Shots: Audiomaze, The Green Kingdom, Sweeney, Geneva Skeen, Sad Man, Saturnin Sektor, William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin

On April 30, 2021April 29, 2021 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

AUDIOMAZE – ERRATIC GESTURES & STATIC INSTABILITY (Downstream Records)

A new album from Downstream Records founder and fan of aliases Damon Vallero, who we last covered when he released last year’s Damaged Textures album under the name Local Sound Developer. Erratic Gestures & Static Instability finds Vallero deploying the quirky Cocoquantus and Plumbutter units from Baltimore synth house Ciat-Lonbarde, whose unique sound-creating interfaces give the album a playful suite of timbres but also more than an affectionate nod in the direction of some of the earliest electronic music experiments. The buzzing topline of ‘Wasp Having A Spa Day’ and its seesawing, wobbly foundation layer wins the prize for the most evocative track of the collection, while ‘Levitation’ has a soothing, contemplative quality ideally suited to a brief moment of calm in the maelstrom of our diurnal existences. Wonderful sounds from St. Albans and another release from Vallero worth spending some quality time with. Released February 5 2021.

https://downstreamrecords.bandcamp.com/album/erratic-gestures-static-instability

THE GREEN KINGDOM – SOLARIA / SWEENEY – MISERY PEAKS (Sound In Silence)

Two new releases from the Athens-based Sound In Silence imprint. The first, from Michigan-based Michael Cottone’s long-running The Green Kingdom project, is a collection of warm, almost folksy ambient soundscapes for electronics and guitar that – to this listener anyway – evokes the subtle optimism that comes with the shift from winter to spring. The details here are what’s important: the eight-minute ‘Arc’ offers a melody that nods in the direction of The Isley Brothers’ version of ‘Summer Breeze’ and ‘Sol 1’ sounds like what happened when Depeche Mode opened the gate to A Broken Frame’s secret garden. The second, Misery Peaks by Australian Jason Sweeney, finds the singer and sound artist offering a ruminative suite of songs over an intricate backdrop of turbulent gestures, modern classical tonalities, harsh industrial noise and sparse, fractured rhythms. ‘Sun’ is the album’s towering highlight, a plaintive love song placed in the context of a constantly-shifting tapestry of sonic events underpinned by a shrouded, submerged pulse. Both released March 27 2021.

https://soundinsilencerecords.bandcamp.com/

GENEVA SKEEN – THE CLAP OF THE FADING-OUT SOUND OF YOUR SHOES (Touch)

Geneva Skeen’s contribution to Touch’s Displacing subscription series finds her using the recorded sounds of Los Angeles from earlier this year and augmenting those with electronic manipulations to form a single piece of episodic, adventurous sound art. Like Chris Watson’s Displacing contribution (Station Chapelle), Skeen’s sounds have a strange, slightly unplaceable otherness. We are told that these sounds originate from LA, but how can we really be sure? What are the critical signifiers of their provenance? What is so distinctive about the hum of a helicopter, a person humming quietly to themselves, what could be the sound of cars driving over joints in a concrete bridge or the rain that makes these sounds sound like LA? This is perhaps the beauty of any field recording taken out of context – they are sounds that need explaining, that need justifying, as if we could not expect to comprehend them otherwise. Put that irreverent psychobabble to one side and what you have is an exciting, vibrant suite of noisy-beautiful sounds that carry a brooding purpose and a dark energy… which I guess is a fairly accurate depiction of LA, actually, now I come to think of it. The Clap Of The Fading-Out Sound Of Your Shoes is another brilliantly evocative chapter in the Displacing story. Released April 2 2021.

