Category: Album reviews

Sunda Arc – Tides

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My first introduction to Sunda Arc came with a December 2018 show supporting Go Go Penguin at the Royal Albert Hall in London. I was left speechless as brothers Nick and Jordan Smart presented a thrilling, loud, bass-rich techno-inflected set that fused intricate electronics with Jordan Smart’s clarinet; it contained such velocity and intensity that I honestly figured the roof of the 1867 concert venue was going to collapse.

The duo quickly released their debut EP Flicker in the days that followed and it didn’t disappoint, capturing the precise essence of that live set that felt so compatible with Go Go Penguin’s own – in spite of Go Go Penguin’s flavour of jazz being written with electronics but played acoustically, whereas Sunda Arc keep the electronics in. It was, perhaps inevitably, more restrained than the live show had been, but only in volume.

Their debut album, Tides, is, in comparison, strangely muted. Aside from the juddering Warp-inflected ‘Dawn’, the slowly growing shimmer of ‘Everything At Once’, the utterly gorgeous ‘Cluster’, and the ominous kick drums of ‘Hymn’, it’s not that the album lacks energy, it just feels like that energy might have taken on a more rueful, less recognisably euphoric tone. A sparseness, or even a brittleness, permeates through these pieces, spliced in with a cautious fragility maybe. Listen to all the components of the aforementioned ‘Hymn’ and it’s hard to know precisely where that comes from – its juddering electro rhythm has plenty of forward motion, and its central melody is not immediately plaintive, questioning or uncertain.

‘Secret Window’ takes that maudlin disposition and attaches it to delicate piano loops and mournful reeds, while ‘Vespers’ does the same only with sheets of ice-bright Bob Fripp-style atmospherics. These are pieces that feel like they could erupt into something edgy and dangerous at any moment, but instead they stay firmly bedded down in an achingly beautiful, yet ultimately sorrowful place.

Once you realise that this is just where Tides wants to stay, it makes for an incredibly well-crafted, detailed and wonderfully minimalist record, full of meticulous gestures and an ever-shifting palette of complex sounds. In spite of the Smart brothers’ role in hip Norwich modern jazz unit Mammal Hands, any overtones from that group lurking around on Tides are discrete, tentative and sporadic. The mysterious ‘Collapse’ is the exception, Jordan’s bass clarinet leading this album centrepiece through an atmospheric, electronically-structured ride through a vibrant, edgy, futuristic souk.

Tides by Sunda Arc is released February 7 2020 by Gondwana.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Further.

Thomas Köner – Motus

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“I dream of a dance floor where Motus would be enjoyed,” says Thomas Köner. “What kind of society would allow that?”

His ambition isn’t necessarily wilfully controversial or provocative, but it nevertheless underpins a desire to unshackle music from the notion of grids, beats, BPMs and electronic music formalism. Motus is the latest instalment in Köner’s gently subversive approach to analogue synthesis, something I first experienced way back in June 1996 with ‘Untitled’, a track included on a CD given away with The Wire (Miaow! (…Cats What I Call Music)). That track was, on face value, a recording containing virtually nothing, a distant, ephemeral rumble easily overtaken by real life; to experience it, one had to tune everything out, turn it up loud and concentrate very hard. Only then could you hear the rich, undulating turbulence that the piece was actually constructed from. It was loud music, just presented very quietly.

Motus, comparatively, is bold, noisy and restless. Freed from the tyranny of the beat, tracks like ‘SUBSTRATE (Binaural)’ take their forward motion not from an obvious rhythm, but the ebbing waves of a modular sequence, whose pace only alters materially when the waveform is tweaked. The effect is, for those used to hearing music anchored to a pattern of kick drums, hi-hats and snare sounds, mildly unnerving. You want to attach these sequences to a rhythm, even though it’s not there, your inner clock suddenly thrown off track by a subtle modulation here or there.

