Red Brut - 2024 - On Bare Ground

Coherent States – CS-52  133.89MB FLAC

 The image selected for this post is even barer than the physical record that originally carried it. The LP sleeve surrounds Marijn Verbiesen’s drawing with a vertical information panel, portrait, descriptive text and label details, but here those elements have been removed. What remains is a black ink creature standing alone in a white field. Its outline suggests a horned body or two mirrored bodies joined at the head, with long arms hanging from angular shoulders and thick serpentine forms twisting through the empty interior. The anatomy never closes. Limbs taper into brush marks, the torso is mostly unpainted space, and a detached black shape rises between the legs without declaring whether it is a tail, shadow, organ or separate being. The drawing is less a picture of a creature than the minimum evidence required to imagine one. By isolating it from the full package, the post makes the white surrounding space function as the album’s first sound: bare ground upon which a form has briefly appeared.

On Bare Ground is Red Brut’s third full-length album and the closing document of Marijn Verbiesen’s long period in Rotterdam. Every sound originated during her final two years in the city, although the recordings were not initially gathered under a conscious farewell concept. They accumulated because recording was already part of how she inhabited a place. Rooms, streets, appliances, water, machines, voices and accidental resonances entered a private sound library before their future purpose was known. Only after moving north to Groningen did she return to those materials and recognize that they formed a diary of the life she had left. The album is therefore retrospective without being nostalgic in the usual sense. It does not polish Rotterdam into a sequence of fond landmarks. It listens to what remained trapped in the small noises of daily existence after the larger story had already changed.

Verbiesen arrived in Rotterdam around 2010, when the city’s unfinished buildings, cheap spaces and rough social infrastructure still offered possibilities to artists willing to construct their own stages. She became involved with the no-wave and noise group Sweat Tongue, organized experimental concerts, helped operate a venue and gradually taught herself to make music by working directly with tape, domestic objects and whatever equipment happened to be available. Over the following decade, the city rebranded and redeveloped itself. Empty buildings that had permitted improvised cultural life disappeared, rents rose, older communities were pushed outward and the roughness once treated as undesirable became an aesthetic sold by developers. Her departure was personal, but it also belonged to a larger urban pattern: the people who make a place interesting are frequently removed once that interest has acquired financial value.

That history makes the title more complicated than a simple image of natural openness. Bare ground can mean freedom, the clean surface upon which another life might be built, but it can also mean land cleared by force. It may be what remains after a house is demolished, after a community loses its rooms, or after an artist strips away the material that once protected a composition. The album contains all of those meanings at once. Verbiesen moved toward a new community, but the music looks backward at the ground from which she had been separated. Its sparseness is not emptiness achieved through purity. It is the exposed condition left after attachments, habits and accumulated sound have been pulled apart.

Red Brut’s earlier recordings established a highly physical method of tape collage. Verbiesen records individual sounds onto cassettes, removes the unused portions and splices the chosen lengths together by hand. The strips can then be placed across a table, giving sound a visible body before it is replayed, combined or disturbed. She has described the labor as meditative and ritualistic. Tape is not being used merely to produce fashionable degradation, nostalgic hiss or an antique patina. Cutting establishes duration through physical measurement. Joining two sounds requires an actual seam. Every edit becomes a small construction whose success remains uncertain until the tape passes across the playback head. This is composition performed with fingers, scissors, adhesive and magnetic time.

Her first self-titled album often crowded such fragments into dense, unstable tableaux, while Cloaked Travels allowed instruments and synthesizers to create more recognizable song-like structures. On Bare Ground pares both tendencies back. It does not abandon collage or melody, but it gives each sound more unoccupied space in which to alter the meaning of its neighbors. A scrape beside a voice becomes different from the same scrape beside running water. A mechanical pulse placed after silence begins to suggest intention. Verbiesen avoids explaining the exact sources because identification would close possibilities that the arrangement has opened. The material is autobiographical, yet the autobiography has been deliberately scrambled. It is a diary in which the proper nouns have been cut away, leaving pressure, distance, rhythm and temperature to carry the memory.

The titles supply a loose concrete poem. “Abri,” “Green Light,” “Night Water,” “Dug Out,” “Mud,” “High Above,” “Passage,” “Here,” “Facing Up” and “Bare” are brief pieces of orientation rather than narrative summaries. Several indicate place, shelter or movement. Others identify matter, light or bodily position. Read in sequence, they describe someone leaving cover, receiving a signal, entering water, excavating, passing through mud, rising, crossing, locating herself, turning toward what has happened and finally standing without enclosure. The progression is subtle enough that it may never announce itself during casual listening, but the album’s emotional movement becomes clearer when the words are treated as another layer of collage.

