7.21.2013

bran(...)pos - Den of Ordure and Iridescence


Another delightful house show-related find for me: I've been unfamiliar with the work of bran(...)pos until now, but I'm beyond glad to get in on this music. With a busy discography dating back to 2000, "Den of Ordure and Iridescence" is a vinyl/digital release via Resipiscent, who previously released "Quaak Muttar" by bran(...)pos on CD in the form of a small, functional pinball game!

Bran(...)pos is the performance/recording pseudonym of theatre sound designer Jake Rodriguez, who combines compositional and performance strengths with experience in softsynth and instrument design to make this project a potent and personal experience. This record covers a wide stylistic range with dexterous ease, and I think it unites the weirdo improv/soundart camps with the whole neo-kosmische scene blossoming right now in the cassette label world.

I'm really vibing on how well this LP hangs with a lot of the music I've been digging lately, and it bridges some genre boundaries that have been somewhat firm in my mind before sitting in this Den. The album opener, "Tin Tract Mine," explores the many sonic possibilities of the bran(...)pos live setup of the last few years. Briefly put, it's an electroacoustic kind of approach, but mostly created using mouth sounds and mouth-controlled synths. At first, I was reminded of the salival sonic palette in the Phillip Gayle album I reviewed a while ago, with lots of lip pops, licking, sucking, gurgling, etc: the "extended technique" range of avant-vocalisations. But the synth sounds that are produced/controlled at the same time expand this music into really surprising territory, creating a sort of eai duet within a singular oral cavity. Amazing, unexpected stuff, slowly rising in density, with lots of wild stereo panning that sounds great on headphones. At first, synths drone and oscillate in low, rumbling supportive roles, but eventually they overtake most of the identifiable mouth/voice sounds, even incorporating an insistent beat toward the end of the piece. Regardless of how this is made, it's a great listen, but the added bonus of seeing these mouth controls in action must surely put this work over the top. I can't wait to see this in person (more on that below), but here's a video to whet your appetite:



The second piece, "Sawed Off at Plasticized Forest," is a great sonic cousin to the Carl Testa album I just reviewed. Here, the bran(...)pos synths are used in conjunction with some extended-technique cello playing. Though much less melodically focused than Testa's "Iris," the cello/electronics relationship here shares a similarly tight kind of interactivity, layers of granular bits of cello seemingly drifting into high-pitched buzzes and glitches, and conversely having passages of synthesized clouds supported by very busy bowing and knocking on the cello. At times I'm reminded of Zbigniew Karkowski's extended piece for cello & electronics from a few years ago, "Nerve Cell_0," too, though many of the synth sounds here start from 8-bit sounding places and edge their way into more ominous spaces slowly. Proceeding through three short movements, "Sawed Off" is full of surprising transitions and high energy, sounding both serious and playful at the same time.

As cool as the A-side of "Den of Ordure and Iridescence" is, I was totally blown away by the B-side opus, a stunning 19-minute piece aptly titled "Lioness." While the first half of the album feels somewhat introverted and improvisatory in nature, with sounds being produced and manipulated from a singular point, "Lioness" highlights the intensely extroverted side of the bran(...)pos sound, carefully composed and with seemingly no orchestrational limitations. This is an expansive cinematic piece that boldly unites orchestral percussion and bits of found sound with a wall of modular synth goodness. This is the kind of work where a play-by-play doesn't do justice, but experiencing the many scenic shifts in this piece feels profoundly moving and almost tangibly visible, evoking lush alien landscapes separated by desolate, Mad-Max feeling deserts. The proportions of synth and "real" instruments put this music into a really unique place, where the timbral approaches of folks like Vangelis and Tangerine Dream get infused with a sort of 20th. C. classical rigor. A fantastic piece, and it's actually quite approachable, too: if you're a slightly less adventurous listener, I'd suggest starting with the B-side first, where you're sure to become so enamored with "Lioness" that you'll warm up to the more abstract approaches of the A-side in no time.