Strangely, the effect of this – despite being made from nothing more than artificial waveforms and electrical current – is to remind you that nature does not cling rigidly to perfection. Gusts of wind don’t readily adhere to a quantised location on a screen; a bird’s flapping wings are not operating at a consistent BPM; your heart is more than likely not beating at precisely the same pace as it was when you started reading this (it will either have slowed down through disengagement or sped up through the panic of a beat-less musical world). It takes pieces like ‘SUBSTANCE (Suicide)’, and the other six tracks on Motus to make you realise that.

Motus by Thomas Köner is released February 6 2020 by Mille Plateaux.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Further.

Infinite Scale – The Value of Accessibility

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Following on from their excellent BUNKR and Echaskech releases, VLSI Records continue to cultivate that rare ability in a label of creating a cohesive identity while simultaneously showcasing acts who have their own personalities.

Such is the case with Harmi Paldi, who has been creating music under the alias of Infinite Scale since 2005. Opening track ‘Caught On Tape’ gives the feeling of leaning forward without falling over, like a glitchy, fragmented Jack Dawson holding Rose Dewitt Bukater at a 45-degree angle on the bow of the Titanic.

‘The Chauffeur’ is fuelled by a laconic bass-line that tethers all the other moving parts to its roots. ‘Ordinary Familiar’ splutters wonderfully to a halt like ‘French Kiss’ deprived of its morning caffeine. Album closer ‘Steppa Side’s wooziness suggests a more playful side which strikes a nice balance with the more muted tones of the track that precedes it, ‘Pay For This’.

The album concerns itself with the ease we have of accessing information and the sheer volume of data available to us. It also suggests a longing for the pre-internet days of anticipation and manual discovery. The use of the word ‘tape’ in one of the titles reveals a fondness for the tactile joy of physical objects. In a digital world items such as audio and video cassettes look and feel antiquated, and it’s easy to see why they might become fetishised by generations who were deprived of the pleasure of possessing them first time around.

Does accessibility trump first-hand experience? Can second-hand experiences ever match seeing and feeling things unfold in the flesh? Does it matter? Are we guilty of setting our personal filters too far to the point where we only interact with our own doppelgängers?

Perhaps the reality is if we solely embrace this constant source of never-ending information we will end up isolated and our opinions homogenised.

The Value Of Accessibility‘s strength lies in its ability to process and present ideas without losing its humanity or identity. To have information at one’s fingertips suits those of us who can no longer can be free in their movements, whether due to geographical responsibilities, mobility issues, or the end of free movement in Europe post-Brexit. Luckily, records such as these transcend physical borders.

The Value Of Accessibility by Infinite Scale is released January 31 2020 by VLSI Records.

Words: David Best. David is a founding member of Fujiya & Miyagi and Ex-Display Model.

(c) 2020 David Best for Further.

Richard Skelton – LASTGLACIALMAXIMUM

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Richard Skelton’s latest album is a forty-minute evocation of the growth, peak and accelerated thawing of the British and Irish glacial landscapes, presented as a series of eight movements of slow, developing tones that ebb away into quiet murmurs; basically, it’s like Morton Feldman, on ice.

The effect is powerfully disconcerting when heard in the context of climate change and the insistent messages of politician, scientists, protesters about the urgency of the corrective action that might be required to arrest the impact.

Across these movements there is a sense of stillness and calm, but also a slightly dizzying sensation. The precise instrumentation is not disclosed, and one never knows the origins of these long, eddying indeterminate tones and warped, muffled drones; at times it sounds like industrial, metallic noise, while at others we hear what could be an especially mournful, poignant cello, only presented like a vague outline of something that once was, but which can never be again. Sounds drift in and out, like gusts of wind across the arctic tundra, only presented as fleetingly melancholic, and edged with a frosty tension. There is a feeling of isolation, a panic-inducing out-of-placeness, that sensation being all the more remarkable given the levels of nothingness one experiences here.

Your response to music is often entirely situational. For me, I chose to listen to this during the clamour and franticity of a walk three and a half blocks from a hotel in New York to a downtown E train during the rush hour. Something about the slow, ominous passage of the music chimed menacingly with the post-work streetscene of manic Manhattan, a world removed from the subject matter of Skelton’s remarkable work, yet somehow entirely in tune with it.

