Enduser - From Zero
Armed with the amen break and his trusty sampler, Lynn Standafer is making an effort to put some emotional content back into the desiccated state of the drum and bass scene. "The beats would sound stale after a while, no matter how chaotic, without some sort of emotion," he says about his drive to make music. "Thanks to my sampler, I can grab emotion from anyone...it's all about how I feel at the time."
A case in point (which is almost enough of a reason to buy the record alone) is his sampling of New Age Celtic siren, Enya. "Endya" is barely two minutes long, but it is a whirlwind of razored beats savaging Enya's distinct voice. It shouldn't work, but it does; Extremely well. It gets even better with "Def?" which bangs ragga like a prison bitch with its hardcore amen smackdown and demonic basso thunder. Ragga vocals and distorted zombie movie samples pop up throughout the record like angry banshees driven from their restless graves by the sonic destruction being lashed about them.
"Ill Cosby's Remix Mashup" swaggers with cutup samples and vinyl breaks, single words piercing the mix with fiery infection. "West Side Breaks" shivers and cascades a This Mortal Coil song over a clattering break line, the emotional core of the song floating like a gossamer veil above the hi-hats and breaks. Standafer isn't just about breaking things -- about creating maelstroms of densely kinetic beats -- he is seeking a marriage between ambience and action. The beats can't exist in a vacuum; they have to go somewhere and they have to appear in public with some sort of vestments. "West Side Breaks" is a precise marriage between the two extremes -- the languid loneliness of the chanteuse and the frantic effort of the rooting male of the species. "Knuckle Fucker" is a minute of Mario Bros. Mash-up, video game noises spun up to 180 BPM before being nailed to the floor by a spastic drill beat. Hipster ragga chipmunks invade “Kick Dem Down,” getting their tiny paws in the air against a backdrop of splattered amen breaks, hand drums, and squirting technoid rhythms.
Standafer wrecks up his vinyl collection of jungle, dancehall and ragga to provide grist for his sampler, layering out the resultant pieces against a barrage of beats and percussion. I usually find breakbeat empty and monotonous; however Standafer's work as Enduser is a constant source of spine-rattling entertainment. From Zero may start from a point of nothingness, but it gets to 180 MPH in just a few seconds. Excellent.
Enduser - From Zero
Armed with the amen break and his trusty sampler, Lynn Standafer is making an effort to put some emotional content back into the desiccated state of the drum and bass scene. "The beats would sound stale after a while, no matter how chaotic, without some sort of emotion," he says about his drive to make music. "Thanks to my sampler, I can grab emotion from anyone...it's all about how I feel at the time."
A case in point (which is almost enough of a reason to buy the record alone) is his sampling of New Age Celtic siren, Enya. "Endya" is barely two minutes long, but it is a whirlwind of razored beats savaging Enya's distinct voice. It shouldn't work, but it does; Extremely well. It gets even better with "Def?" which bangs ragga like a prison bitch with its hardcore amen smackdown and demonic basso thunder. Ragga vocals and distorted zombie movie samples pop up throughout the record like angry banshees driven from their restless graves by the sonic destruction being lashed about them.
"Ill Cosby's Remix Mashup" swaggers with cutup samples and vinyl breaks, single words piercing the mix with fiery infection. "West Side Breaks" shivers and cascades a This Mortal Coil song over a clattering break line, the emotional core of the song floating like a gossamer veil above the hi-hats and breaks. Standafer isn't just about breaking things -- about creating maelstroms of densely kinetic beats -- he is seeking a marriage between ambience and action. The beats can't exist in a vacuum; they have to go somewhere and they have to appear in public with some sort of vestments. "West Side Breaks" is a precise marriage between the two extremes -- the languid loneliness of the chanteuse and the frantic effort of the rooting male of the species. "Knuckle Fucker" is a minute of Mario Bros. Mash-up, video game noises spun up to 180 BPM before being nailed to the floor by a spastic drill beat. Hipster ragga chipmunks invade "Kick Dem Down," getting their tiny paws in the air against a backdrop of splattered amen breaks, hand drums, and squirting technoid rhythms.
Standafer wrecks up his vinyl collection of jungle, dancehall and ragga to provide grist for his sampler, layering out the resultant pieces against a barrage of beats and percussion. I usually find breakbeat empty and monotonous; however Standafer's work as Enduser is a constant source of spine-rattling entertainment. From Zero may start from a point of nothingness, but it gets to 180 MPH in just a few seconds. Excellent.
Exotoendo - Push Kara
There are six intermediate states through which a human being travels during the Buddhist cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Inspired by the Bardo-Thödol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Exotoendo's Push Kara is a transformative work of ritual music, intended to assist you in visualizing the True Reality which may be glimpsed at these liminal points of existence. The six states -- "bardos" -- are life, dream, transe, death, existence and reality, and each track maps itself to one of these states.