Bran(...)pos is on tour right now promoting this album. Traveling with Blood Transfusion, a new project from Sharkiface, they're making a stop at my Think Tank House one week from now. They'll be joined by Moss, a local group seriously deep into synth playing and design as well. Event info here. And the rest of their tour dates around this amazing album will be:

Sunday July 14, 2013 9pm
1336 S.Grand Ave. Los Angeles, CA

Tuesday July 16, 2013 8:30pm
MEDICINE SHIT WAVE
4th and Mountain
Alberquerque, NM

Thursday July 18, 2013 9pm
Roll on down to Club 1808 for this Fantastic Mixed Bill ! Lots of Harsh Noise, Experimental sounds, Noise, Electronic Wizardry, Noisy Noise, Folk Songs & Dub Step.
Your Hosts Topher Wallace and { AN } Eel will delight & Amaze you.
featuring in 2 rooms:
1808 E. 12th St.
Austin, TX

Friday July 19, 2013 9pm
House of Tinnitus Presents
Apochrypha
411 E Sycamore
Denton, TX

Monday July 22, 2013 3:30pm
3401 Chartres St.
New Orleans, LA

Tuesday July 23, 2013 9pm
Reid Campbell
407 49th Ave.
N. Nashville, TN

Friday July 26, 2013 9pm
CLEAV'D CLEAVER
1550 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, IL

Wednesday July 24, 2013 9pm
39 S Market St. #B
Asheville, NC

Saturday July 27, 2013 9pm
Moss
627 S. 28th St.
Lincoln, NE

Sunday July 28, 2013 9pm
Blood Transfusion
3553 Brighton Blvd.
Denver, CO
No comments:

7.07.2013

Nicoffeine - Au Revoir Golden Air (and more)



It's been a while since we've heard from Germany's Nicoffeine, and their latest LP, "Au Revoir Golden Air," shows continued evolution toward new atmospheres. Dating back to the early 00s, this band has deep roots in various forms of aggressive music, but with each new album, their unique marriage of harsh noise textures and surprisingly tuneful melodic sections grows increasingly focused.

For a band that spends a lot of time approaching the volume levels of a power electronics act, "Au Revoir" opens with a marvelously subtle gesture, gradually lifting out of silence into a chorus of weirdly harmonized and modulated vocals in the first minutes of "Goldenbergersteeg." While a pad of these almost Residents-sounding vocals fades and returns throughout the piece, drummer Jorg Schneider sets the mood with a stuttering drum riff, his kick drum heavy in the mix. Second track "Wolf in Bathtub" then establishes the kind of contrast that defines Nicoffeine, centering around a relatively conventional uptempo tritone-bassed riff, tons of distortion, and layers of slithering noise and feedback.

While there is plenty of guitar on this album, Soheyl Nassary's approach this time around obscures the recognizable sounds of "rock guitar" tones at every opportunity. A lot of his riffs, like the trippy "Ando Guerillo" or "Sunstudio Wizard," are blasted through ring mods and assertive distortions, which turn his lines into harsh textural splashes while bassist Guido Lucas plays in unison, defining the actual pitches. Even when the ring mod is off, most of his tones have a touch of harmonizer blended in with a bit of very short delay that cause the guitars to feel like they're trapped within their own artificial spaces, absorbing a bit of the tonal mass of meaty synth sounds. Sometimes it sounds like a whammy pedal is turned on and displaced up an octave, too, adding to the tonal surprises.

Schneider's playing is busier overall than the last few Nicoffeine albums, with a lot more tom rolls--his crazy workouts in Jealousy Mountain Duo must be rubbing off! His playing here continues to focus on creating distinctive drum parts for each piece, though, and his rock playing is harder and more pugnacious than ever.

Lucas' bass work is the melodic anchor on the most aggressive sections of this record, taking over riff-playing duties with alternating clean and distorted tones while effected guitars, feedback, and rumbling/squealing synths explode in every direction. While the bass holds things together, the actual mix of this music almost becomes an additional instrument: as the album progresses, parts of the drum kit, especially the kick drum, are pushed underneath concentrations of low-frequency noise that seem to be made of equal parts synths and overworked amplifiers. Listening to this album on headphones, you get weird upheavals in the perceived space the band is playing in, expanding and contracting and occasionally bursting into moments of high-frequency barrages.

