Infrasound Collective - Owasso Night Atlas
I love the little tag line that came with this compilation of work from the artists associated with the Infrasound Collective: "a work of art sabotage sponsored by the muse." An explanation -- I hope -- for the assault that sweeps over you with track 4 on this disc. This is your only warning.
Owasso Night Atlas begins with long, processed flute tones by Mark Feuver, drifting in from the distance like dissonant cries of wounded birds lost out in the darkness of the Everglades. It is the wind whistling through old, rusted auto bodies on the banks of dry rivers. Even in decay the muse must thrive because as these processed tones collapse into a striking snarl of near-static, there is something human and lonely about the sound. The father and son team within The International Bankers layer static and thick bass over a mad calliope, spinning us into a dervish nightmare lost amid the circus tents.
And then Ed Petry launches into his 'I've got ADD and I'm whacked out on speed and crack but I'm a real huge fan of Jimi Hendrix' routine. Which thoroughly fucks up the groove so nicely laid down by The Grassy Knoll just moments prior. Therein lies the art and the sabotage, dovetailed so precisely. And it smacks us again with the sudden gong of the "Steel Mill Improvisation" after the drifting seascape of Absorption's "Dead Slow".
While Intrasound point man Brian Siskind does some impressive cut-and-paste under his fognode::: guise with material from Michael Shrieve, Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, and Klaus Schulze, fellow collective member Layng Martine III heats us with "Globe" -- something a little warmer than his usual outings under the Corporal Blossom banner. Christopher DeLaurenti haunts with the sounds of "Sylvian's Wood" and Siskind closes us out with a final ambient excursion.
Filled with contributions from a number of luminaries on the Seattle avant-garde and experimental scene (including an excerpt from an illicit Tentacle-inspired improvisation inside an abandoned Seattle steel mill), Owasso Night Atlas takes you into the night and asks that you close your eyes and listen to the darkness. Not everything you hear is pleasant, but all of it moves you. That is what the muse does after all.
Infrasound Collective [2001]
International Peoples Gang - Action Painting
The latest release from duo Martyn Watson and Ric Peet dovetails nicely with the resurgence of the em:t label as a waystation for the electronically adventurous. Action Painting is a lysergic curiosity, an aural psychedelic landscape that has a kinaesthetic impact upon the listener. Watson and Peet throw classically-minded electronics, contextually-adrift discourse, warped recordings of fuzzed guitar and a hint of dub at a blank canvas where they let it slide together, mixing and melding until a more-or-less stable state is reached.
The looping melody of "AC Harmonics" may have come from a guitar once upon a time, but it has been warped into a sound palette that is reminiscent of a bent harmonium. While breezes of classical strings and deploring electronics cascade around the looped melody, crystalline percussion drops dewy trails in the wake of the swelling melodies. "Stretch" is a nocturnal pastiche -- a mimetic pastoral of chimes, bell tones, vaporous electronics and brittle backmasking that brings to mind a city in winter: glassy streets, lantern light flickering beneath a film of ice, white smoke curling in abstract symbols from soot-darkened chimneys, snow flecking the hibernating trees.
The music of "Myopic" is nearly hidden beneath the foreground recording of a physical therapy session. It is a drift of drones that rises out of the encouraging dialogue and deposits us in the "Waiting Room," yet another interstitial piece. Filled with the reverb of guitar strings, "Waiting Room" redecorates the musical headspace into the experimental chill lounge of "That Time Already?" As if you have been blindfolded, lead across town by the elbow, left in an elevator, which in turn took you to a mysterious grotto where fat beats, string quartets, a meandering breeze from the South Seas and a DJ with a crate of old funk records greet you as if the party has been waiting for you to arrive.
There's a sense of falling down the rabbit hole with Action Painting, a constant sonic disorientation that both envelops and repulses you. Anne Papiri's voice on "Fireworks" wants to seduce you, but the music darts and swarms around you like so many wild birds -- fireworks, even -- that distraction is constant. Until the birds all roost and, accompanied by the noisy burr of cell phone static, fall into an avian lullaby that swiftly calms your restlessness. The swirling voices of "Polite State" intoning "Yes," "No," "Thank you, please" contribute to the hypnologic state introduced by the bird song of "Fireworks." I can't even remember what galaxy I'm in as the solar flares of "Shimmer" begin to fall around me.
Classical guitar, modified bird song, and deft beat programming greet our return to this earthly aural space in "Mornin'," a paean to the dawn light that dapples away the night. A chaotic wash of strings and guitar represent the full flush of light that breaks the skyline and, just like that, the frozen life of night is blown away by the crescendoing texture of the day's movement. And, yet, for as gorgeously symphonic as "Mornin'" is, the subsequent "Granny Takes a Trip" is an inversion of crackling vinyl, electronic squiggles, distorted childhood nursery rhymes and deformed tones that, again, drains us down the rabbit hole. We are flushed into a world of echoing strings -- a phantasmal realm where cast-off symphonies go to lament their unfinished state.
Watson and Peet call Action Painting a "synaesthetic" record, a collection of aural vignettes that twist the senses. The collision of disparate instrumentation and styles certainly makes it feel like a surreal mash-up experience, but they never completely abandon us. The chaos of Action Painting feels guided, like International Peoples Gang are your drug gurus. They are your LSD guides who show you the door into the surreal psychedelic landscape but who always give you a way back to comfortable reality.
International Peoples Gang
em:t [2006]
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