I could not trace much on the french artist Guy Frank Pellerin. Consequently within the context of this review he remains an artist without a history. On "Periplo" he collected 12 pieces, a kaleidoscope of instrumental miniatures. All of them are played by Pellerin on a diversity of percussive and wind instruments. "Stella" is the only written piece by Pellerin. All other pieces are spontaneously improvised or improvisations on preconceived ideas. With his music, Pellerin makes the impression of some one who is out of step with what is going on. An album by a loner who creates his own musical universe. His music is anything but far out. On the contrary Pellerin seeks to create 'small' and unpretentious music, that attracts attention through being modest but deep. In his sax playing Pellerin expresses himself from his most jazziest side, as a capable improvisor who can tell his story without big gestures. Pellerin does not seek complexity, but simplicity. This results in a bunch of timeless instrumentals that are beyond categorization, beyond musical trends and fashions. Simply beautiful. (Dolf Mulder) Address: <cosmic-ride@sfr.fr>

TAKUMI SEINO - MOOD FOR RED (CD by Vos)
Here we have Seino with his Drops Trio caught live at Big Apple, Kobe (Japan). On drums we have Hiroshi Matsuda and Osamu Mihara plays acoustic bass. Seino himself on acoustic and electric guitars. About half of the titles are compositions by Seino. The other half are groupimprovisations. Seino is a talented guitarist who did his studies at the Berklee College of Music in the US. He plays a prominent role in several groups. Recently we reviewed the CD "Life-Refined" by Next Order, earlier "Tree" by the Blue Willows Trio that have both Seino on guitars. He is comparable with the canadian guitarist Antoine Berthiaume who also changes from avant garde to very accessible jazz music. Seino is back now with a jazz trio, specialized in a very comforting easy-listening kind of jazz, with some distorted electric outbursts from time to time. I wished there were more of them. For my tastes it remains mostly much within the boundaries of a genre that is too well-known. So I was never surprised by what things trio brings about. Although they are fine musicians who make up a well-balanced trio and who understand their craft. And they deliver you some very sophisticated jazz leaving you in a mood of pleasant calmness. That's for sure! (Dolf Mulder) Address: http://www.takumniseino.com/

SIMULACRA - THERE IS A FOUNTAIN FILLED WITH BLOOD (CD by ConSouling Sounds & No Angels Productions)
Somehow I thought Simulacra was an older name, or perhaps I am (mildly) confused with something else, but its the name used by Miguel Boriau from Belgium, who is working as such since 2006. He is also working as Mannus and Beyond Infinity, as well as Nihilum with someone named Mu. Simulacra is however his main project, having a release on Triple Bath and No Angels Productions. The title may suggest some bloodstained musical horror, but actually its not. Its perhaps not entirely pleasant either, but this darker than dark ambient music is actually great. If you ignore any darker undercurrent coming through titles or the blood red cover, then you'll discover this really nice dark ambient, both spelled in capitals. Its hard to say wether this was made with instruments, field recordings or extensive computer manipulation, but the music rolls majestically like slow motion pictures of the sea. Think Paul Bradley, but then a bit less abstract and moving a bit more towards the musical side of things, with long sustaining chords ebbing and flowing about. Great music, but don't play this scary nightmare in a pitch black environment - ghosts may crawl upon you. Including a remix by Mystified, who simply extends the proceedings - still not much more light - but a slight variation. (FdW)
Address: http://www.consouling.be

GARETH DAVIES & STEVEN R. SMITH - THE LINE ACROSS (LP by Alt.Vinyl)
Work by Gareth Davis has been reviewed before, either solo or in collaboration with others, such as Machinefabriek. Here he teams up again with Steven R. Smith, with whom he already recorded 'Westering', a LP for Important Records (see Vital Weekly 683). Smith (also a member of Hala Strana, Mirza, Thuja) plays electric guitar, spike fiddle and nail violin, and Davis is on bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet. This time recorded in two studios, in Amsterdam and in Los Angeles. Two side long improvised pieces, which continue the mood of the previous record. Mood music that it is. Music that depicts the endless road through the desert. The guitar is played with an open end, sometimes with a slide and always with lots of echo. The clarinets cook up a background drone for it. Sometimes things get even a bit rhythmic on the guitar. A desolate atmospheric piece, this 'Other Forms Of Consecrated Life'. On the other side we find 'The Natural History Of Devastation', which starts out low humming. From there things evolve in a rather natural way. Guitars are layered through the looping device and gradually built up over the course of the piece. The clarinet goes into a much more abstract territory here and perform some great drone like background. An excellent piece, the best duo piece from these two. A totally great record. (FdW)
Address: http://www.altvinyl.com