But everyone returns to the same room on the balanced, serene album closer, the 13-minute epic title track. Guitars sound like guitars and synth/noise textures are subdued for most of this piece, opening with gentle chordal strumming and some wah accents, and the band goes into a lengthy postrock arrangement from there. A few reverb-drenched vocal lines in the first third of the piece remind me of Kayo Dot, and the music rises and falls carefully over time, not heading toward detonation this time.

The music feels very mature and serious this time around, but Nicoffeine shows their lighter side in the packaging: a new Nicoffeine logo on the back cover parodies the mid-80s "Point of Entry" era Judas Priest logo, and the band photo on the inside of this beautifully designed gatefold jacket totally cracked me up, with Nassary taking the world's biggest yawn.

"Au Revoir Golden Air" will be released in August on Blunoise in LP and CD formats, but if you just want a digital copy, you can proceed to Nicoffeine's BandCamp page right now. Nicoffeine tours regularly in Europe, and they're planning a US tour toward the fall of this year--keep up with tour dates on their Facebook page.

A few related albums
When Schneider sends these albums over from Germany, he often includes recordings of previous bands he's worked with. It's been a great opportunity for me to learn a bit about the experimental rock scene in Germany over the past decade or so, mostly centering around releases from the Blunoise label, which is operated by Nicoffeine bassist Lucas. These guys have been working in noisy, crazy rock circles since the 90s, when both Schneider and Lucas played stints in Les Hommes Qui Wear Espandrillos.

Since then, Schneider has played in a variety of interesting configurations that include:

Gaffa - Hundred Reasons to Kiss the Ground
Before Schneider and guitarist Berger began playing as Jealousy Mountain Duo, they played together as a less kinetic "slowcore" act called Gaffa. This music reminds me a lot of the Chicago Touch & Go scene, with maybe a little of the introspection of Low thrown in for good measure. There are great tunes, simple and direct, and unlike the spry instrumental voyages of JMD, this album has a lot of vocals, capably delivered by Berger.

Tarngo - Horman
Another duo band, Tarngo found Schneider working with bassist Scharco on a couple of albums. These are riff-based uptempo jams, featuring a variety of juicy overdriven bass tones and lots of creative cymbal work that foreshadows Schneider's later playing in JMD. If you're into intense Skin Graft-y instrumentals with a touch of math, you'll dig "Horman" a lot.

Fischessen
Jorg has sent along both of his albums with Fischessen, the debut "Suicide is Much Too Blonde" and followup "Koder," and I think these are my favorite work of his outside of JMD and Nicoffeine. "Koder" is a classic instrumental power trio record with Yvonne Nussbaum on bass and Tarngo's Scharco very capably moving over to guitar. Great playing and great songwriting in mostly postrock atmospheres dominates this record, and it's a bummer that it seems to be pretty obscure, not even showing up on Discogs. "Suicide is Much Too Blonde" captured the band in a period with a larger lineup, and it includes occasional vocal and synth accents. Fantastic, inspired writing, this debut feels a little more playful than Koder, and includes my favorite song of this band, "Wolfskull." Highly recommended.
No comments:
Labels:

7.06.2013

Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Rhythm Section and a Laptop: solo works from Brian Chase and Carl Testa


The history of early electronic music stayed in close alignment with "classical" music circles for many decades--the sounds were new and otherworldly, dovetailing nicely with New Music innovations from serialism to indeterminacy, and from a practical perspective, building and maintaining the first generation of synths took the kind of money one rarely finds in musicians' hands outside of academia. As time went on, and electronic instruments became both portable and affordable, they increasingly became go-to instruments in rock and pop music circles, and as we all know, the popular music of the last several generations is constructed from mountains of silicon and electricity.