“Abri” is an especially precise beginning. In Dutch usage, an abri can be the shelter at a bus or tram stop, a transparent little room built for waiting while remaining exposed to the street. The track assembles weather, urban motion, construction-like friction, passing bodies and metallic calls into a temporary enclosure. The listener is protected from none of these sounds, but the composition creates a frame within which they can be noticed. Something clanks like a bent horn. Other fragments slide, scratch and pass before their causes can be identified. The city is not represented from above through a recognizable skyline. It is heard from the height of a person waiting beside traffic, where architecture becomes wind resistance and public space arrives as interruption.

“Green Light” sounds like permission without specifying what has been authorized. High electronic flickers, fuzzy transmissions and pulley-like friction form a signal system that never quite resolves into language. The title may suggest a traffic light, an artistic permission, the glow of machinery or the moment of deciding to leave. Its brilliance is thin rather than radiant. The light feels glimpsed through dirty glass or emitted by equipment whose original purpose has been forgotten. Red Brut repeatedly finds vitality in sounds that ordinary listening discards as malfunction, interference or background labor. A squeal from a mechanism does not have to imitate a conventional instrument before it can carry suspense, humor or melody.

“Night Water” moves beneath the city’s visible surfaces. A breath-like human trace passes through hard tapping and submerged resonance, producing a nocturnal piece that is both intimate and infrastructural. Verbiesen’s use of a hydrophone contributes to the record’s aquatic and subterranean character, allowing vibration to arrive through water rather than through air. Such recordings unsettle scale. A small movement can become an enormous internal groan, while a large environment may be reduced to a distant trembling. Rotterdam is inseparable from water, canals, rain, drainage, tunnels and the broad Nieuwe Maas, but the track avoids picturesque river imagery. It hears water as another recording medium, one already storing the pressure of objects, weather and construction.

“Dug Out” is more openly sculptural. A sustained grinding tone resembles a saw, damaged reed or low mechanical throat, but the sound refuses to remain one thing long enough for recognition to stabilize it. It thickens, buckles and collapses before giving way to another rough action. The title suggests both excavation and a cavity created by removal. Verbiesen’s editing behaves accordingly. Instead of filling the piece with additional layers, she carves transitions into the material, revealing strange interior grains. Musique concrète is sometimes discussed as though recorded reality were a neutral block placed beneath the composer’s knife. Here the knife discovers that the block was already alive. Each cut releases another possible animal.

“Mud” occupies the album’s most bodily terrain. Verbiesen has affectionately described her creative struggles as mud crawling: getting stuck, pulling free, falling back and learning through the repeated contact. The track turns that private metaphor into a clammy psychedelic episode. Voice fragments and footsteps appear inside a shifting surface that never becomes fully solid. Mud is neither water nor ground, but a temporary confusion of both. It slows movement while preserving evidence that movement occurred. Every footstep leaves a form, and every attempt to escape changes the surface further. This is an excellent image for the album’s method. The recordings document life, but editing them disturbs the documentation. Memory leaves tracks while simultaneously erasing the ground upon which those tracks were made.

The paired titles “High Above” and “Passage” redraw the album’s vertical and horizontal axes. “High Above” contains voices and resonances that can feel enclosed, tunneled or underground despite the upward title. The contradiction makes height psychological rather than geographic. One can look down upon a former life while still hearing it from inside. “Passage” then introduces a more definite pulse through rattling, whistling and gong-like impacts. It is among the album’s most rhythmically legible pieces, although the beat feels discovered rather than imposed. Objects knock against one another until a pattern appears, walks for a short distance and dissolves. The passage is not a grand corridor between completed chapters. It is a route improvised while crossing.

“Here” is the album’s spoken center and its most openly autobiographical piece. Verbiesen’s voice reflects on being shaped by Rotterdam, on the successive life that began there and on the city’s changes, but the delivery refuses emotional theater. The words hover in a drowsy, matter-of-fact register while treated cassette noise squeaks and breathes around them. This reserve gives the piece unusual force. A farewell does not always arrive as a climactic confession. Sometimes it appears while listening back to a room after the furniture is gone. The voice says “here,” but everything surrounding it belongs to a place that has already become “there.” Tape permits both locations to occupy the same duration.

The track also clarifies why Red Brut can be described as concrete poetry as well as musique concrète. The spoken words are not placed above the sound as an explanation. They become physical components within it. Hiss affects the emotional weight of a sentence; a pause exposes the grain of the recording; repetition can detach a phrase from ordinary communication and turn it into shape. The music does not translate experience into a polished story. It allows language to remain inside the unstable sensory field from which stories are later assembled.