https://touchdisplacing.bandcamp.com/community

SAD MAN – THE MAN FROM S.A.D

A new album arriving through your letterbox from peripatetic Bourneville sonic magician Andrew ‘Sad Man’ Spackman is always a treat. Sidestepping the surprising directional shifts of his last three projects – the oblique radio play Stories From An Island with Francis Lowe for Cue Dot, the claustrophobic Music Of Dreams And Panic for Wormhole World and his soundtrack for silent movie Menilmontant – The Man From S.A.D finds Spackman riffing off the electronic wonkiness that characterised 2020’s genius Daddy Biscuits. More melodic than some of his other releases, for the most part The Man From S.A.D has a cheerful swagger and spring in its step, exemplified by the churning electric forward motion of the standout ‘Finny Feet’ and ‘The Green Opal’. We also find Spackman experimenting with vocal textures and samples across this album, always in typically skewed and playful way (see his brilliantly obtuse soul-inflected block party jam ‘The Shark’). What’s refreshingly omnipresent, though, is his dexterous, restless ability to endlessly hop from one idea to the next without catching breath, an effect that’s a lot like watching Charlie Chaplin in the mesmerising, chaotic but meticulously arranged conveyor belt scene from Modern Times. Released April 23 2021.

https://sadmanband.bandcamp.com/album/the-man-from-s-a-d

SATURNIN SEKTOR – NIGHT ENCOUNTERS (Cruel Nature Records)

Kinda hard to write about this new Cruel Nature album by Genovese electronic music duo Saturnin Sektor without using the expression ‘imaginary soundtrack’ or the superlative ‘John Carpenter-esque’ – mostly because Night Encounters is an imaginary soundtrack and its familiar tonality was inspired by the long shadow that Carpenter’s approach to scoring cast over a pivotal segment of the 1980s movie landscape. So you know the drill: stalking basslines, expressive melodies, resolute drum patterns and a heightened sense of psychological drama, which these ten tracks all have in an abundance. MS and TC (the anonymous minds behind the project) break with the format slightly on ‘Among The Ruins’, which manages to adopt a proggy stance courtesy of some soaring ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ organ chords; at just shy of five minutes, the preceding action in our imaginary movie suggests a heck of a lot of stuff got ruined. Released April 30 2021.

https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/night-encounters

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS & BRION GYSIN – WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS & BRION GYSIN

This vinyl-only release from Cold Spring collects together rare recordings of Beat authors William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, drawing together pieces made while they were both staying in Paris in 1970, an October 1982 Burroughs performance from Liverpool’s Centre Hotel, and a series of poetry readings by Gysin from the mix-1960s. Listening to Burroughs’ familiar drawl from the Centre Hotel recordings, there’s a certain deft humour to his newsreader-like delivery which has the audience in uproarious laughter. Some of Burroughs’ racial language is enormously offensive when heard today, but it’s the home recording of his asserting a nihilistic surrender to junk on an extract from ‘The Beginning Is Also The End’ that’s arguably the collection’s most shocking moment.

Gysin’s recordings focus on the development of the cut-up technique, including the instructive tape piece ‘Cut Ups Self-Explained’ which sounds like a lecture on the process until its practical demonstration reveals the splices, leading to words placed out of context, suddenly making no sense, making new shapes and inferences instead. Alongside pieces like ‘Pistol Poem’, wherein the dry sound of a gunshot is looped into a nascent rhythm, Gysin initially appears the more experimental of the two word-innovators, but largely only because the Burroughs performance making up most of this album is relatively linear. The inclusion of three versions of the Burroughs piece ‘Invisible Art’, supported by inchoate found sounds and words, does much to even up the balance. Released May 10 2021.

https://coldspring.bandcamp.com/album/william-s-burroughs-brion-gysin-csr293lp

Words: Mat Smith

Sad Man – Daddy Biscuits

On June 3, 2020June 3, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

cover

In May 2020, Sad Man – the alias of Bournville’s Andrew Spackman – ran a Twitter poll to ask fans to suggest the name of his next album. The options were Sad Man 13, ISO-Nation, Wonky Heights and the winner, with a cool 50% of the vote – Daddy Biscuits. It arrived in my inbox, just three months after his last release, with the description that it was a ‘wonky banger’.