HIS DIVINE GRACE/DE GRACE - REVELATION (LP by Just Another Winter)
NOTRE DESSEIN - COMME UNE MER DE VERRE (LP by Just Another Winter)
PROCER VENEFICUS - HOW THE HEATHER MOONLT SHIVERS (2LP by Just Another Winter)
A subdivision from (T)reue Um (T)reue which is dedicated to ambient and experimental black metal is the new Just Another Winter label, whom kick off with three releases, all in colorful covers. One is even a double album. I never heard of any of these bands/projects but they seem to share a common love in dark icons, latin names and other pseudo religious outings. Its a world I don't feel connected with. 'Gothic' we sometimes call this smilingly. The first one I played is a split by His Divine Grace and De Grace. It seems that both have the same members, Moonchild Erik (keyboards) and Lamort (guitar and vocals), but it is said in past tense for the first moniker. Under the banner they have a side long track with is a long ambient piece of slow moving electronics and a piano like sound (no doubt a guitar), and maybe heavily processed vocals. Actually quite a nice piece. They developed into De Grace, in which the sound is richer. There are three tracks here, in which we clearly distinguish a guitar, some field recordings and more electronics. Quiet music, hardly complex and highly based in the world of drone music, but with a more open ended guitar sound, and wordless singing/chanting;. Hardly black metal - experimental or not. But a record I like, despite the black undercurrents.
Its hardly a surprise that the 'Comme Une Mer De Verre' by Notre Dessein is much like De Grace. Its the solo project of Lamort - black metal with no drums, as said by the label. Here the inspiration comes from the book of revelations (see also the title of the De Grace album, and, coincidentally the CD by M.B. elsewhere). Much alike but not the same. With Notre Dessein the emphasis lies more on the use of guitar and the vocals here are screaming somewhere in the background - or maybe even in a room next door. I guess this counts as black metal (maybe I should know about this kind of music?), but the musical part doesn't strike me as metal at all - or did someone already think of the term ambient metal? What is similar is the slow playing, the likewise slow evolution of the composition and its ambient character - despite the surpressed vocals. Not as good as De Grace, but certainly enjoyable.
Also a new name (obviously) for me is Procer Veneficus, who have more material out, since the label says this is their 'bleakest' release to date. The cover shows old chairs in red light on the outside, two naked women on the inside in the same red light; two pieces of vinyl pressed in red - so maybe there is a sexual theme? All the material was recorded by one Derek, and one song is by Amber Asylum. This Derek sings and has an acoustic guitar, and loads of reverb behind his back. The music sinks away in this pool of reverb. This is slow music also, but I think its the least interesting of this trio. The sound is drowned out too much, which made me suspicious: why is that? Is there something to hide in the music? Maybe the fact that Procer Veneficus doesn't have that many ideas (but why make a double LP then)? Maybe this counts in some areas as folk noir, but then perhaps its also the kind of music I never really liked and never did much trouble for in understanding. So not my cup of tea, this collection that would not find a place in any brothel. (FdW) Address: http://www.turtur.com/jaw

INCH-TIME - AURORA (LP by Static Caravan)
TULA - NO NAME/REMINDED ME (7" by Static Caravan)
IRIS TO HYPNOS/FIELDHEAD (CDR by Static Caravan)
Three new releases on Static Caravan, three different formats and three different kinds of music. Stefan Panczak from London (originally from Australia) is the man behind Inch-time, and its twelve inch-time here. Five pieces of some great laidback dub jazz rhythms. Soft, not too outspoken pieces of music. Clicky deep rhythms, a guitar, maybe a harp and nice moody tunes. Gorgeous tunes at work here. Vaguely exotic, mildly dark, this is nocturnal music. Delicate music, foot tapping rather than dancing music. Excellent stuff.
On 7" two pieces by Tula, as it says on the cover, but on the backside its says by Tula and Cameron Miller. Two simple folk tunes of guitars (acoustic I should hope) and female vocals and towards the end an accordion. The b-side is probably even stranger: it almost sounds like country & western, but its probably not. How would I know? I never liked that kind of George Bush music, but this piece... well, this piece is actually quite nice. What a lovely 7"!
The final release is by Iris To Hypnos and Fieldhead. Two tracks by each, and each using sound material from the other. Moody, melancholic music here. Soft piano's, multiple soft violins, playing soft tunes and in 'Stele 31' a bit of rhythm carefully brought into the proceedings. Thoughtful music, from the borders of popmusic and modern classical music. Four pieces that clock in at some fifteen minutes of sad music. And sad it made me. Not the music as such, but such sweet music could have lasted a bit longer as far as I'm concerned. Much longer. This simply sounded like more! How sad. How great. (FdW) Address: http://www.staticcaravan.org

