The first track of Amoral Mayor Earwig EP, how a hot air balloon works, starts out straightforwardly enough. Some quiet acoustic guitar plucks, repeating and slowly adding some more layers of guitar. Sure, there’s some digital delay but mostly it’s just guitar. Some bitcrushing distortion eases into the left speaker just enough to raise an eyebrow, but it keeps with the guitar thing. Oh nice, some drums. Maybe even live. Strange processed guitar in the background, almost voice-like. A single reversed cymbal, very quick. Drum break. Quite distorted. Wait, how did we end up here? By the time the second track, i saw two of me, starts our hot air balloon has caught the jet stream. No turning back now.

Amoral Mayor Earwig EP and Bishop-Whitney EP could be two sides of a single album. I tend to listen to these together. El Hacedor is perhaps a little more mysterious, a little mellower. All three are intriguing and highly enjoyable.

Links

Beak on MySpace (bonus downloadable track, Limozeen)

This is part of a series of netlabel reviews.

Yuki Yaki’s blurb for Heavy Weights has this fanciful description: The tracks will take you on a dive cruise, each of them has its own little valley and its own moon. So: Take your time. This is exactly how I feel about it. The underwater aspect is suggested by the cover, which looks like a Shogun trilobite, and continues through the tracks with glossy, undulating textures. When this album starts I feel like I’m returning to a space that has continued to exist in my absence.

A couple of months after finding Heavy Weights, Vate (released on the 1 bit wonder netlabel) popped up in the archive.org feed. I literally cheered when I saw that there was more Glander to experience. Vate shows how dialed in to his technique Glander is, without at all being formulaic. The same masterful use of repetition is there but there’s a slightly grittier edge to the textures, and I almost get the sense that the camera has a wider angle lens, as bizarre as that is to say about music. These tracks are funkier, too. For instance, listen to the syncopation in the second track, Hmbrg, or the staccato gurgles in Drift. While Heavy Weights is a deep sea dive, Vate is a swooping flight through an urban landscape.

I’m still trying to understand why Glander’s use of repetition is so satisfying. On closer listening, the repeating textures are actually continually varying in small ways, and the different layers flow in and out of the foreground, creating complex interactions. There’s also a constant, but subtle, change in the surrounding space. Sometimes the textures will echo, and then it’s like they come close to you and have a very focused feel, and then drift outward into a cavernous space. There will be long stretches where you might not have noticed even that there were no drums, and then the kick will return at just the right moment.

Both of these albums, along with the bonus tracks available on Glander’s site, reward close listening as well as zoning out and using as background to working and working out.

Links

Glander (download individual tracks that have been on various compilations)

This is part of a series of netlabel reviews.

In 1995 British modern music magazine Wire sent Stockhausen some tracks by electronica acts (Stockhausen was an early pioneer of electronic music), including Aphex Twin and asked for his response. The article was called Advice To Clever Children. Here’s part of his response:

I wish those musicians would not allow themselves any repetitions, and would go faster in developing their ideas or their findings, because I don’t appreciate at all this permanent repetitive language. It is like someone who is stuttering all the time, and can’t get words out of his mouth. I think musicians should have very concise figures and not rely on this fashionable psychology. I don’t like psychology whatsoever: using music like a drug is stupid. One shouldn’t do that: music is the product of the highest human intelligence, and of the best senses, the listening senses and of imagination and intuition. And as soon as it becomes just a means for ambiance, as we say, environment, or for being used for certain purposes, then music becomes a whore, and one should not allow that really; one should not serve any existing demands or in particular not commercial values. That would be terrible: that is selling out the music.

Clearly this was a man who took his art seriously! I wonder if he disliked Satie, the originator of ambient music (“furniture music,” as he called it).

About Aphex Twin he said he should immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, change tempi and at least have a direction if there had to be repetition. For each of the artists, he recommended a piece of his own to listen to for ideas. Aphex Twin’s response was irreverent and humerous:

I thought he should listen to couple of tracks of mine: Didgeridoo, then he’d stop making abstract, random patterns you can’t dance to.

The article is funny and it’s easy to dismiss Stockhausen as not understanding the context of electronic dance music, but I think it’s to his credit that he took the exercise seriously enough to think about their works as compositions to be critiqued instead of dismissing them outright. What’s fascinating is that in ‘95 Aphex Twin was making fairly repetitive drum machine-based loopy tracks and over the next few years became more and more abstract to the point sometimes of alienating all but the most dedicated listeners. I don’t know if he just got bored with what he was doing before or if he took Stockhausen’s advice to heart after all. Stockhausen’s aversion to machinistic repetition are put into relief by this quote from the well written Guardian obituary:

Stockhausen recalled how as a boy he heard marching songs played incessantly on the radio [in Nazi Germany]; an experience which left him with an abiding hatred of regular repetitive rhythms in music.

To be thorough, I should say that while this may be true, it’s also been part of the zeitgeist of avant garde music since the beginning of the 20th Century, or at least since World War I, when composers reacted against the atrocities they had experienced as well. It would be interesting to follow the schism where dance (that is, non-modern, popular dance) was left behind by the avant garde and taken up by the rest of the music world.

I’m not sure how I’ve been influenced by Stockhausen. I have only a couple of recordings, one of which is the Helicopter String Quartet, performed by the Arditti String Quartet. Musically it’s not something I return to often, but the idea is magnificent: each member of the quartet plays aboard a separate helicopter (yes, in flight!) and the audio and visuals are shown on stage for the audience on the ground, including the sound of the rotors. It’s such a crazy idea and spectacle — the very fact that it could be pulled off is amazing to me. It certainly showed me how the barriers we construct around the concert can be broken in dramatic fashion. I think his influence on me has been indirect, as he was tremendously influential on previous generations of composers, especially in his feeling of the importance of music in society, and in striving to create something new.

The highest calling of mankind can only be to become a musician in the profoundest sense; to conceive and shape the world musically. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Photo: Stockhausen Publicity photo 1975. Chrysalis Records

The Helicopter Quartet (excerpt) as performed by the Austrian Ensemble for New Music.

Konterkonzept EP

According to Lagerfeld, “it was created by exclusively using hardware synthesizers to set a counterpoint to the prevailing approaches of laptop and software.” He seems to be onto something. This stuff just crackles with energy from the first few seconds and carries through to the end.

While the requisite minimal techno repetition is there, it exists simply to lull you while subtle surprises slink in and out of auditory view. Lagerfeld knows how to take his time and explore an idea, and then move into territories that at first are unexpected, then seem inevitable. This is true of the structure as well as the sound design.

Note: for some reason archive.org’s stream of this EP is playing back at a slower speed. Preview this one from the mp3 downloads instead.