Spackman has done most of the legwork for me with that, to be honest, as those two words perfectly sum up the sound of the twelve songs on this new collection. These are pieces that jerk around like they’re being attacked with an electronic music cattle prod, all quirky beats, skewed melodies and sounds that feel like they’re splintering and fragmenting inside your ear canal.

The jazz influence that can be felt on other Sad Man releases is here suppressed ever so slightly, emerging in the background on pieces like ‘Fump’ or in the coda on the icicle-sharp ‘Illustration’; instead, the only way I can describe a track like the nine-minute title track, or ‘Wonder’, or the effervescent ‘So So’ is how I imagine it might sound in the nightclub of a ship that’s about to capsize in a storm. Or a ‘wonky banger’, I guess.

Buried deep here is the minuscule ‘Water’. It’s a track that seems to pack so many disparate ideas into its brief, sixty second existence, from muted house-style riffs, deep beats and a frantic jumble of melodies that sound like a stroll around a dimly-lit games arcade.

Daddy Biscuits by Sad Man is released June 5 2020.

Words: Mat Smith

Sad Man – Indigenous Mix 3

On March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

Indigenous Mix 3 is the counterpart to The King Of Beasts, the latest album from Andrew Spackman’s Sad Man alias. The King Of Beasts offered all the expected characteristics of a Sad Man album in the form of jerky, vibrant electronic music that draws heavily on the legacy of jazz music, giving his pieces a natural freedom and looseness that is rare to find in music made on a grid.

Here, each of the album’s twelve pieces are given a substantial makeover, the approach varying between incorporating tribal percussion and throwing out some of the jazzier reference points in favour of a skewed, wonky electronica, and most points in between. That approach gives the mixes of ‘Carbonated’ and ‘Kalifornia’ an awkward, clipped, chunky quality offering a firmness in place of the original’s lightness of touch.

Elsewhere, ‘After After’ is re-rendered as a longform electro workout full of ringing motifs and buzzing melodies, while a standout new version of ‘Door’ becomes a metallic hip-hop groove knocked off course by springing, unpredictable electronic percussion and nauseatingly spiked vocal samples.

Indigenous Mix by Sad Man is released April 1 2020.

Read Further.’s interview with Andrew Spackman about ten of his musical influences here.

Words: Mat Smith

Take Five: Sad Man

On February 4, 2020February 3, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn Interviews1 Comment

Sad Man is the alias of Bournville-based Andrew Spackman. The last few years have seen Spackman deliver an incredibly prolific series of electronic albums that straddle the gulf between odd rhythmic gestures and jazz, the result being a suggestion that those two worlds aren’t necessarily so dissimilar or incompatible as they might first appear.

His latest album, The King Of Beasts, is due to be released on February 10 2020, and finds Spackman proffering a highly accessible, many-layered journey through the musical themes that have coloured his recent output, while placing a greater emphasis on traditional jazz reference points.

Further. spoke to Spackman about his formative musical influences, in the process no doubt distracting him from his work on what is probably another Sad Man album expected to land later this year. “It’s definitely not an exercise in being, or looking, cool!” he warns.

Geoff Love & His Orchestra – Big Western Movie Themes

My parents didn’t seem to have any particular interest in music. They were teenagers before the teenage revolution really got going, and so they still had quite an old-fashioned view of entertainment. My mum, however, was a big fan of musicals and westerns, and we had an old 1960s Radiogram that sat in the living room. It didn’t seem to get used much, but I was particularly fond of how you could stack the 7-inch records in such a way that once one finished the next would drop down on top of the previous record. That probably horrifies the purist vinyl collectors out there.

My parent owned a few records. Mostly they were compilation albums of movie music from the Music For Pleasure series on EMI. I particularly remember listening to this record, Big Western Movie Themes by Geoff Love & His Orchestra. Although the orchestration was probably very heavy-handed, it suited the bombastic scale of these western themes. When I listened I could see the barren landscapes of Spaghetti Westerns, the beating heat of rocky canyons, and sound of cowboy boots on the front step of the O.K. Corral. Beguiling stuff.