GERRITT WITTMER - PORTIONS OF HELL (CDR-EP by Misanthropic Agenda)
This was shipped off almost unheard to Jliat, our man of all things noise, but I decided to have a quick listen myself. Gerrit Wittmer was until now best known as Gerritt and a man of harsh noise attacks. This new, short release, sees him working under his own full name and moving away from the strict noise genre. That is something that I of course most welcome. There is only as much noise as you can make, I guess, before leaping into repetition. The second piece here reflects something of the old noise spirit - a sort of sound poetry gone brutal. However the third piece (all untitled of course) is something that is has no sound at all, or rather: not one we can hear. One is short etude for a contact microphone, while four has very soft rattle of a synth that gradually builds up and so on. This music is much more extreme in my opinion than the average noise release, since it cleverly bounces back and forth between very loud and vicious material, and very soft material, with a strong emphasis on dynamics. Excellent material. Concise, to the point, full of surprises. (FdW) Address: http://www.misanthropicagenda.com

ERIC LUNDE - REDUCPLICATIVE STRATEGIES (CDR/DVDR by Trait)
This is how these things sometimes work. I hadn't heard the name Eric Lunde in years. Many years actually. But last week I reviewed a split of his together with Kommisar Hjuler, and on the same day that review went out, this new release arrived. Lunde writes me that 'recent events brought me kicking and screaming into the digital world'. His latest, newest work is what all his work is about: erosion. Both in audio and in visual. Lunde again takes the work 'I Am Sitting In A Room' from Alvin Lucier as a starting point. You have a recording, you play it back, record that. Then play that recording, record that, and so on. You can apply that to xeroxes and to video. To start with the latter. There are two video's called 'Lucid'. Lunde says that the first is long and perhaps boring - and yes, I agree. Home video's, from the car, from the TV - re-recorded but the narration as such eludes me. There is hardly any music. In the second, shorter version of 'Lucid', Lunde takes an old porn movie and reworks that into a great visual piece. Its green visuals, stretched out, blurry, a bit flickering and with a great low end sound of mumbling like insect sounds. A great piece of film, and as far I'm concerned it would have been enough to release just that on the DVD. The CD takes sounds from the 'Lucid 1' movie and reworks that into eight separate pieces. The ninth piece is a 'reduplicative processing' of the voice over from trailer by Jeph Jerman (also known as Hands To, and back in the days an early collaborator of Lunde). The eight Lunde pieces are best to be heard as one continuos piece of music of the same 'slurping' sound, with sometimes a bit of voice or rhythm. Interesting enough but for forty minutes this is actually a bit too long. The Jerman piece takes a the voice from trailer, and uses the lowest of equipment, the memo-recorder for recording and playback. This is the closest things get here to Lucier original - almost like a cover version. Its a great piece however, which, together with a somewhat slimmed version of Lunde's audio works make up a fine release. A highly limited edition, and I recommend getting the full version: it includes a book which explains the ideas quite in-depth, with some illuminating graphics. (FdW)
Address: http://www.trait/vox.com

LASSE-MARC RIEK - HABITATS (CDR by 3Leaves)
The name Lasse-Marc Riek showed up before in Vital Weekly, but he's mostly known as the man who runs the Gruenrekorder label. On that label you find many people working with pure field recordings, and that line of interest is also to be found in his own work. His 'Habitats' release for the Hungarian label 3Leaves opens with a spoken word by him and he explains what we are hearing: field recordings made in Finland. That introduction is not really necessary. Print it on the cover - which he actually did: there is a list of places mentioned and the variety of birds he recorded (including their latin name - the man knows his birds). The recording of birds is great - even when they don't make the same sense as they do to him. Its hard to say wether these recordings were combined into one, or wether they actually reflect a real time recording, which was then spliced together. The whole piece is separated into eigth parts, cut into one track on the release. A wonderful release of some great recordings, which make my longing for springtime even greater. Pure, poetic field recordings. (FdW) Address: http://www.3leaves-label.com

ANDREW WEATHERS - A GREAT SOUTHERN CITY (CDR by Full Spectrum Records)
Quite an obscure release, this one. The cover lists Andrew Weathers as the creator of the music. He plays 'stringed instruments, percussion, organ, voice, electronics', with some help from others on clarinet, violin, piano, saxophone and cello. No website for the label is mentioned (and why should there? You can always find it). There I read that this is the first release under his real name, and that apparently he has worked as Pacific Before Tiger, and that his music is not unlike that of Greg Davis and Peter Broderick. I might add also the name of Machinefabriek to that small list. Weathers compositions are minimal in their approach. A bow on the snare, a few plucking sounds, a strum here and there. Mostly along gentle paths in a forest at dawn. But there is also the short hectic improvisation of 'Left Arm Sunburnt' as well as, right after that, the orchestral piece 'Sails', with gentle gestures. Its great mixture between ambient like textured music and folk like strumming, and should indeed please those fans of the aforementioned others alike. (FdW)
Address: http://www.fullspectrumrecords.com

