3 Questions: Charlotte Spiral

On February 7, 2020February 14, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn InterviewsLeave a comment

Charlotte Spiral is a duo of Amy Spencer and Avi Barath, two former Goldsmiths students now writing complicated songs laced with lyrics loaded with emotional uncertainty; those words are only matched in their complexity by the many-layered musical architecture that supports Spencer’s distinctive voice.

“I kind of like it that people think my name’s Charlotte,” laughs Amy. “The name Charlotte Spiral came from a pose in figure skating. We started putting the music on top of old figure skating videos and then Avi and I decided that our band name should have something to with it because it’s so elegant. We wanted that to be reflected in the music.”

Upon the release of their debut EP, the gorgeous, mesmerising and haunting Ideal Life, Charlotte Spiral spoke to Further. about fake medicine and ‘A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts’ – very probably the one and only time that song’s going to get a mention here, and highly unlikely to feature on their debut album, I imagine.

What’s your earliest memory?

Amy: When my brother and I were kids my grandparents would look after my brother and I, mostly after school and also in the summer when our parents were at work.

I have a strong memory of them sitting together on a bench under the apple tree in the garden. My granddad loved music and he could sing beautifully – he could play the harmonica and even the spoons! My grandma would sing that song ‘I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts’. I’m sure she sang many other songs too but for some reason that one sticks!

Avi: There is a place in Rhodes that is meant to be very beautiful called Butterfly Valley. Sadly, my earliest memory is of being very sick there. My dad tricked me and gave me a Mentos sweet, which he told me was medicine. I think it actually worked…

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?

Amy: Stop worrying!

Avi: Trust your instincts.

Where are you most productive or inspired?

Amy: I often get ideas for lyrics when I’m travelling or walking somewhere. It’s usually just a line or two that I will finish once I have a chord progression and melody.

Avi: It changes all the time to be honest, but recently it’s been wherever there is a piano.

Ideal Life by Charlotte Spiral is released February 7 2020.

Interview: Mat Smith

Avi Pfeffer – A Lasting Impression

On February 5, 2020February 4, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

Classical music and electronics are currently locked in a comfortable embrace. This has arisen largely as a consequence of modern compositional methods which rely heavily on the ambience and atmospherics that a careful-deployed analogue synth or some after-hours digital manipulation can add to the music.

It wasn’t ever thus. From more or less the beginning of synthesizer technology becoming more accessible, the game in town was to produce electronic arrangements of classical pieces, and that’s the jumping-off point for Boston composer Avi Pfeffer’s A Lasting Impression.

The four-part suite uses classical structures and figures but is delivered entirely electronically. Beats drift in then ebb away, melodic gestures re-emerge continually and Pfeffer deploys a dizzying array of sounds, textures and rhythms throughout the almost hour-long album. The tonality of these collected sounds is especially important – this isn’t gauzy, drifting ambience or modern glitch-heavy soundtrack noir, but bold, grandiose sounds arranged into longform movements. I’ve never quite grasped the vernacular to articulate why this is, but there’s something about hearing electronics used in this way – a particular challenge when your diet consists primarily of people twiddling modular synth knobs or making electronic pop – that makes me think of Don Dorsey’s distinctive retrofuturism.

Dorsey made a series of electronic albums in the mid-1980s that essentially took Bach’s music and recreated their austere presentation with an enviable kitlist of cutting-edge electronic equipment, much as Wendy Carlos had done twenty years before. He also went on to be the in-house sound designer for Walt Disney World, composing the fresh, euphoric, scientific-sounding music that’s still memorably piped into places like Epcot and Tomorrowland.

I get the same feeling of hearing something exceptionally forward-looking yet locked in a particular era when listening to A Lasting Impression. If the press release had said Pfeffer had written these pieces thirty-five years ago and they’d languished, unreleased, I’d have not been surprised. To do this type of thing today is brave. We’re not used to hearing electronics like this in 2020, and so to enjoy it requires a little adjustment. Once you do, it’s a perfectly enjoyable record, full of interesting details and moments.

My personal favourite sequence arrives with the gleeful, squelchy opening minutes of the third part, largely because it transports me to the deck of Narcoossee’s on a balmy Florida evening several years ago watching The Electrical Water Pageant (originally scored by Dorsey) burble and fizz its inimitable way past with my daughters; just for giving me the the opportunity to reminisce about that makes this album entirely worth it.

A Lasting Impression by Avi Pfeffer is released February 7 2020 by Pumpedita.

Words: Mat Smith

Thomas Köner – Motus

On January 31, 2020January 31, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviews1 Comment

“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

Infinite Scale – The Value of Accessibility

On January 31, 2020January 31, 2020 By miyagi42In Album reviewsLeave a comment

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.

Waclaw Zimpel – Massive Oscillations

On January 27, 2020January 27, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

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

OUTLANDS – The Joyous Thing: Secret Flight / BodyVice

On January 26, 2020January 26, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Live reviewsLeave a comment

Two polar opposite live performances forming part of The Joyous Thing, a weekend of events at Milton Keynes Gallery investigating the UK experimental music scene. The Joyous Thing is part of the nationwide OUTLANDS interdisciplinary project.

