VA - 2008 - Zelphabet Vol. B

 

Zelphabet – none

The alphabet is one of the first systems used to discipline language. Twenty-six symbols are arranged in an agreed order so that any imaginable statement can be built from them, catalogued by them, or returned to its proper shelf. Zelphabet takes that childhood instrument of organization and feeds it material that resists organization at every level. Volume B collects four artists whose names begin with the same letter, but their common initial does not imply a common language. The disc becomes a cabinet with four drawers, each labelled B, each containing a different method of making sound misbehave.

GX Jupitter-Larsen conceived the series as a kind of musical address book, drawing several decades of noise, sound art, tape work, improvisation, and damaged electronics into alphabetical proximity. This is a deceptively simple curatorial device. Alphabetical order normally suppresses judgment: B comes after A not because it is better, louder, older, or more important, but because the system says so. The method allows an established figure such as blackhumour to sit beside younger groups without being treated as their ancestor, superior, or historical explanation. Everybody becomes temporarily equal before the letter.

The Beast People open with “Backing,” immediately disturbing any idea that the alphabet will make the contents educational or well behaved. Associated with Aaron Dilloway, Andrew W.K., James Twig Harper, and Nate Young, the project has the character of a deliberately unstable gathering rather than a normal band with dependable functions. Voice, microphone handling, tape, and physical interference produce something closer to a creature being assembled in public. The title “Backing” might ordinarily describe accompaniment, but there is no secure foreground here for anything to support. Background and subject keep trading places. What appears to be incidental debris suddenly becomes the event, while whatever seemed central is shoved into the walls.

That opening prepares the listener for 16 Bitch Pile-Up without making the two groups interchangeable. “No Burden, No Guilt” is a magnificent title because it sounds both liberated and morally suspicious. Burden and guilt are forms of weight carried from an earlier action into the present. To possess neither could mean innocence, shamelessness, emotional freedom, total denial, or the clean conscience of someone who has simply refused the court’s authority. The music does not clarify which condition applies. It creates fifteen minutes in which responsibility moves continuously among several sources and can never be pinned permanently to one.

By this period, 16 Bitch Pile-Up had become especially skilled at giving collective improvisation the tension of a psychological scene. Sounds enter without identification and immediately affect the available choices. A sustained electronic pressure can make the next vocal movement feel trapped inside it. Rough contact with an object can break open a pocket of space, only for another signal to occupy the opening. Nobody accepts the burden of functioning as leader, but that does not mean nobody exercises power. Control appears briefly wherever one gesture changes everyone else’s behavior, then migrates before authority can become a role.

The title can also be heard as a description of improvisation’s peculiar freedom. A conventional composition carries obligations established before the performance: notes, arrangements, durations, cues, expectations, and the responsibility to reproduce recognizable material. Here the performers are released from much of that inherited burden, but not from consequence. Every sound still affects other people. Freedom does not remove responsibility; it makes responsibility immediate. There is no written structure to blame when a passage closes down or becomes congested. The group must hear the problem while standing inside it.

“No Burden, No Guilt” is especially effective in this compilation setting because it occupies the transition between The Beast People’s eruptive physical theater and blackhumour’s colder concentration. Blackhumour, the long-running project of Frazer Hall, constructs “And Do What / Control” from untreated human voices looped and progressively shortened. Speech becomes material without requiring electronic disguise. As the loops contract, language is stripped of context and intention until the voice begins behaving like machinery. Yet the knowledge that every fragment originated in a mouth keeps the machinery uncomfortably human. Control is achieved not by silencing speech, but by forcing it to repeat until its original meaning can no longer escape.

This makes blackhumour an illuminating neighbor for 16 Bitch Pile-Up. Both works disturb the relationship between voice and authority, but through opposite procedures. 16 Bitch Pile-Up releases vocal sound into a changing collective environment where its status cannot remain fixed. Blackhumour takes recorded voices and imposes an increasingly severe temporal enclosure. One creates instability through live social responsiveness; the other creates it through repetition so strict that the repeated object begins to disintegrate.

Bob Bellerue closes the volume with “Fridge Tower,” a title that combines the domestic appliance’s low electrical life with architecture reaching upward. Its subdued noise does not try to defeat the preceding tracks through greater volume. Instead, it makes quietness feel structurally uncertain. Refrigerators already produce an accidental household drone: compressor hum, vibration, relay clicks, circulating coolant, and the mysterious night sounds of machinery continuing its labor while people sleep. A tower enlarges that private mechanism into a landscape. The disc ends inside an imagined vertical structure built from hum, resonance, and refrigerated air.

The cover’s overlapping radiographic bodies provide the ideal visual grammar. Several positions seem to occupy one frame, with skull, spine, hands, and limbs repeatedly exposed as though the body has become its own alphabet of bones. X-rays promise knowledge by making the hidden visible, but these superimposed images create confusion from revelation. Too much transparency produces another kind of concealment. That paradox runs through the compilation: the shared letter appears to classify the artists clearly, while listening reveals how little an initial can explain.

Volume B ultimately turns alphabetical order into an instrument of discovery rather than containment. The letter brings four practices together, but cannot domesticate their differences. The Beast People make the body erupt through microphone and tape; 16 Bitch Pile-Up distributes power across an improvising group; blackhumour traps voices inside repetition; Bob Bellerue builds unstable architecture from restrained noise. B is only the address. Everything living inside it remains gloriously unalphabetized.