“Facing Up” breaks the suspended atmosphere with a blunt, honking intrusion. After the ghostly inwardness of “Here,” the switch can feel rude, even comic, but it prevents the record from sentimentalizing departure. Facing something is not equivalent to making it elegant. Recognition may arrive as a sound that embarrasses the mood one was carefully constructing. Red Brut’s humor often lives in these collisions, where an ugly noise enters at exactly the point a more conventionally tasteful composer might have supplied a soft resolution. The interruption restores the material world. Pipes, horns, keyboards, machines and cassettes do not care whether they have entered a poignant scene.

“Bare,” co-composed by Michiel Klein, closes the sequence with repetition and a melancholy simplicity that is closer to damaged bedroom pop or early electronic minimalism than to an explosive noise finale. Klein also edited the album, providing a second ear for material that remained deeply personal to Verbiesen. Editing another person’s sonic diary could easily force clarity upon its ambiguities, but the finished record retains gaps, uncertain sources and abrupt seams. “Bare” does not solve them. It reduces the remaining motion until a small melodic cycle can be heard standing without protection. The title becomes a condition rather than an absence. To be bare is to have fewer layers between the self and whatever surface comes next.

The ten tracks last just under thirty minutes, and their compactness is essential. None is asked to become a total environment. They operate as short exposures, each revealing a cluster of relations before the ear can settle into passive immersion. The album can certainly sound dreamlike, but it is not ambient music designed to smooth the room. Edges remain sharp. Voices appear without introductions. Loops show their joints. Textures can become warm, comic, threatening or tender within seconds. The listener remains responsible for attention because the record will not maintain one emotional atmosphere on their behalf.

This may be the most significant development in Red Brut’s work. Verbiesen has not become more polished by removing the strange physicality that made the earlier recordings distinctive. She has become more exact about how little material is required to activate the imagination. A distant voice, warped piano fragment, scrape or pulse can imply an entire scene when it is not buried beneath evidence. The cover drawing follows the same principle. A handful of black marks produces a body because the unpainted field is allowed to participate. Absence is not the opposite of composition. It is one of the materials.

The record’s relationship to Rotterdam also resists the usual civic portrait. There are no grand monuments, tourist narratives or obvious documentary announcements. The city survives as weather on tape, the friction of public transit, construction, water, rooms, voices and personal changes that cannot be separated from urban ones. It is precisely because the sources are not identified that the album can preserve more than one Rotterdam. The same mechanical sound may contain the old city of cheap improvisation, the redeveloped city pushing its artists outward and the imagined city reconstructed by a listener who has never been there.

The three-label release structure quietly extends that idea of community beyond the city being left behind. Coherent States in Greece, Dead Mind Records in the Netherlands and Econore in Germany jointly carried the album, while Costas Verigas mastered it, PH!D designed the physical layout, Michiel Klein edited the material and co-composed the closing piece, and Verbiesen supplied the sounds, compositions and central drawing. The release is personal without pretending to have been made in isolation. Even an album about losing a place arrives through another network of people willing to manufacture, distribute, describe and hear it.

The post performs one more reduction. It removes the portrait, essay, rear typography and co-label information visible on the complete LP package, presenting only the ink figure, Coherent States catalog number and a lossless archive. This does not reproduce the physical edition in full, but it creates a distinct digital object appropriate to the music. The album has been stripped back to image and sound, just as Verbiesen stripped her accumulated Rotterdam recordings into ten concise compositions. The 133.89 MB file becomes another small shelter, carrying a final period of one life into rooms and listening systems far beyond the city where its noises were gathered.

On Bare Ground is ultimately not a clean farewell. Clean farewells belong to stories arranged after every feeling has agreed to cooperate. This record preserves the friction that remains when affection, disappointment, loneliness, gratitude and renewed possibility occupy the same place. Rotterdam was where Verbiesen began making music, built communities and learned to hear domestic surroundings as instruments. It was also a city whose transformation made continued belonging difficult. The album neither condemns nor romanticizes the whole experience. It takes the scraps that survived, lays them across a table and listens for the new creature that appears between them.

That creature is visible on the cover but cannot be fully named. It may be one body divided, two bodies meeting, an emptied skin, a dancer, a ghost or a new form learning how to stand. Its feet touch almost nothing. Its interior is open white space. Yet it remains upright, made coherent by a few gestures and the willingness of the eye to connect them. The music achieves the same astonishing balance. It stands on bare ground without pretending that ground is neutral, and it discovers that exposure can be another form of shelter.

Anyone who owns the physical LP may be able to add details about the clear and white pressings, the full sleeve construction, or how the vinyl sequencing changes the ten-part movement when “Mud” ends the first side and “High Above” begins the second. Recordings this intimate continue to change as they move between tape strips, edited files, vinyl grooves, digital archives and other people’s rooms. On Bare Ground leaves enough unoccupied space for those later histories to enter.