Mike Oldfield – Incantations

Up until the age of nine I shared a bedroom with my brother. He was much older than me and his taste in music would today be described as ‘Yacht Rock’, which is now rather cool, but back then, it was not. His stereo played host to a blur of Billy Joel, Christopher Cross, and Hall & Oates. In amongst this smothering smooth-fest sat a collection of Mike Oldfield albums: Incantations, Platinum, QE2…

Even at the age of nine I preferred instrumental music. I liked listening and trying to understand how all the instruments wove together. Also, the idea that Mike Oldfield played all these instruments too fascinated me. I remembered watching him on Blue Peter and he had this extraordinary technique when playing the guitar and very long fingernails. The track that I particularly liked was the live version of a track called ‘Punkadiddle’, which has the most amazing guitar solo on it. I later learned that Mike Oldfield got that sound by playing his guitar through the tape heads of an old tape recorder to give that fantastic fuzz / distortion sound with seemingly endless sustain.

Incantations features the vocals of Maddy Prior on ‘Part 2 – Song of Hiawatha’ and strings arranged by David Bedford. Like many of his albums, it is a cocktail of styles and instrumentation, with no fixed genre reference point. I’m not sure if it completely lasts the rest of time, but putting it context, he pretty much did everything before any one else had even got out of bed.

The Albion Band – Lark Rise To Candleford

When I was about 15 years old my school staged the National Theatre’s adaption of Lark Rise To Candleford. The play featured music by the Albion Band, made up of Fairport Convention’s Ashley Hutchings, Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy and others. I had a very minor role in it, but it brought me into contact with folk rock music, played on this occasion by an excellent line up of local musicians. A few years later I went on the play for several folk rock bands too.

My love of folk music has continued, despite it seeming incongruous with my electronic music output as Sad Man. I love The Unthanks, This Is The Kit, Kate Rusby and Lau.

The The – Soul Mining

My first introduction to The The came when I was 19 and I had just bought a Triumph Spitfire. It was a beautiful green colour, and despite the constant smell of petrol, the ill-fitting doors and the extortionate insurance cost, I loved that car. It also had a very nice Pioneer stereo with speakers fitted into the doors, which, when you were in the driving seat, weren’t far off ear height.

I would often drive around the country roads with the top down late at night, to and from a pub where I worked in the evenings. On the stereo was The The. First was the Infected album (my first introduction to Neneh Cherry) but then later I discovered Soul Mining with its use of the Roland TR 606, pounding drums and chanting by Zeke Manyika. I think The The are the only band that I’ve ever had a fan thing for. I saw them play at the Albert Hall with Jonny Marr on Guitar. They were perfection.

David Toop – Ocean Of Sound Volume 3 – Booming On Pluto: Electro For Droids

When I moved to Bristol in 1997 my musical tastes had already travelled through rock music, folk rock, progressive rock, shoegaze, funk rock, grunge and indie music. Apart from the odd album from The Art of Noise, Tangerine Dream and some others, very little of what I listened to was electronic.

The Gloucester Road in Bristol had several second-hand record shops, and when I moved there and started making experimental and electronic music I also started buying CDs and records and expanding my repertoire: records by Scanner, Black Dog, Jack Dangers, anything on Warp records, Mu-Ziq , DJ Shadow, Jimi Tenor, Black Dog, Red Snapper, Labradford, Plaid…

I bought Booming On Pluto from the bargain bucket and loved its electro sound. Afrika Bambaataa, To Rococo Rot and A Guy Called Gerald all feature on this album and it’s a real classic. I guess once I’d heard this, the future of music for me was no longer guitars and distortion pedals, although I’m still very partial to a good distortion pedal (ProCo Rat, ZVE Fuzz Factory, Fuzz Face).

The King Of Beasts by Sad Man is released on February 10 2020.

Interview: Mat Smith