PNDC & HOUSEWORK - MOMENTS OF GREY FORGETTABLENESS (CDR by Listen Loudest! Records)
The work of Greek producer PNDC is always welcome here at the Vital headquarters, but its hardly music that fits these pages (I think). PNDC, who always works through mail exchange with Housework (Belgrade) play music that is best described as a mixture of classic new wave, dark wave and electronica. Rhythms arrive via the machine, to which they add guitars, keyboards and vocals. So far they release a couple of great albums, and this album fills in the blanks from previous years: a bunch of tracks that weren't released (for whatever reasons), or remixes of previously released tracks. This is another fine collection of uptempo beats, harsh guitars, piercing electronics, and tormented vocals. Indeed: not the world of Vital Weekly per se, but it makes a perfect antidote for the all serious music that floats around the 'office'. Think Depeche Mode meeting New Order on the darker hours of the night. Excellent outsider in this underground. (FdW)
Address: http://www.myspace.com/pndc

GIANCARLO TONIUTTI - IGILAGIILAL AGLALGAL (3"CDR by Kaon)
TOY BIZARRE - KDI DCTB 216 [DATA #9] (3"CDR by Kaon)
Kaon never fully established itself to be a real label. It mainly releases the work of Cedric Peyronnet (also known as Toy Bizarre), but he writes that this is about to change. First there is a bimonthly project based on recordings of the Taurion River. Peyronnet made these recordings in the river valley, capturing aircraft, crickets, cicadas, grasshoppers, snow and ice. He handed these to various artists to compose a piece of music with it. The first is Giancarlo Toniutti, whose work is greatly appreciated here, but which is sadly quite sparse. The title means 'was brought together in baidars' from the language Atkan Aleut, an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken on Atka Island in the Aleutian archipelago, North Pacific (no google here: its mentioned on the cover). Its hard to say what kind of process he applied to the material, but it seems to me an analogue treatment of radical equalization. All the lower end sounds are pushed up, leaving a bit of the mid end, and nothing for the high end. The result is a very dark textured piece of music of around fifteen minutes in which we recognize nothing of the original, save maybe for the final bit. Its very much a Toniutti piece of music of radical treatments of disturbing beauty.
It seems we missed out on the 8th volume of Toy Bizarre's series of weather treatments, since here is installment number 9. After a few surprise volumes, it seems like Toy Bizarre goes back here to his original sound: that of crackling sound and mild processing. It deals with the weather conditions in Australia in November (the 19th to be precise) and of course its getting summer time over there. Maybe that's what I hear, or rather I believe to hear. In the first ten minutes things die out quite slowly, but then in the last two minutes (all these pieces last twelve minutes) Toy Bizarre picks up on the drone again of the more recent works. Its not the best work in the series, but along a pretty fine standard. (FdW)
Address: http://www.kaon.org

LASSE MARHAUG - THE SKY ABOVE THE BUD BELOW (cassette by Prest!? Records)
DORO BENGALA (cassette by Prest!? Records)
Italy's Presto!? slowly builds an interesting catalogue of music, in which they use all sorts of formats. Here two cassette releases. The first is by the well-known Lasse Marhaug, who is best known as one half of Jazkamer, but also for his many collaborations with like minded noise artists around the globe. Two pieces here, both just under ten minutes of improvised noise music. Its hard to say what he uses equipment wise, but my best guess would be that he has loaded his computer with a bunch of sound files and plays them through some sort of computer program that slices the material up into smaller particles, which then go into an analogue mixer with some outboards sound effects, mainly a delay device. This is all generates a rather loosely organized sound - let's say improvised music. Not as loud as some of the material he also releases, but definitely loud and clear. Short and sweet.
Even shorter is the release by Doro Bengala. "We practice the art of sense stimulation through the use of colored flames, of shrieks and low frequencies. Our group carry out a practice from Bengal founded by Mrs Subhash Candra Doro in the late 1895". To that end they use explosions of fireworks and electronics. two pieces, one of three minutes and one of four minutes. Its not easy to judge this, since its all so brief. But a-side is more present with explosive sound - although not easy to be recognized as fireworks - whereas the b-side is a very low end sound, with events a bit buried. A small mysterious release, but quite nice. (FdW)
Address: http://www.prestorecords.com

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