LASTGLACIALMAXIMUM by Richard Skelton is released February 2 2020 by Corbel Stone Press

(c) 2020 Further.

Evil Gal – Brown Acid / The Village Of Doom

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A cassette outing for this 28-minute outburst from Canada’s Evil Gal, originally released digitally last November, here released through the uncompromising Industrial Coast imprint. Evil Gal is an offshoot of New Brunswick’s Women Of The Pore (M Gatling), here with additional sonic architecture from Montréal’s Matthew Donnelly (Fecal Mutiliation).

Both artists have a long pedigree in the world of noise, but ‘Brown Acid’ and ‘The Village Of Doom’ play with a different, slightly more restrained sense of violence, feeling more like a low-budget soundtrack to a particularly vivid video nasty only available through the dark web. ‘Brown Acid’ creeps, prowls and stalks with extreme menace, proceeding on a murky bass sequence over which all manner of sounds – percussion, sax, general unholy disquietude – are overlaid. It’s a thick, gloopy sonic goo that leaves indelible stains on your psyche. In a good way.

‘The Village Of Doom’ is more sparse, though just as freakishly uncomfortable, opening with oscillating sounds like warbling sirens, the hiss of escaping air, distortion, micro-loops of unknown origin and randomised non-rhythms and electronics that sound both chaotic and intricate. Nothing here stays around for long; passages are cut off just as they start to become repetitive, engendering a queasiness and rapid motion that means its fourteen minute duration nonchalantly zips by before ebbing away into surprisingly pleasant texture.

Brown Acid / The Village Of Doom by Evil Gal is released January 3 2020 by Industrial Coast.

Words: Mat Smith

Waclaw Zimpel – Massive Oscillations

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For anyone interest in the rudiments of electronic music, titles don’t come much more thrilling than Massive Oscillations, the name of the second album by Polish multi-instrumentalist Waclaw Zimpel. It is both a perfectly accurate depiction of the structure of the title track’s enormous, ever-shifting undercurrent of snarling, wild, grinding synth lines, and the guiding principle that runs throughout the record.

The album finds Zimpel, an arsenal of vintage electronics from oscillators to tape machines, a piano, his clarinet and a guitar operating in a many-layered excursion into the underexplored territory between the slow evolutions of minimalism, avant-garde jazz and intense electronics. The four tracks were recorded at Willem Tweestudio in Den Bosch, Netherlands over a period of nine days and then mixed by James Holden, a musician who knows more than a thing or two about fusing together jazz and electronics (see his deployment of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic theory with fellow auteur Marcus Hamblett for evidence).

Both ‘Massive Oscillations’ and ‘Sine Tapes’ deploy a tension between wandering electronics and Zimpel’s clarinet, resulting in something that can – on one level – appear meditative and soothing but at other times presages a dirty, turbulent discordancy. The expressive reed playing could easily be allowed to dominate, but instead it threads noisily through the wavering, oscillating tones that dominate the foreground, only rising to the top when developed into thick, heavy blocks of drones, squeals and resonant melodies.

‘Release’ is perhaps the biggest departure from the sonic architecture used on the preceding three tracks, given that the electronics take something of a backseat, reduced to textural white noise, gentle shimmers and air cylinder hissing. Here we find Zimpel exploring territory not dissimilar to Terry Riley’s In C, repeated motifs for prepared piano, clarinet and guitar quietly developing over the course of its eight beatific minutes. The introduction of heavenly vocals provides the piece with an unexpectedly transcendent, dream-like quality.

Massive Oscillations by Waclaw Zimpel is released January 31 2020 by Ongehood.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Further.