As pop music took over the Moogs and the hard drives, though, the classical music world slowly shuffled its feet backwards toward the exit doors. With a few notable exceptions, most of the contemporary classical folks whose work I've admired over the years have quietly but pretty thoroughly avoided electronics, other than the occasional amplified acoustic instrument. You can see the same kind of trend in jazz music as well: other than basic amplification needs, you have to go all the way back to the 70s to find a really active period of electronics in jazz.

But as electronic instruments evolve from hardware to software, I think we're due for an invigorating electronic revival in New Music of both composed and improvised disciplines. To an extent, it seems inevitable: if you're 40 or younger, you've lived at least half of your life within the "computer age," after all. When computers are an ordinary fact of life, moving from towers in home offices to handheld devices on nightstands, it's only natural that they're going to be integrated into a wider variety of musical activities than ever before. It's a total non-issue for the youngest generation coming up: living with computers is just living.

With that in mind, here are a couple of exceptional records integrating acoustic instruments and software manipulations. Both of these records create sonic environments that remind me of "classic" eras in electronic composition and improvisation, though the primary sounds within each are triggered by activities on acoustic instruments.

Carl Testa - Iris
A phenomenal upright bass player and composer, Carl Testa's "Iris" is a document of live solo bass/electronics improvisations. Playing bass while writing live code into a SuperCollider-based software environment, these pieces outstretch into chamber group-sized acoustical spaces with an unpredictable timbral variety--a surprisingly melodic brand of electroacoustic improvisation.

Opening track "At Early Bright" is a great introduction to the concept, as it features some of the most harmonically simple bass playing on the album, against which you can develop a feel for a few of the ways this software interacts with the live-sampled fragments of sound. Working mostly with variations on a tritone-based figure (which amusingly sounds like a Black Sabbath riff early in the piece), crystalline tones four and five octaves above the source material fall into melodic patterns and shimmer in quickly-repeating delays. As the synthesized fragments continue to unwind, Testa adds more complexity into the bass parts, with some walking lines and some harsh tremolo-bowed passages. In this piece, at least, he keeps vibrato to a minimum, locking tightly into tune and working each note for pure tone.

There is some beautiful, emotive vibrato in alternating bowed/plucked passages in the next piece, "When Scattered," from which a few relatively unaffected loops are retained to build tense passages with close-voiced dissonances that would be difficult or impossible to play as doublestops. The SuperCollider setup doesn't start to have a noticeable role until halfway into the piece, where it picks up textural clouds of sound from a section of particularly bristly extended technique shredding, with fast bowing scrapes and col legno, ect. This is followed by "Diffracted," which is the most texturally-focused piece here, closer to "classic" eai with little concern for harmonic development.

My favorite track is the final piece, "And Engulfed," which evolves slowly to incorporate large aggregations of beautiful high-pitched synth chords that glisten and whirl around one another. Toward the end, it takes on somber tones that wouldn't be entirely out of place in the denouement of a Godspeed tune--amazing that all of this sound can be produced can controlled from humble bass tones with live manipulation.

It's a great-sounding record regardless of how these sounds are produced, but if you're interested in seeing a bit of Testa's setup, here's a video of him tweaking a live synth module in SuperCollider:


Edit 7/9/13: Testa has uploaded a great, informative video showing the process behind "Iris" here:


"Iris" will be released on July 16th, and you can pick it up via LockStep Records. There will be a 5.1 DVD audio mix that you can buy and download, as well as CD and mp3 formats. I only have a stereo setup, myself, but I imagine that the many fragments of granular sound manipulation would sound really amazing in full surround.

Brian Chase - Drums & Drones
As drummer in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Brian Chase is probably the most commercially successful musician whose music I've profiled here. But he's been a long-time participant in avant-garde circles, too, playing with scores of folks on the NYC downtown scene, including some seriously wicked drumming on Jeremiah Cymerman's "Fire Sign" album that I reviewed a while ago. Through a series of events that are fully detailed in the liner notes, Chase has been developing a compositional process for filtering and effecting the sounds of drums to tease out the overtones, creating electronic-sounding music in just intonation.