Secret Flight is a local MK electronic musician whose current concerns involve fusing reverb-drenched vocals to delicate synth melodies and minimalist rhythms. The result is dreamy, angelic, choir-like voices delivered with a gauzy, hypnotic warmth, only laced with an uncertain quality somewhere between intense rapture and crushing disappointment. Her last album, 2018’s My Forever Mirage is a brilliant and understated gem of an album. Listen to My Forever Mirage at Bandcamp.

BodyVice is the latest project from Natalie Sharp, best known for her audacious, confrontational performances as Lone Taxidermist and as a Gazelle Twin collaborator. For BodyVice, the subject matter is the intense and excruciating back pain that she suffers with, and finds her channelling her experience at the hands of doctors as they seek to identify the cause.

Beginning with a hospital gown-wearing male collaborator’s Irvine Welsh-style delivery of what initially sounds like a misty-eyed recollection of a Speedy J set at a Belgian rave – all intense beats of rising velocity and modulating electronics – it becomes apparent that he is, in fact, describing an MRI scan experience. What ensues is nothing short of unnerving – Sharp (with a collaborator and occasional flautist) rotating on turntables against a backdrop of howling, impenetrable noise to evoke the claustrophobia and unnatural experience of an MRI scan, all frantic, rising rhythms and industrial-strength walls of unending sound.

The performance then proceeds through angry lists of precautionary statements from a clipboard waiver, mesmerising sounds and non-melodies played on modified spinal chords (pun intended) designed by Tara Pattenden (Phantom Chips), guttural invocations worthy of Diamanda Galás and a thrilling coda of punishing, strobe-lit industrial techno as Sharp douses herself in fake blood while screaming.

According to Sharp, BodyVice is a reaction against the proliferation of stale, insipid electronic-musician-on-stage-with-MacBook performances. It is most definitely that. It is also uncomfortable, challenging and frequently terrifying; as a physical, visual and aural metaphor for Natalie Sharp’s chronic pain, it is forcibly and viscerally accurate.

January 25 2020. Thanks to Zoe and Simon. MK Gallery: mkgallery.org

Words and terrible photographs: Mat Smith

First Play: Novelty Island – Saturn Alarms

On January 22, 2020January 22, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Single reviews

Novelty Island is the brainchild of Tom McConnell, who hails from an indeterminate location somewhere in the north of England, and whose group may or may not be named after a Vic and Bob skit.

Featuring deft choruses, woozy retro synths and a wonky, space-age sensibility, Novelty Island released their debut single, ‘Magdapio Falls’ last year and follow that understated, singalong gem with ‘Saturn Alarms’ which will be released this Friday.

Both tracks feature on the debut Novelty Island EP, Welcome To Novelty Island, which is due to land in March. ‘Saturn Alarms’ is the counterpoint to ‘Magdapio Falls’s languid, laidback structure, being an urgent rush through the turbulent reaches of our solar system and the omnipresent sauce junk floating around out there, replete with catchy vocals and star-scraping electronics. The track was named after some inexplicable graffiti that McConnell spotted tagged onto his mother’s house in Liverpool, and thenceforth transformed into a retro-futurist pop monster.

Listen to the exclusive first play of ‘Saturn Alarms’ below.

Novelty Island play The Social, London on March 19 and Shipping Forecast, Liverpool on 26 March. Saturn Alarms is released January 24 2020 through Ditto Music.

Words: Mat Smith

3 Questions: YOVA

On January 21, 2020January 21, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Interviews

YOVA are a duo of Jova Radevska and Mark Vernon. Their first single, ‘Moondog’, was released last year and found the pair accompanied by a diverse group of players including Grumbling Fur’s Daniel O’Sullivan and PJ Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis.

On new single ‘Rain’, Jova ratchets up the mesmerising, enthralling innocence of her naturally soulful voice on a song detailing a painful, terminal break-up. The track has been given a a special mix from Erasure’s Vince Clarke that will be available from February 28. Both tracks will then be released as part of a four track digital bundle on March 6 2020.

To celebrate the release of ‘Rain’, Further. asked Jova and Mark our customary 3 Questions, with typically revealing results.

What is your earliest memory?

Jova Radevska: Wrapping my stuffed monkey in a blanket and also screaming my lungs out near a scarecrow in a cornfield with my grandmother.

Mark Vernon: The psychedelic colour of leaves, buildings, blues skies, clouds, stars and moon from the pram

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?

JR: Trust yourself and don’t put all your Easter eggs in one basket.

MV: Never take no for an answer. Less is more. Don’t put the cart before the horse. The latter is from The Velvet Underground’s John Cale.

Where are you most productive or inspired?

JR: Mostly in solitude and when I’m sad and angry.

MV: When I’m either within reach of a keyboard or fretboard.

Rain by YOVA is out now. Listen here.

Interview: Mat Smith

VEiiLA – The Nation Of One

On January 10, 2020January 9, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviews1 Comment

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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.

John Chantler / Steve Noble / Seymour Wright – Atlantis

On January 9, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

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.