Ocean Viva Silver – Îpe

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Ocean Viva Silver is the pseudonym of Valérie Vivancos, a Paris-based sound artist whose work centres around an interest in the physical properties of sound. Îpe, her new cassette for Industrial Coast, forms part of a series called Releasing The Spirit Of Object wherein a combination of electronics, found sound and musique concrète electroacoustics are used to explore a particular object. In the case or îpe, that object is a piece of wood, the intention being to identify its distinct voice within two twenty-minute compositions.

The end result is forty minutes of complex and thrilling noise, carefully curated so as not to become a sprawling, dissonant, ugly collection. On ‘Par Le Menu’, you hear blocks of reverberating sound juddering into view, forming a murky bass tone underpinning squeaks, taps, hissing, violent squalls of distorted electronics and an unpredictable universe of sonic colour. There are moments here of intense beauty, ambient pads emerging suddenly out of nowhere to give the piece a symphonic, beatific edge.

The B-side, ‘A Contrario’, dispenses with the languid pace of its counterpart and instead opts for a sense of turbulent volatility, all skittish sounds and a wild, restless, ever-changing harshness, interspersed with indecipherable vocal incantations.

Îpe by Ocean Viva Silver is released January 20 2020 by Industrial Coast.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Further.

Robert Haigh – Black Sarabande

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Everything I’ve ever written about any album, concert or piece of music is wrong.

I know this because of something that happened while I was quietly listening to ‘Arc Of Crows’ by pianist Robert Haigh, a track taken from his new album Black Sarabande, at the weekend while reorganising my loft. The experience was a poignant one in more ways than one, but not because of the crawling around on my knees sorting out boxes; that was just painful.

‘Arc Of Crows’ is an arresting, quiet, delicate piece of piano music nodding gently and reverently in the direction of Satie and it immediately stopped me in my tracks, a box of Christmas decorations in hand, and I found myself standing there for the entirety of its three minutes and forty-eight second duration, in that brief passage of time contemplating everything I have ever done, everything I have ever hoped for, the highs, the lows, the disappointments, the missed opportunities, the what-ifs, the future – the lot.

It very possibly had the profoundest effect on me that any piece of music has had or will ever have. Possibly this was owing to its sparseness, being simply Haigh’s piano accompanied by a soft, imperceptible sound in the background, somewhere between a brushed cymbal, muted traffic noise or a curtain of rain; or possibly because of its textures, its hidden depths and its delicate, resolute, outline.

Toward the end of my immersion in my thoughts, my teenage daughter arrived in the room in which the loft happens to be, and visibly and audibly recoiled at Haigh’s piece. She complained of it making her feel claustrophobic, panicked, uncomfortable and very possibly called it ‘weird’ (both of my daughters call all of the music I listen to ‘weird’, incidentally). She was still griping about it over lunch the next day. I’m at a loss to understand what it is that she heard that I didn’t, what quality it was that I found mesmerising but which she found anxiety-inducing.

Hence my conclusion that you can’t trust anything I write. Read on at your peril.

The reason Black Sarabande might have got me in a contemplative mood is possibly because it finds Haigh ruminating on his own life, specifically his childhood in the mining village of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire; his father was a miner and his early years were spent among the strange culture clash between the vestiges of the Victorian Industrial Age and the rural hills and dales through which progress had permanently left its mark.

That tension can be be found mournfully lurking in pieces like ‘Stranger On The Lake’ or ‘Ghosts Of Blacker Dyke’, not in an air of machine-driven harshness but just a sort of echo of one; little sounds drift in and out of view, sometimes melodically, sometimes as what could be a distant train clattering on its tracks, sometimes as unidentifiable noises with a brittle edge as if broken forcibly from something else, leaving only a vague impression of what was there before. Other pieces, like the genteel arpeggios of ‘Progressive Music’ are simply unadorned moments of intense wonder, like a hopeful sunrise on a frosty morning, full of promise and serenity and freighted with a welcome, disarming clarity.

Black Sarabande by Robert Haigh is released January 24 2020 by Unseen Worlds.

(c) 2020 Further.