These liner notes deserve a mention all their own--they're the most extensive notes I've seen in quite some time, fully elucidating both the personal and technical developments that led to this music. At times they get quite confessional, and in reading these elaborate notes, listening to the album many times, and watching the DVD, I kind of feel like I know the guy. And I like him. Chase has created a mini-site for the record here, which has some meaty excerpts of the liner notes and a lot of additional information and samples. Very much worth checking that out.

So I'm not going to delve into heavy technical details here--the liner notes have all of the information you could hope to find about how each track was made, as well as a narrative describing the three-phase evolution of this concept over several years. Instead, I'm going to try to describe how this music sounds, and how I'd suggest listening to it at first:

The basic physics that make this music possible are pretty straightforward. When someone strikes a drum, we're all trained to think of it as a rhythmic event in which the first moment of articulation is "the money." But after the initial hit, the drum continues to resonate for quite some time, and it contains a complicated set of interlocking frequencies, partially dependent on the main resonant frequencies of the drum shell, but also quite variable depending on the tuning of the drum head.

As Chase uses a number of filtering/effect strategies to attenuate various pitches within the set of natural overtones, pure sine waves are brought into the foreground. And a lot of these waves are very, very high pitches. When you consider that the fundamental pitches of many drums are already quite high, and the lowest overtones start sounding an octave above their fundamental pitches and head toward the stratosphere from there, a lot of the most interesting melodic stuff in this music happens in the upper ranges of your hearing, approaching and sometimes crossing into the territory usually reserved for hearing test tones.

Though the track sequencing of the album is really nice on repeated listening, I would recommend starting your experience with this music on track 4, the "Bass Drum Drone." As one might expect from the low fundamental pitches of a bass drum, a lot of these overtones sit in the midrange of your hearing, making really nice washes of pure chords and rhythms that are easy on the ear. A bit of feedback finds its way into this piece at times, and it ends on a high note--literally--but I find that I get a bit of hearing fatigue jumping right into some of the pieces that start in super high pitch ranges.

Here's another weird thing about listening to high-frequency compositions: when there are moments of complex high-frequency density, you can make your own melodies simply by moving around the room or sometimes even subtly moving your head. I first became aware of how much you can control this as a listener at a Jason Zeh show last year, where he creates really rich fields of high-frequency sound with modified cassette players. Moving around in sweet spots between the cranked PA speakers, even a tilt of your head would bring out different pitches, as those tiny waves react in wildly complex and functionally unpredictable ways to volume levels, speaker placement, and the proportions and variety of reflective surfaces of the room you're in.

That's part of the big-picture challenge with getting the most out of just-intonation music: if you have the opportunity, it's nice to figure out what the strongest resonant frequencies are in whatever room you're using with the music, and then if it's possible to tweak the tuning of the music to work with those frequencies, it's a way more powerful experience with lots more sympathetic vibrations erupting into the room. For this reason, I slightly disagree with Chase's liner note recommendation to listen to this album on stereo speakers versus headphones or computer speakers. If you want to hear it "how the artist intended," I think a really good set of headphones is worth trying with this album. But you'll want to try it multiple ways. When you pump it through a stereo, experiment with variations in speaker placement if it's possible, and you'll be able to get all kinds of sounds out of this album, from crazy hornlike sounds in the middle of "Snare Brush Drone," or a perfect storm of complex pitches to try that head-tilting trick with in "Drone State of Mind, V 1."

What I'm ultimately saying is that while this is essentially a drone album, and the influence of and affinity with other kinds of just-intonation drone music is definitely present, don't expect "In C" bumped up a few octaves. This is its own thing altogether, and you have to live with it in a very unique way.

There's a great DVD of mostly black and white visuals that comes with the disc, too. Produced by Ursula Scherrer and Erik Zajaceskowski, I found it fun to play around with the album as a purely audio experience a bunch of times, trying different setups, and then checking out the video. And if you get a chance, see this live! From the couple of videos floating around online, it looks like seeing this performed with the videos projected would be an intense, beautiful experience. You can check out a couple of live videos here. Pick up the CD/DVD/liner note epic from Pogus Productions.

No comments:
Labels: ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)