Akira Rabelais - Spellewauerynsherde
Akira Rabelais, whose very name evokes images of Renaissance alchemists poring over cryptic texts of mysterious rituals and angelic evocations, uses home-built software with very Borgesian names like "Evisceration Reanimation, Morphological Disintegration," "the Lobster Quadrille" and "Argeïphontes Lyre" to give ethereal life to faded voices lifted from dusty reel-to-reel tapes. While performing archive work on old Ampex tapes, Rabelais discovered a treasure of Icelandic accapella ballads performed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Seduced by the haunting heartbreak of these voices, he embarked on an ambitious project to give these faded and dying voices new life. The result is Spellewauerynsherde, a record of ghostly voices that hover on the periphery of thought and perception.
Some of the voices are treated and some are presented in their rarified and naked state. The lengthy track titles hint at other mysteries (and may only be intended as archival notes to be deciphered by Rabelais himself), but a title like "1559 W. Cuningham Cosmogr. Glasse 125 Within which draw an other Circle, a finger bredth distant." will take you longer to say than to listen to its 44 seconds of unadulterated lamentation. "1390 Gower Conf. II. 20 I can noght thanne unethes spelle that I wende altherbest have rad." becomes a duet, the soloist's lament rising above a mist of transparent voices as if her accompaniment is nothing more than the looped echo of her own voice (in RabelaSpellewauerynsherdeis-speak this would be the result of a "time domain mutation").
The centerpiece of Spellewauerynsherde is the 21-minute "1483 Caxton Golden Leg. 208 b/2 He put not away the wodenes of his flessh with a sherde or shelle." The voices become insubstantial specters, ghostly choirs drifting back and forth across an endless featureless landscape. There is no fixed point, no anchor, and we are set adrift in a sea of harmonic tonalities, flooded with the elongated purity of these simple songs. There is an organic drift to these voices as if the Collective Unconscious has embarked on an iterative exploration of the infinite possibilities of tone and timbre.
Spellewauerynsherde is a record which exists outside of time, a collection of plainchants rescued from medieval obscurity by the pristine digitization of the 21st century and transformed into a ephemeral brume of sublime inflections. Highly recommended.
Akira Rabelais
Samadhi Sound [2004]
Raan - The Nacrasti
One thing I miss about not having been a youngster during the 1920s and 1930s is the pulps. I miss reading those lurid dime adventure novels where the stalwart hero braves unexplored continents and mysterious caverns to save the civilized world from some nefarious -- though always overwrought -- plan for world domination. I miss the febrile excitement of exploring dark jungles and stumbling across temples of human sacrifice, the shivering anticipation of uncovering forgotten cities buried beneath sheets of ice, the page-burning terror of unleashing ancient monsters captive for centuries. In short, I miss everything that I am reminded of by dark ambient music.
These bleak instrumentals are the soundtrack for the areas on ancient maps labeled "Here Be Monsters." Always consumed with the shadows, this type of music is filled with the sound of deep caverns, ruined cathedrals, crumbling ossuaries and black pits. The men and women who craft these bleak soundtracks are cartographers teetering on the rim of insanity. The bravest mapmaker of late is one Stig Berg. Recording under the moniker of Raan, his first excursion into darkness is called The Nacrasti, a record of his journey into a world filled with seismic uncertainty, black water, and spectral winds.
Released on the fledgling Antibody imprint of dark ambient champion Malignant Records, The Nacrasti is a tormented travelogue of hidden tunnels and lost pits. There are echoes of wood instruments that strain through the tumultous rumble of moving stones -- tiny, distorted melodies that fell down wells decades ago and have wandered lost in these caverns ever since. There are heavy rustling sounds -- not chains, not claws, not naked bones rattling together -- the sound of gigantic scales rubbing against stone as the flank of some immense beast scrapes the walls of narrow passageways. There are sub-sonic tremors, reverberations from the massive heart of empire-devouring beasts which have lain in captivity since the birth of mankind. There is the sound of viscious fluid dripping. It isn't water and it isn't oil; it is almost like blood, squeezed out by the immense pressure of the rock. There are sepulchral horns, a summons to an ancient sacrificial ceremony at the lip of a pit that has been breached by the molten spume of the earth.
There are no blank spots on modern maps, no scrollwork and ornate calligraphy that marks these places of uncertain darkness. There are no hidden civilizations, ancient blood-soaked temples, and untracked territories any more. The pulps are gone. The only places where you can find monsters any more are those places you visit in your mind. Dark ambient records are your charts and guides. Though, even Alan Quartermain would think twice about descending into the darkness of the The Nacrasti. Which suits me just fine.