VEiiLA – The Nation Of One

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The thing that instantly grabs you about The Nation Of One, the debut album from Saint Petersburg duo VEiiLA, is the smoke-shrouded vocal of Vif Nüte. Possessing a voice capable of delicate musing to anguished frustration, hers is a vocal infused with equal doses of rich jazz phrasing and raw bluster, often within the same track. That vocal is best showcased on the pairing of ‘Dust’ and ‘Trust’ that open The Nation Of One, or the languid Balearic shimmer of ‘ReDive’. On these pieces, her voice is matched to delicate, if restless, electronics, a natural sparseness in these accompanying structures allowing the voice to powerfully occupy the foreground with a beautifully devastating depth.

These tracks are perhaps atypical for VEiiLA, however. Their principle focus is on tracks conforming to clubbier expectations, Nüte’s voice becoming a texture within a grid of beats, pulses and the obligatory rises and falls of any descendant of house music. Here you find a a compelling tension between Nüte’s innately soulful leaning and the clinical precision of her and Bes Eiredt‘s music, with tracks like the restrained and bitter ‘Exorcism’ carrying a stridency and emotional power as the song slowly rises to a necessary release.

Elsewhere, the evolving, transcendent ‘Farewell’ might be the duo’s most complete statement, with a crisp, crunchy beat, Rhodes-esque keys and jazz piano knitting seamlessly together with a mournful and tenderly enveloping vocal. Its concluding moments unexpectedly coalesce into a clamorous, edgy stew of melodic spirals, angular bass shapes and ghostly, evocative howling.

The Nation Of One by VEiiLA is released on January 15 2020 by Womhole World.

(c) 2020 Further.

John Chantler / Steve Noble / Seymour Wright – Atlantis

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Atlantis is the second album from electronic musician John Chantler’s vibrant trio with drummer Steve Noble and alto saxophonist Seymour Wright. Their first, Front And Above, was recorded at Dalston’s Café Oto, the Ground Zero of London’s improvised music scene and the birthplace of many new and sonically challenging collaborations, including Wright’s ongoing work with Noble and his GUO unit with Daniel Blumberg. Their first album with Chantler was heavily edited to draw out a focus on its emptiest passages, whereas Atlantis’s feisty declaratory aura bespeaks a wildness that was more or less intentionally scrubbed out from Front And Above in the manner of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased De Kooning sketch

Not that this is just some on-the-spot spontaneous date lacking any sort of overarching vision: though Atlantis was recorded and mixed in a single day (24 January 2018) at the very Stockholm studio space that ABBA once called home, it was preceded by a week of intense trio rehearsals at the Fylkingen arts space in the city and a smattering of gigs in Norway. Listening to the three pieces presented here, that time spent in each other’s company creates a sort of seamless, highly responsive intermeshing of the three musicians, threaded through which emerges a kind of restless, gripping energy and tension.

A key ingredient in pieces like the twenty-two minute ‘Class I – A Single Entrance Created From A Gap In The Bank’ is a sort of power drumming that’s often absent from improvised music, where the emphasis is more frequently on balance, texture and abstract percussive pointillism. Some of the impact here comes from the studio itself, where the space’s dynamics created a rich, natural reverb that loaned itself to a heavier form of playing. Many of the most thrilling moments arrive when Noble works himself into a cyclical frenzy, the response from Wright being a howling, guttural tone and through which Chantler weaves elastic drones and grimy extraterrestrial splinters.

Introspection also emerges elsewhere in that piece’s passage. A delicate tipping point arrives in the middle five minutes involving what sounds like tuned percussion interacting with a shimmering, enveloping blanket of lyrical synth tones and an engaging high-pitched whine like compressed air escaping gradually from Seymour Wright’s sax. When the piece inevitably builds back up toward its denouement, it is led by Chantler’s synths becoming restless and as angry as a swarm of irritated hornets, inspiring a heavyweight percussion response and angry saxophone growls.

Atlantis by John Chantler / Steve Noble / Seymour Weight is released January 16 2020 by 1703 Skivbolaget.

(c) 2020 Further.