The first long breath of Push Kara is the five minutes of "sangs-rgyas-kyi dgongs-pa 1 (life)" wherein a breathy flute pines against a minimal rhythm section of bells and gongs. A single voice drifts in, a solitary monk chanting slowly in an incense-filled prayer room. Reality begins to fragment in "sangs-rgyas-kyi dgongs-pa 2 (dream)" as a female voices enters the audio environment, her long tones cascading down as if they have fallen from Heaven. The tinkling bell tree and solitary flute of "sangs-rgyas-kyi dgongs-pa 1 (life)" are lost as this single descending voice removes you from the affirming light of life into the subtle darkness of the dream. Whatever grasp you had on reality, on the shifting tones and peals of sound which kept you breathing are lost as you chase this voice into the perpetual gloom of the subterranean rumbles which begin the thirteen and a half minute "'pho-ba (transe)."
Stringed instruments rise out of the gloom as "'pho-ba (transe)" unfold, shivering notes which hover around another chanting voice. The pace and repetition of the rhythms puts you into a deeply meditative state. Push Kara was recorded in an abandoned industrial vat which lends a sonority to the echoes, and the subterranean rumbles of "'pho-ba (transe)" begin to fall further apart, their echoes lasting longer, and the scattered sound of the stringed instruments fragments into the sound of invisible insects whispering in your ear.
Each of the bardos offers an exit point into the Buddha state and "chi-khái bardo (death)" is the moment of death, that final instant where your breath hitches at the edge of cessation. The subterranean thunder is gone and all that remains is the tiny prick of miniscule bells ringing at the edge of your perception. A rain stick perpetrates a fraud of weather and, even more distant, is the barest hint of a stringed instrument being played by an idle wind. Everything slowly comes to a halt as you finally stop breathing.
During the three minute interlude of "chos-nyid bar-do (existence)," a woman's voice rises out of the drifting miasma. Speaking rapid French, it almost sounds as if she is your guide to the next iteration, giving you directions so that you may find your way to your next reincarnation.
The final bardo, "srid-pa bar-do (reality)," is the intermediate state of gradual change as you move towards your re-emergence from the womb. As with the other bardos, "srid-pa bar-do (reality)" is meant to give you insight into this state of Totality, it is meant to allow you to participate in the Buddha nature which can be achieved. The long tones which sweep through "srid-pa bar-do (reality)" are elephantine streams of elastic memory, the Totality of human experience which dips all the way forward and backward through Time. You become part of everything and part of nothing, you are the hedge down at the edge of the garden, as each elongated note spreads your consciousness out.
I am a restless spirit. I find it very difficult to sit still and enter a Right-Minded state. Meditation, to me, has always seemed to be an impossible state to achieve, and yet, with Exotoendo's Push Kara, I find myself much more readily entering a hypnotic state of mind. It could be the continued state of sleep deprivation in which I find myself or it could be more readily linked to the expansive suggestion implanted by listening to this record. I'm inclined to believe it is the latter as Exotoendo's ritual music breaks down my restless energy and releases my reflective soul. This is old school chill out music, and you can feel the pulse of several thousand years within each ringing bell and each infinite tone.
Athanor [2001]
des Esseintes / E.P.A. - AZ50HD
A split between Sweden's des Esseintes and Australia's E.P.A., AZ50HD adroitly demonstrates that power electricians aren't just bashing machinery without plan. Not all noise and thunder is random fortuity; in most cases, the decision to create howling walls of noise is a conscious one and not just a studio accident that occurred when the artist left tape running and stepped out for a sandwich. Both Magnus Sundström (des Esseintes) and Darrin Verhagen (E.P.A.) have much more classically inclined projects and, in the case of AZ50HD, they each reconsider a piece by the other in this vein.
While strands of noise curl and spark in the background, a chamber orchestra plays out a soundtrack for an action film chase scene (complete with the rising and falling sound of police sirens) for Shinjuku Thief's remix of the des Esseintes track. It's an interesting juxtaposition, especially as the remixes come before the original tracks on this split release. Unlike pop song remixes which are all about adding a techno beat to the core elements of the pop song, the remixes here are collaborative efforts where the baseline of a track is simply a suggested mood and everything can be further changed to realize the final mutation. des Esseintes' original track isn't as orchestrally cinematic as the Shinjuku Thief remix; that piece is better suited as accompaniment to the growing tension of a supernatural film.
des Esseintes redrafts E.P.A.'s "With Shredding Rubber," distilling the thirteen minute noise excursion into a five minute symphony of slumbering martial drums and glacial tones that struggle to break through the coruscating shower of noise. The full fury of "With Shredding Rubber" is a frontal assault on your cranial receptors and des Esseintes "recap" is a bombastic redrafting of the shrieking fury of E.P.A.'s power noise. If the E.P.A. track is Ragnarok, then des Esseintes' "recap" is the final approach, the last outpouring of courage and strength before being consumed by the conflagration at the end of time.
As both original tracks are pulled from other CDs (the des Esseintes is a Malignant Records release while E.P.A.'s can be found on Dorobo), AZ50HD is not just an exploration of the cinematic skills of Sundström and Verhagen but also a sampler of other noisier releases. As a fan of both aspects of these creators, I found AZ50HD to be a great summary of their work: a little bit of noise (which is all one really needs) to cleanse my head of idle synaptic garbage and a bit of gothic orchestration to properly color my day.
Magnus Sundström Portfolio
Darrin Verhagen
Fin de Siècle Media [2005]
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