Raan
Malignant Records:Antibody [2002]
Rapoon - I Am A Foreigner
Robin Storey, who used to be a part of the ethnic ambient whisper of :zoviet*france:, loses himself in loops. His work as Rapoon has always been an endless pattern that shifts and alters itself upon subsequent iterations like the re-arrangement of sand across the broad back of a line of dunes. "Via" from I Am A Foreigner, for example, crackles with sand ground deep in a vinyl groove while ambient tones spread across a sun-bleached horizon. You fall into his work, get yourself mired in the shifting sand underfoot, and quickly lose all sense of time and space. Vaguely ethnic drum patterns swirl and circle in the mix, building cascading patterns that move like, well, sand. However, with I Am A Foreigner, Storey has become entranced with something new and, as a result, there is a novel cast to the sonic weather eddying on this record.
A disembodied voice intoning "I am a foreigner" was the creative impetus for this record. Taking a break from recording, Storey wandered into his kitchen in time to hear this sentence ring out in the empty room. His wife had inadvertently left the machine on with her "Teach Yourself Italian" tape running. While making himself a cup of tea, Storey ruminated on his reaction to the strange voice. From this brief accidental moment, an idea grew in his head: how we, as foreigners, are more prone to listen intently due to the newness -- to the alien nature -- of what we are hearing. With both the tape and his cup of tea in hand, Storey returned to his studio and, utilizing fragments and samples from the language instruction, embarked on a new direction for Rapoon.
The contents of the instruction tape show up most overtly in "Tarsut," the dueling voices weaving themselves through a whispered ambient drum chant. Elsewhere, the clear voices are stretched like soft taffy into indistinct organic drones while piano melodies play out in stark relief against these amorphous backgrounds as in "Breakfast in Mesopotamia" where the keyboard plays in a trio with a landscape of ululating voices and distant street pipes. "Yarsut" is built from loops and time-stretched samples of choral voices and these elements are vibrant participants in the mix in contrast to their spectral and nearly invisible existence in previous Rapoon releases.
Rapoon is still looped-based music -- endless times 'round the mulberry bush -- but Storey's impetus with I Am A Foreigner has added a vocal element to the work, a foreground intensity of human speech that is a new emphasis to his work (while voices samples played an integral part of What Do You Suppose? from 1999, they were accents to the ghostly music). Previous Rapoon releases have been passive listening experiences; with I Am A Foreigner, Storey has delivered a release that demands your attention -- very nice.
Rapoon
Caciocavallo [2003]
Red Reflection - Prelude to Annihilation
As a cold wind whistles through the shattered windows of a ruined church and a lone piano resolutely fills the cracked nave with its melody (in a Sisters of Mercy "1969" style), a voice that may be Keifer Sutherland's ponders the approach of Death. "We spend all of our lives trying to stop Death: hating, inventing, loving, praying, fighting, killing. But what do we really know about Death? Just that nobody comes back. But there comes a point in life, a moment, when your mind outlives its desires, its obsessions..."
This is the opening statement of Red Reflection's return to Frozen Empire Media with the grandiose Prelude To Annihilation. "Gift," with its spectral wind and striking piano, posits the question which will run throughout this record: maybe, when all else has faded, Death will be something we'll finally embrace. Prelude To Annihilation plays out like a final summation: a tallying and weighing of a life led. "In Vertigo" captures the last time you were in love, blissfully caught up an emotion which blew away all other fears and doubts. "Withering World" is a forced march across a blasted plain, the final push towards the fatal goal which awaits all of us at the end. As great machines bleed steam into the morning air during "While England Slept," a chamber orchestra and a drum machine provide impetus for early morning espionage (in fact, this track would be great incidental music for a short film based on Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths"). If the piano melody of "Gift" is the leitmotif of our lives, then "Nearly God" is the climactic big beat remix of our greatest achievement, the Technicolor recreation of our proudest moment done up with high orchestration, trip-hop beats, and just a bit of squelchy noise.
It's been more than two years since Red Reflection's first record, Amid The Ruins, and the intervening time has been well spent. The orchestration of Prelude To Annihilation is more assured and more confident. The texturing of the tracks sounds like there is an entire fleet of stringed instruments working hard to achieve the rich sonic envelope of the work. The beats -- both noise-inflected and tribal -- augment the moods and focus the energies of the songs. Red Reflection has forged a connection between the gothic orchestration of Shinjuku Thief's Witch Hammer trilogy and Craig Armstrong's operatic soundtrack work.
"Maybe Death is a Gift." Maybe, but the prevailing emotion left in the wake of Prelude To Annihilation is: not yet. Red Reflection has some things left to do in this life, and he knocks out the spectre of the sophomore slump with great panache. This record will be on my Top Ten list at the end of the year. Highly recommended.
Red Reflection
Frozen Emire Media [2004]
Resina - Opinio Omnium
Resina is a collaboration between Marco Messina and Retina.it, both whom have been working the electronic circuit in Italy for a number of years. Messina has been the sound manipulator for 99 Posse and, more recently, part of Nous. Nous composed the soundtrack to Dentro La Tempesta, a reworking of Shakespeare's Tempest where the modern hand of experimental electronic music reconfigures the words of the English playwright. The duo of Retina.it (composed of Lino Monaco and Nicola Buono) operate in Pompeii at the foot of Mount Vesuvius where they do improvisational work which has been previously released on Chicago's Hefty Records. Opinio Omnium is the result of the meeting between Messina's sonic craftsman aesthetic and Retina.it's organic minimal techno improvisations.
"Muschià" sets the tone for Opinio Omnium with its steadfast beat and granular effects which caper and whisper about the solid tempo. Call it concrete micro-house as the dance floor aesthetic collides with the scattered detritus of glitch elements and tiny squawks of compacted field recordings. "Enchantillateur Digitale" squeaks and pops with machinery that is imitating bird calls while a sub-100BPM rhythm gets the room in motion. "Aitan" unfolds like a many-layered Thomas Brinkmann-esque flower, layers of textures gradually piling up on top of a precise beat. The sound effects of cows lowing in the opening minute only add to the pastoral texture of Resina's work as if we were attending a house party behind held at an Italian villa in the rural country. "Jeninbophal" is spooky aquatic dub, a soundtrack to an underwater thriller complete with slow-moving thunder and jangling string samples.
Retina.it work the old-fashioned way: using analog equipment and twiddling knobs. They're not unaware of the possibilities of crafting music through software; they simply prefer the more "hands-on" approach to their work. This adherence to organics lends warmth to their songs. The beats -- while hypnotic and endless in their looped state -- aren't completely sterile. Instead of creating hyper-intense rhythm structures, they put their attention to the micro-elements: the tiny swirls of sonic grit which get under the beats, the collage of recorded voices which gather together to become a melodic line (in "Mundo Taku"), and the creaking of old springs and brushing of steel pipes which pervades "Lenticchie" as rhythmic accompaniment to dub-inflected synthesizer tones. "Toledo" takes it to the dance floor with a stronger kick drum and harder synth stabs, a club-friendly collision between rhythmic noise and the Basic Channel sound.
Resina brings a level of crackling chaos and noise to micro-house. The eight tracks of Opinio Omnium bristle with restrained energy and constant movement, a result of the trio's emphasis on scattering noise and random elements across the stoic beats. If Einstürzende Neubauten put out a record inspired by the minimal techno flooding Cologne, it might sound a lot like Opinio Omnium.
Mousikelab [2003]
Steve Roach - Midnight Moon
Steve Roach has been doing ambient and fourth world dreamscapes for so long now that to say his music has a timeless quality is almost meaningless. It would be better to say that they have a permanence in our subconsciousness, a constant residence in a place beneath and beyond time that stretches out before us in an unbroken wave to the infinity. This wave is easy to ride: you slip in a disc, close your eyes, breath more simply, and let yourself be moved. With Midnight Moon, Roach has crafted soundscapes that are so transformative that, like the ocean's riptide, you are pulled in without warning and taken far out along the wave.
Roach has traditionally used synths as the foundation for his sonic creations and, with Midnight Moon, we find him exploring the sonic possibilities of the guitar. In the late hours after the sessions which gave us Dust to Dust (a fantastic collaboration with guitarist Roger King), Roach would find himself drawn to these stringed instruments. This same sense of discovery translates to the dark undertone of the songs, a journey of illumination through dark caverns with distant specks of gleaming lichens and pools of still black water. There isn't the same sense of oppressive isolation that you would expect with Final or Lull, but there is still a sense that you are far from civilization and the closest you might get to contact with another living creature would be the unblinking eyes that stare out at you from the inky gloom cast up around you.
A truly meditative experience, Midnight Moon finds Steve Roach journeying to sonic terrain as yet unexplored, melding his unique vision of sonic landscapes with the unearthly lament and tonality that can be drawn from the guitar. This is the quiet emptiness between the notes of the spaghetti western theme music--the distant desolate spaces with the full moon hung low.
Steve Roach
Projekt [2000]
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